However, what Larrea does not say is how "Guernica" can be considered to be of any importance if we do not believe in magic or if we do not believe in the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Or, to put it another way, if "Guernica" is important as a political act what distinguishes the painting of it from, say, the hurling of a grenade at a Fascist tank? The philosophy of art implied in Larrea's view that the work is magical and political is certainly unacceptable to most people and yet Larrea offers no justification of this philosophy but simply assumes that if he can find a meaning that satisfies him for most of the figures in the picture then he can claim that the work has been satisfactorily explained. Nowhere does he attempt to explain the specifically artistic, or formal, elements of the composition. Are we to conclude that any kind of composition would have been just as good as long as it contained the symbols (like the horse-shoe, that is supposed to bring the warrior good luck !)? And can Mr. Larrea explain why he considers "Guernica" a success when Fascism was not defeated in the Spanish Civil War and was only overcome fifty years later? Are we really to believe that the passage from fascism to democracy (and not to republicanism, we might add!) was in any way due to the magical spell cast by Picasso when, in his artistic imagination, he hurled his lance into the side of Fascism!

Mr. Berger, a Marxist , offers an explanation of the painting that is as ingenious as it is fallacious. We are told that it represents political protest at the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by the German allies of the Spanish Fascists. No one disputes that the picture was commissioned by the Spanish Government, which had been driven into exile by the Fascists. But how do we know that the style of the work implies a political protest? Because, Berger tells us, the bodies, the hands, the feet, etc. express physical pain and, since pain is the protest of the body, therefore "Guernica" is a protest against war. The trouble is that not only is it unclear how the bodies in the picture express physical pain (and Berger certainly doesn't tell us!) but it is by no means clear how physical pain could ever be expressed by a work of art. I am aware that art can tell us what psychological pain is, like sadness or despair, but I'm not aware of any example of art conveying to the spectator physical pain. And even if "Guernica" did express physical pain I should not account myself in any may enlightened by the knowledge of what it physically feels like to have a bomb drop on my head!

If I have understood Mr. Rudolf Arnheim , the psychologist, he sets out to show that the figures in "Guernica" can be understood by appreciating their composition in psychological terms. This, I take it, is why he gives a list of the figures followed by a description of each figure's posture and then a conclusion as to the emotion implied by the posture. However, the results of this enquiry are neither illuminating nor reliable. This is because it is unclear how one can conclude from the direction in which a figure is moving the feeling this implies or, in Arnheim's jargon, the "sentiment" does not necessarily follow from the "attitude". Thus, the baby's "attitude" is "downward" from which it is concluded that its "sentiment"is "death". Death, of course, is not a sentiment, or feeling, but the lack of one! But, in any case, why should a downward direction imply death, and not unconsciousness, or tiredness, or despair or any number of states, or emotions? And why does the same "attitude" , namely "uprightness", produce two different "sentiments" in two different figures (in the bull it is said to signify courage but in the mother lament)? The inadequacy of this approach is quite apparent but when Mr. Arnheim tries to explain the bull using more complex reasoning the result is even more incoherent. We are told that the bull is of paramount importance as all eyes are upon it, except those of the figure on the right. This turns out to mean not that all the figures are looking at the bull but that, for instance, the child's face is directed towards it, which contradicts his earlier statement that the child's "attitude" is downward. The warrior on the ground is gazing at the bull, we are told, but we are not told how his eyes, which are painted flat on the canvas, can be interpreted not as looking straight out at the spectator but straight up towards the bull. We are told that the woman pushes the lamp towards the bull when the painting only entitles us to say that it is in the general direction of the bull that the lamp moves. That the lamp's destination is the bull is a mere opinion, and unjustified at that! So we are hardly surprised when we are told that the bull, through present, is absent from the scene of destruction, which is supposed to explain its apparent indifference to the suffering mother! This is a fair sample of the evidence Mr. Arnheim brings in support of his contention that the bull is "the impurturbable image of Spain". But, in conclusion, he seeks to reinforce this view of the bull by saying that it must be a positive, good figure because if the bull symbolized Fascism then the work would be only an image of callousness and destruction whereas Picasso intended the work to be an inspiration to the Republicans. Thus Mr. Arheim uses an extrinsic justification of his interpretation and thus contradicts his main thesis that it is the form of the work itself which, being psychologically significant, gives the work its meaning.

Mr. Hilton is an art historian and his interpretation is perhaps the strangest. He claims that the picture is incoherent since its symbols cannot be explained, nor what is happening in the picture. Furthermore, he agrees with Mr. Clement Greenberg, an American critic, that, "Bulging and buckling as it does, this huge painting reminds one of a battle scene from a pediment that has been flattened under a defective steam-roller." Having thus denied that the work possesses either of the two essential properties of any work of art, good composition and meaning, does he condemn the work? Not a bit of it! The American abstract expressionists were in need of just such a monumental failure in order to free themselves from the need to depict objects in space. What is important, according to Mr. Hilton, is not the significance of the individual work but its contribution to the history of art. The inconsistency of such a position needs no emphasis. The subject of this essay will be the meaning and the formal brilliance of the work but I should like to goint out here that nowhere does Mr. Hilton justify the view that abstract expressionism is good art, which omission casts doubt on his opinion that Picasso's work is important in so far as it led to it.

Herbert Read is probably the most respected art critic of the twentieth century. He can't understand what all the fuss is about: "it has been said that the painting is obscure… but actually its elements are clear and openly symbolical." The light is that of day and night (does he mean twilight ? or what?); the figure emerging from the window symbolizes Truth since she carries a lamp and has classical features; the bull is "tense with lust and stupid power" (but why is the "Truth" figure allegorical and the others not? and what is the significance of all the other figures?). Having thus, to his own satisfaction, clarified the subject of the painting, he links it to the classical theory of tragedy: the spectator is somehow purified, or relieved, by the feelings of pity and fear in a process called "catharsis". But he does not say how the feelings of pity and fear are produced by the formal qualities of the painting and nor does he either justify, or even explain, the theory of catharsis. However, he somehow feels that what he has so far said entitles him to claim that he knows the meaning of the painting as a whole: "Not only Guernica, but Spain; not only Spain, but Europe, is symbolized in this allegory. It is the modern Calvary…" etc. etc. What is amazing about this kind of criticism is not so much its conclusions as the complacency with which it dispenses with logical justification by simply saying that all this is just obvious. Ignorance is indeed blissful!

Of the five opinions dealt with Mr. Read is perhaps the least helpful. Very little is in fact clear about "Guernica". Try and answer the basic questions: Who? Where? What? When? Why? and you will soon see how little is obvious but our disagreements with the other four critics may be illuminating. If Berger was wrong to interpret the work in terms of physical sensations with political consequences can we interpret it in terms of moral or spiritual feelings related to the individal human being? If Arnheim's scheme for reading the figures psychologically was defective can we suggest a valid one? Can we show that Hilton's criticism of the composition and the symbolism is unfounded and that their meaning is to be understood not as magic, as Larrea suggests, but as fitting into an artistic and cultural system far nearer home?

