Art and psychoanalysis Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Art and psychoanalysis - Essay Example Upon hearing about the bombing of Guernica, Picasso started sketching a mural. â€Å"He drew screaming women and children, perhaps inspired by his fear that harm might come to his own baby daughter. He seemed haunted by the many faces of anguish.†1 Although the woman holding a wounded child is in Guernica, she is also in many other works of Picasso. This woman is of different color and shape, but can be identified throughout Picasso’s other works. One source reports: Characters that typically appear in these paintings reappear in Picassos paintings as well. Theres usually quite clearly a suffering woman, someone whos screaming, a woman with a child whos been injured, or may even be dead.2 As suggested above, maybe Picasso was thinking of his daughter. However if this is true, why did Picasso distort the images? The distorted images seem to speak of an underlying emotion in his subconscious. It must be noted that Picasso had an art background. His father was a painter as well. Picasso could have drawn and painted in more realistic terms. One source reports, "Picasso was very properly trained in the grand tradition of painting, allegorical painting about universal themes: the horrors of war, the massacres of the innocents.†3 Picasso could have used photos from Guernica to make a more realistic picture. Instead â€Å"Picasso was able to take that traditional academic motif and actually rework it and make it relevant again to this particular time and this particular circumstance, I think is really one of his great achievements in this painting."4 Picasso did not make a realistic picture due to a deep unconscious need inside. Picasso had a subliminal problem that was deeply rooted in his psyche. It might be the death of his sister. Picasso’s mother might have shut down with grief after the death of her daughter. This could have made Picasso have deeply buried animosity toward his mother for the