2* - Alfonso XIII was the King in 1920 when Spain was a constitutional monarchy.
Stalin’s Russia. Fascist Italy under Mussolini would be an obvious ally, as would Germany, once Hitler obtained power in January 1933.
Matters came to a head when in January 1933, 25 people were killed by government troops who were attempting to catch some rebels near Cadiz. This lost the government a great deal of support among the working class and the Socialists withdrew their support from the government. Azana resigned as prime minister and elections were called for November 1933.
The new Right wing government immediately over-turned all of the changes brought in by the Azana government. This angered many but especially the Catalans who had their privileges withdrawn. This was a serious error of judgment as the Catalans and Basques had supported the government in the elections. The way ahead for Robles3* became clear to many – an attack on the left wing parties of Spain.
The military had, in fact, already made preparations for a takeover of Spain. assumed control of the military. He took control of Spanish Morocco after overthrowing the civilian government there. His next target was to invade mainland Spain, establish a military government there and rid the country of all those involved in Left wing politics. The Left would have to fight for survival. The civil war started in July 1936.
The war also witnessed the first ever deliberate aerial bombing of a city. On April 27th 1937, the ancient city of the Basques, , was bombed and destroyed by the Condor Legion of Germany. For Hitler it was a useful experiment into the value of bombing civilian targets. For the Nationalists, it took out a city of spiritual importance for the Basques. For Europe, the warning posed by this bombing was obvious. Aerial bombing and its consequences were to terrify Western Europe.
By the time the Condor Legion had left, the center of Guernica was in ruins. 1,654 people were killed and 889 wounded. The world was horrified but denied that the raid ever took place. He blamed the destruction of Guernica on those who defended it
The town of Guernica is situated 30 kilometers east of Bilbao, in the Basque province of Vizcaya.
George E. Steer, (28th April, 1937)
“Guernica, the most ancient town of the Basques and the centre of their cultural tradition, was completely destroyed yesterday afternoon by insurgent raiders. The bombardment of this open town far behind the lines occupied precisely three hours and a quarter, during which a powerful fleet of aeroplanes did not cease in unloading on the town bombs weighing from 1000Ib downwards. The fighters meanwhile plunged low from above to machine gun those of the civilian population who had taken refuge in the fields.”
The next section looks at Picasso’s reaction to this event and the painting which arose from this reaction.
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3* - José Maria Gil Robles was born in Salamanca in 1898. After university he became a journalist with Catholic daily newspaper, El Debate. He was active in right-wing politics and was a member of Partido Social Popular.
He was a supporter of the dictatorship of . After the establishment of the Second Republic in April 1931 he joined Accion Nacional and was elected to the for Salamanca.
He helped to establish the CEDA, out of a collection of small right-wing parties opposed to the policies of and his Republican government.
He supported the during the war. He was unwilling to struggle with General for power and in April 1937 announced the dissolution of the .
At the end of the Civil War he went into exile. He returned in the 1960s and became one of the leaders of the Spanish Christian Democracy. José Maria Gil Robles died in 1980.
Section 2: Picasso’s Reactions to the War,
Why He Painted Guernica and How He Painted It.
While Spain was being torn apart by Civil War, a civil servant at the Spanish Embassy in Paris, the poet Jose Bergamin, got Picasso to agree to paint a large panel for the Spanish Pavilion for a sum of 150,000 francs. Picasso was a supporter and remained loyal to the government in his homeland, a fact recognized when they appointed him Director of the Prado Museum in 1936. The Republican government of Spain called on him to represent them and in, turn Picasso, called upon the terror and pity he had pictured in his own works since 1925 to, not only send out those qualities to others of his time but, to sum up the horrors of war for the entire 20th century.
“The Spanish Civil War is a battle of reactionaries against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing other than a continual struggle against the forces of reaction and the death of art. In the panel on which I am working on and which I shall call Guernica, I express clearly my horror of the military class that has plunged Spain into an ocean of pain and death.” 1*
The great canvas was the star attraction of the Spanish Pavilion. Other Spanish artists such as Mirớ, Sanchez, and Gonzalez also made contributions. So strongly did Picasso feel regarding the domination of his homeland by the successful Fascists in 1939 that he refused entry of the canvas into Spain until such time as Spain would become a democracy. The great painting finally moved from The Museum of Modern Art in New York to Spain in 1978.
He did not begin to work on Guernica, which had been promised for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 International Exhibition, until Dora Maar 2* (a new mistress, a Yugoslavian photographer who spoke excellent Spanish as a result of a South American upbringing) had found him a large studio on the Rue des Grands-Augustins which, it was hoped, would encourage the painter. Then, at the end of April 1937 the Condor Brigade – aircraft belonging to Franco’s German allies – bombed to ruin the ancient Basque capital of Guernica, on its market day. There was a straight propaganda issue involved: Franco, the Germans and the Vatican denied the bombing and claimed that the town had been blown up by withdrawing Republican forces. Three photographs of the bombing of Guernica appeared in the newspaper Ce Soir on 1st May 1937. Picasso then flung all his feelings of horror into Guernica. He immediately began a series of preparatory drawings for the huge frieze size painting that we know it is today. The symbolic elements were present in the very early sketches: the bull, the horse, and the bearer of light. The whole picture was filled with mourning, black and white, suggesting death.
