'Dove with olive branch', Pablo Picasso

openDemocracy, 3 April 2005

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To mark the 32nd anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death, openDemocracy launches its “Image of the week” series with his line drawing “Dove with olive branch”.

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Colombe au rameau d’olivier, visage, main et feuille de chêne, 1950
Pablo Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973)

Five years after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pablo Picasso created this picture of peace. In the same year, William Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for literature, with the following words:

“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?”

But, he said, “I decline to accept the end of man… I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.”

With thanks to the Online Picasso Project

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