My enquiry into the symbolism in the picture began as a result of a feeling I had about the figure coming in through a window. The hair reminded me of a figure in Botticelli's "Birth of Venus". Some months later I got round to looking the picture up and discovered that the figure in "Guernica" is an amalgam of the two figures entering on the left in the "Birth of Venus" for it has similar hair to one of the figures and a similar mouth to the other. So perhaps the figures reprensented something like the Muses of poetry. The figure on the right, I discovered, derives from a painting by Raphael in the Vatican called "Fire in the Borgo", in which a figure with a similar funny tuft of hair raises his arms just like our figure. Instead of a window we find a "loggia" and here too it is a question of a fire. Furthermore it contains a figure with upraised arms, hanging onto a wall who strangely resembles, especially in his leg, an earlier version of our figure (see photo stage). And there is also a house with no roof! In the picture by Raphael, the figure with upraised arms is imploring the Pope, who occupies the loggia, to intervene on behalf of the Romans after a great fire has broken out. The figure at bottom right is an amalgam of St. Peter and St. Andrew in Raphael's "The Miraculous Draught" in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Picasso has incorporated into his figure the upraised head of St. Peter and St. Andrew's appealing arms.

At this point the picture seemed to be acquiring a considerable religious content. And then I remembered a remark by Timothy Hilton in his "Picasso". He says on page 246: "Why should we have to decide whether the light in this barn is electric or supernatural?"A barn. It does look like the inside of a barn. Now look beneath the figure entering through a window and you will see a hand in the form of a star. A few animals, as well: a horse and a bull and some kind of bird. And then on the left a mother and her child. A star outside and a mother and her child with some animals in a barn. Or should I say a stable? Look at the line running down from the bull's chin and you will see something like a halo-effect reminiscent of the one formed by the trees around the head of the lady in Botticelli's "Primavera". And we have already noticed that the figure entering through the window went back to another birth, that of Venus.

It is difficult to avoid thinking of the birth of Christ. The lines of the child's hands have been stylized into crosses and its right hand suggests pressure in its palm which is consistent with a nail being driven into it while the right hand has the form of a hoof, which is suggestive of the Christian lamb, and almost the crossed "P" or "ichthys", a Christian symbol for Christ. But this Christ is not alive but dead. And if we look at the mother and child again is it so far from Michelangelo's Pieta, or the laying of Christ to rest? Then look at the bull, at its horns and the black insides of the ears. Can we avoid thinking of the devil?

And then look again at the bird between the bull and the horse's head. This is generally taken to be a dove representing peace. This is quite wrong. This misconception is the result of the popularity of the dove Picasso designed as a poster for a peace congress. But this was ten years after "Guernica" and the bird on the poster has no stylistic qualities other than mere elegance. It possesses none of the power of Picasso's best work and is one of a number of works, including the portrait of Stalin, which were made to please people or to serve as propaganda. "Guernica" is the opposite: Picasso did not know what he was creating; he let what was inside him come out! But the fact that Picasso's dove of peace became well known has meant that every time people see a dove in Picasso's work they interpret it as peace. This is not true in "Guernica". The dove in our symbolism, in the culture of the Renaissance that has come down to us, it represents, as in the picture by Piero della Francesca of the Baptism of Christ, the Holy Spirit.

If we now look at the whole picture we see that it has a central part with the horse and two parts at the sides, one with the bull, the mother and the child and the other with the figure with arms raised below the window. Does this not remind us of the traditionnal medieval and renaissance religious form of altar-piece in three parts, called a triptych?

But what about the figure lying on the ground at bottom left? I had thought that the position of the arms suggested a crucifixion and that led me to the idea of St. Peter crucified upside down. There is a picture of the latter by Caravaggio but St. Peter's head is held upward and looking at the nail in his hand. It is not conclusively the same. The position of the head suggested a figure at bottom left of Gericault's "Radeau de la Méduse" (and lots of people liken the triangular constructionof the middle part of "Guernica" to a similar construction in Géricault's picture). But I wasn't satisfied. But I had earlier looked at the broken sword and for some strange reason had been reminded of the words I thought from St. Paul, but which are actually uttered by Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane: "Those who live by the sword shall perish by the sword." And the eyes of the figure had always baffled me. All the eyes in the picture give an impression of emotion but this figure's eyes simply do not register. For nearly a year I had starred at them without ever being able to read them.

I realize now that it was like one of those lateral thinking puzzles where you are given a situation, say a murder, and some seemingly irrelevant circumstances from which you must reconstruct the crime. The point is that you have to make some kind of logical jump in order to understand what happened. I had stared at the eyes that do not register as those of someone who is alive. So, logically, the person must be dead. But they do not suggest a dead man either and nor does the mouth. So how can he be neither dead nor alive? But think again of the broken sword and the quotation I had thought from St. Paul and look at the eyes again. What if those eyes are those of a living man, but one who has lost his sight! This is the only possible reading for the eyes. Once we know they belong to a blind St Paul they make immediate sense. They gape and stare but see nothing. And now we see why the head is bent backwards: when St. Paul was blinded "he fell to the ground". And perhaps we understand better the light that comes down diagonally towards him when we read in Acts 9: "and suddenly a light from heaven flashed about him."

At this point we have made a great deal of progress. We have learnt that these figures did not just pop out of Picasso's head butthat they followed on from his artistic and cultural ancestry. But we are nowhere near a comprehensive view of the picture. We have the birth of Christ and the descent from the Cross rolled into one, the birth of Venus, the fire in the Borgo with some nameless Roman with his hair on fire, St. Peter and St. Andrew rolled into one and having changed sex in the process and a blinded St. Paul. We don't know what the table is or the building inside the room, or the horse, and we still have to explain those strange faces and gestures.

Let us start with this extraordinary number and sex change of St. Peter and St. Andrew. Now, there is a basic rule of artistic interpretation that we must observe here and that is that when the artist quotes from a work of the past he does not necessarily use it to the same purpose as it was used in the work he quotes. The new figure formed on the basis of the earlier one may have a similar form but a quite different content. The logic here is quite simple. The artist is not trying to copy the older work but merely to use it to make a new work of art. So, in order to find out the significance of the new picture we must look carefully at the differences from the original and try to make sense of them in the light of the new work.

So the two saints have become a woman. Actually, there are probably other people pushed inton this figure as well as in the "Miraculous Draught" there are other figures in the boat and our figure in "Guernica" is of an extraordinary length. It is almost like some enormous creature from the sea! However the important point is that it is a woman and we know this because she has breasts and a somewhat feminine face. But there is a hardness about the breasts. They have dried up and become wooden. And all over the body there is what looks like dirt of grime. Her most obvious characteristic is that her whole body arcs upward, especially the neck, in a gesture of appeal, which the position of the arms confirms. But, whereas her right hand has a sort of kindliness about it, although it is wracked with tension, the left arm is thrown back down and to the right against the movement of the body as a whole and the left hand is badly arrt about in its form and suggests great anxiety. This is mirrored in the head where the mouth is suggestive of a kind of wonder but also disappointment and while her left eyes suggests a feeling of wonder her right eye counteracts the upward movement as if the upward glance had been stopped in its tracks by what it had seen.

The figure's upward stare is the culmination of a movement that penetrates the whole body. The tremendous sweep of the upward curving movement, which encompasses not far from half the length of the picture and well over half its height, it set off by:

1. The enormous internal compression of the body. The latter is lumped together around the knee and torso and the near and far side of the figure have been squeezed together with the posterior twisted around and up.

