RA: Guernica

I had the opportunity to see Guernica in person at the Prado in Madrid last month. Thus it is my choice for rhetorical analysis. The painting asks, what are the consequences of war on society and more generally on all humanity? The obvious answer is that war destroys humanity because bombing innocent victims creates nightmarish chaos in the otherwise normal lives of common people. The target audience for this piece of art is the apathetic public: those generally unaware of the terrible tragedy at Guernica as well as those who knew about the bombing and did nothing. The implicit assumption is easily accepted by the audience—anything which creates nightmarish chaos in an otherwise normal life destroys humanity. Picasso uses a variety of methods to convey this to his viewers. There is much emotion in the painting as all the painting is done in dark colors with abstract and freakish figures. People are being burned alive; a horse cries out with a wild and maddened look; a woman weeps over a dead child with a howl of unreal pain on her face. Pity and despair are shown by a woman leaning out the window holding a simple candle which illuminates the horror all around. And above the chaos floats an on looking eye with a light bulb as its pupil, perhaps a symbol of a world viewing the mayhem through the lens of the media, but doing nothing to stop it. The fact that Guernica was created by Picasso adds to the authority of the argument. He is a famous painter well known throughout the world. Also adding to this is the fact that Picasso is himself a native Spaniard making him well acquainted with the misery of the bombing and the civil war in his own homeland. Though Picasso’s work is generally chaotic, his depiction of Guernica makes logical sense to the reader that war is chaos—never before has the abstract made so much sense because war is indeed a black nightmare. Through his rhetoric Picasso succeeds to a great measure in convincing his audience of the horrors of war.
To see a copy of the painting visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(painting).