Guernica

Guernica
Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937
By TROY WORKMAN

Plane engines scream across the sky. Bombs roar as they tear through bricks and steel, fire swallows buildings and people whole. Nazis and Spanish fascists soak their cold hands in innocent blood.

On April 27, 1937, the sleepy town of Guernica in the Basque country of Spain, was mercilessly bombed. Seventy percent of the town was destroyed and one third of the civilians were murdered. Guernica held no strategic value, it was simply picked as a stage for genocide. 100,000 pounds of incendiary bombs were washed over the city for three hours, while other planes picked off civilians trying to escape the fire and rubble. Fires raged across the city for three days.

When the news struck Paris just days after the attack, and Picasso was horrified. He began making hundreds of sketches, and completed the painting for the Paris World's Fair. Not only did millions of people see this work of art at the Fair, after the event the Spanish Republicans sent Guernica on a world tour, and brought the Spanish Civil War to the globe's attention. The painting traveled for 19 years, and eventually returned home to Spain in 1981. Picasso stated that he wanted the painting to return only after Spain had public liberties and Democratic institutions.

The piece itself rattles with chaos. Black, White, and Grey, fight for balance in the jagged shapes. People and animals scream with shattered tongues. A man lies dead with a severed arm and a broken sword. A woman howls with grief for her dead child. A horse cries, impaled by shrapnel. People flail while being eaten alive by burning buildings. Guernica is the pinnacle of Picasso's extraordinary ability. This timeless piece represents the new era of modern warfare, and there is no escaping for anyone.


  • 7:00 AM

Guernica

Guernica
To Those Which They Never Turned Another Cheek: 
Admiration for Paintings with Major Authority Issues 
Curated by Shweta Vadlamani 
Guernica, Picasso, 1937

History required power. Precedents were set by people who wielded that power. There was one point of time when people believed that the enthroned were the only ones who could oppose the forces of society to make a change. I now proceed to write about the artistic voices who actively refuted that claim. 

“This bull is a bull and this horse is a horse… I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.”
 –Pablo Picasso

To summarize it in one word, Guernica speaks of a tragedy. Piccasso’s self-expressed “abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death” is most evident in the tears and mortified postures of the painting’s protagonists. The painting was created as a direct reminder of the bombing of Guernica, Basque country, a Nazi bombardment. German and Italian forces massacred the small Spanish village by mercilessly firebombing the unsuspecting visitors, and making the staggering death rates a terrifying example of why Spain should fear Nazi contempt.

The Spanish government commissioned Picasso to paint a mural in memory of the attack during the pinnacle of the Spanish Civil War. Officially revealed on April 26, 1937, Picasso’s masterpiece was to act as a brutal reminder of how drastically brutal a war can become.

The less-than-censored screams of the painting’s civilians, coupled with the crying bull, representative of Spain’s remorse regarding the tragedy, emphasizes Picasso’s plea for the Spanish populations to stop their fighting.

The painting’s attack upon children and women, who in Picasso mind composed the epitome of human’s perfection, shows the artist’s perception of war as emblematic of mankind’s central, most fatal flaw.

Picasso’s mural created a general feeling of uneasiness regarding war, effectively sparking a cultural campaign against the Spanish Civil War, while also maintaining that same sentiment years later.

At a 2003 United Nations conference that was being held in New York City, journalists claim that the Bush Administration had a blue curtain cover the UN building's tapestry version of Picasso’s Guernica, to strengthen the motivations of the U.S. diplomats who argued for war on Iraq.

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