With its black-and-white tones, The Charnel House was inspired by newspaper photographs showing piles of corpses in liberated Nazi concentration camps. Picasso depicted a murdered family unceremoniously tangled together under a dining table. With its varying degrees of finish—you can see traces of charcoal and sections of blank canvas—and vast network of undulating lines and geometric shapes, Picasso seems to have obscured legibility in favor of generating a rhythmic abstraction. As if questioning the ability of painting to represent war, he created a shifting, spectral vision.
2019
Provenance Research Project
This work is included in the Provenance Research Project, which investigates the ownership history of works in MoMA's collection.
1945 - 1954, Pablo Picasso, Paris.
1954 - 1971, Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., New York and Warrenton, Virginia, purchased from the artist.
1971, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired by exchange and purchased from Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
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Pablo Picasso
Spanish, 1881–1973 1251 works onlineWith these words, Picasso shed light on two central principles of his artistic production over nearly 80 years: his openness to a diverse range of styles, subject matters, and mediums, and his resistance to the notion that change in art necessarily corresponds to improvement or progress.
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