One of the many questions that come to mind exploring Hirst’s body of works concerns the validity of subjective interpretation - does it matter if the viewer comes up with some interpretation that is wildly different from the artist’s intentions? Does that make the interpretation irrelevant?
These extracts give some of Picasso’s thoughts about the interpretations offered about Guernica. Also interesting to note how his tone changes over a period of years (I would have liked to have known the years he said these remarks but that information was not provided at the Source)
Picasso never committed to a specific explanation of his symbolism: “…this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse… If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.”
“Picasso made a very poignant personal statement about the horse in Guernica being connected to the idea of the suffering of the people,” adds Failing[1]. “And since it’s an animal with a big lance wound through its center, certainly that’s a connection many people would find quite plausible. But Picasso was maddeningly inconsistent about what he had to say about these particular characters, although he didn’t like to say very much at all about them. He knew that it’s better to not say something and allow the interpreters to fill in the space. That gives them something to do. It makes them think about you more.”
Years after the completion of Guernica, Picasso was still questioned time and time again about the meaning of the bull and other images in the mural. In exasperation he stated emphatically: “These are animals, massacred animals. That’s all as far as I’m concerned…” But he did reiterate the painting’s obvious anti-war sentiment: “My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. In the picture I am painting — which I shall call Guernica — I am expressing my horror of the military caste which is now plundering Spain into an ocean of misery and death.”
[1] Failing, Patricia. “Picasso’s ‘Cries of Children…Cries of Stones.’” Art News 126, 7 (Sept 1977): 55-64.