Guernica
Pablo Picasso (1881 to 1973) · May to June 1937
Nearly eight metres wide and painted entirely in black, white and grey, Guernica fills the end wall of its gallery like a scream frozen in paint. A bull stands at the left over a woman who holds a dead child and howls at the sky. A horse in the centre, pierced by a spear, throws back its head with its tongue like a knife. A fallen soldier lies in pieces with a broken sword in his hand and a flower growing beside it. From a window a woman thrusts out a lamp, another runs with outstretched arms, and at the right a figure burns in a house, arms raised. Above them all an electric bulb blazes like an eye.
Picasso painted it in Paris in about five weeks after German and Italian planes, at Franco's request, bombed the Basque market town of Gernika on the twenty sixth of April 1937. It was made for the Spanish Republic's pavilion at the Paris World's Fair. Look at how he uses the language of Cubism, with bodies broken into flat overlapping planes, and combines it with the newspaper greys of the photographs through which the world learned of the raid. There is no aeroplane and no bomb, only the effect. Dora Maar photographed each stage, and the museum shows her photographs and Picasso's sketches in the surrounding rooms.
After the fair the painting toured to raise money for Spanish refugees and then stayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, because Picasso refused to let it go to Spain while Franco ruled. It arrived in Madrid in 1981, six years after the dictator's death, and was moved from the Prado's annex to the Reina Sofía in 1992. It is too fragile to travel and will not leave this room. Photography is forbidden here; put the phone away and look.
Did You Know? Picasso is said to have told a German officer who looked at a photograph of Guernica and asked whether he had done it: no, you did.
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