Picasso’s Guernica Stands as Lasting Symbol of War in New Show
A man looks at Spanish artist Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece ”Guernica” at Madrid’s Reina Sofia museum, April 3, 2017. | Photo: Reuters
Eighty years after the bloody air raid on the Spanish town of Guernica that drove Pablo Picasso to paint a masterpiece, a new exhibition in Madrid highlights the enduring relevance of his depiction.
Adolf Hitler sent aircraft in support of Francisco Franco’s nationalist forces to strike the Basque town on the afternoon of April 26, 1937, killing as many as 1,600 and wounding hundreds.
The show at the Reina Sofia museum, the painting’s home since 1992, includes newspaper photographs of the destruction which the Spanish artist saw at home in Paris, and drew on in the black-and-white oil painting.
“Guernica” was commissioned for the Spanish pavilion at Paris’s World Fair in 1937.
Rosario Peiro, head of collections at the Reina Sofia, said that while researching she had seen a photograph of an image of “Guernica” on display in the Syrian town of Aleppo.
“It addresses a system of destruction and terror which sadly is very much a part of our lives,” Peiro told Reuters. “It is so hard to fathom, you never really stop thinking about it.”
Versions of the image have been produced at times of conflict in places from Afghanistan to South Carolina, exhibition curator Timothy James Clark said.
