Guernica (Picasso)
Guernica is a large 1937 oil painting on canvas by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. It is one of his best-known works, regarded by many art critics as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history. It is currently exhibited in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.
The grey, black, and white painting, which is 3.49 meters (11 ft 5 in) tall and 7.76 meters (25 ft 6 in) across, portrays the suffering wrought by violence and chaos. Prominent in the composition are a gored horse, a bull, screaming women, a dead baby, a dismembered soldier, and flames.
Historical context
See also: Bombing of Guernica; Spanish Civil War; and Spanish Civil War, 1937
Bombing of 26 April 1937
During the Spanish Civil War, the Republican forces were made up of assorted factions such as communists, socialists, anarchists, and others with differing goals. Yet they were united in their opposition to the Nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco, who sought a return to pre-Republican Spain based on law, order, and traditional Catholic values.
Guernica, a town in the province of Biscay in Basque Country, was seen as the northern bastion of the Republican resistance movement and the center of Basque culture. This added to its significance as a target. Around 4:30 p.m. on Monday, 26 April 1937, warplanes of the Nazi Germany Condor Legion, commanded by Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, bombed Guernica for about two hours. In his journal for 30 April 1937, von Richthofen wrote:
- When the first Junkers squadron arrived, there was smoke already everywhere (from the VB [VB/88] which had attacked with 3 aircraft); nobody would identify the targets of roads, bridge, and suburb, and so they just dropped everything right into the center. The 250s toppled a number of houses and destroyed the water mains. The incendiaries now could spread and become effective. The materials of the houses: tile roofs, wooden porches, and half-timbering resulted in complete annihilation. Most inhabitants were away because of a holiday; a majority of the rest left town immediately at the beginning [of the bombardment]. A small number perished in shelters that were hit.
Guernica was a quiet village 10 kilometers from the front lines, and in-between the front lines and Bilbao, the capital of Bizkaia (Biscay). But any Republican retreat towards Bilbao, or any Nationalist advance towards Bilbao, had to pass through Guernica. Wolfram von Richthofen's war diary entry for 26 April 1937 states, "K/88 [the Condor Legion bomber force] was targeted at Guernica in order to halt and disrupt the Red withdrawal which has to pass through here." Under the German concept of tactical bombing, areas that were routes of transportation and troop movement were considered legitimate military targets. The following day, Richthofen wrote in his war diary, "Guernica burning".
The nearest military target of any consequence was a war product factory on Guernica's outskirts, but it went through the attack unscathed. Thus, the attack was widely condemned as a terror bombing.
Significance and legacy
During the 1970s, Guernica was a symbol for Spaniards of both the end of the Franco regime following Franco's (✦4 December 1892 – †20 November 1975) death, and of Basque nationalism. The Basque left has repeatedly used imagery from the picture. An example the organization Etxerat, which uses a reversed image of the lamp as its symbol. Guernica has since become a universal and powerful symbol warning humanity against the suffering and devastation of war. There are no obvious references to the specific attack, making its message universal and timeless.
Art historian and curator W. J. H. B. Sandberg argued in Daedalus in 1960 that Picasso pioneered a “new language” combining expressionistic and cubist techniques in Guernica. Sandberg wrote that Guernica conveyed an “expressionistic message” in its focus on the inhumanity of the air raid while using "the language of cubism". For Sandberg, the work's defining cubist features included its use of diagonals, which rendered the painting's setting "ambiguous, unreal, inside and outside at the same time". In 2016, the British art critic Jonathan Jones called the painting a "Cubist apocalypse" and stated that Picasso "was trying to show the truth so viscerally and permanently that it could outstare the daily lies of the age of dictators".
Works inspired by Guernica include Goshka Macuga's The Nature of the Beast (2009–2010), which used the Whitechapel-hosted United Nations Guernica tapestry; The Keiskamma Guernicas (2010–2017); and Erica Luckert's theatrical production of Guernica (2011–2012). Art and design historian Dr. Nicola Ashmore curated an exhibition, Guernica Remakings, at the University of Brighton galleries from 29 July 2017 to 23 August 2017.
- More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Guernica_(Picasso) ]
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