Art

What Makes Guernica

Picasso’s Most
Influential Painting
By Casey Lesser
Jun 12, 2017 1:55 pm

Installation view of Picasso’s Guernica. Photo by Joaquín Cortés / Román

Lores. Courtesy of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
Eighty years ago, Pablo Picasso received a
commission that would forever change his career.
The Spanish Republic—then in the throes of the
Spanish Civil War, against future dictator Francisco
Franco—had asked Picasso, among several other
prominent artists, to create a painting for its pavilion
at the Paris International Exposition of 1937. The
work he made was Guernica, the now-legendary,
mural-sized painting inspired by the bombing of a
small Basque town, which now resides at the Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in
Madrid.
While numerous works by Picasso have been
crowned masterpieces—like Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon (1907), which is said to have set
Western abstract art in motion—Guernica stands
alone in the artist’s prolific oeuvre. Why has this
painting, in particular, struck a chord with generations
of viewers?

The Artistic Experimentations That

Led to Guernica
In an exhibition currently open at the Reina Sofía to
mark the 80th anniversary of the creation and display
of Guernica, titled “Pity and Terror: Picasso’s Path
to Guernica,” curators Timothy James Clark and
Anne M. Wagner delve into the artist’s production
during the decade prior to the work’s inception. These
earlier preoccupations include the artist’s interior
scenes and depictions of women from the mid-1920s
and ’30s, two themes in Picasso’s work that would
ultimately surface in Guernica.
In the mid-’20s, around the time that Picasso became
involved with Surrealism, he was painting interiors
with still lifes, featuring objects like musical
instruments and fruits. And initially, these works
conveyed pleasure. But, as Wagner explains, the
interior space soon became claustrophobic. “Its
pleasure seemed to be charred and burnt up,” she
says. “It became a theater for drama.”
This shift occurred amid the tumultuous World War I
recovery efforts in the U.S. and Europe, the years
preceding the devastating stock market crash of 1929.
During this period, Picasso and the Surrealists were
examining the dark spaces of the human psyche.
“Picasso knew very well that being a human involved
terror, tragedy, excess, and violence,” Wagner notes,
“and he believed very much that the psyche is a place
in which one plays out the unconscious mind.”
Pablo Picasso
The Three Dancers, 1925
Tate Modern
Pablo Picasso
Cabeza de mujer llorando con pañuelo (III). (Weeping Woman’s Head
with ...
Museo Reina Sofía

The Three Dancers (1925), a large painting now

in the Tate’s collection, is a prime example of
Picasso’s work of this era. (Wagner notes that, later in
life, Picasso considered it to be his greatest work.)
“It’s a wild picture, full of a kind of excess,” Wagner
says. “For Picasso, what’s now inside the room is not
so much still life objects, but it’s the bodies of
women, now treated in an immensely complex and
defamiliarizing way.”
Notorious for his relationships with women, Picasso
portrayed his lovers with affection in private works,
but these depictions diverged markedly from his
public paintings of women.
“For his public art, he was considering how women’s
bodies could be monumental or architectural,” says
Wagner, “how they could be traps or machines; how
they could be the index of a different kind of reality,
and how they could also be monstrous.” In the years
leading up to Guernica, paintings and sketches
evidence the artist’s ruminations on the symbolism
that could be conveyed through manipulation of the
female body—experimentations that find their
resolution in Guernica.
Despite reports of the great speed with which Picasso
created Guernica, it didn’t come out of nowhere. It
is the result of years of artistic production, as well as
the artist’s personal investment in the fraught politics
of Spain, where his family was still living.

Picasso Receives the Commission

While the German and Soviet pavilions at the Paris
International Exposition of 1937 were giant
architectural displays of authority and power, the
Spanish Republic, less than a year into the Civil War
and in need of financial support, opted for a modest,
efficient structure, and filled it with world-class art.

Installation view of “Piedad y Terror en Picasso. El camino a Guernica.” Photo by

Joaquín Cortés / Román Lores. Courtesy of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte
Reina Sofía.

