Dove of Peace - Pablo Picasso

Join us as we uncover the powerful simplicity of Picasso's stroke and how this representation of a dove became a universal symbol of peace and solidarity.

Discover the nuances and continued relevance of this piece in the work of the master cubist and world history.

The Dove of Peace is a series of drawings created by Pablo Picasso to symbolize the peace so longed for after the Second World War.

Picasso was considered a symbol of the defense of peace and freedom after painting Guernica in 1937 in response to the German bombings in the Spanish Civil War.

After the Second War, a World Congress for Peace was organized in April 1949 in the city of Paris. Among the participants were: the French physicist Frédéric Joiot-Curie, the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, the French surrealist writer Louis Aragon, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.

One day before the start of the Congress, the French artist Françoise Gilot, who was Picasso's companion at the time, gave birth to a girl they named Paloma. For Picasso, doves were a reminder of his childhood and his father, who had taught him to draw doves in Málaga, his hometown.

The image he created after the birth of his daughter was a very simple composition, a white dove standing out against a black background.

He declared: "I wanted, through drawing and color, once these were my weapons, to penetrate more deeply into the knowledge of men and the world so that this knowledge would liberate us more and more each day; I tried to say, in my way, what I considered the most true, the most just, the best, and it was always naturally the most beautiful." Pablo Picasso

When visiting Picasso's studio, Louis Aragon chose this image to illustrate the poster for the World Congress for Peace. Thus, Picasso's Dove became the emblem of subsequent congresses, in which Picasso made different variations of the dove image.

From the 1960s onwards, Picasso began to stylize his drawing to represent the Dove of Peace even more. He also added an olive branch to the beak, a symbol that, according to the Bible, Noah brought back to tell the world that the earth was near.