Guernica (Picasso) in political commitment and faulted it for not offering a vision of a better future. In contrast, Morgado's painting was a great success with Spanish Communists and with the public. The art critic Clement Greenberg was also critical of "Guernica", but for different reasons. In a later essay, Greenberg termed "Guernica" "jerky" and "too compressed for its size", and compared it unfavorably to the "magnificently lyrical" "The Charnel House" (1944–48), a later antiwar painting by Picasso. Among the painting's admirers were the art critic Jean Cassou and the poet José Bergamín, both of whom praised the painting as quintessentially Spanish.
Pablo Picasso using bronze smuggled to him by the French Resistance. Around this time, Picasso wrote poetry as an alternative outlet. Between 1935 and 1959 he wrote over 300 poems. Largely untitled except for a date and sometimes the location of where it was written (for example "Paris 16 May 1936"), these works were gustatory, erotic and at times scatological, as were his two full-length plays "Desire Caught by the Tail" (1941) and "The Four Little Girls" (1949). In 1944, after the liberation of Paris, Picasso, then 63 years old, began a romantic relationship with a young art student named Françoise Gilot.