Known for its reverence toward artists and

intellectuals, the Republic tapped creatives at the
forefront of the ’30s avant garde, like Joan
Miró and Alexander Calder. Picasso received the
commission for a mural-sized painting in January
1937.
While artworks created for the Republican pavilion
were intended to serve as political vehicles
(commissioned by an anti-fascist regime), Picasso’s
original plan for his work was, at least at face value,
decidedly apolitical. According to Wagner, the artist
was at a loss as to what he should paint. Initial
sketches for the work depict a painter in his studio,
facing a nude model who reclines on a sofa.
It was tragedy that led him to change course.

The Bombing of Guernica and the

Painting of Guernica
On April 26, 1937, Franco ordered the Nazi Condor
Legion (loaned to Franco by Germany) to drop bombs
over the small town of Guernica. It was a market day;
civilians, predominantly women and children, were
convened outdoors in public squares. As the first
place where democracy was established in Spain’s
Basque region, the town was a symbolic target. The
brutal bombing, which killed hundreds of people (the
number is contested, and reports vary between 200
and 1,700) and injured as many as 900 others, was the
first instance in the Spanish Civil War in which a
defenseless city was attacked.
“One of the things you can immediately glean from
the whole spectrum of imagery around the Spanish
Civil War was that there was a very public awareness
of what was happening to civilian bodies—women
and children,” Wagner notes. Indeed, the Spanish
Civil War was the first war of its kind to have a press
photography corps on the front lines, and like
countless others, Picasso opened his morning paper in
Paris on April 27th to find devastating images of the
destruction of Guernica.
Though Picasso was already a known leftist—he had
created a pair of etchings, titled the Dream and
Lie of Franco (1937), which were reproduced and
sold in order to raise funds for the Republic—the
bombing struck him with particular force. And on
May 1st, he took to his studio on Rue des grands
Augustins, and began new sketches for the
commission.
By mid-June, the work was finished; the Surrealist
artist Dora Maarcaptured the various iterations the
composition went through in a series of photographs.
In July, Picasso delivered the finished work to the
Republican pavilion, where it quickly became the
centerpiece, flanked by Calder’s Mercury
Fountain (1937) and Miro’s The Reaper (1937).

A Picture of Human Tragedy

Pablo Picasso
Guernica, 1937
Museo Reina Sofía

Guernica portrays a frenzied tangle of six human

figures (four women, a man, and a child), a horse, and
a bull; the action transpires within a claustrophobic,
low-ceilinged interior, below an overhead lamp that
appears to burst with light. While, as Wagner points
out, hints of Picasso’s original composition (the
interior of an artist’s studio) remain, the scene can
clearly be read as the emotional and physical
aftermath of war and violence.
While Picasso never made explicit to the public the
symbolism behind each of Guernica’s figures and
objects (“It’s up to the public to see what it wants to
see,” he once said), much of it can be taken at face
value. At the same time, art historians have, for
decades, split hairs over the intentions behind nearly
every brushstroke.
Most direct, perhaps, are the contorted expressions of
the women, suffering physical agony and mental
anguish. “You can see that the kinds of deformation
are Picasso’s devices to register pain and suffering,”
Wagner explains. The artist conveys their desperation
through sharp, pointed tongues; and sorrow through
tear-shaped eyes.
On the far left, one woman wails towards the sky
while cradling a limp, lifeless child in her arms;
another roars, her arms shooting upward as she’s
consumed in flames; another emerges from an open
window, wielding a torch. This third woman is at
times interpreted as a sign of hope. Each woman is
portrayed through amorphous shapes and jutting
angles, their bodies at once cobbled together and
falling apart.
On the floor, a figure who has been identified as a
soldier, lies in pieces—perhaps a personification of
the fledgling Republic. His dismembered arms are
criss-crossed with gashes. One hand forms a tight fist
—a symbol of the Republic—around a broken sword.
The overhead lamp has been read as symbolic of a
bomb, though others have taken its form (shaped like
an eye, with the light bulb as its iris) as a nod to the
eye of god.
The bull and horse have drawn varying
interpretations. Most trace back to the animals’ roles
in the traditional Spanish bullfight, where horses can
become collateral damage, and the bull is wounded to
the point of death. In contrast, though, some have
theorized that the bull, which lacks the emotional and
physical expression of the rest of the figures, is an
emblem of Franco or fascism. Still others believe the
bull is representative of Spanish heritage—a stoic and
unwavering witness to the tragedy.
Picasso, Nude Standing by the Sea, 1929. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ©
Sucesión Picasso. VEGAP, 2017. Courtesy of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte
Reina Sofía.
Picasso, Busto de mujer con sombrero de rayas, 1939. Musée Picasso
Paris. © Sucesión Picasso. VEGAP, 2017. Courtesy of Museo Nacional Centro
de Arte Reina Sofía.

