Tyranny & oppression

Featured Artworks

Guernica

Pablo Picasso (1937)

Guernica is a monumental, monochrome indictment of modern war, compressing a town’s annihilation into a frantic tangle of bodies, beasts, and light. Across the canvas, a shrieking horse, a stoic bull, a weeping mother with her dead child, and a fallen soldier stage a civic tragedy rather than a heroic battle. The harsh electric bulb clashes with a fragile oil lamp, turning the scene into a stark drama of terror and witness.

The Third of May 1808

Francisco Goya (1814)

Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808 turns a specific reprisal after Madrid’s uprising into a universal indictment of state violence. A lantern’s harsh glare isolates a civilian who raises his arms in a cruciform gesture as a faceless firing squad executes prisoners, transforming reportage into modern anti-war testimony [1][2].

Liberty Leading the People

Eugene Delacroix (1830)

Liberty Leading the People turns a real street uprising into a modern myth: a bare‑breasted Liberty in a Phrygian cap thrusts the tricolor forward as Parisians of different classes surge over corpses and rubble. Delacroix binds allegory to eyewitness detail—Notre‑Dame flickers through smoke, a bourgeois in a top hat shoulders a musket, and a pistol‑waving boy keeps pace—so that freedom appears as both idea and action [1][2]. After its 2024 cleaning, sharper blues, whites, and reds re‑ignite the painting’s charged color drama [4].

The Raft of the Medusa

Theodore Gericault (1818–1819)

The Raft of the Medusa stages a modern catastrophe as epic tragedy, pivoting from corpses to a surge of collective hope. The diagonal mast, torn sail, and a Black figure waving a cloth toward a tiny ship compress the moment when despair turns to precarious rescue [1][2].