2. The solid base formed by the two feet and the knee.

3. The solid verticals of the bulging knee, the right leg and the right arm.

4. The left arm that runs counter (i.e. downward) to the upward diagonal curve of the body as a whole.

The figure is artistically perfect: its whole construction expresses the feeling of the character. The latter feeling becomes externalized in form, which is the fundamental process of art. The idea, commonly accepted, that the figure is simply a fugitive is a complete misreading of the figure's form (its great stability makes it clear that it cannot be running) and would make it unintelligible as it would be fleeing from something outside the picture which the spectator would be incapable of understanding. Furthermore, it undervalues the figure's meaning in trying to limit it to mere fear. The latter is a very mundane emotion. Art is commonly believed to express emotions and it is true that it does but it does not simply express earthly emotions. If it only told me what it is like to be afraid of falling off a ladder it would tell me something perfectly banal. Art speaks of that emotion that links man with his god. It is moral , or spiritual, emotion that art aspires to express. It is true that the figure is regarding something that is not in the picture. But it is not fleeing from some earthly terror. Art is not about avoiding the truth but searching for it. The figure is moving towards something. It is moving forwards and upwards towards the light of the oil-lamp and the electric light but neither of the objects could explain the figure's fascinated gaze - they are merely earthly clues, directing the figure's attention further to "the light", in the spiritual sense. The figure is bereft of all earthly prestige. The head and hair reduce its femininity to a minimum. The stupidity of the facial profile is not intellectual but spiritual stupidity, or the recognition of the futility of earthly enlightenment as compared to spiritual awakening. The critics are insufficiently aware of the continuity of the development of Picasso's style over the decades. This figure is a stylistic and thematic solution to the problems posed by "The Embrace" of 1903. Stylistic because all that redundant flesh has disappeared to be replaced by a form which is only expression and nothing more; thematic because it is recognized that the human solidarity which "The Embrace" strives for is essentially the fruit of a spiritual search for that light that is outside and above man. It is this sense of humble, spiritual endeavour which, even more than the origin of the figure in Raphael's Saints Peter and Andrew and the dried-up, asexual breasts, suggest to me that the figure is an echo of St. Mary Magdalene at the Crucifixion.

This suggests that the horse represents Christ and I know the reader will find this quite implausible. I would ask him to suspend judgment until we have dealt with some over figures, when we will be able to concentrate all our efforts on the figure of the horse. For the moment we shall just assume that the horse in some way recalls the Crucifixion.

If we now look at the figure on the right we are forced to admit, firstly, that if it really is supposed to represent a Roman in a great fire "Guernica" as a whole is unintelligible. And secondly, we must admit that if we don't know what situation the figure is in we cannot tell what he is feeling, i.e. the formal characteristics, like the shape of the face, do not register on us and give us the impression of a feeling. But if we look at the painting as a whole we see the Birth of Christ and the descent from the Cross on the left and the Crucifixion in the centre. We should then be entitled to put forward the idea that the figure on the right is Judas. We then see those dinosaur-like triangles of fire not as the historical fire in Rome but much more simply as the fire of Hell, which has begun to burn Judas's hair and Hell would seem to be a building, invisible to us, from which the flames are coming. The strange opening in the wall is not the Pope's loggia but the way out tha Judas chose, that opening of doubtful hope, suicide. Now, if we see the figure in this context we can understand its formal qualities. It is reminiscent of the terrified seated figure in Michelangelo's "Last Judgment". The face is eaten away by guilt; the arms, the neck and chin rise up in despair, and yet hope: the fingers writhe in agony, the left hand more hopeful than the twisted right; and the eyes regard the hated self and yet look out in hope. It is the greatest depiction of Judas since Giotto's "The Kiss".

This figure is generally referred to as"the falling woman" and it is assumed that she is physically falling as a result of the physical destruction of the town of Guernica in the bombing raid carried out by the German allies of the Spanish Fascists. But if the painting is to be interpreted as a physical depiction of destruction this will drastically reduce its importance as a work of art (since art is concerned with moral and not physical problems) and it will be impossible to explain why the physical event is not portrayed in more realistic terms. And if we look at the formal properties of the figure we shall see that far from falling it is in fact extremely stable. It must be so in order to hold the upward thrust of the arms, neck and chin and the downward pull of the head. The idea that the figure is a woman derives mainly from earlier versions and sketches Picasso did, which portray a more clearly feminine figure but all that is left of this feminity in the final version is a suggestion of breasts and a long dress but the former is slight and the latter becomes a board in the barn. As against this it can be stated that the sketches for this figure include a bearded man, though it is perfectly feasible that the figure could change completely in the final version. Secondly, the hair-style suggests a man and the physical feautures of the face and, perhaps, the expression of guilt suggest the masculine. And it seems more likely that Picasso used the device we saw in "Girl in front of a Mirror" (1932) where the masculine and feminine features are contrasted with one another in the same figure, though here it is done with much greater restraint. The flat, white figure is masculine while the "wooden dress" suggests the feminine. We should also note that the lower part is cut off from the upper part by a quite unrealistic straight line, which suggests that the bottom half may have little to do with the top half. It seems to be a way of integrating the figure into the picture as a whole. Just as the bull has a torso of a different nature to that of its head and neck, and a leg that becomes the leg of a table, so our figure has a long robe which is also a plank of wood that rivets the figure into the overall scene of the barn.

Those who argue the figure is a woman base their view on the early versions of "Guernica" but if the reader is able to see reproductions of the photographs taken at various stages of the work's composition he will note that between the third and fourth stages there is a very clear and abrupt change in this figure; it is radically altered. Not only does it acquire more masculine features (such as the hair-style) but it shows the influence of earlier figures in two earlier Crucifixions. In the drawing for "Crucifixion" of 1929 we see a figure on the right edge of the picture pointing across the picture in the direction of the Christ-figure who appears to be climbing a ladder. This is presumably a representation of Judas since, although he actually revealed Jesus with a kiss, the gesture is clearly one of denunciation. But a far more expressive Judas is found just to the right of Christ's left arm in the "Crucifixion" of 1930. There is just a kind of red, elliptical sphere which contains the profile of a head. It is impossible to place the figure definitively as Judas but there is enough anxiety, and perhaps guilt, in the expression to suggest him. But what is extraordinary is the way the lower part of the face is being reduced almost to vanishing point. This mirrors very closely the way the profile below the nose is eaten away in the final figure in "Guernica ".

We now come to the figure on the right, entering by the window. We said that it owes much to Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" but if we are meant to associate the Crucifixion with the Birth of Venus we would have to admit that the painting as a whole is simply absurd, just ridiculous. There is also a quotation from Titian's "The Entombment". The eyes and eyebrows of St. Mary Magdalene express a similar feeling of fascinated revulsion as that expressed by our figure's eyes. But if this is St. Mary Magdalene then there is redundancy as we identified the figure at bottom right as her too. But our picture shows the figure arriving somewhere from a window and since we have the Birth of Christ on the left, towards which the figure is moving and also since she is holding an oil-lamp, which suggests some kind of illumination, would it not be more sensible to see the figure as a representation of the Annunciation ?

