27 December 1989

A glass refracts the sunlight across the newsprint which reads:
He occasionally touched his wife's hands which were folded on her lap. Her face betrayed no emotion. She wore a winter coat with a fur collar. As sentence of death for genocide...

A sea wall covered in coarse yellow grass and to the left the ocean, where a wave, always the same, breaks along the shoreline. To the right of the wall stretches the flat East Anglian landscape of compounds, water towers and churches. The woman's body is rigid as she looks towards the evening sun which casts a golden light.

The bowed head of a saint whose eye is gouged out, the Man of Sorrows?

The woman is isolated in the centre of the image before a white basin into which drips the sheet of her wet hair. To the right are a heap of genitalia in front of the Guggenheim Museum, and to the left an open book floats towards a star filled sky. One of its pages carries a photograph of twelve pears on a crumpled cloth whilst the other is inked black.

Painting is not done to decorate apartments...it is an instrument of war for attack and defence against the enemy.

Pablo Picasso on his reasons for joining the Communist Party in 1945