Picasso’s Triumph – Madrid Vacation Stories
by Tony Perrottet
A trip to Spain is not complete without viewing some of Picasso’s famous works.
Nobody remains impassive after entering the white-walled gallery room in the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid where Picasso’s Guernica is displayed: Some viewers gasp in recognition, others are stunned, a few older Spaniards even burst into tears. The enormous canvas, where twisted abstract figures cascade across an exploding landscape in agony and confusion, is the West’s most famous anti-war statement, and its story encapsulates the tragic history of Spain’s bloody civil war, which raged in the late 1930s and still resonates today.
Picasso, who had been born in Andalucia, was living as an expatriate in Paris in 1937 when the Republican government asked him to create a painting for the Spanish Pavilion in the World’s Fair. He had been working on a quite different artistic project when he read a newspaper report of the bombing of Guernica in the Basque Country. This town was considered a stronghold of left-wing Republican sympathy by the right-wing Nationalist forces led by General Francisco Franco, who was supported militarily by the German Nazi Government.
On April 26, the German air force swept down on the town, raining bombs upon its civilians indiscriminately. Guernica’s male inhabitants were fighting on the front lines, so the attack caught mostly women, children and the elderly; planes strafed refugees mercilessly with machine gun fire. Picasso was deeply affected by the account; he abandoned his earlier project and threw himself into painting Guernica. The 25-foot-long, 11-foot-high piece captured all the barbarity of the attack and it became an instant icon. After the Parisian exposition, the painting toured the world, finally reaching South America and the United States.
By 1939, Europe was engulfed in the Second World War, so Picasso asked that the painting remain safely at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and not be returned to Spain until Franco had been removed from power. This change took far longer than anyone could have guessed. The sinister dictator not only won the Civil War, he controlled the country until his death 36 years later, in 1975. But democracy was finally restored in Spain the following year, and with great fanfare, Guernica traveled home to Madrid in 1981.
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