This figure presents us with a profile view. The figure's left eye is mainly in profile but the pupil is turned round a little towards us while the figure's right eye is turned round to look at us nearly head-on and the eyebrows suggest a three-quarters view. Why this contradiction of normal perspective? The answer is: in order to achieve expression. As we have said, the figure expresses fascinated horror, which is indicated by the drawing of the features, the mouth, the left-hand eye etc. which express a psychological state of mind. But this fascinated horror is also expressed by the movement of the figure as a whole. The shape of the head suggests a meteoric expansion from the right to the left (and represents a perfection of the style groped after in "Three Women on the Beach" of 1923). Now, fascinated horror implies a forward movement and a backward movement and it is precisely the check in the forward movement which is provided by the right-hand eye which, firstly, by being turned nearly towards us forms an angle of 90 degrees with the right to left surge of the face and thus holds it in check and, secondly, by being this side of the nose rather than the far side it wrenches the face to a halt. If you doubt the importance of the right-hand eye block it out with a piece of paper and see how the tension caused by the differing view-points falls flat.

Now, if this is the Angel of the Annunciation we can identify the room, or building, from which she appears as Heaven. It is a brilliant expression of the seemingly inexpressible. For Heaven is a place which exists outside space. Now, in order for us to imagine a place of any kind we must imagine it as in space. But it exists. How could an artist put that across? Picasso's answer is: by turning space inside out. He takes a building and, firstly, puts it inside a small room, a barn, inside which it could not logically be contained and, secondly, he turns the building itself inside out so that the roof runs down the inside of the wall and so that the wall-face nearest us, bathed in light, appears to be the inside of the wall turned outwards. And note that the angel coming out through the window only appears this side of the window - we cannot see through to the other side. And the bottom part of the door gives the same impression of an opening which we cannot see through, a kind of neutral space, or space filled up with emptiness, and which, incidentally, like the opening above the Judas figure, can be read as a cube protruding outwards towards us as well as an opening. This is not merely Op Art, or art that creates optical illusions for their own sake: it is a logical necessity for if it represents space filled up with emptiness it must also represent space whose fullness has been emptied out. Thus the paradox of a place existing outside space is rendered by paradoxical form: an object that can be read in two utterly contradictory ways.

We have now identified the Annunciation, the Birth of Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Descent from the Cross, Judas, St. Mary Magdalene, Heaven, Hell and the Devil (incidentally, the table under the dove, in this context, must be an echo of the Last Supper, which may explain the tiled floor beneath the horse, which does not look like the floor of a barn). Now, in all this imagery the central element must be the Crucifixion but in our picture we see a horse. How could Christ be portrayed as a horse? A lamb perhaps, even a donkey, but a horse!

For a start, the horse shares one characteristic with Christ: it has a lance in its side. But this is clearly not nearly enough. In order to get a clearer view it is necessary to look at the other set of symbols in the picture, the one connected with bull-fighting: the bull, the horse, and the apparently beheaded and blind figure lying on the ground, whom we can presume to be a matador.

In order to gain a clear understanding of the metaphor of the bull-fight it is necessary to dispel certain prejudices about bull-fighting. It cannot be a matter of glorying in the suffering in a deliberately uneven contest for it is not conceivable that a civilized Catholic nation could stomach such barbarity. The bull-fight must be a ritual in which the evil which the bull represents is triumphed over by the matador. If we look at it in this way we can understand why the crowd is not intoxicated by the blood-letting but, on the contrary, are reacting to something moral. They are not in fact watching a bull being killed: they are looking through the physical fact of the killing, through the symbol of the killing, to the triumph of good over evil.

Now, the bull-fight we see in the picture is a strange one indeed. During a normal bull-fight the bull is weakened by the picadors, who shoot lances into its side. Here the lance has not been shot into the bull but into the horse. So the bull-fight has been perverted. The horse, which in the bull-fight intervenes in man's favour, has itself been pierced by the lance and is no longer able to intervene for man. Thus the beast is all-powerful and man lies impotent on the ground.

The important point is that in the bull-fighting metaphor the horse intervenes for man. This fits in with the image of Christ, for he too intervened for man. The horse's eyes express incomprehension and its mouth and nose express ferocity. This fits in with the bull-fighting metaphor because the horse has been pierced unexpectedly by the lance but how does it fit in with the image of Christ? We are used to thinking of the Crucifixion in the way St. John presents it in the last of the Gospels where, after three hours of suffering, Christ says, "it is accomplished" and renders up his spirit. But St. Matthew's version is quite different: Our Lord cries out, "Eli Eli, la'ma sabach - tha'ni?" Here it is suggested that the Son of God knew also the despair of rejection. It will now be our task to justify the view that it is this feeling that the horse expresses.

The argument for interpreting the horse as Christ crucified is firstly that it coincides with the other figures we have identified (including the spear in the horse's side and also the hole in its side as St. Thomas was later to feel it), secondly that it links up with the bull-fighting metaphor, thirdly it is the only way of adequately accounting for the extraordinary expression on the horse's face, and fourthly it corresponds to a Freudian interpretation of the picture.

It is the final point I wish to take up now. Picasso had painted the Crucifixion in 1930 and produced a canvas full of macabre faces and distorted figures, the whole thing daubed in heavy red and blue and orange. A horrid mess! And Picasso had also dealt with the Spanish Civil War in the "Dream and Lie of Franco" of 1937. Here we have Franco depicted as a chap with a great big long aggresive-looking penis and the Republic as a lovely white horse. Sentimental, spiteful rubbish! The reason these works are so poor is that Picasso set out consciously to describe what he thought about the two events. He thought the Crucifixion was horrible so he painted a horrible picture; he hated Franco so he drew a hateful picture of him; and he thought the Spanish republic was a lovely, romantic dream so he drew it as a nice white horse. But none of this corresponds to reality. They were merely immature ideas in the head of Picasso the private individual and they are no more valid than those of anyone you might meet in a pub!

We have seen what a mess he made of it in the "Cruifixion" of 1930 when he tried to express his concious ideas directly. And if we look at "Minotauromachie" of 1935 we see what happened when he tried to express ideas indirectly. The picture is stylistically brilliant. It is balanced in its composition and bathed in a mysterious dark light which is admirably even. Here we have a Christ-like figure mounting the Cross but instead of being nailed on by soldiers he skulks mysteriously up a ladder. The figure is clearly Christ, as the beard and the loin-cloth show, as does the ladder, which is borrowed directly from the "Crucifixion" of 1930 and the drawing for the Crucifixion of 1929. Now, Picasso thought he could get at the truth indirectly by a kind of Freudian symbolism; by taking the character out of its proper context, adding the Freudian symbol of the ladder, which stands for the sex-act, I believe, making the atmosphere mysterious by adding this dark light which suggests that the Freudian meaning lies below the surface and by placing the figure of Christ with other symbolic figures. But the result is pure mystification : the child with her light and flowers is merely sentimental; the minotaur with its bear-skin head is ridiculous; the girl spectators with the dove are just mysterious and nothing more; the lady and the horse are unintelligible ; the figure of Christ is quite absurd; and the lighting is a throw-back to the gratuitous mysteriousness of the Blue Period. If it is claimed that these figures are Freudian and that, like elements in a dream, their meaning is beyond the merely rational it must also be explained how figures which are significant when they appear to us when we are asleep are supposed to be meaningful when we look at them when we are awake! Picasso thought that by using Freudianism he could illuminate reality. Instead he rendered it either unintelligible or banal or sentimental.

