Thread: Guernica talk in London recalling another era of refugees

As refugees dominate talks in EU and Mae Sodt a free discussion of Picasso's masterpiece

Thursday 29th October 2015
The Cañada Blanch Centre seminar: "The Birth of Guernica"
Gijs van Hensbergen
by Gijs van Hensbergen (Fellow of the Cañada Blanch Centre)
At 18:00 pm, Cowdray House, Portugal Street, London WC2A 2HJ
The event is free and open to the public. Seats will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. See poster …

In just six weeks Picasso finished one of the most dramatic and astonishing works of the 20th Century. Inspired by the horrific news, photographs and witness statements of the bombing, Picasso feverishly tried to respond to the enormity of the catastrophe.

Much has been made of the art historical sources that inspired Picasso's choice of subject matter, but Gijs van Hensbergen seeks out and records the genesis of Picasso's masterpiece in his own earlier work and in other new unpublished sources.

The final masterpiece is a complex synthesis of Picasso's thoughts on war, chaos, the human capacity for astonishing cruelty and a coded autobiographical dissection of his complex emotional life.

Gijs van Hensbergen is a Picasso expert and specialist in Guernica and the Spanish Civil War. He has written the biography of Gaudi and is completing his forthcoming books on the Sagrada Familia and a study of the birth of American philanthropy in the arts.

Over the last five years he has collaborated with Sir John Richardson on his four volume biography The Life of Picasso. Gijs van Hensbergen, author of Gaudi and Guernica

Midway Temple and Holborn Tube tucked behind LSE