Picasso’s visual language, however, transcends the

particulars of a single Spanish tragedy to become
universal. “It’s grand and intense and specific—you
know what’s happening is about pain and death. But
it’s not the case that you would say ‘Aha, that’s
Spain,’” Wagner notes. “It has great applicability
because it seems to be appropriate to so many
different contexts.”
The current show at the Reina Sofía is titled after the
disparate emotions that the painting conjures: pity and
terror. “It makes you feel some of the tragedy of
human existence,” says Wagner. “If you can feel
simultaneously terror and pity for that plight, you’ve
had that full throated, full-minded engagement with
that experience.”

Guernica in the Public

Imagination
Following the close of the Paris
Expo, Guernica went on tour in Europe. After the
war ended, as Franco took power and the Republic
folded, the painting continued to travel, and helped to
raise funds for Spanish Republican refugees who had
fled the country. It featured in the 1939 Picasso
survey exhibition at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, and Picasso would stipulate that
MoMA act as Guernica’s guardian.
Between 1939 and ’52, Guernica traveled to art
institutions across the U.S.; thereafter, it was
exhibited in Brazil and throughout western Europe—
until 1958, when it was returned to MoMA and
deemed no longer fit to travel. Decades of transport,
including stretching and restretching the canvas on
many occasions, had left the painting in a precarious
physical state. It remained in New York until 1981.

Photo by C. Elle, via Flickr.

It was during this time span that Guernica took on a

life beyond the canvas. It became a stand-in for
Dresden, Berlin, Hiroshima, synonymous with places
where defenseless civilians came under attack. And in
step, it began to take on particular resonance for anti-
war protestors.
“We take it for granted that Guernica is symbol of
modern warfare,” Wagner says, adding that in
curating the 80th anniversary exhibition, they came
across images showing reproductions of Picasso’s
masterpiece being carried in protests all over the
world, from Calcutta to Ramallah to South Carolina.
In turn, as with many great works of art,
contemporary artists began to respond
to Guernica in their own work, appropriating its
imagery to respond to themes of war and violence.

The Legacy of Guernica

While Picasso was still alive, he understood the
political potency of Guernica. As early as 1939,
when World War II broke out, he was surveilled by
Nazis, due at least in part to Guernica’s resounding
message. It’s said that a Nazi soldier once visited
Picasso’s Paris studio, pointed to a reproduction
of Guernica on the wall, and asked the artist, “Did
you do that?” Picasso responded: “No, you did.”
“He had to stand up for this painting,” Wagner
explains. “It became something whose fate he had to
be very concerned about. He knew that he had done
something unique and grand and important, and he
knew just like he knew his name was Pablo that it
could not go back to Spain.” To ensure the painting’s
safety, he had a legal document drawn up that
stipulated it should not enter Spain until democracy
had been established there.

Lluis Barba
Guernica, 2013
Cynthia Corbett Gallery

In 1981, six years after Franco died, and eight years

after Picasso died, Guernica finally returned to
Spain. Still a polarizing force for the nation, which
was recovering from nearly four decades of
dictatorship, it was shown under bulletproof glass.
The glass was removed in 1995, but Guernica’s raw
political might has not wavered. In 2003, for example,
controversy stirred when a tapestry reproduction
of Guernica at the United Nations in New York was
covered up by a blue curtain. It would have been the
backdrop for Colin Powell as he gave a speech
proposing U.S. involvement in the war in Iraq. (There
are conflicting reports as to the reason for the cover-
up, with some U.N. officials claiming reporters found
the painting visually distracting on camera.)
Wagner notes that Picasso made significant political
works following Guernica, though none would
achieve the same exposure and
resonance. Guernica became a marker of humanity,
the message of which is still understood by people all
over the world. Wagner may put it best: “It was a
tremendous circumstance for Picasso and the history
of art, Republican art, protest art, and humankind.”

Casey Lesser is an Editor at Artsy.