The important thing is that Picasso needed an intermediary. But he misunderstood Freud. The whole point about Freudian experience is that it is unconscious. You cannot use it. You cannot set out to depict reality in its terms. It must come from within. And this is precisely what happens in "Guernica". Here Picasso allowed the figures to take the form which satisfied him not as a psycho-analyst but as an artist. But, as we said before, the figure of the horse was essential. We have seen that the "Crucufixion" suffers because Picasso looked directly at his subject and allowed his conscious feelings to intervene and in "Minotauromachie" he was unable to get at reality because he imposed on his vision a particular psychological view of the relationship between experience and its deeper meaning, i.e. he silenced his artistic vision by imposing on his work a Freudian view of the mind. Now, in the "Dream and Lie of Franco" he used symbols to get at the truth but again allowed personal feelings to falsify and romanticize his vision (the Republic as a while horse etc.). Thus we see, with hindsight, that what the artist needed were symbols which distanced him from his subject, not sentimental symbols like the white horse but a symbol which his artistic mind was free to fashion to get at the truth, without the interference of ready-made psychologies like Freudianism.

This is what happens in "Guernica". Probably as a result of the bombing of the civilian population of the Spanish Basque town of Guernica by the Nazis Picasso let his artistic self speak. This meant letting go of his conscious control of the picture and allowing his unconscious to speak through his artistic talent. He allowed the horse to escape from its political role as a sentimental symbol of the Republic and become something that he did not consciously understand. In this way he painted a truly Freudian picture as he allowed the horse to express what was most important to his unconscious self. The figure of the horse did not become any of the stereotyped Freudian symbols which belong to the world of dreams and not of art, but came to express that which lay deepest in Picasso's and in Catholic Spain's unconscious: the Crucifixion.

Now we can see why the bull-fighting metaphor is inadequate in many ways (why should the matador be blind? who threw the lance? why is the bull removed from the horse?). The reason is that the bull-fighting metaphor has no importance in itself but merely serves to form a bridge between the events of the Spanish Civil War and the Crucifixion. The bull has left the arena all together and become a symbol, a flat, white, ghostly figure above the mother and child and the figure at the bottom is in no way clearly related to the horse, but has become St. Paul, who thus links the theme of war (St. Paul persecuted Christians) to the theme of religious conversion. The lance in the side of the horse has become the spear in the side of Christ (the hole in Christ's side is also visible, as it appeared to St. Thomas and it is perhaps his hand we see low on the horse's side, reaching to touch it). The horse that intervenes for man in the bull fight has become the Son of God.

The important thing to understand is that the figure of the horse, since it did not stand for anything in particular in Picasso's conscious mind, could be treated entirely freely by the artist. This is how he achieved a vision of the Crucifixion that had up until then eluded him. His unconscious mind was free to fashion the horse's eyes in painful incomprehension and the mouth visciously snapping. Is this merely a horse shying at some invisible danger? It is the style that tells us it must be something deeper. It is quite common for critics to say the horse is a pathatic old nag on its last legs. This is the case in the Spanish critic Larrea's view as he has the unenviable task of explaining why the horse represents Fascism. This view of the horse as Franco's Spain depends on a complete misunderstanding of Picasso's artistry. Larrea reads the horse as a pathetic old nag. This must be because he is interpreting the horse in conventional artistic terms, i.e. he thinks that because the horse is not represented in the usual perspective, in normal three-dimensional drawing, that this must mean that the horse is being torn apart. If this were true it would mean that most of Picasso's artistic creation would merely be pictures of things falling to bits. The truth is that Picasso had learnt a new artistic language in which different views of objects could be blended into the same picture in order to give a dynamic impression of the object. We saw in the "Self-Portrait" of 1907 with what extraordinary skill Picasso throw the different planes of the head together to make that tremendous impression on the spectator. In this connection the horse is Picasso's greatest achievement. Let us see why.

Anyone who who has studied pictures will be aware of the fundamental problem of how the spectator outside the picture comes to be related to it. Over the centuries various methods have been devised to guide the spectator's eye into the picture. But never till 1937 has the latter been thrown in over the central figure and back out again! It is not just that the far side of the horse has been pushed upwards towards us like the flap of a jacket. It is also the drawing of the lance which, by the use of foreshortening and its odd angle, enables us to see the lance not on our side, but on the far side of the horse, thus giving us the impression that it is we who have changed position and are seeing the horse from the other side at the same time as we see the point of the lance appear on this side. We have the impression of being on both sides of the horse at once. It makes Cubism's snipping up of the picture into little diamond shapes look very petty indeed!

We have seen how Picasso developed a way of imagining things in contrast to normal, realistic perspective, how he enables us to see with our mind. Here, in the horse, we have a plethora of ways of seeing all thrown against one another and bathed, for the most part, in luminous light. If we look first at the two hind hooves we see that the one on the left has been drawn in a summary, schematic, child-like way whereas the one on the left has been drawn in a very sophisticated way, the planes having been warped. The latter is a more sophisticated version of the warping of space we first noticed in the arms of the two central figures in the "Demoiselles". The horse's tail is, like the left horse-shoe, almost schematic, a few lines suggesting the debonnaire flow of a real tail. The outline of the rearmost leg is the more beautiful as the black against which it is set is extremely deep and shiny. The three rearmost legs, and most of the horse's body, are covered in small little lines which suggest newsprint, thus giving the impression that this is a representation of a horse rather than a visual reconstruction of one. It is reminiscent of "collage" but it is a demonstration of how the artist's hand can, with endless variation of the tallness and thickness, the lightness and darkness and the spacing, produce an effect far more brilliant than any bits of real newspaper or any other ready-made material used in collage. The effect is of flatness, as against the rounded figures we normally see in space. But the foremost leg and the front part of the body have a fairly realistic outline but inside the outlines it looks rather as if the history of art since the Renaissance is being stood on its head. Light, in the form of light and shade, is no longer acting as a tool to tell us where the objects are and what they are like, but is becoming liberated from form. All that is left of the form is the bare outline, a few lines suggesting a knee-cap and little more, and a few patches of shade that have lost any sense of roundness. Light is becoming simply light.

Whereas the body and three of the legs gave an impression of standing for those parts of the horse rather than expressing perceptual qualities like the texture of the horse's coat, the neck and head suggest a sort of texture but it is hard and wood-like and quite inappropriate for a real horse. The teeth are pretty realistic but the nostrils have been unrealistically moved around to find a prefect expression of ferocity. The eyes are depicted shematically and the ears rather resemble leaves. The tongue lies somewhere between the shematic and the symbolic. It has become some sort of spike.

If we now look at the horse as a whole we can get an idea of the extraordinary way in which Picasso has used space. If we look at, say, Géricault's horse we see that the impact it makes is due to the way the horse moves through space, from the foreground to the background and round again towards us in the head and neck. But that is the nineteenth century and the space is real space. In "Guernica" we are in the twentieth century, in the world of relativity and doubt in man's scientific knowledge. Here the movement is not through real space but through space itself. We can see this if we look at the horse's head. If we imagine a real horse's head and we look at it from the side it will have a near side and a far side and we know that, in real space, or the space of Newton's physics, those two sides can never meet. We might say that they are in two different planes. But here, in Picasso's horse, we begin near the horse's right eye on the far side of the head but when we get down to the nose we have crossed over to the near side. And yet we have no feeling of inconsistency, no impression of having crossed a kind of intellectualized space, or space itself. We have conceived of the notion of the relativity of space.

The head and neck are swung round in the opposite direction to the body and joined onto it, at the bottom of the neck, by a large patch of black, which suggests a kind of black hole, or a hole through space or time. The top of the horse seems to belong to its bottom half but is seen in a totally different way. The hole in the horse's side suggests a hole through absolute space.

