Massacre in Korea is a 1951 expressionistic painting by Pablo Picasso which is seen as a criticism of American intervention in the Korean War. It depicts the 1950 Sinchon Massacre, an act of mass killing carried out by South Korean and/or American forces in the town of Sinchon located in South Hwanghae Province, North Korea. Though the events are still much debated, the victims appear to have been communist sympathizers and North Korean civilians, including a large number of children. Picasso's work is drawn from Francisco Goya's painting The Third of May 1808, which shows Napoleon's soldiers... executing Spanish civilians under the orders of Joachim Murat. It stands in the same iconographic tradition of an earlier work modeled after Goya, Édouard Manet's series of five paintings depicting the Execution of the Emperor Maximilian completed between 1867 and 1869. As with Goya's The Third of May 1808, the painting is marked by a bifurcated composition, divided into two distinct parts. To the left, a group of naked women and children are seen situated at the foot of a mass grave.
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| Artist: | Pablo Picasso |
| Artform: | Painting |
| Date completed: | 1951 |
| Genre: | History painting |
| Height: | 3' 7" |
| Width: | 6' 11" |