art links

Inspired by the Futurists! (2008)

Futurism was an art movement that originated in Italy at the beginning of the 20th century.

These artists explored every medium including painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre, music, architecture and even gastronomy. The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was the first among them to produce a manifesto of this artistic philosophy which was published in the French paper Le Figaro.

Marinetti summed up the major principles of the Futurists, including a passionate loathing of ideas from the past, especially political and artistic traditions. Nevertheless, he managed to attract the support of several prolific painters namely Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, and Luigi Russolo.

The Futurists adopted a love of speed and technology. The car, the plane, the industrial town were all legendary subjects, because they represented the technological triumph of people over nature.

Art teacher Mr K Balzan together with Form 5 students Ryan Pisani, Joseph Vella and Andre Gialanze used this artistic style to represent movement in their work 'Horse and Jockey.' This large painting (8X4 feet) is one of our school's entries in Artlinks 2008, currently hosted at Fortini Boys' Secondary School.


Picasso's Guernica (2004)

Guernica is a painting by Pablo Picasso, depicting the Nazi German bombing of Guernica, Spain, by twenty-eight bombers, on April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The attack killed between 250 and 1,600 people, and many more were injured.

The bombing of Guernica provided Picasso with the inspiration for the mural which he had previously lacked. The striking black and white photographs that appeared in newspapers within days after the bombing made such a lasting impact that, within fifteen days, Picasso began work on the final canvas for the mural. It has surpassed the limits of the event which inspired it, becoming a timeless icon for all generations to ponder.

In its final form, Guernica is an immense black and white (3.5 metres tall by 7.8 metres wide) mural painted in oil. The mural presents a scene of death, violence, brutality, suffering, and helplessness without portraying their immediate causes. Guernica depicts suffering people, animals, and buildings wrenched by violence and chaos.

  • The overall scene is within a room, where, at an open end on the left, a wide-eyed bull stands over a woman grieving over a dead child in her arms.
  • The centre is occupied by a horse falling in agony as it had just been run through by a spear or javelin. The shape of a human skull forms the horse's nose and upper teeth.
  • Under the horse is a dead, apparently dismembered soldier, his hand on a severed arm still grasps a shattered sword from which a flower grows.
  • A light bulb blazes in the shape of an eye over the suffering horse's head (the bare bulb of the torturer's cell.)
  • To the upper right of the horse, a frightened female figure, who seems to be witnessing the scenes before her, appears to have floated into the room through a window. Her arm, also floating in, carries a flame-lit lamp.
  • From the right, an awe-struck woman staggers towards the center below the floating female figure. She looks up blankly into the blazing light bulb.
  • Daggers that suggest screaming replace the tongues of the bull, grieving woman, and horse.
  • On the far right, a figure with arms raised in terror is entrapped by fire from above and below.
  • A dark wall with an open door defines the right end of the mural.

Click here for a slideshow of the Art Links Exhibition held in 2008 (javascript required)

Click here for a slideshow of the Art Links Exhibition held in 2006 (javascript required)

Click here for a slideshow of the Art Links Exhibition held in 2004 (javascript required)