Picasso’s War: The Masterpiece that Changed the World [View all]

[CTyankee]

“No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”
-- Pablo Picasso
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Guernica. 1937. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Monday, April 26th, 1937 was a busy market day in Guernica, the cultural capital of the Basque people, when twenty-five bombers of Hitler’s Condor Legion, accompanied by twenty Italian Fiat Fighters, dumped one hundred thousand pounds of high-explosive and incendiary bombs on the village. The attack lasted for over 3 hours. Terrified inhabitants who tried to escape the bombs were cut down by the strafing machine guns of the accompanying fighters. Seventy percent of the town was destroyed and sixteen hundred people killed or wounded.

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The attack was launched on the orders of the Nationalist leader, General Franco, who was waging a war against the republican government of Spain. Guernica had served as a testing ground for a new Nazi military tactic: blanket bombing a civilian population to demoralize the enemy -- Guernica had no strategic value as a military target. Franco, the Germans and the Italians, denied any responsibility for the attack but few were fooled.

Before the attack Pablo Picasso had agreed to paint a large mural for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. The devastation of Guernica gave him his subject and he poured his rage onto canvas -- “Cubism with a conscience” in the words of art historian Simon Schama.

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Stylistically a broad canvas with chopped up images, the work taken as a whole is paradoxically unified in its impact, perhaps because it was painted over a three month period by the artist as a full throttle cry of pain. Picasso made the decision that it should be devoid of color -- black, white and gray only --what his contemporary Barnett Newman would later discuss in “The Ideographic Picture” as “the greyer, softer chaos that is tragedy.” He placed the attack at night, highly suggestive of unseen terrors that come out of deepest darkness. Picasso also seems to be commenting here about the shock effect on a public who consumed its news through the black and white of newspapers by using a newsprint design in the mural’s images.

Artist Nicholas Lacy-Brown points out the prominence of female grief present, notably the mother with a dead baby in her arms, and that weeping women are common in Spanish art, comparing Picasso’s treatment to “icons of the Maria Dolorosa and the Virgin Mary with her dead son spread across her knees,” a kind of Spanish Pieta.

Simon Schama devotes an entire segment of the TV series “The Power of Art” to “Guernica.” In it he describes the human eye with an incandescent filiment as the “naked light bulb in the torturers cell” (and indeed a cell window appears over the head of the screaming man on the picture’s right side). An outstretched arm brings a candle’s flame -- an offer of flickering hope or a hopelessly weak light against such a glowing menace?

But Schama also calls our attention to the painting’s further religious reference: the stigmata occurring on the fallen warrior’s hand that echoes Goya’s indelible imagery of the stigmata on a peasant’s hand before the invading French soldiers’ guns.
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Many art experts provide extensive analysis of Picasso’s use of the bullfight references -- the proud and disengaged stillness of the bull at the far left and the horse’s anguished cry and raised body. Lacy-Brown suggests that the horse is the artist’s symbiology of Spanish pride and fighting power against brutality used against them. That the bull “remains untouched by this tragedy emphasizes that the drama going on around him remains an exclusively human one...” A fallen warrior (or matador?) lies dead at its feet, his broken sword still clutched in his hand. The bull’s impervious stance is perhaps the hope that resistance to the Franco regime will be steadfast until the dictator is gone and Spain is free.

Picasso, however, had commented that the viewers must decide the meaning of the symbols in his work, according to their own individual interpretations.

The painting continued to be a rallying cry against fascism after the Fair. It toured European capitals and in 1939 the mural arrived in New York for a fund-raising visit to support Spanish war relief. During that time the Museum of Modern Art had become its semipermanent home where it stayed safely from the bombs and other violence of war in Europe. Picasso was fine with letting his masterpiece reside there, saying “It will do the most good in America.” Sadly, the artist did not outlive Franco, who continued to want to reclaim the painting “for Spain.” But it had been Picasso’s stern wish that it not be returned until “public liberties were restored” to his country.

Unfortunately, for America’s audience, the MoMA’s exhibit space was cramped, low ceilinged and harshly lit, diminishing the impact of the highest note in the museum’s collection.

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Ironically, in 1967, 400 artists responding to the Vietnam War signed a petition urging Picasso to withdraw it from the United States “for the duration of the war.” Once again, “Guernica” was enmeshed in a political and bloody crossroads. It was not until 1981, six years after Franco’s death, that the canvas was returned to Spain. And to the bitter end MoMA fought, but ultimately lost, its possession of the work.

In Madrid “Guernica” was lodged temporarily at the woefully unprepared Prado (a situation that became a bit of a hot mess all of its own) while a rancorous regional fight broke out as to where it should have a permanent home. In 1997, the new modern art Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao, the capital of the Basque region. Frank Gehry had designed dedicated space to hold the work, in a room he called “The Chapel.” The masterpiece belonged here, the Museum argued, as Bilbao was its rightful “home.” Bitter accusations against the “Madrilenos” ensued. They would not even allow the mural to be exhibited at the Guggenheim’s opening because there were renewed fears (not publicly expressed) that once the Basque nationalists got it, they would not let it return. Madrid said only that the canvas was in such a delicate condition that a move would damage it irrevocably -- it had suffered in being moved thirty-two times over its life. La Reina Sofia, the national museum of 20th century art established in 1992 in Madrid, would be at long last “Guernica”s permanent home.

“Guernica” at La Reina Sofia
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But still the mural provoked controversy. A tapestry of “Guernica” done in brown and taupe was donated to the United Nations by Nelson Rockefeller’s estate in 1982. It resides just outside of the Security Council room, intending to remind world leaders of the horrors of war. It was there in early 2003 that Secretary of State Colin Powell was to make his statement about the casus belli necessitating U.S. aerial bombardment, codename “shock and awe,” of Baghdad. Powell would be standing in front of the 20th century’s most iconic protest against war’s inhumanity as his backdrop --- the optics for the Bush administration would be unfortunate, to say the least. When the announcement was made, a blue UN curtain and flags had been hastily arranged to cover the tapestry. Sadly, it was -- like the painting -- a prophecy of things to come.

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bombardment of Baghdad March 20, 2003


Note: On May 12, 1999, the New York Times reported that, after sixty-one years, in a declaration adopted on April 24, 1999, the German Parliament formally apologized to the citizens of Guernica for the role the Condor Legion played in bombing the town. No apology has yet been issued by the Spanish government for its role in the attack.