‘Guernica’: Pablo Picasso’s generational protest painting
Pablo Picasso is not for everyone. His cubist style was revolutionary, but some felt it marked art’s slow descent into something more strange than beautiful. His surrealist visions were too far from reality. The geometric, one-eyed faces he constructed lacked the realism necessary to be considered masterpieces. Of course, that was only one school of thought. Others believed his paintings were nothing short of small revolutions, each an intentional stride towards the unknown. Guernica united the two, and it is universally agreed to be one of history’s most poignant anti-war artworks.
In 1937, Picasso was living in Paris when the Spanish government approached him to create a mural for the Spanish Pavillion at the World’s Fair, the idea being it would raise awareness of the war and raise money. He spent a handful of months on the initial sketches. The commission hadn’t inspired him much, so he half-heartedly worked, choosing an artist’s studio as his theme. In the end, it was poet Juan Larrea who provided the push he needed.
After reading reports of the bombing of Guernica, Larrea visited Picasso personally. He implored him to make that the theme. Picasso mulled, read eyewitness accounts of the horror, and sprung into action. George Steer’s report, first published in The Times, stuck with him. “Guernica, the most ancient town of the Basques and the centre of their cultural tradition was completely destroyed yesterday afternoon by insurgent air raiders,” he wrote.
The attack by Nazi Germany’s Condor Legion was on a Monday, the town’s market day, to ensure maximum devastation. “The fighters,” he wrote, “Plunged low from above the centre of the town to machinegun those of the civilian population who had taken refuge in the fields.” Picasso did not like to be watched while he worked, but for Guernica, he slapped matte paint onto his colossal canvas in front of an audience – hoping the publicity would support the anti-fascists.
“The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art,” he explained. “In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.”
In his bleak black-and-white painting, chaos and death explodes over all 11 feet of the canvas. The scale of the violence mirrored all the material he’d read about the bombing. Women weep for their dead children, men are dismembered, and flames erupt around horses and bulls. For once, Picasso’s scale reflected reality’s horrors – and the painting became an enduring symbol of anti-war sentiments.
Guernica was such a raw reflection of the sheer human cost of war, a tapestry of it had to be covered at the United Nations in 2003, too solemn a reminder – and a political clash with the speeches about the ongoing Iraq war. In a recent protest for Palestine, the Guernica-Palestine Citizens’ Initiative insisted that the world cannot stand by and accept another Guernica.
But the most powerful testament to Guernica comes from an interaction Picasso had when Paris was under German occupation. A German officer had seen a picture of it in his apartment and breezily asked if he did it. “No,” Piccaso replied. “You did.”
