and the center of the painting is illuminated as if by a street light that looks in Picasso’s handling like a human eye, but also as an explosion, but also with an incandescent light bulb at its center. Art historians have read this a number of different ways. It has been read as the flash of a bomb, but it’s also been read as the price of modernity. That is, we often think of modernization, of the advance of science and technology as a human good, as something that raises our standard of living. But technology has also, in this case, afforded us weapons that create human misery. And I think here Picasso is signaling this malevolent aspect of technology.
I think most people don’t actually notice this bird. It’s painted against one of the darker gray areas, and it’s painted in a black outline that seems to have almost been painted over, so that it is almost invisible. And because of Picasso’s other work, I think we can stand on fairly firm ground when we say that it is likely a dove as a symbol of peace. And so I think it’s important that Picasso has made it recede in our visual space, that peace is not accessible to us. This symbol of peace has its mouth open as if it is in agony.
And in fact, a tapestry of this painting hangs in the United Nations in New York, directly outside of the Chamber of the Security Council, a reminder to all of the world leaders who enter into that room and make decisions that affect innocent people on the ground.