The Charnel House

The Charnel House (Le Charnier) is a c.1944–1948 painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), purportedly dealing with the Nazi genocide of the Holocaust. The black and white 'grisaille' composition centres on a massed pile of corpses, and was based primarily upon film and photographs of a slaughtered family during the Spanish Civil War. It is considered to be Picasso's second major anti-war painting, the first being the monumental Guernica (1937), but it is not thought to be as significant as that work because the artist left it unfinished.

Picasso spent at least six months working on The Charnel House which has iconographic links to the graphic work of Picasso's Spanish compatriot Francisco de Goya (1746–1828). Picasso's friend and biographer Pierre Daix records that the title of the painting was not one assigned to it originally by Picasso himself – the artist referred to The Charnel House as simply 'my painting' or 'the massacre'; nevertheless, in later years after the Second World War Picasso refused to retitle the painting once its identity as The Charnel House gained popularity, and it was first exhibited as such following Picasso's joining of the Communist Party in 1946.

Charnel house

A charnel house is a vault or building where human skeletal remains are stored. They are often built near churches for depositing bones that are unearthed while digging graves. The term can also be used more generally as a description of a place filled with death and destruction.

Old World

In countries where ground suitable for burial was scarce, corpses would be interred for approximately five years following death, thereby allowing decomposition to occur. After this, the remains would be exhumed and moved to an ossuary or charnel house, thereby allowing the original burial place to be reused. In modern times, the use of charnel houses is a characteristic of cultures living in rocky or arid places, such as the Cyclades archipelago and other Greek islands in the Aegean Sea.

Monastery of the Transfiguration (Saint Catherine's), Mt. Sinai

Saint Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai is famous for having a working charnel house. Saint Catherine's was founded by Justinian in the early 6th, on the site of an older monastery founded about 313 AD and named for Helena of Constantinople. The monastery comprises the whole Autonomous Church of Sinai, under the Patriarchate of Jerusalem. The site lies at the foot of Mount Sinai where Christians believe Moses received the Ten Commandments.

Charnel House (publisher)

Charnel House is a horror fiction publishing house, specializing in limited edition books noted for their craftsmanship. Examples being The Regulators (1996, by Stephen King writing under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) which featured bullets protruding from the front board and Last Call (1992, by Tim Powers) which featured endpapers made from untrimmed sheets of American dollar bills. Several of their releases are unavailable in any other format.

Works published by Charnel House

2008

2007

2006