Focus on this artwork and explain the Significance and legacy.
William Rubin, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, said of the painting, "Its grisaille harmonies distantly echo the black and white of the newspaper images but, more crucially, establish the proper key for a requiem".Clement Greenberg for ArtForum opines that, "Charnel House is magnificently lyrical—and Picasso at his best is usually lyrical. And it is fitting that this picture should be lyrical, for it is an elegy, not an outcry or even a protest, and it is fitting that an elegy should chant rather than intone."Adrian Searle for The Guardian commented that, "It is a deceptively complex and rich painting, with an amazing tension between the subject and the language used to depict it – the slaughtered family heaped dead under a kitchen table, their bodies intertwined. The more you stare at it, the more you get entwined, too.In New York Magazine, Mark Stevens opined, "The Charnel House is yet another example of Picasso’s sublime intuition about how an artist must approach the century's horrors. Not long after he painted the picture, writers would argue that art must fall mute before the Holocaust – that no image could represent its meaning in anything but the most broken, partial manner. In The Charnel House, Picasso begins but does not presume to end the accounting of the Holocaust: His lines fade toward nothingness."On the painting's significance, William Rubin, director of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art said, "I saw The Charnel House as a kind of sequel, almost, to the larger subject of Guernica. If Guernica, inspired by the Spanish Civil War, raises the curtain on World War II, then The Charnel House, done in 1945, lowers it. It can't fill the gap left by Guernica, but it will play a role representing the collective-oriented Picasso, which is very rare."
The Charnel House Spanish Civil War Guernica the Holocaust Museum of Modern Art grisaille World War II