Attlee - Guernica: the life and travels of a painting

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Pablo Picasso had already accepted a commission to create a work for the Spanish Republican Pavilion at the Paris World Fair in 1937 when news arrived of the bombing by the German Condor Legion of the undefended Basque town of Gernika.

James Attlee offers an illuminating account of the genesis, creation and complex afterlife of Picassos Guernica. He explores the historical and cultural context from which it sprang; analyses the painting itself and the meanings that art historians, museum curators, politicians and anti-war protestors have ascribed to it; traces its travels across Europe and the Americas from the late 1930s to its arrival in Spain in 1981; and speaks with key artists, art-world figures and cultural commentators about its all-pervasive presence today.

In 1937, Guernica sounded a warning of what was to come: with demagogic politicians once more stalking the stage, Attlee argues its message is just as relevant today

Painting is not done to

decorate apartments.

It is an instrument of

war.

PABLO PICASSO

DORA MARR , Picasso working on Guernica in his studio in the rue des Grands Augustins, 1937

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa

I hate Guernica because

of the amount of bad books

that have been written and

will be written and because

none of them express

my contempt satisfactorily.

ANTONIO SAURA

Contra el Guernica, 1982

I

Pablo Picassos painting Guernica has always been at the centre of things: a magnetic attractor of attention, discussion, eulogies and argument in equal measure. Created in 1937 for display at an international exhibition in Paris, it was born onto a world stage, a position it has never relinquished. After it left Paris, it remained outside Spain for the first forty-four years of its life, its location as much a statement as its subject matter. Wherever it has been shown it has stirred debate. Critics have seen it as either its creators career masterpiece or his fall from grace; the route by which he reconnected with his social conscience or the moment he lost his way. Politicians have praised it and railed against it, both in print and in the forums provided by the very different nations they inhabit. Artists have had to face up to its challenge, absorbing its lessons or overthrowing it in an Oedipal struggle, in order to make their own way forward. On its final arrival in Spain in 1981, it became the only painting in history to be widely associated with the transition of a nation from dictatorship to democracy.

Inspired by a specific event, the bombing in April 1937 of an undefended Basque town during the Spanish Civil War by the German Luftwaffe, it contains nothing that refers directly to that place or the people who suffered there. Instead it features figural elements and themes that have already resonated throughout Picassos career and will continue to do so: a bull, a tortured horse, a woman holding up a lamp, another woman weeping over a dead child. Over the past eighty-odd years, these and other symbolic motifs that haunt Guernica , as well as the setting in which they are placed, have been variously interpreted by some of the worlds leading art historians and by countless other commentators. Much that has been written has focused on Picassos biography in an attempt to decode the paintings meaning in a manner that does not always add to our understanding.

French postcard, 1937

When considering a work as overtly polemical yet stubbornly opaque as this one, it is essential to know something of the historical moment that gave birth to it; an atmosphere still adheres to its visibly aged surface, the electrical energy of a gathering storm that was soon to engulf the world. Guernica was born out of a fratricidal civil war Picasso never saw with his own eyes, but to which he was connected through bonds of friendship, family and identity. It raged in his psyche, just as a few hundred kilometres away it was playing out in reality, sinking Spain into what he described, in a famous letter to The New York Times , as an ocean of pain and death. Information travelled in a different way in 1937 to the way it does now. News of the war in Spain reached Picasso through personal letters, newspaper articles, pamphlets, posters and conversations with displaced Spanish officials, artists, poets and friends. Despite his exile, he was a combatant. Untrained in the use of a rifle or in aerial combat, the weapons he deployed were borrowed from his artistic forebears in the Prado Museum or learnt while watching the corrida de toros in the bullrings of his homeland. To trace these wellsprings back to their source is to enrich our response to the painting itself.

II

Once Guernica had left its moorings in Paris it toured the world, subject to new interpretations and controversies wherever it went. Released from its first function as a propaganda weapon and fundraising tool, it swiftly took on a second life as a post-religious icon, somehow able to represent the victims of conflicts as far apart in geography and time as the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Vietnam War and the conflict in Syria. When its physical fragility brought its wanderings to an end, its likeness continued to spread through global consciousness via every conceivable manner of reproduction, ranging from life-size tapestries to postage stamps, from walls of art books to the millions of versions that surround us in the digital cloud. Equally part of its story are the works it has inspired by other artists; the political debates it remains central to; the way in which, through new contexts or re-makings, it continues to acquire fresh meanings for succeeding generations of viewers. At various times its entombment in a gallery and its ubiquity in reproduction have threatened to rob it of its power, but it has never been long before it has returned to the front pages, whether through being defaced by activists, covered up by politicians or brandished as a banner in the faces of TV crews and the police. In a remarkable way it has vaulted the wall of the museum to become public property, to the extent we might be justified in asking where or which is the real Guernica ?

Picasso had a horror of finishing a work. Only death finishes something, he told his friend the photographer Brassa. To finish, achieve dont these words have a double meaning? To terminate, to execute, but also to put to death, to give the coup-de-grace ? As far as he was concerned, when he stepped back from a painting it continued to mutate, remaining an active agent, only achieving its final state in the mind of the viewer. If we take him at his word there are an infinite number of Guernica s in the world, locked in the museums each of us carries behind our eyes yet there is also just one. Today history has once more conspired to reanimate Picassos painting. The forces of nationalism and militarism are on the rise in Europe as old alliances fracture: demagogic politicians bestride the stage, their language eerily similar to that heard at the time the painting was created; and atrocities are committed on a regular basis, both by states determined to maintain their hold on power and by individuals gripped by apocalyptic religious ideologies. In 1937, Guernica sounded a warning of where this would all lead. As we approach the third decade of the twenty-first century, that warning note remains as relevant as ever.