On Monday 26 April 1937, Gernika, a small historic Basque town close to the French border, held its weekly open-air market.
Culturally conservative and loyally Catholic, the Basque region nonetheless mostly supported the Republican cause during the civil war, in return for the promise of regional autonomy within a democratic Spain. In the Spring of 1937, the rebel forces seeking to overthrow the Republic were making slow but steady advances towards the heart of the Basque region, but General Franco and his German military advisers wanted to accelerate progress in this region. So they planned to start attacks on civilian settlements that lay well behind the military front line.
At around 4.30 in the afternoon, a single plane from the Condor Squadron – led by Colonel Wolfgang von Richthofen, and comprised mostly of German fighters and bombers, supplemented with some Italian planes – appeared over Gernika, and dropped a few bombs. Once it had departed, the townspeople rushed out of their shelters to survey the damage and provide help to the few wounded. Around fifteen minutes later, a full squadron of planes arrived, and more bombs were dropped onto the town centre. At the same time, a group of fighter planes strafed those attempting to flee into the fields beyond the town. The local hospital, staffed by nuns, was also attacked.
At 5.15, another wave of planes appeared overhead and for the next two-and-a-half hours, they carpet-bombed the town: this was a new aerial strategy that the Condor Squadron had recently developed for attacking enemy trenches, but which they now experimented with in an attack on a civilian settlement that lacked any form of defence. As well as bombs, numerous incendiary devices containing thermite and phosphorus were also dropped, burning alive the people and animals below, and setting fire to buildings. By evening, the town centre was flattened, a chaotic mass of charred ruins. Of the 7,000 population, more than one third were casualties: 1,600 dead and close to 900 wounded.
Three days later, General Franco’s HQ accused the Republic’s forces of setting fire to their own city using gasoline. Later, veterans of the Condor Squadron claimed they had been targeting a bridge just outside the town, but that strong winds had blown the bombs off course and onto civilian buildings. The Vatican declined to criticise the murder of Catholic nuns and the destruction of Catholic churches. In his diary, von Richthofen described the attack as absolutely fabulous … a complete technical success.
Pablo Picasso was at this time living in Paris. He was a pacifist and had chosen not to return home to fight, but he supported the cause of the Republic and had recently agreed to make a large painting for the Spanish pavilion at the forthcoming World Fair, the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, to be held from late May through the summer. On 29 April, Picasso read a first-hand account of the massacre at Gernika in L’Humanité, and the following day there were photographs of the ruined town, corpses filling its streets, in Ce Soir. Picasso now had the subject for his painting.
During twenty-five days, from mid-May, Picasso made the painting Guernica, using the Spanish rather than the Basque spelling of the town’s name. The canvass is 3.5m in height and 7.75m in length, and is painted wholly in blacks, greys and whites. Picasso used an ultra-matte paint, specially made for him for this picture, drawing inspiration from the black and white photography of his then partner, Dora Maar, who documented the painting process in film. The picture was installed in the Spanish Pavilion in early June, but Picasso did not stay for the opening ceremony on July 12. Instead he went off on holiday to Mougins, just outside Cannes, with Dora, Roland Penrose, Lee Miller, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin.
The painting also went on tour. After the World Fair closed, it was shown in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom (including at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, close to where I live), and then, after the defeat of the Republic, the painting toured the US as part of a fund raising campaign in support of Spanish refugees. It remained in the US for many years, Picasso having insisted that it could not be shown in Spain until democracy was restored. It eventually made its way to Madrid in 1981, eight years after Picasso’s death, and in 1992 was installed in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reine Sofia, where it now hangs. I saw it there last month, when I visited Madrid
Guernica is one of the great twentieth century artworks. It’s unequivocal anti-war message is obvious: the image is filled with the suffering consequent upon organised violence: human misery, animal pain, destruction, and brokenness. Yet it avoids cartoon representations of the perpetrators, and by the use of cool, monochromatic tones, it also avoids the sensationalist presentation of injury and death. The absence of natural colour, and the use of cubist forms and symbols, ensures that the overall message is both immediately clear but at the same time elusive in the details. Picasso forces the viewer to take time to do the necessary interpretative work.
I stood for some minutes, along with many others, and looked closely at the painting. There was a hushed, respectful tone in the gallery, a recognition that this is a painting that pays honour to the dead. (The selfie hysteria that surrounds the Mona Lisa in the Louvre is not appropriate here.) Some critics think that the bull, to the left hand side of the painting, represents Picasso himself, an observer of the events of 26 April, but not himself immediately affected. And the light-bulb in the sun is perhaps a reference to the flash bulb of a camera, drawing attention to the media’s role in reporting (and in some cases, of not reporting) the full truth of what happened in Gernika.
There are some who think that in the twentieth century, modern art became self-referential, elitist, and ugly; that artists no longer had anything important to say, and that they lost the skills needed to make work as beautiful as their predecessors at the time of the Renaissance or the Baroque. This painting shows that thought to be mistaken. This is a wonderful artwork, made in great haste and in anger, but using the techniques of cubism and surrealism to tell a deep and powerful lesson about the reality of war, and the hypocrisy of those leaders who wage war on their own people. It is not beautiful, but it is true.
Bibliography
Antony Beevor, The Spanish Civil War (1982), chapter 17.
John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol.4 (2022), chapter 14.