David Hockney–On Photography

There is a painting by Picasso called "Massacre in Korea", painted in 1951. As a schoolboy I can remember when it was first reproduced in the newspapers. It was dismissed at the time, even by the art world, as mere communist propaganda. Otherwise they would not have liked what he was doing and they would have shot him as well

Even back then I remember thinking that Picasso was not capable of something as banal as communist propaganda. I had almost forgotten about the painting until the large Picasso exhibition in New York in 1980, when I came across it again and it began to have a considerable effect on me.

Critics are still attacking it. As recently as five years ago, in a book on the late work, it is dismissed as illustrative, and not very important. But in thinking about this painting, I began to see it as a remarkable critique of photography.

In my reading of it Picasso is telling us of difficulties of depiction that the critics of the time could not or would not see. In the painting we see something is about to happen. Soldiers are about to murder women and children.

Their shapes and clothing suggest armour and the medieval; hints of chivalry and honour in battle, yet they are about to commit an unchivalrous massacre. It is clear in the painting which side Picasso is on, where his sympathies lie, with the unadorned, ordinary humanity, the women and children. This does not surprise us, but let me point out that a photograph could not depict this scene as the painting depicts it, because the photographer would have had to be allied to the soldiers.