The triumph of outrage

In this book Russell Martin seeks to explain to the common reader how Picasso’s largest canvas, measuring 11′ 6” high and 25′ 8” long, came to be called ‘Guernica’, after a small Basque market town of some 7,000 inhabitants and how it became the painter’s best known work as an icon of the radical Left throughout the world. He achieves this by putting both the painting of the picture and its subsequent fate in their historical contexts.

In 1937 Picasso had been living in France for 30 years. Yet he did not take out French nationality. Martin argues that in Paris he had become ‘more Spanish than less so’. From the outbreak of the Spanish civil war in July 1936 between Franco and the defenders of the Republic, he made clear his detestation of Franco, shared by his circle of friends – fellow artists like Max Ernst and the surrealist poet AndrZ Breton. In January 1937 Picasso wrote a surrealist poem illustrated by 38 etchings of Franco depicted as a loathsome, wormlike monster.

In early 1937 the embattled Republican government had appealed to him to join artists like the Catalan painter Mir— and Gonzalez, famous for his metal sculptures, to produce works for the Paris International Exhibition of Art and Technology. They would demonstrate that the Republic was fighting to defend democratic freedoms against the barbarism of Fascism. Picasso’s contribution would be the giant mural that would dominate the entrance to the Spanish Pavilion. Picasso was not a political animal as was his friend Louis Aragon, the poetic voice of the Communist party. His response to the invitation was cautious. He hesitated on his choice of subject. But all was to change as he read the newspapers on 28 April. He had found his subject.

On the afternoon of 26 April the aeroplanes of the Condor Legion, sent by Hitler to Spain to aid the Nationalist war effort, had bombed and destroyed the centre of Guernica by a mixture of explosive and incendiary bombs.