The title of this painting refers to the outbreak of the Korean War, which had started in the previous year, yet the subject matter is ambiguous, as Picasso does not point directly to a period or location within the composition.

[5] Reports of German atrocities in the Holocaust are also thought to be the main inspiration behind the unfinished Charnel House, though its content was drawn from Picasso's experiences in Spain similar to Guernica.

[8] Picasso's work is influenced by Francisco Goya's painting The Third of May 1808, which shows Napoleon's soldiers executing Spanish civilians under the orders of Joachim Murat.

[7] It stands in the same iconographic tradition of an earlier work modeled after Goya: Édouard Manet's series of five paintings depicting the execution of Emperor Maximilian, completed between 1867 and 1869.

A number of heavily armed "knights" stand to the right, also naked, but equipped with "gigantic limbs and hard muscles similar to those of prehistoric giants."

In Picasso's representation, however, the group is manifestly helter-skelter – as was often apparent in his portrayals of armored soldiers in drawings and lithographs – which may be taken to indicate an attitude of mockery of the idiocy of war.

Their helmets are misshapen, and their weaponry is a mishmash amalgamation of the instruments of aggression from the medieval period to the modern era; not quite guns nor lances, they perhaps most resemble candlesticks.

[11] On 9 October 2022, two activists from the environmental pressure group Extinction Rebellion glued their hands to the painting using superglue while it was on loan to the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.