Picasso wanted to show the viewers how his painting came about. He had long been careful to have a record kept of all his productions, and had quite recently remarked on an interest he had in making a public record of the workings of his mind as he proceeded through a painting. ‘It would be highly interesting’, he said, ‘to fix photographically not the successive stages of the painting but its successive changes. In this way one might perhaps understand the mental process leading to the embodiment of the artist’s dream.’ 3*
Here was the opportunity for such a study. However, some people think that this undertaking – the first time that an artist had thought to preserve all the stages of a painting, and catalogue them, before embarking on the work – was in large part the work of Dora Maar. All or nearly all the drawings were preserved, and the work on the canvas was photographed by Dora Maar seven times, from the first graphic descriptions to the final
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1* - Lorraine Levy – “Picasso”
2* - Photographer, one of Picasso’s mistresses at the time.
3* - Timothy Hilton – “Picasso”
product. Picasso himself was photographed while painting the picture, and he received visitors in the studio while work was going on, and talked with them about it. He completed forty-five preliminary drawings, most of which were in colour.
Two pencil sketches of the briefest sort immediately laid down the basis of the painting. A bull and a horse are placed together underneath a building. A woman with a lamp leans out of a window to light up what is going on. A bird hovers over the bull’s back. In the second drawing this becomes a miniature-winged horse, a Pegasus, while the horse has been twisted into an agonised position nearer to the bull, its head and neck assuming a phallic form.
The next day, the figure of a slaughtered warrior was introduced, mixed together with the fallen horse and the legs of the bull. And it is in just this area that the drawing is impressive. The natural volumes of limbs are twisted into linear clashes; different manners are shared in the same drawing, from the smooth and almost cartoon-like bull’s head to the ugly lines of the warrior’s spear. Even at this early point, one might feel that it was fixed that the painting would not be in colour. He refused to say why he had drawn each figure and what they symbolised, he preferred to encourage the viewer to understand the work on an emotional, sensitive level. On the right and left hand sides of the composition, two women shrieking in distress, with eyes transformed to the shape of tears look toward the heavens, source of their pain and death. The figure on the left holding a dead child adapts the Pieta theme to this nightmare, while the woman to the right cries from the flames that have swallowed up her house. Below her another woman drags her mangled leg and, with arms outstretched, seems to be pleading for help. Above, an oil lamp, suggestive of the light held by symbolic figures of reality and freedom, is pushed into the chaos. This light, however, is overwhelmed by the harsh radiance from the bare electric bulb, added to the composition only in the final stages of painting. Previously this area had represented the sun or an eye. The change to the electric light is most likely a hint of technology, which, during the bombing of Guernica, was let loose as a spiteful and vicious force.
During its composition, Guernica came to be thought of as a frieze-like work, and its compositional elements were flattened to take account of this. Picasso drew in the first intimations of shallow cubist space and then tried to float over them the spread-out figures showing the battle scene.
“The bull represents brutality, the horse the people. Yes, there I used symbols.” 4*
It was executed in virtually one month’s time, between May and June of 1937, for the Spanish Pavilion. A huge canvas measuring 11½ by 25½ feet, Picasso's techniques and many of his images can be found in earlier works, but here they are incorporated into great shock and pain. The bombs are invisible but are hinted by the flash of the light bulb and the light from above the door. We only see the victims that are suddenly struck down.
Another artist whose work was also shown in the Spanish Pavilion in 1937 was Mirό. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, Mirό returned to Paris and stayed in France until 1940. In 1937 he painted a large panel The Reaper for the Spanish Republican pavilion at the Paris World Fair. The panel, which presented a Catalan peasant, disappeared or was destroyed after the Pavilion was disassembled.
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4* - Lorraine Levy – “Picasso”
Section 3: Modern ideas and reactions to Guernica.
History paintings are generally considered something of the past in which academic painting reigned, but Picasso was able to update this tradition by providing a modern grammar for it. His famous interpretation of the Spanish Civil War here became an international symbol for the aggression of war and a gathering point for those who were against it. Few paintings can summarise such a huge segment of the human character. Guernica still stands today as an icon, a modern history painting in a period that frequently turns its back on history.
