Biopolitica, anatomía, y dolor social

Abstract

This article reflects on the ways of representing Picasso’s human anatomy in relation to the biopolitical and, above all, thanatopolitical development of fascism during the 1930s and 1940s in Spain and Europe, according to the theoretical proposals of Arendt, Foucault and Esposito. To this end, we have chosen three works: Guernica (1937), Woman Weeping (1937) and The Ossuary (1945), which make up the Malaga painter’s analytical and aesthetic line around his process of deconstructing the human anatomy from a Cubist viewpoint, but, from 1937, with a clearly vindictive function, of international struggle and denunciation against fascism. On the other hand, we have attempted to approach these works by Picasso from the point of view of the plastic art of Grünewald, Bosch, Goya and, much more closely, the painting of the expressionist Otto Dix, that is to say, we have looked at the pictorial tradition that has dealt with the human body, pain and war, in order to establish possible threads linked to Picasso’s work. In this sense, our objective has been to analyze the relationship between totalitarian power and the ways of understanding the representation of the human body, deconstructed anatomy, monstrosity, and collective suffering through the different aesthetic interpretations of Pablo Picasso.