The Charnel House

Beneath a kitchen table a heap of slaughtered bodies - a bound man, a woman, a child - lies tangled together in stark black, white, and grey, the violence rendered with grim, near-monochrome restraint. Picasso painted the Charnel House in the war's aftermath, in response to the atrocities of the concentration camps, as a quieter companion to his Guernica. Now in the Museum of Modern Art, the unfinished canvas is among his most harrowing - the massacre of an ordinary family stripped of all color and rhetoric, an austere, unbearable witness to the century's worst crimes.