On the afternoon of 26 April 1937 — market day — aircraft of the German Condor Legion, joined by Italian planes fighting for Franco, spent about three hours bombing and strafing the Basque town of Gernika. The town burned; the numbers killed are still argued over, from the thousands claimed at the time to lower modern estimates in the hundreds, but the meaning was never in doubt: a defenceless civilian town, methodically destroyed as an experiment in air power. The British journalist George Steer reached the ruins that night, and his dispatch in The Times, reprinted around the world, pinned responsibility on German bombers. In Paris, a Spaniard read the coverage with mounting fury. He happened to owe the Spanish Republic a very large painting.
Pablo Picasso had accepted a commission months earlier for a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition, and had been drifting, short of a subject. The news gave him one. He started sketching on 1 May, and in roughly five weeks in his studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins produced Guernica: a canvas about 3.5 metres tall and nearly 8 metres wide, painted entirely in black, white and grey, like a scream printed in newspaper ink. His companion, the photographer Dora Maar, documented the painting's evolution stage by stage — a rare record of a masterpiece being argued into shape. He revised ruthlessly as he went: early states included a raised fist, which he painted out as he purged the canvas of anything resembling a slogan. The imagery is a compressed nightmare: a gored horse, an impassive bull, a mother howling over a dead child, a fallen soldier gripping a broken sword, a woman falling through fire, and over it all a bare electric bulb inside a jagged sun. Picasso refused to decode it, insisting a horse was a horse and the public should see what it saw.
The touring conscience
At the Exposition the mural initially puzzled visitors and officials alike; some in the Republic's camp had wanted something more straightforwardly propagandistic. But as Spain fell, Guernica took on a job no painting had held before: itinerant war memorial and fundraiser. It toured Scandinavia and Britain — at its 1939 Whitechapel showing in London, the price of admission was a pair of usable boots for Republican soldiers — then crossed to America to raise money for Spanish refugees. When the Second World War began, Picasso entrusted the painting to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with a condition that turned it into a decades-long political hostage: it must not go to Spain until public liberties and democratic institutions were restored. Franco outlasted the painter — Picasso died in April 1973, Franco in November 1975 — so Picasso never saw the homecoming. The canvas finally arrived in Madrid in 1981, the centenary of his birth, displayed at first behind bulletproof glass with armed guards. Since 1992 it has hung in the Museo Reina Sofía, and it does not travel: conservators judge the much-shipped canvas too fragile, which is also a polite way of ending arguments about where in Spain it belongs — the Basque government has asked more than once.
Legend and afterlife
The painting trails one irresistible story: during the Occupation, a Gestapo officer in Picasso's Paris studio is said to have pointed at a photograph of Guernica and asked, “Did you do that?” — to which Picasso replied, “No, you did.” The exchange is reported in several versions and may well have been polished in the telling, but it survives because it distils exactly what the picture is for. Its shadow reaches into modern diplomacy too: a tapestry copy of Guernica hangs outside the Security Council chamber at the United Nations in New York, and in February 2003 it was covered with a blue curtain while officials made the case for war in Iraq — a backdrop, it was evidently felt, that would argue back. That is the strange power the five-week mural still holds. Armies have air forces; a painting has only grey, black and white. Yet eighty years of generals, censors and diplomats have treated this one as something that needed to be managed, delayed, guarded and hidden. The bombers over Gernika took three hours. The reply has lasted ever since.
Quiz nuggets
- Gernika was bombed on 26 April 1937, a market day, by the German Condor Legion supported by Italian aircraft.
- Picasso painted Guernica in about five weeks for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition.
- The mural is monochrome — black, white and grey — and roughly 3.5 by 7.8 metres; Dora Maar photographed its stages.
- At Picasso's insistence it stayed at MoMA in New York until democracy returned, reaching Spain only in 1981; it now hangs in the Reina Sofía.
- A tapestry copy at the UN was curtained off in 2003 during briefings for the Iraq war.