Picasso's 'Guernica' (Art Drop #11)

Picasso's visceral painting about the killing of innocent civilians during the Spanish Civil War is a powerful anti-war statement. Too bad the artist's outrage hasn't prevented more of the same.

Guernica, Picasso, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Photo by Peter Collins via Flickr Creative Commons 2.0

In the aftermath of Israeli air strikes that killed seven World Central Kitchen workers in Gaza on April 2nd, what could be more appropriate for today’s art drop than Pablo Picasso’s Guernica?

The killing of innocent aid workers has prompted outrage from leaders all over the world, but it is only the latest incident of its kind.

So far, 196 humanitarian workers have been killed in Gaza and the West Bank since October. The Gaza Health Ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but it has placed the total number of deaths during the war at 32,845 and the number of injuries at 75,392.

For its part, Israel estimates that about 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and says 256 soldiers have been killed since the start of its military operation in Gaza.

So many deaths—and that’s just this war.

By comparison, the 1600 civilians who were killed or wounded in Guernica, a small Basque town in northern Spain in 1937, seems relatively small. But that was one-third of the town’s population—a town that had no strategic significance.

The bombing of Guernica was a cold-blooded training mission carried out by German and Italian forces at the request of General Franco in order to intimidate and terrorize resistance to his fascism.

Did you do this?

Picasso’s artistic response to the slaughter was a gigantic painting bearing the name of the town. At 25 feet 6 inches wide and 11 feet 5 inches tall, Guernica was his entry to the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. That painting was how Picasso shocked the world into paying attention to the suffering of the Spanish people.

It is well known that years later, during Germany’s occupation of Paris in the 1940s, German soldiers entered the artist’s studio and pointed to a photograph of the painting. “Did you do this?” one of them asked. “No, you did,” Picasso replied.

Is it possible that a work of art could have such an impact today when we have multiple images of carnage reaching our phones and tablets hourly?

It would be nice to think so.

But the evidence suggests that people would simply tune it out. In February of 2003, shortly before the US/Iraq war, a tapestry replica of Guernica, which hung in the UN Security Council, was covered with a blue curtain.

Why? Because the optics were bad.

As Slate reported: “Officials thought it would be inappropriate for Colin Powell to speak about war in Iraq with the 20th century’s most iconic protest against the inhumanity of war as his backdrop.”

The 19-year exile

Picasso refused to allow Guernica to return to Spain until after democratic institutions were restored there, which did not occur until 1981. The painting traveled the world, residing at various museums, for 19 years.

The scale of this gigantic piece makes it impossible to appreciate in a photograph. But the following 2-minute 40-second video from the BBC isolates several closeups, which will have to do for now.

An in-person contemplation of the painting will have to wait till we can visit its current location at Reina Sofia, Spain’s national museum of modern art in Madrid.

A final question

Why has Guernica maintained its power to affect us for nearly 87 years—and counting? What gives it more staying power than the many thousand videos we’ve seen from Gaza since October? Could it be that videos come and go with the sweep of the second hand? While Art arrests our attention for considerably longer than that. And forces us—sometimes shocks us—into a level of awareness we cannot easily dismiss.

©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill
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