80th Anniversary of Picasso’s Guernica: A Date with Peace at the University of Navarra Museum

ABSTRACT

As in the case of the 80th anniversary of Picasso’s Guernica, painted in 1937, museums can incorporate significant dates and anniversaries into their educational programming. The University of Navarra Museum has taken advantage of the opportunity presented by this anniversary to present an educational project entitled “Guernica,” whose primary objective was to foster peace through art. This anniversary project was a collaborative one in which 946 individuals (primarily students) between the ages of 3 and 103 participated, using their creativity to seek a significant experience. In the course of the project, contextual synergies were established with artworks from the museum: Mousquetaire, Tête (Picasso, 1967) and Tombstone to the peaceful town that was Guernica (Oteiza, 1957).

KEYWORDS:

• Meaningful experiences
• education in museums
• peace education
• Picasso
• contemporary art

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

About the author

Fernando Echarri Iribarren ([email protected]) holds a degree in Biological Sciences (University of Navarra, 1989) and a PhD in Environmental Education (University of Navarra, 2007). He is an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Biology of the University of Navarra (Pamplona, Spain) and teaches in the following areas: “Ecology,” “Environmental Impact Assessment,” “University Master’s Degree in Higher-Education Teaching” and Master’s Degree in “Biodiversity, Landscape and Sustainable Management.” Since 2014, he has been Head of the Education Department at the University of Navarra Museum. His interests include significant learning and significant learning experiences.

ORCID

Fernando Echarri http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1886-8927

Notes

1 Hensbergen, Guernica: la historia de un icono del siglo XX, 2.

2 See Fundación Pablo Ruiz Picasso, El Guernica de Picasso: didáctica de un mito.

3 Palau i Fabre, El Guernica de Picasso, 16.

4 Palau i Fabre, El Guernica de Picasso, 22.

5 See Falk and Dierking, The Museum Experience; Hein, Learning in the Museum; Hein, The Museum in Transition; Hein, Progressive Museum Practice; Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture; Falk, Identity and the Museum; and Burnham and Kai-Kee, Teaching in the Art Museum.

6 Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation, 3; Yenawine, Visual Thinking Strategies. Using art to deepen learning across school disciplines.

7 The terrorist organisation ETA laid down its arms in April 2017 after leaving 829 people murdered in its almost 60 years of activity.

8 Hargreaves, Infancia y educación artística, 179.

9 Hernández, “Framing the Empty Space”. Two examples of the history of art education in the Spanish political context, 59.

10 Falk, Identity and the Museum, 46.

11 Hargreaves, Infancia y educación artística, 188; See Agirre, Teorías y prácticas en educación artística.

12 Dewey, El arte como experiencia, 288, 307.

13 See Ausubel, Psicología educativa.

14 See Novak, A Theory of Education.

15 See Caduto, Guía para la enseñanza de valores ambientales.

16 Chawla, “Significant Life Experiences Revisited”; Life paths into effective environmental action; Significant Life Experiences Revisited Once Again: response to Vol. 5 (4) “Five Critical Commentaries on Significant Life Experience Research in Environmental Education.”

17 Seligmann, “Book and Project: Learning Museum”, 63.

18 Filippoupoliti and Sylaiou, “Museum Education Today”.

19 Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation, 108.

20 See Arnheim, Visual Thinking; Berger, Ways of Seeing; Freedman, “The Importance of Modern Art”; Yenawine, Visual Thinking Strategies.

21 See Felder and Bent, “Learning by Doing”.

22 Johnson, Johnson, and Smith, Cooperative Learning: Increasing College Faculty.

23 See Gokhale, “Collaborative Learning Enhances Critical Thinking”.

24 See Dewey, Art as Experience.

25 Based on Ministerio de Cultura, Picasso. Guernica. Vol 1. Reproducción del cuadro a su tamaño [Picasso. Guernica. Vol 1. Reproduction of the painting to scale].

26 Freedman, Teaching Visual Culture, 77; Lovgren and Karlsson, “From Art Making to Visual Communication”, 91.

27 See Olmo, Colección María Josefa Huarte, 97, 65.

28 Insausti, Poesía edición bilingüe, 687. As can be noted, the year of production and the dark color of the monument remove any doubt regarding its correspondence to the piece “Estela para un pueblo pacífico que era Guernica [Monument to the peaceful town that was Guernica]” (Oteiza, 1957) at the Museum. There is no other piece in the sculptor’s oeuvre with these characteristics. This conclusion has been corroborated by the conservators at the Oteiza Museum (Navarra).

29 See Cabezudo and Haavelsrud, “Rethinking Peace Education”.

30 See Camps, Los valores de la educación.

31 Calvo, El Guernica de Picasso, 57.

32 Hensbergen, Guernica: la historia de un icono del siglo XX, 6–7.

33 Paynter et al., “Rooted in the Past, Active for the Future”.

34 Tamashiro and Furnari, “Museums for Peace”.