#AtoZChallenge: Guernica (Picasso)

Who:

Pablo Picasso, artist

What:

Painting, 11 feet 6 inches x 25 feet 6 inches, oil on canvas (grey, black, and white paint)

When:

During the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939) the painting was commissioned by the Republican government for the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. Picasso was notified in January and the painting was completed in June. Picasso changed the subject of his commission when he learned about the bombing of Guernica, which occurred in April 1937.

Where:

Guernica was painted at Picasso’s studio at 7 Rue des Grands Augustins, 75006 Paris, France. This studio was on the Left Bank close to the River Seine and Le Pont Neuf. Picasso rented this studio beginning in 1937. He used it until 1955 and lived in it during the Occupation during World War II. Picasso kept the studio until his landlords evicted him in 1967.

The Spanish town of Guernica is in the Basque Country of Spain in the northern area of the country.

Today the painting is at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid. Picasso had directed that the painting not be given to the people of Spain until the country was once again a republic. Picasso died in 1973 and General Franco died in 1975. After some delay because Spain is technically a constitutional monarchy, the painting was shipped from the United States’ Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where the painting was displayed after much worldwide travel, to the Prado Museum in Madrid. After the Prado Museum went through a reorganization of buildings, the painting has been displayed at the Museo Reina Sofia, also in Madrid.

Why:

Picasso quote from 1937 as he was working on Guernica—

The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. How could anybody think for a moment that I could be in agreement with reaction and death? … In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.

How:

From an article in The Guardian dated 29 April 2006 and written by Colm Tóibín —

Gijs van Hensbergen, in his definitive book Guernica: The Biography of a 20th Century Icon, writes about that first day’s work: “There is nothing in the first preparatory sketch for Guernica that specifically describes Gernika [the Basque spelling], the bombing, the planes, the effect of incendiaries, the fingers of flame, or the crashing explosions and the array of corpses. From sketch 2 through sketch 6, all produced on that first day, Picasso … repositions his actors and discards those extraneous to the plot, slowly refining and paring them back … By the evening of May 1, he had come remarkably close to the finished painting.

Each weekday that May Picasso worked on the painting, allowing [Dora] Maar to photograph the process, and at weekends he went to the country to be with Marie Thérèse Walter. At the end of the month he invited friends and artists, including Alberto Giacometti, Roland Penrose and Henry Moore, to see the work in progress. Moore remembered: “You know the woman who comes running out of the little cabin on the right with one hand held in front of her? Well, Picasso told us there was something missing there, and he went and fetched a roll of paper and stuck it in the woman’s hand, as much as to say that she’d been caught in the bathroom when the bombs came.”

Sources: johndnugent.com, theculturetrip.com, The Guardian, Wikipedia