Guernica: Testimony of War

But the mural called Guernica is not at all what Pablo Picasso has in mind when he agrees to paint the centerpiece for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 World's Fair.

For three months, Picasso has been searching for inspiration for the mural, but the artist is in a sullen mood, frustrated by a decade of turmoil in his personal life and dissatisfaction with his work.

The politics of his native homeland are also troubling him, as a brutal civil war ravages Spain.

Republican forces, loyal to the newly elected government, are under attack from a fascist coup led by Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

Hoping for a bold visual protest to Franco's treachery from Spain's most eminent artist, colleagues and representatives of the democratic government have come to Picasso's home in Paris to ask him to paint the mural.

Though his sympathies clearly lie with the new Republic, Picasso generally avoids politics--and disdains overtly political art.

Organizers hope this vision of a bright future will jolt the nations out of the economic depression and social unrest of the thirties.

Who would suspect that this dramatic progress would bring about such dire consequences?

On April 27th, 1937, unprecedented atrocities are perpetrated on behalf of Franco against the civilian population of a little Basque village in northern Spain.

Chosen for bombing practice by Hitler's burgeoning war machine, the hamlet is pounded with high-explosive and incendiary bombs for over three hours.

By May 1st, news of the massacre at Guernica reaches Paris, where more than a million protesters flood the streets to voice their outrage in the largest May Day demonstration the city has ever seen.

Picasso is stunned by the stark black and white photographs.

Appalled and enraged, Picasso rushes through the crowded streets to his studio, where he quickly sketches the first images for the mural he will call Guernica.

From the beginning, Picasso chooses not to represent the horror of Guernica in realist or romantic terms.

Key figures--a woman with outstretched arms, a bull, an agonized horse--are refined in sketch after sketch, then transferred to the capacious canvas, which he also reworks several times.

Located out of the way, and grouped with the pavilions of smaller countries some distance from the Eiffel Tower, the Spanish Pavilion stood in the shadow of Albert Speer's monolith to Nazi Germany.

The German fair guide calls Guernica "a hodgepodge of body parts that any four-year-old could have painted."

They favor more overt imagery, believing that only more realistic art can have political or social consequence.

After the Fair, Guernica tours Europe and Northern America to raise consciousness about the threat of fascism.

There is no doubt that Guernica challenges our notions of warfare as heroic and exposes it as a brutal act of self-destruction.

But it is a hallmark of Picasso's art that any symbol can hold many, often contradictory meanings, and the precise significance of the imagery in Guernica remains ambiguous.

When asked to explain his symbolism, Picasso remarked, "It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them."

On the centenary of Picasso's birth, October 25th, 1981, Spain's new Republic carries out the best commemoration possible: the return of Guernica to Picasso's native soil in a testimony of national reconciliation.

Now showcased at the Reina Sofía, Spain's national museum of modern art, Guernica is acclaimed as an artistic masterpiece, taking its rightful place among the great Spanish treasures of El Greco, Goya and Velazquez.