To Those Which They Never Turned Another Cheek: 

Guernica, Picasso, 1937

“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.”

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.