Take the bull by the horns_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Take the bull by the horns

Picasso’s politics were never in doubt, though this side of him is often pushed aside for a view of the artist as a protean genius and priapic monster. He was a man of his time, shaped by his upbringing, ambition and talent (it possessed him as much as he possessed it), as well as by the events he lived through. Guernica, commemorating the destruction of the ancient capital of the Basque homeland in 1937 by German and Italian bombers, and painted the same year, remains Picasso’s best-known declaration of revulsion to fascism; but themes of war and suffering were a constant in his work. Guernica's blacks, whites and greys, as stark as newsreel footage and front-page news, were continued in works such as the less-than-successful 1951 Massacre in Korea, or the great Charnel House, now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The current exhibition opens with Charnel House, which would alone be worth a visit to Liverpool; but Picasso’s small still lifes of the 1940s, 50s and 60s carry a similar symbolic weight, even if their meaning is more furtively delivered. They are filled with disquiet.

“Painting is not made to decorate houses,” the artist wrote in 1943. “It is an instrument of offensive and defensive war against the enemy.” Picasso toiled over Charnel House slowly, between 1944 and 1945, despite the fact that the painting appears almost cursory and unfinished. It is a deceptively complex and rich painting, with an amazing tension between the subject and the language used to depict it – the slaughtered family heaped dead under a kitchen table, their bodies intertwined. The more you stare at it, the more you get entwined, too. The painting was initially inspired by documentary footage showing the assassination of a family during the civil war; the ghost of Goya’s Disasters of War hovers in its mangled stillness. This is nature morte as aftermath. An arm reaches upward, stiffened in death, the hand bloated and seamed like a baseball mitt, clutching at nothing.