Chapter 42

Black and White and Red All Over

Unlisted on many official maps of the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris, the Second Spanish Republic’s pavilion may have left the most permanent imprint of all forty-four countries that appeared there. Finished seven weeks into the fair’s run, the pavilion, representing the democratic (and doomed) government opened to little fanfare at first. Ignoring the show’s theme of art and technology, the pavilion was instead an architectural expression of the horrors of warfare. It was a world made pacific by “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “Cry Havoc,” and the 1933 University of Oxford debate, in which the motion “one must fight for King and country” was stomped on with ideological Doc Martens as thoroughly as Europe would be a few years later.

Over the entrance to the pavilion loomed a gigantic photographic mural of Republican soldiers, with an inscription that had the naiveté of national anthems:

“We are fighting for the essential unity of Spain.

We are fighting for the integrity of Spanish soil.

We are fighting for the independence of our country and for the right of the Spanish people to determine their own destiny.”

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” might have been more appropriate for a conflict that George Orwell immortalized in “Homage to Catalonia” as “an attempt not so much to impose fascism as to restore feudalism.” Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s troops used mass rape as a cardinal point of its civilian terrorizing, shooting more than twenty pregnant women point-blank in a Toledo maternity hospital, and even branding women’s breasts with the Falangist symbol of the yoke and arrows.

Inside the squat proletarian building in a 33-by-11.5-foot space, agitprop art veered between modernism and martyrs. To visitors’ left as they entered was an enormous black=and-white picture, earnest and solemn in the way of high school yearbook photos, marked “FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA, POET KILLED AT GRANADA.” (Fascist forces had executed Garcia Lorca in August, 1936, just about a month after the Spanish Civil War erupted.) Nearby, surrealist, modernist, and now-propagandist Joan Miro was represented by the two-story-tall mural, “El Segador” (“The Reaper”), depicted a Catalan farmer lifting a sickle to slash at the fascist forces, and Alexander Calder’s mercury-powered fountain/mobile painted a cheery red that symbolized the Spanish Republic. Calder’s artwork was a memorial in metal to the siege of Almadén, whose cinnabar mines had supplied the world with mercury since the days of Roman occupiers. Documentary films about the civil war, “Madrid ’36” by Luis Buñuel and “Spanish Earth” by Joris Ivens and Ernest Hemingway, played in the auditorium.

None, though, would shake the world like the cultural temblor of Pablo Picasso’s work. In January 1937, the Spanish Republican government commissioned him to create a mural for the upcoming exposition, plying the artistic polymath with 150,000 French francs, a “symbolic” amount for any expenses incurred. With his pioneering work in collage, his “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” and his Blue and Rose periods having earned “greatest hits” status, the middle-aged co-founder of Cubism sulked and paced in his Paris studio, lost in the painter’s equivalent of writer’s block.

Then on April 26, 1937, inspiration came, as it were, from above.

The Condor Legion, an air and land unit comprising volunteers from the German Air Force and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria, scorched the Basque village of Guernica in northern Spain with high-explosive and incendiary bombs. A kind of homicidal dress rehearsal for World War II (the attack’s architect, Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, later schemed the blitzkrieg attacks on Poland and France) that lasted more than three hours, the barrage killed anywhere from 200 to 3,000 of Guernica’s 5,000 inhabitants. After reading war correspondent George Steer’s account of the first complete destruction of the town by aerial bombardment in The Times of London and the New York Times, Picasso jettisoned his almost nonexistent start for something rawer and more brutal.

Stretching an 11.5-by-26-foot canvas, he filled it with images over a twenty-four-day painting spasm (punctuated by visits from sculptor Henry Moore and surrealist Salvador Dali) that would become the go-to cliché for war: bodies crushed, mothers keening, horses dying. The Picasso of the peacock colors made his greatest creation using a monochrome palette that possessed the harsh forensics of black-and-white newspaper photos of crime scenes. In removing a raised fist from early versions, Picasso purposely obliterated any sign of optimism or resistance.

Later a more appreciative world would place Picasso’s “Guernica” in the same pantheon as Francisco Goya’s “The Third of May 1808.” The Spanish Romantic’s masterpiece of peasants mowed down by Napoleons’ troops, also oversized at about 8.7 by 11.5 feet, was received with disdain for depicting its victims as less than dashing and heroic.

Like the response to the “Third of May,” the immediate reaction to Guernica was to attack rather than applaud. A German guidebook (the steel-and-glass Spanish pavilion stood next to the German pavilion) to the fair dismissed it as “A hodgepodge of body parts that any four-year-old could have painted.” Paul Nizan, the Communist, novelist (“Antoine Bloye”), and close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, sniped that Picasso’s art was all ivory tower and effete.

Despite the initially cool reception at the exposition, the fair proved to be a perfect launch pad. “Guernica” traveled to Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and then Britain, raising money for the anti-fascist cause. In January 1939, the painting was displayed in London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery where 15,000 viewers paid a total of £250 to see this cause célèbre on a canvas. (Additionally, the price of admission to see the painting included donating a pair of boots to be sent to the Spanish front.) At the Washington, D.C., stop of the American tour, 100 people paid $5 each to attend a fund-raiser, where they mixed with Eleanor Roosevelt and Simon Guggenheim. In 1939, Picasso left the painting in the care of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, stipulating that it would return to Spain only when democracy there was reestablished.

Art will never be mistaken for artillery. Houseflies and head colds probably bothered Franco more than “Guernica” ever did. After the war, Franco executed 100,000 Republican prisoners and remained comfortably in power until he was declared really, most sincerely, dead in 1975, two years after Picasso died.

Six years later, “Guernica,” the prodigal artwork, arrived home in Madrid, secure at the Casón del Buen Retiro, an annex to the Museo del Prado, where Picasso’s will dictated the artwork should go if it returned to Spain. However the governing body of the Prado Museum voted to transfer it to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Inaugurated in 1992, the Sofía houses the cream of Spanish modern art and was thus considered a better home for Picasso’s work, alongside that of Salvador Dali, Juan Gris, and Joan Miró.

The canvas was rolled and unrolled so often—possibly as much as 100 times—over the years on its many tours that the paint has cracked and chipped off, like an old and much-used coffee cup. But its depiction of war remains as freshly unnerving as Goya’s “Third of May” and his “The Disasters of War,” along with Otto Dix’s “The Trench Warfare.” “Guernica’s” power to shock and awe, however, makes the art from past battles and other wars seem as ineffectual as guns without triggers.