El osario (The Charnel House)

Pablo Picasso said that this work was a response to the first publicised photographs of corpses piled high in German concentration camps. MoMA purchased it in 1971. The painting contributes to the discourse on ‘Picasso’ and ‘modernism’ as contested signifiers in the politics of representation that the New York museum sought to establish. Guernica (1937), El osario (The Charnel House, 1944–1945) and El rapto de las Sabinas (Rape of the Sabine Women, 1963) were vivid exemplars of art and politics for many artists in the US who were engaged with the difficult combination of modernist avant-gardism and leftist politics, particularly during the Cold War and its aftermath.