Guernica (Picasso)

Pablo Picasso’s 1937 oil painting *Guernica* hangs in Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía. Measuring 3.49 meters tall by 7.76 meters wide, the grey, black, and white canvas shows a gored horse, a bull, screaming women, a dead baby, a dismembered soldier, and flames. Many art critics consider it the most powerful anti-war painting ever made.

The work was a commission. In January 1937, while living in Paris on Rue des Grands Augustins, Picasso—then Honorary Director-in-Exile of the Prado Museum—was asked by the Spanish Republican government to create a large piece for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition. From January until late April, he worked without much passion on initial sketches of an artist’s studio, a theme he often revisited. Then, after hearing about the 26 April bombing of the Basque town of Guernica, poet Juan Larrea visited Picasso and urged him to paint that event instead. Days later, on 1 May, Picasso read George Steer’s eyewitness account of the attack, originally published in *The Times* and *The New York Times* on 28 April. He abandoned his first idea and, following Larrea’s suggestion, began a series of preliminary drawings for what became *Guernica*.

The bombing itself was carried out by Nazi Germany’s Condor Legion and the fascist government of Italy. On Monday, 26 April 1937, warplanes commanded by Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen bombed Guernica for about two hours. Richthofen’s diary entry for that day states the town was targeted “to halt and disrupt the Red withdrawal which has to pass through here.” The next day he wrote, “Guernica burning.” On 30 April he noted that when the squadron arrived “there was smoke everywhere” from an earlier attack by three aircraft; since nobody could see roads, bridges, or suburbs, “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.”

Guernica was a quiet village in the province of Biscay, seen by the Nationalists—led by General Francisco Franco, who wanted a fascist dictatorship—as the northern bastion of the Republican resistance and the center of Basque culture.