Da Picasso a Banksy: raccontare la guerra per vivere la pace

Abstract

Before the Francoist coup in 1936, Picasso had been interested almost exclusively in formal research, but outrage at the tragic events affecting his homeland prompted him to reconsider his role as a man and an artist. Building on the examples of Goya, Picasso began to explore the meaning of peace through the lens of war, transforming his view of contemporary reality and establishing a profound link between art and social engagement, culminating in the composition of Guernica. The decoration of the Temple of Peace in Vallauris in the early 1950s further consolidated the artist’s pacifist message through the use of archetypal figures such as the Dove, the first example of which had been made in 1949 for the poster of the first Paris Congress of the Peace Partisans Movement: an episode followed by many others, destined to influence the symbolism of the pacifist movements of the Sixty-eight. In the new millennium Banksy has reinterpreted this symbol with the mural Armored Dove, where he has addressed the theme, cloaked in bitter irony, through a reference to the War-Peace dichotomy that can be ideally linked, in visual impact, to the best Picasso works dedicated to this theme.