The Formal Elements of Art

The Formal Elements of Art

Picasso's Guernica, a war memorial

Picasso's large mural has been glimpsed as the symbolic decorating of the horrors of conflict — its decimation, its cruelty. The attractiveness of the decorating, although, has another source. This mural is large, as I have wise from Aesthetic Realism in my study with its founder, Eli Siegel, because it displays, even as it takes on the cruelty and appearing non-sense in the world—that there is pattern, there is association, there is certain thing bigger than man's "inhumanity to man." Picasso read about Guernica in the newspaper. That newsprint ...