Pre-Modernist

Like many artistic and intellectual movements, Modernism challenged its immediate predecessors by reaching back to earlier artistic forms. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona notes, for instance, the decisive influence that Grunewald’s Isenheim Alterpiece had on Picasso, and on the Guernica in particular. At one point, she focuses attention on the shrieking woman on the right side of Picasso’s painting:

“The first image was that of the shrieking woman whose hands and arms stretched upwards, and whose mouth was open with the now silenced sounds of terror. The viewer’s eye then moved
across the diagonal line formed by the body of the next figure to the outstretched hand holding a lamp, the head of a horse whose open mouth was overwhelmed by the presence of a jutting tongue, and the mandorla-shaped sun-lamp. Then the viewer’s eye moved diagonally across the body of the suffering horse to the outstretched arms and a shrieking mouth of the dead soldier across the bottom left side of the canvas. From his exaggerated left hand, the viewer’s eye moved upward to the dramatic image of a secular version of the pieta and the presence of a bull. Then, the viewer exited the room. This visual presentation of pain, fear, and awe depicted by Picasso was devoid of the dramatic color and tactile attraction of his earlier Crucifixion. Rather, he followed Grunewald’s lead of reducing himself to an almost monochromatic palette. Thus the Spanish artist rendered his canvas in black and white, having himself witnessed the power of Zervos’s black-and-white photographs of the Isenheim Altarpiece which emphasized gesticular communication and the physicality of agony without the emotive benefit of color. Therefore in the duality of the forms noted earlier, that is the normal and the engrossed halves of each figure, Picasso had both symbolic and haptic intent.”