If we look at the legs as a whole we are aware firstly of the extraordinary breadth and movement. The sheer distance between the back leg and the front leg suggest that the space itself is being stretched. The second rearmost leg has been bent foreward towards us through space itself while the second foremost leg is similarly bent backwards. In the latter leg there is a suggestion of dislocation which may mean that the leg has jumped over absolute space.

Thus we cannot agree with Larrea that the horse is simply a pathetic old nag. It has a rare beauty and an extraordinary power. It is at the same time an expression of the twentieth century universe and of the central feature of Spanish belief, the Crucifixion.

We have said that the interpretation of the picture as a Crucifixion is consistent with the development of Picasso'' art in general. I would now like to draw the reader's attention to specific elements in "Guernica" and the sketches Picasso made for it which indicate that the theme of the Crucifixion was in the artist's mind. Firstly, in two sketches the mother and child are climbing a ladder. This is the ladder we saw Christ ascending in "Minotauromachie", which was itself borrowed from the "Crucifixion" of 1930. This suggests a link in the artist's mind between the mother and child and the Crucifixion. It is also clear that the mother in "Guernica" is styistically related to the head of the Virgin in the "Crucifixion" (which itself goes back to the"Woman in an Armchair" of 1929, whose hair is borrowed for the mother in "Guernica") and that the vertical lines on the mother's dress echo the lines on the Virgin's clothes and on Christ's loin-cloth. 5it is interesting to note, too, that the bird in "Guernica" goes back to the red, descending bird on the left edge of the "Crucifixion". Secondly, in the earlier stages of the mural's composition (see, for instance, fig. 15 of Arnheim's "Genesis of Guernica") we see a number of bodies lying on the ground, one of which survives in the final version of "Guernica". This, too, goes back to the "Crucifixion" of 1930, where we see a group of prostrate figures lying at the foot of the Cross. Thirdly, in an early sketch (Arheim's figure.6) the figure on the ground, who survives, transformed into the final version, is wearing the helmet and carrying the lance of the Roman centurion we see in a drawing for the "Crucifixion" made in 1929. In the "Crucifixion" itself (1930) the centurion is playing dice at the foot of the Cross, while the lance is held up to the side of Christ by the small figure on horseback. And fourthly, if we look at the earliest photograph of the unfinished "Guernica" the upraised arm and the legs of the prostrate figure on the left appear to be framed in a structure which resembles a cross. And the figure's torso has a kind of woodenness about it, especially at the top, as if, by a transformation reminiscent of the left-hand figure in the "Demoiselles", the cross and the body had merged into a single substance. This woodenness is transferred, significantly, to the horse's neck in the final version of "Guernica"!

The reader may be unable to accept a religious interpretation because he feels that it is inconsistent with twentieth century art in general. But the fact is that the religious looms very large in, for example, the greatest play of our century, "Waiting for Godot". The title itself is indicative of a religious theme; one of the characters claims always to have compared himself to Christ; there is a discussion of the way the story of the convict crucified beside Christ is told in the various Gospels; and in both acts there appears a messenger who looks remarkably like an angel. Is it not also significant that in this play the religious themes are hidden below the surface action of the play in just such a way as in "Guernica"! Furthermore, the central character in Camus's great novel "L'Etranger" has often been likened to Christ in his rejection of society, his trial, condemnation and death. And if the transformation of Christ into a horse is to be criticized then there will be a good deal in Kafka's work that will have to be criticized too!

The reader may appreciate the stylistic qualities of the horse but may still be unable to accept that it represents Christ. There is no way that this can be proved. I have sought to show why it is likely but the reader may like to ponder on the way the critics have talked about the figure of the horse and the painting as a whole. Berger says of a sketch for the horse that Picasso "has been able to see and imagine more suffering in a single horse's head than many artists have found in a whole crucifixion." Herbert Read claims that the painting is: "the modern Calvary… It is a religious picture, painted… with the same degree of fervor that inspired Grundwald and the Master of the Avignon Pieta, Van Eyke and Bellini." Others have compared the work with Grunewald's "Crucifixion" too. We have already mentioned that Timothy Hilton sees the room as a barn, which suggested the idea of the stable to me at least. Roland Penrose suggests that the best figures in "Guernica" are reminiscent of the drawings of the Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene for his "Crucifixion" of 1930. And finally, I am unable to resist the temptation to quote Rudolf Arnheim who, talking of the way Picasso changed the position of the horse's head and neck, says, "As the horse bends downward it ceases temporarily to fulfill this function, now taken over by the soldier's arm. But in the end the horse will rise again." (my underlining, of course!)

We must deal with an objection raised by the horse whose leg appears to be dislocated. It may be objected that since Christ's leg was not broken by the soldiers, as he was already dead, the horse cannot represent Christ. As I said earlier, I see this primarily as a way of making the leg jump over absolute space but the leg may be broken. But I think it would be rather harsh to conclude that this means that the horse cannot be Christ. As we have said, the religious symbols came to Picasso quite unconsciously and so it should not surprise us if there are slight inconsistencies . I should like to think of it as a kind of slip of the Freudian tongue. Larrea has also pointed out that the same leg may be genuflecting. This is not impossible.

It is also necessary to deal with the figure of the bull. We have seen with the horse that the bull-fighting metaphor dissolved into a Freudian symbol and with the bull, too, there is liltle to be gained by insisting on the bull-fighting metaphor. The profile of the front of the bull's face and its mouth suggest a human given to bestiality; the blacked in ears and the horns suggest the devilish; the neck suggests massive strength; and the eyes are all-seeing. Beneath lies the woman bewailing her dead child but the bull remains magnificently impassive. Its eyes comprehend and are without pity. The bull is a vision of the magnificence of evil.

However, both Arnheim and Larrea suggest that the bull represents the Republic triumphant and Arnheim claims that the bull protects the mother "like a roof". It is difficult to imagine quite what protection a roof would afford to a mother who has just lost her child! I suppose what he means is that the upward thrust, or vertical movement, of the woman's body is countered by the horizontal immobility of the bull. But how does this prove that the bull protects the mother? Why does the mother show no sign of relief? Why does the bull show no sign of sympathy for the mother? What Arnheim does not understand is that the bull's horizontal immobility is precisely what gives the mother vertical thrust. It is the opposition formed by the bull which sets off, or highlights, the form of the mother. Just as the colour black will look more black when contrasted with white than when contrasted with blue so shapes and directions are stressed by being contrasted with their opposites. Thus formally speaking, the bull is the cause (or one of the causes, the other being the child) of the mother's grief. Nor is it easy to see how the bull's psychological state, as conveyed through its form (e.g. its eyes, profile, colour, shape, etc.), could in any way mitigate the woman's grief. She shows no sign of relief and the bull is impassive. The simple truth is that the bull exhibits precisely those qualities that would maximize the woman's suffering. The bull's psychological qualities are those which, as we saw with the forms, gives the maximum weight to the woman's grief. The bull's magnificent, self-sufficient, merciless, impassivity highlights the woman's futile, tormented, angry plea. If the bull protects the woman it can only be in that sense in which the Mafia protects its victims!