Modern critics still find this emotional painting fascinating and many have written much about it:
Timothy Hilton 1* had some interesting ideas on some of the iconography in the following statement which encourages us to read the idea of the bull (such a powerful image in his minotaur series and in his life) symbolically…
“If someone wished to interpret the iconography of the finished picture, they ought to be interested in its previous changes. One must start with the bull. He is prominent in all the early parts of the sketching and designing, where he is a leading figure – the real leading role – in a way that disappears in the final version. His significance is tricky. At no point does he seem frankly vicious. If we take him to be aggressive, it is only because we know it to be in the nature of bulls to be so. If he has slaughtered the horse, there is yet no sign that he is responsible for the other animal’s suffering. Indeed, the evidence of the sketches points in the other direction. Picasso tried to move our expectations of what is bull-like in an unexpected direction. Some drawings such as that done on 10th May, present him with an unreal and God-like expression, a Grecian and beatific bull. But this is quite at variance with what Picasso himself said about the role of the animal in the painting.”
Picasso claimed that ‘the bull is not Fascism, but it is brutality and darkness… the horse represents the people… the Guernica mural is symbolic… allegoric. That’s the reason I use the horse, the bull and so on. The mural is for definite expression and resolution of a problem, and that is why I used symbols.’
At the centre is the painful death of his horse from the bullfights, probably representing the loyal people of Spain. All exist in the collapsed space of a basic Cubist composition. Each part had been seen before but nothing can account for the new totality.
Apart from the late Cubist style, the only specifically modern elements in Guernica are the Mithraic eye of the electric light, and the suggestions that the horse’s body is made of parallel lines like newsprint, like the newsprint of some of Picasso’s collages. Otherwise its heroic abstraction and pain hardly seemed to belong to the time of photography. Picasso’s most effective way of showing the period of the painting was to paint it in black and white. Despite its huge size, it retains something of the grainy, brief look one associates with a newspaper’s front cover.
In January 2003 U.N. officials covered up a tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica (which was donated by Nelson A. Rockefeller, and has hung outside the U.N. headquarters for nearly 20 years) during US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5 presentation of the American case for war against Iraq. Still, today, this painting is seen as the most famous anti-war expression in the history of modern art and was temporarily covered by a baby blue banner that shows the U.N. logo. It was a surprise for many of the representatives to arrive at U.N. headquarters on 27th January 2003 for a Security Council briefing by chief weapons inspectors, only to find the great work covered.
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1* - An Art Historian and critic. Born in 1941, educated at Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art where he taught.
2* - Surrealism – An art movement in the 1920s founded by Andre Breton. The term Surrealism is more loosely used of fantastic, weird or horrific imagery.
U.N. officials said that it was more appropriate to photograph in front of a blue background with some flags than the impressionist image of shattered villages and livestock. “With the Picasso as a backdrop”, Mr Kabbaj, the organisation’s media liaison, said, “no one would know they were looking at the United Nations”. He also said they had a problem with the horse; the camera crew noticed that anyone who stood at the U.N. microphone would be photographed next to the backside of a rearing horse.
Other people in the organisation thought it ironic to force officials to walk by Picasso’s uncovered painting while on their way to discuss bombing Baghdad. Others thought it not ironic at all as they wanted to remind people of the horrors of war before they go to make decisions.
Hommerabi, another official, had views of the painting and they were expressed. He said “I would guess that a lot of people who walk past the painting each and every day have no clue what it is about. I would also guess that the only comment they make on it is something along the lines of “Gee, I could have painted that!” Then they slap their partners’ backs and have a good laugh. Covering up the painting does not remind people of the horrors, having it in full view, and having people understand its history and meaning, will.” From looking at this statement we see that a majority of the population probably have no idea what Guernica is about. However, we also see that from it being covered up, people, even now, realise the horrors of war just from looking at the painting. It is interesting to note that 70 years later, to some people, it still carries that same symbolic meaning.
Conclusion.
Guernica is a work that we know intimately, in some ways. We know how it was conjured up, how it was built up, put together, put in opposition, and so on; and we also know, from the photographs, a great deal about how the picture was developed when it was actually on the canvas. But what people know about the picture most of all is that it is a masterpiece, and that it is on the right side in the Spanish Civil War. In this opinion at least one of the intentions of the painting – to have a propagandist function – has been successfully fulfilled.
When I first saw a reproduction of Guernica I had no idea about its contents and the civil war that inspired its iconography. As a result of my research for this dissertation I have learnt so much more about nationality, the context of the war, and, of course Picasso’s deep feelings as a Catalan. I only really knew about Picasso from his Cubist works but now I have discovered a different side of Picasso which I had never learnt about before.
Bibliography
Books.
Picasso – Timothy Hilton
A Picasso Anthology – Edited by Marilyn McCully
Picasso’s War – Russell Martin
Picasso – Ingo F. Walther
The Shock of the New – Robert Hughes
Picasso – Lorraine Levy
Pablo Picasso, A modern Master – Richard Leslie
Guernica – Paloma Esteban Leal
Paper Museum – Andrew Graham-Dixon
The Story of Modern Art – Norbert Lynton
Visual Arts in the 20th Century – Edward Lucie-Smith.
Newspapers and magazines.
The Times March 3 1999
The Times April 28 1937
Web sights.
