Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) 
Massacre in Korea
Oil on plywood, 1951
110 cm × 210 cm (43.3 in × 82.7 in)
Musée National Picasso, Paris, France

 

 Massacre in Korea is a 1951 expressionistic painting composed by Pablo Picasso which is seen as a criticism of American intervention in Korean conflict. The work is drawn from Francisco Goya's painting The Third of May 1808, which shows Napoleon's soldiers uting 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 ution 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 portrayals of armored soldiers in drawings and lithographs – which may be taken to indicate an attitude of mockery of the idiocy of war.

Their helmets are misshapen, and their weaponry is a mishmash amalgamation of the instruments of aggression from the medieval period to the modern era - not quite guns or lances, they perhaps most resemble candlesticks. What is more, none of them have penises. This representational feature is highlighted by the pregnant state of the women on the left side of the panel. The soldiers, in their capacity as destroyers of life, have substituted guns for their penises, thereby castrating themselves and depriving the world of the next generation of human life.

 

During this period, Picasso is believed to have been moving away from his earlier communist ideology. Alongside with Guernica, The Charnel House (1944-45), War and Peace (1952), and Rape of the Sabine Women (1962–63) this is one of Picasso's works that he composed to depicts the politics of his time.

At 43 inches (1.1 m) by 82 inches (2.1 m), the work is smaller than his Guernica. However, it bears a conceptional resemblance to that painting as well as an expressive vehemence.