Defiance in Bronze: The Death's Head

Sum up *La tête de la mort* (Death's Head), completed in 1943, in one word and it would be "resistance." At a glance it's just a skull-shaped sculpture of bronze and copper, but it has a deep story behind it. Paris in 1943 felt nothing like the city before the war. The Second World War, which caused the greatest loss of life and property in human history, was at its height, and this work was a fierce act of defiance against Nazi Germany. The Nazis kept threatening Picasso throughout the war, and to understand that relationship we first need to look at another of his most famous works, *Guernica*.

*Guernica* is painted entirely in black, white, and gray. A woman wails over her dead child. A bull, seemingly symbolizing Spain, looms nearby. A horse screams, pierced by a spear, and a body lies on the ground. Every face is twisted in agony, and the colorless palette itself feels hopeless. The painting is based on a real event, and Guernica is also the name of a town in Spain.

Spain was then in the grip of a brutal civil war. On the surface it was a fight between the Republicans and the Nationalists led by General Franco, a man often called a dictator, but both sides were backed by foreign powers, and behind the scenes the great powers were jockeying for position. The Soviet Union backed the Republicans, Germany and Mussolini's Italy backed the Nationalists, and Britain and France adopted a policy of non-intervention. It looked like a dress rehearsal for the Second World War. As the two sides seized cities from each other as if playing a land-grabbing game, civilians were killed and wounded, buildings collapsed and burned, and whole regions were laid waste. Then, on April 26, 1937, the small northern town of Guernica was struck. It happened to be market day, and people were out in the streets. Around 4 p.m., with no warning, dozens of bombers swooped in low and began bombing mercilessly. As people fled the burning town, fighter planes are said to have chased them down and attacked indiscriminately. The Basque government at the time reported some 1,600 dead and about 900 injured (later research puts the death toll in the hundreds). The attackers were the Germans, who stood behind the Nationalists. Their aims were to terrify the Republicans and to test the power of their newly developed air weapons, and Germany's involvement came at General Franco's request. Guernica, in effect, became a testing ground for Germany's new weaponry.

When Picasso heard the news, he was furious. He had been commissioned by the Spanish government to produce a painting for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World's Fair, and he finished this enormous canvas, 776 by 349 cm, in just one month and hung it in the pavilion. Through the press and word of mouth, the world learned of the severity of the Spanish Civil War and of the international crimes of Franco's regime and the Nazis. *Guernica* symbolizes the horror of war and Picasso's anger at its countless innocent victims. It couldn't go straight to Spain. Picasso asked that it be returned to his homeland after Franco's death, once Spain became a democracy, and in keeping with his wishes it stayed in New York until 1981 before returning to Spain.

There's one famous anecdote about the painting. During the Second World War, after the Nazis took Paris without a fight, a Gestapo officer said to have been a kind of envoy of the Nazi regime often visited Picasso's studio. Unable to arrest him, the officer kept watch to make sure he didn't paint another *Guernica*-like work that might stir people up. Standing before a photograph of *Guernica*, the officer asked, "Did you do this?" Picasso reportedly replied, "No, you did." In the 1940s he is also said to have handed out postcards of *Guernica* to German visitors with a mocking look, saying, "Take one, as a souvenir." The Nazis threatened Picasso repeatedly and denounced him in public as a degenerate artist, but because of his enormous fame they couldn't easily arrest him; doing so might have provoked an even bigger backlash.

Back to the *Death's Head*. The Spanish Civil War ended in victory for Franco's side, and about two years after *Guernica* was painted, the Second World War broke out. When the German army entered Paris without a fight, the whole city came under oppression and was gripped by fear. Picasso and Dora Maar kept hearing news of friends who had been sent to concentration camps for joining the Resistance, and of Jewish friends who had been tortured. Since *Guernica*, the Nazi regime had attacked Picasso harshly, and he himself had become a symbol of defiance. Modern artists were banned from exhibiting and publishing, lest they produce a second *Guernica*. Casting in bronze, in particular, was completely forbidden. Bronze could be used to make weapons such as ammunition, and German forces, short of metal in wartime, were collecting bronze from statues on the streets, melting it down, and turning it into arms. Even in that grim climate, Picasso decided to cast his own sculpture in bronze. He waited for a chance to cast it in secret and produced the *Death's Head*. To have completed it at such a time was in itself a remarkably defiant and courageous act.