Massacre in Korea is an expressionistic painting composed by Pablo Picasso in 1951. The work is drawn from Francisco Goya's painting The Third of May 1808, which shows Napoleon's soldiers executing Spanish civilians under the orders of Joachim Murat. It stands in the same iconographic tradition of an earlier work modeled after Goya, Édouard Manet's series of five paintings depicting the Execution of the Emperor Maximilian completed between 1867 a...
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Massacre in Korea is an expressionistic painting composed by Pablo Picasso in 1951. The work is drawn from Francisco Goya's painting The Third of May 1808, which shows Napoleon's soldiers executing Spanish civilians under the orders of Joachim Murat. It stands in the same iconographic tradition of an earlier work modeled after Goya, Édouard Manet's series of five paintings depicting the Execution of the Emperor Maximilian completed between 1867 and 1869.
As with Goya's The Third of May 1808, the painting is marked by a bifurcational composition, divided into two distinct parts. To the left, a group of naked women and children are seen situated at the foot of a mass grave. A number of heavily armed "knights" stand to the right, also naked, but equipped with "gigantic limbs and hard muscles similar to those of prehistoric giants". The firing squad is rigidly poised as in Goya. In Picasso's representation, however, the group is manifestly helter-skelter – as was often apparent in his...
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