A masterpiece, a beast: Picasso’s iconic painting still resonates
For many, its chaotic, savage portrayal of the aftermath of atrocity makes it the definitive artwork laying bare the horror of war.
Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, with its shattered imagery including a grieving mother, a dead soldier, a screaming woman engulfed by flames, a flailing horse and a wide-eyed bull, has an iconic statement against war.
The giant canvas – it measures 25ft 6in across and 11ft 5in in height – was painted in a fit of passion by the abstract artist in just 25 days after the bombing of the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War on April 26, 1937.
Having been commissioned to paint a piece for the Spanish display at the World’s Fair exhibition, Picasso had not settled on a subject until being told of the slaughter of civilians. The death toll inflicted by Nazi pilots with bombs and machine guns is still disputed but some believe it climbed well above 1,000.
In A Life Of Picasso Volume IV, the latest in a series of about the Spanish painter’s life and career, author John Richardson recounts how Basque painter Jose Maria Ucelay claimed to have told Juan Larrea, cultural attaché at the Spanish embassy in France, about the bombing, and Larrea subsequently rushed to the Café de Flore in
Paris to find Picasso and tell him about the town’s obliteration, believing it would provide the artist with the subject he had been seeking.
Picasso is said to have remarked that he had no idea what a bombed town looked like, to which Larrea replied, “Like a bull in a china shop, run amok.”
Richardson recalls an interview he in 1992 with Dora Maar, a photographer and lover of Picasso who witnessed and documented the making of Guernica. She told Richardson that Picasso had told her that he knew he was “going to have terrible problems with this painting, but I am determined to do it – we have to arm for the war to come.”
For painter Tom Mckendrick, Guernica is an iconic anti-war painting that is still relevant, especially with the war in Ukraine.
“Sometimes it feels like an artist might be put on Earth to make a statement, and Guernica is certainly a statement from Picasso. It’s a masterpiece,” said Mckendrick, whose paintings of the Clydebank Blitz are on display in Clydebank’s town hall, 40 years after he painted them. “It’s a snapshot of something that belongs to a moment in time, that signifies horror and modern warfare – there’s the big flashing light, the eviscerated horse, all of that destruction. It’s a beast of a painting.
“As a single image, it’s an anti-war icon. It’s a magnificent thing and it serves its purpose of making us think twice about our actions, about tyrants and terror and destruction
– all of that is folded into it. Guernica reaches out to ordinary people. Art is about communication – communicating things you can’t see but you can feel. My Blitz paintings were connected to real stories, and people who had never seen abstract art before could stand in front of them and tell their kids or families why this was like this or that – they could relate to the paintings. Not speaking about them in an abstract way but in a real way because it is their reality.
“To stand in front of something that can move you emotionally without making a sound is unique, and that’s the strength of art.”