In portraying the magnificence of evil Picasso is simply doing his job as an artist: he is telling the truth about the nature of evil, what it is like, why people are attracted to it just as Shakespeare did when he created Lady Macbeth. Evil is awe-inspiring and, in a terrible way, beautiful. This is the difference between Picasso's final version of the bull and earlier sketches, especially the attractive, humanized bull with a young man's face. In the final version the artist has cast aside his illusions. In the sketch good and evil inhabit the same figure. Evil is made to seem good. But this is a contradiction, at best a wish about what a different world from ours might be like, at worst a lie about what our world is like. In the finished version evil is truthfully depicted, as it is, powerful, magnificient, attractive but always evil and utterly exclusive of good.

If we are right about the religious symbols there is one figure who is missing : God the Father. He must be missing if we are right in attributing the words "My God, my God, why hast thou foresaken me?" to the dying Christ. But we have to explain the explosion of light which seems to run in two directions, downwards and to the right from somewhere near the lamp at the top (this light corresponding to the inside wall, turned outwards, of the building we identified as Paradise) and downwards across the body of the horse towards the figure lying on the ground. The light can thus be seen as emanating from near the lamp at the top of the picture and being reflected by the wall of the Paradise building back towards the left. Thus we can see the light as coming from God the Father. It is this light which guides the St. Mary Magdalene figure towards the Father. It is this light that blinds the St. Paul figure lying on the ground. And it is this light that is transfiguring the lower half of the Christ figure, or the horse, even as its top half is being overcome with despair.

It may be objected that St. Paul has no place in the Crucifixion.But he does have a place in the history of Christianity and he also has a place in the Spanish Civil War. Just as the bull moves away from the horse and takes its place with the suffering mother and the horse becomes Christ so the matador leaves the bull-fighting metaphor to become a link between the religious themes and the Spanish Civil War. Just as St. Paul persecuted the Chrsitians so the fighters in the Spanish Civil War were persecuting Spain. This figure represents neither the Fascists nor the Republicans: the symbol of the former, the arrow, and that of the latter, the flower, have lost virtually all significance: the flower has perhaps withered and the arrow points nowhere in particular . The Civil War, through the symbol of the broken sword, is seen as an illustration of Christ's admonition that "he who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword".

This warrior who, in a earlier version, raised his fist to the heavens in a gesture of defiance on behalf of the Republican cause now lies blind and defenceless on the ground and since the Fascist arrow lies near him and points away from him and since the flower is not grasped by his hand it would seem reasonable to see the warrior not as symbolizing one side or the other but as symbolizing the fighting in general. Just as the non-human symbol of the bull enables us to conceive of evil in general (i.e. as a quality in itself unrelated to any particular human being) so the warrior enables us to conceive of the notion of fratricide in the cause of a political ideal in general (i.e. this fratricide may not have been the desire of any particular fighter on either side and yet it is the result of the action of all those who fought). This fratricide in the cause of a political ideal is seen in the figure of the warrior as a spiritual blindness, symbolized by his physical blindness, and futile, as symbolized by the broken sword. The warrior, as we have suggested, is an echo of St. Paul. And the picture as a whole sets the Spanish Civil War in terms of the Crucifixion. Far from being a matter of physical suffering, as Berger suggests, it is the representation of spiritual suffering which is the result not of the wrongs one side committed against the other but of the offence both sides were guilty of in eyes of God.

There is another justification for interpreting the soldier as St. Paul. This is to be found in Picasso's use of time . In the figures of the mother and child we have both the birth and death of Christ. But this is not a gratuitous confusion of time. It is time conceptualized. In the figure of the horse Christ despairs of the Father. This despair has an influence on all the other events depicted in the picture. The Angel of the Annunciation has spiked breasts and the look on her face is one of fascinated horror; the flatness of her form makes her storm forward but her eyes push backwards in a look of horror which is echoed by the mouth, which is a mixture of lyrical ecstacy and horror. Seen in the light of the despair of Christ on the Cross the Annunciation has become an awful lie . The degree of illumination she brings is ironically summed up by the modern oil-lamp she bears.

Similarly, the Birth of Christ, seen in the light of his Crucifixion, has become something like a miscarriage. The figures of the mother, the child and the bull deserve a special explanation as it seems to me that in the forms Picasso has found to express the horror of evil he has reached a summit of artistic expression. The figures are locked together in a pose that is more than monumental: it expresses what is eternal.

If we start with the child's head, then follow the woman's arm up to her neck, then her chin and then up along the profile of the bull's head we gain an impression of how the figure as a whole has been pulled at from top to bottom, or elongated. In this respect it is not dissimilar from Picasso's artistic ancestor, who was also a Spaniard, and whose influence we noted in the early work, "Evocation", that is El Greco. The forms are not stretched apart for nothing. This stretching is expressive of the anguish of the mother. Her child is dead and its head hangs downs perfectly vertically. Her face, on the other hand, is thrust upwards perfectly vertically in anguish but that upward thrust is contained and set off by the head of the bull, which is perfectly horizontal and her hair which pulls downwards. We should also note that at the bottom the downward movement of the child's head is contained by the clear horizontal of the lady's skirt. The vertical lines of the skirt echo the vertical movement of the mother's head and the child's head. Now, this vertical movement is countered by four arcs. First, that of the child's body, which is a small arc and goes from low down up with the neck and down to the toes. This arc is countered by a much larger one running in the opposite direction, from the lady's hand up through to her neck. This in turn is countered by a third arc, formed by the outline of the neck and leg of the bull. And this is finished off by a fourth arc, the top profile of the bull's neck which mirrors the third arc but which is less acute. We should note also that the lady's hand on the right also arcs round and outwards towards the mother's head. If we put all this together we find that the vertical movement is contained by strong horizontals and that this vertical-horizontal tension is countered by arcs that contain it and set it off. In the middle of this we find a kind of bent triangle formed by the arms and neck of the mother and mirrored in her skirt. So we have all these arcs straining against one another, and themselves in so far as they deviate from smooth curves, held in check and set off by strong verticals and horizontals, and these two systems mediated between by a sort of bent triangle.

This controlled tension is the reason why the configuration makes such an impression. But controlled tensoin is not enough to satisfy us. It must also make sense in its context. This it does in so far as the child's head hangs downwards because it is dead, that the mother's head is thrust upwards in an agonized appeal to the bull, which remains impassive.

Also the physical features of the characters must be legible and expressive and so they are. The bull's eyes are indicative of the superhuman, they are impassive, removed from the human sphere and utterly pitiless. The form of the woman's hand expresses forlorn hope, her hair, her eyes, squeezed tight together, her tongue and especially the profile on her face express agony. Her body is thrust upwards but what would be an appeal to God has become the terrified recognition of evil.

But how can we see the woman as the mother of Christ, as we earlier suggested, when she is far from the sweet and tender maiden we are accustomed to in religios pictures? The explanation is in the figure of Christ. If he is despairing of God then the mother of God becomes the mother of mere man. The birth of Christ is seen as a death, which explains why the baby is also Christ after the Crucifixion. This is the agony of Mary when Christ admits to human despair.

However, the figure of the child is not one of despair. If we look at its feet we see how human Picasso's style can be. By rounding off the toes and making the two feet almost symmetrical he expresses the delicacy and innocence of an infant, which any mother must recognize. But no sentimentality! The lines are firm and the volumes of the toes are solid.

