Guernica
Picasso’s response to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. A screaming horse, a mother with her dead child, a dismembered soldier – in black, white and grey.
Colour has vanished, as in a newspaper photograph; the lamp at the top resembles both an eye and a light bulb.
On 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Basque town of Guernica was bombed by German and Italian aircraft supporting General Franco. Much of the town was destroyed and many civilians died. The number of dead is still disputed. Pablo Picasso had been commissioned by the government of the Spanish Republic to make a painting for the Spanish Pavilion at the World’s Fair in Paris that year, and he chose the bombing as his subject.
Picasso painted Guernica in his studio in Paris in about five weeks. His partner at the time, the photographer Dora Maar, documented the work in a series of photographs showing how the composition changed. The canvas is almost eight metres wide and nearly three and a half metres high.
The painting does not show the bombs themselves. Instead we see a chaos of screaming people and animals. On the left a bull stands over a woman holding a dead child. In the centre a horse screams, a wound in its side. On the ground lies a dismembered soldier with a broken sword in his hand. From a window a woman thrusts out a lamp. On the right a figure in a burning house raises its arms. At the top shines a lamp that resembles both a light bulb and an eye.
The colours are only black, white and grey. This has been compared to newspaper photographs, which were how most people learned about the bombing. The composition recalls a triangle with the light at its apex. The forms are broken up in Cubist fashion, and the bodies twist and press against one another.
Picasso himself refused to explain the symbols. The bull and the horse have been interpreted in many different ways, as brutality and suffering, or as Spain and the people. Picasso said only that the bull was a bull and the horse a horse. The woman with the dead child has been compared to Christian images of the Virgin with the dead Christ.
After the World’s Fair the painting was shown in several countries, including the Nordic countries and Britain, to raise money and support for the Spanish Republic. From 1939 it was kept at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Picasso stipulated that it was not to go to Spain until democracy had been restored. It was not taken there until 1981, after Franco’s death. Since 1992 it has been in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.
Guernica has become one of the best-known anti-war images in the world. In 1974 it was spray-painted with red paint by a protester at the Museum of Modern Art, but the paint could be removed. A tapestry copy of the painting hangs at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The work shows how modern art can take a stand on political issues.