An Introduction to Guernica
On April 26 1937, late in the afternoon, the undefended Basque town of Guernica was bombed relentlessly for three hours by German and Italian aircraft that were acting on the instructions of Franco's Nationalist forces. The horrific campaign experimented with the potency of modern warfare, including incendiary bombs, explosives and shrapnel and was deliberately aimed at destruction of the civilian population. Escort planes that plunged from the sky to strafe people fleeing from the town exacerbated the massacre. The town was razed to the ground. Of the ten thousand inhabitants and refugees who made up the population of Guernica, three thousand were estimated to have died and thousands more were injured and mutilated.
When newspaper reports of the brutal attack appeared the following day the world was shocked and outraged, particularly as the attack took place on market day. Also, most of the inhabitants of Guernica were women, children and the elderly, because the younger men were away fighting in the Republican army.
When newspaper reports of the brutal attack appeared the following day the world was shocked and outraged, particularly as the attack took place on market day. Also, most of the inhabitants of Guernica were women, children and the elderly, because the younger men were away fighting in the Republican army.
To access Bombing of Guernica: original Times report from 1937:
Picasso had never been moved to engage in overtly political art, but his deep sorrow at the outbreak of civil war in his homeland (where his cousins were fighting on the Republican side), and his relationship with the politically charged Dora Maar, a member of the French Communist Party, had galvanized the passionate Spaniard into publicising his outrage. Early in 1937 he began the Dream and Lie of Franco, a series of fourteen etchings designed to be published as individual postcards to raise funds for 'Governmental Spain'. Resembling a comic strip, they evoked a traditional form of satiric Catalan engraving and depicted Franco as a giant, grotesque, demonic dictator in a series of ridiculous postures and costumes, including the elaborate attire of a courtesan. A nightmarish parody of civil war and a protest against Franco's claim to be a champion of traditional Spanish culture, the works show him in various frames riding a mad and disembowelled horse, destroying a classical sculpture or mounted on a pig. In each case Franco is leaving a trail of death and destruction. The key messages were in no doubt, that Franco was an oppressor of the common people, an enemy of the arts and a murderer of women and children.
When news of the bombing of Guernica reached Picasso he was stunned and horrified to such an extent that he was again driven to respond with impassioned political statements. He added four new plates to the Dream and Lie of Franco series that were first printed in the journal Cahiers d'Art in 1937, and later as a portfolio with an epic poem by the artist mourning the tragic events in Spain.
'Cries of children cries of women cries of birds cries of flowers cries of wood and of stones cries of bricks cries of furniture of beds of chairs of curtains of casseroles of cats and paper cries of smells that claw themselves of smoke that gnaws the neck of cries that boil in cauldron and the rain of birds that floods the sea that eats into bone and breaks the teeth biting the cotton that the sun wipes on its plate that bourse and bank hide in the footprint left embedded in the rock.. '
The above is Picasso's poem accompanying the Dream and Lie of Franco
Picasso was appointed honorary director of the Prado in 1936 and commissioned by the Spanish Republican Government to create a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the World Fair being held in Paris in 1937. He started on a large painting based on the theme of The Studio: The Painter and His Model. The emotional wave of horror and indignation following the barbaric attack on Guernica led Picasso to instead create what was to become one of the greatest masterpieces in the history of art – a monumental outpouring of grief and rage condemning the senselessness of war.
The Making of Guernica
Picasso moved into a new studio in the attic of 7, rue des Grands-Augustins, which Dora Maar found for him in early 1937. Originally part of a grand 17th-century mansion, it had an intriguing history that appealed to Picasso's sense of irony, particularly as he was painting Guernica. The studio was said to be the setting for The Unknown Masterpiece, a short story written in 1837 by the famous French author, Honoré de Balzac. It describes an obsession by the painter, Frenhofer, the greatest painter of his time, to represent the absolute on his canvas, a process that takes years for his creative powers to complete. When the picture, which becomes less and less recognizable as time goes on, is ridiculed by his artist friends as the work of a madman, he destroys the work and dies. The story resonated with Picasso who, like Frenhofer, also locked himself away in the same studio to create a masterpiece, although in his case it was recognized as such.
Picasso made hundreds of preliminary drawings for Guernica and more than fifty studies. In some of these the heads of Weeping Women appear for the first time.
Constraints such as the enormous size of the stretched canvas, measuring 3.5 x 7.8 metres and so had to be tilted to fit under the rafters of the ceiling, and dim lighting from bay windows on one side of the studio, failed to hinder Picasso. The painting was completed in twenty-four frenetic days. Streams of ideas, emotions, traditions, myths, obsessions and symbols of his roots deeply embedded in Hispanic and Mediterranean culture spilled onto the canvas. These were fuelled by anger and a need to express his pain.
Motifs of a woman screaming in agony as she clutches the limp body of her dead child; another woman stretching out from a window with a lamp, hoping in vain to illuminate the encroaching darkness; mutilated bodies and the gaping mouths of those hysterical with pain, fear and sorrow merge with a wounded horse and the ever-present bull to create a profound dramatic tension. The gruesome imagery encircled by burning buildings and painted in black, white and subtle gradations of grey, suggests that Picasso may have drawn on newspaper photographs and newsreels documenting the tragedy in Guernica. The fine patterning in the centre of the painting resembles words on torn pieces of newspaper, suggesting that art is as powerful as the mass media in communicating a message. Chaos and despair are amplified by sharp, angular shapes, particularly the bold triangular form at the centre of the painting and vivid contrasts of light and shade. Purity of line from Picasso's Neo-classical period, elements of Surrealism and Cubism, and a reference to Goya's famous painting of 1814 depicting the horrors of war, El Tris de Mayo (Third of May), coexist in this summation of Picasso's development as an artist to date.
Speculations about the exact meaning of the symbolism in Guernica have varied. Some insist that the bull represents brutality or the ritual of life and death epitomised by the bullfight, while the horse is a metaphor for the suffering people. Others suggest that the reverse is true and maintain that the bull signifies the people and the horse can be read as Franco's Nationalist forces. Picasso was adamant that he had not intended to symbolise in such a concrete way and it was entirely up to the viewers to interpret the painting.
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