According to Larrea, critics cannot make up their minds whether the child is dead or alive. It seems to be another lateral thinking puzzle like the one we dealt with concerning the St. Paul figure. But we don't have to be geniuses to solve the puzzle if, like Picasso, we know Michelangelo's "Pietà". As in the latter's Christ the baby here is both dead and alive in the spirit! Stylistically the child's head deserves special attention. One might be forgiven, at first glance, for seeing in it the same kind of simplicity as in Brancusi. But whereas the latter really simplifies forms so that they conform to simple geometrical shapes, thus removing tension and producing monotony, here the form is full of tension. The head is dramatically vertical, upside down; the outline of the head is a beautiful series of delicate curves, asymmetrical but balanced, and coming to points at top right and bottom left; the nose unnaturalistically confirms the downward weight of the head; and the single ear has moved down nearer the chin and has been turned round to face the back of the head. It is a masterpiece of asymmetrical harmony. But, more important still, the eyes, empty and yet full of mystery, and the mouth, perfectly reposeful, make it palpably clear that, though physically dead, the child remains alive in his spirit.

Thus the child is also a figure of hope. While the lines on its left hand suggest a pressure in the palm, consistent with the nail that will later be driven into it, the lines on the right hand have become a serene system of crosses and the hand itself is becoming the hoof of the Lamb of God.

In dealing with the significance of the figures we have discussed most of the picture's stylistic qualities but we must look at the style as a whole in order to understand the picture as a whole. Let us first look at Picasso's use of space.

The first impression we gain is that space is overfull: there are too many things for the space to hold. Physically there just too many things in the barn for it to be credible: there is the building turbed inside out on the right, there is a suggestion of a volcano in the bull's tail, and all the figures (i.e. the mother, the horse, etc.) are too big to fit into the barn realistically. Picasso manages to contain these figures by subjecting them to a very rigorous composition. The mother, child and bull (whose vice-like composition we have already dealt with) on one side and the figure with upraised arms on the right form two vertical blocks which are like walls holding the composition together at either side. Similarly, at the bottom there is a very clear horizontal base, formed by the warrior's two arms, three of the horse's hooves and the right-hand woman's right foot and left leg, which supports the central figures, including the horse, and the two blocks we have seen at either side. The central block of figures (the warrior, the woman and the horse) from a sort of irregular triangle, which gives stability to the composition. Then, on the left, the dove and the table mediate between the horse and the bull-lady-child block while, on the right, the inside-out building and the figure coming through a window mediate between the horse and the figure with upraised arms. If we now look at the way the light is distributed in the picture we see that on the two sides the figures are flat and white like ghosts while in the middle the light seems to emanate off centre towards the left, near the lamp, then falls down diagonally towards the right, this being balanced by a stream of light that appears to be reflected by the wall of the building down towards the left of the picture and the warrior's head. It is this solid, architectural frame which contains all the bulging, contorted, surging figures but it is also this framework which gives the figures their power by providing a counterbalance against which and in contrast to which they gain their full weight and power.

But even this would not be able to contain the figures if we looked at the barn as realistic space. As we mentioned before in discussing the horse, Picasso breaks with realistic space to portray absolute space, or ideal space, the best example of which is the horse's head which, as we saw, moves from one plane into another. From the top at the ear to the bottom at the nose it has moved not through space, but across space - from one plane to another. We saw how the horse's bent leg jumps over space and how there are black patches which represent non-space, or the lack of space, rather like black holes. We saw how, in the representation of Paradise as a house turned inside-out, we have a place outside natural space represented as inside natural space by being turned inside-out, i.e. what is impossible to represent inside space because it is not inside space is given a representation in space which is credible precisely because it is impossible (i.e. a house turned inside-out is, realistically, impossible). We noted how light reinforces the representation of absolute space by hiding texture. The horse's legs, for instance, look rather like newsprint and give no impression of what a real horse's legs feel like to our sense of touch. The horse's neck gives an impression not unlike woodenness. In this way light tells us that these objects are there but does not tell us exactly where they are in real space, or what they look like or what they feel like. We gain a picture of a horse in our mind distinct from its realistic properties as perceived by our senses. We see intellectually.

The notion of space is intimately connected with that of movement. The figure at bottom right which is, as we said, an amalgam of a row of figures in Raphael's "Miraculous Draught", introduces us to the notion of symbolic movement. Those heavy feet are firmly planted in the world but the body moves through earlthly existence and upwards towards the light of Truth. Similarly, the figure with a lamp surges from a Heavenly place into the earthly world of confusion below.

Just as space has exploded, in the sense that the figures have burst through the space of the barn, so time has imploded in the sense that various points in time have been squashed into one moment. There are three parts to the latter process. Firstly, various moments in the New Testament are depicted in the picture as taking place concurrently (e.g. the Crucifixion and the Annunciation). Secondly, the individual incidents are seen in the light of the main incident, the cry of despair of the crucified Christ (e.g. the Birth of Christ becomes a kind of miscarriage). And thirdly, the events of the Spanish Civil War of the 1930's, as symbolized by the arrow (Fascism) and the flower (the Republic), both situated near the warrior, are seen in terms of the Crucifixion. Thus, at one and the same time, Picasso has expressed the relativity of time discovered around 1900 by the scientists, the way in which our understanding of past events is coloured by our present situation, the way events in the present are understood in terms of events in the past and the way our sense of past and present is influenced by our search for Truth, or Light, in the future.

The figures that inhabit this universe are, apart from the horse, flat and white. What kind of people can they be? We have seen that the figure at bottom right developed from "The Embrace" of 1903, all the unnecessary flesh having been stripped to leave a form which is absolutely expressive. But if we compare it to "The Mirror" we see how the luscious black outline which gave that sense of sexual abundance has been reduced to a mere line, thus transforming that natural sexual energy into spiritual severity. Similary, we note that the figures have been reduced to a minimum of sexuality. The females and males are barely distinguishable as such. In reducing the sexuality of the figures Picasso has increased their spirituality.

But even these spiritual figures do not have the power of the light in the centre. It is this light which gives the painting its power and drama. It is nothing less than the mystery of life which is being depicted. Nowhere is there a single object realistically rendered. Reality, as we normally perceive it, has dissolved into a world of mystery: at the left there is the suggestion of a land-scape and a volcano while at the right a door is mysteriously ajar and in the middle a barn is inhabited by ghostly symbolic figures echoing the life of Christ and the Spanish Civil War. It is the light that suggests the ghostliness of the figures and the strange transformation in the bull and the figure with upraised arms. It is the light that suggests different "planes"of reality: does the upturned triangle below the figure with upraised arms suggest a different "time plane" or "place-plane" from its surrounding space? It is the light that is transforming (or transfiguring !) the body of the horse. And it is the light which guides the glance of the figure at bottom right. The actual light at top centre is not what the figure is seeking but the source of the light, which cannot be revealed to man. The "electric light" is clearly not the source of the light. But its form and colour suggest a host or, more precisely, a host held up above the chalice in the rite of the Mass, a suggestion re-inforced by the oil-lamp, which resembles a candle, and the arms of the Christ-child, which remind one of a priest's stole with a suggestion of the Christian "ichthys" symbol of Christ we noted earlier. The latter images relate to the Eucharist, which is, of course, a Mystery.

"Guernica" reveals to us what we might call the inner reality of life. The spectator is led through the human drama of good and evil, of innocence and guilt, of futile military solutions and of human grief, through to the spiritual drama of the search for the Light of Truth which can be approached through a series of signs of Christian origin but just as in the picture the source of light is hidden so in life the essence of truth can never be reached, which is why the drama of the search continues.