Picasso's Guernica

The story

A civil war in Spain

In July 1936 part of the Spanish army, led by General Francisco Franco, rose up against the government of the Republic, elected only a few months earlier. It was the start of a civil war that lasted almost three years and split the country in two: on one side the Republicans, defenders of democracy, supported by workers, peasants and the Soviet Union; on the other Franco's Nationalists, who had the backing of the Church, many landowners and large parts of the army.

The war drew the attention of the whole world, because it was like a dress rehearsal for the Second World War. Hitler's Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Fascist Italy sent Franco aeroplanes, weapons and soldiers. On the other side, volunteers from many countries, called the “International Brigades”, came to fight for the Republic, convinced that they were defending freedom for everyone.

26 April 1937

Guernica (Gernika in Basque) is a small town in the Basque Country, in northern Spain, a place dear to the Basques because an oak tree stands there under which assemblies had met for centuries. On the afternoon of 26 April 1937, a Monday and market day, the town was full of farmers who had come to sell their produce. At half past four, German aircraft of the Condor Legion and Italian ones, supporting Franco, began to bomb, in waves, for about three hours. Most of the town was destroyed by the bombs and the fires that followed.

Nobody knows exactly how many people died: estimates range from a few hundred to more than a thousand, and historians still argue about it. But the news went round the world, because it was one of the first air raids on a town in which it was mostly civilians who suffered. For many people it was a warning of what could happen anywhere.

Picasso paints

Pablo Picasso, born in Málaga, Spain, in 1881, had lived in France for a long time and was already one of the most famous artists in the world. The Republican government had asked him for a large painting for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris. Picasso could not decide what to paint. When he learned about the bombing from the newspapers, he made up his mind: he would tell what had happened at Guernica.

He started work on 1 May, in a studio in Paris, and in little more than a month, with very few second thoughts, he finished a gigantic painting, almost eight metres long and about three and a half metres high. He used only white, black and grey, like the photographs in the newspapers. His partner, the photographer Dora Maar, took pictures of the painting at every stage, and so today we can see how it changed.

What you can see

The painting shows no aeroplanes and no bombs. There are suffering figures, drawn with broken and distorted shapes. In the centre there is a horse wounded by a spear, screaming; on the left a mother cries out in pain, holding her dead child; on the right a woman fleeing from the flames and another who is falling; at the bottom a soldier, lying on the ground, with a broken sword and a flower in his hand. Above, a light bulb shaped like an eye, and a hand holding a lamp, seem to light up the scene, as if to say: look! On the left there is a bull, which has several meanings, perhaps brutal force, or perhaps the Spanish people.

Picasso said he did not want to explain everything. The painting works like this: it does not tell one particular event, but shows the suffering of every war, and so it speaks to everyone, even to people who do not know the history.