ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 tells the story of Picasso’s process in painting the mural Guernica. It, too, was the subject of a pioneering study of a creative episode, influential in art history as well as psychology. Rudolf Arnheim studied all the known preliminary sketches that Picasso preserved as well as photographs of various states of the mural. An artist as well as a psychologist, Arnheim looked at the different ways that images can mean and how images gave clues to visual thinking. Applying these concepts to Picasso’s sketches and stages, Arnheim followed Picasso’s thinking through the changes. The chapter adds the discovery of mural sketches made before the bombing of Guernica and considers how this enriches the understanding of Picasso’s creative process. The chapter also introduces the term avatar to refer to an artist’s representation of some distinctive features of a living person without portraying all of them.
