Guernica

Guernica is one of Pablo Picasso's best-known works and one of the most debated paintings of the twentieth century. He painted it in Paris between May and June 1937, in response to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on 26 April that year during the Spanish Civil War. The commission came from the government of the Second Spanish Republic, which wanted a major work for the Spanish pavilion at the International Exposition in Paris, hoping to draw international attention to the Republican cause.

Although the title points to a specific event, the painting shows neither the town nor its fighters. Picasso chose a symbolic language instead: the scene is rendered in black, white and a range of greys, with fragmented, overlapping figures in a Cubist manner. Its structure recalls a triptych, with the dying horse and the woman holding a lamp in the central panel, and the figures are also arranged in triangles that meet at the light bulb placed inside a sun.

Among the figures, the bull, standing impassive on the left, and the mother with her dead child, drawing on the iconography of the Pietà, attract the most attention, and critics read them in different ways. The dove, almost invisible because it shares the colour of the background, is usually taken as a symbol of broken peace, though it has also been suggested that it refers to music.

Its full meaning remains open to debate, yet its artistic value is not in question. After Franco's dictatorship was established, Picasso left the painting in New York, intending that it return to Spain once the republic was restored. It reached Madrid in 1981 and has been displayed at the Reina Sofía Museum since 1992. The critic Robert Hughes called it the last great history painting.

Painter

Pablo Picasso

Date

1937

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

349 × 776 cm

Museum

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

Movement

cubism

Genre

history painting

Depicts

Spanish Civil War, Bombing of Guernica

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