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Pablo Picasso had already accepted a commission to create a work for the Spanish Republican Pavilion at the Paris World Fair in 1937 when news arrived of the bombing by the German Condor Legion of the undefended Basque town of Gernika.
James Attlee offers an illuminating account of the genesis, creation and complex afterlife of Picasso’s Guernica. He explores the historical and cultural context from which it sprang; analyses the painting itself and the meanings that art historians, museum curators, politicians and anti-war protestors have ascribed to it; traces its travels across Europe and the Americas from the late 1930s to its arrival in Spain in 1981; and speaks with key artists, art-world figures and cultural commentators about its all-pervasive presence today.
In 1937, Guernica sounded a warning of what was to come: with demagogic politicians once more stalking the stage, Attlee argues its message is just as relevant today
Welcome Page
About Guernica
Epigraph
Introduction A Mystery in Plain Sight
Chapter 1:The Disintegration of the World
Chapter 2: Materializing a Dream
Chapter 3: Death and Geometry
Chapter 4: It Will Be Spoken Of For A Long Time
Chapter 5: A Message from One Age to Another
Chapter 6: More or Less True
Chapter 7: At Some Point in the Near Future
Chapter 8: Beauty and the Beast
Afterword Picasso, Baby!
Acknowledgements
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Picture Credits
Index
About James Attlee
The Landmark Library
An Invitation from the Publisher
Painting is not done to
decorate apartments.
It is an instrument of
war.1
PABLO PICASSO
DORA MARR, Picasso working on Guernica in his studio in the rue des Grands Augustins, 1937
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
I hate Guernica because
of the amount of bad books
that have been written and
will be written and because
none of them express
my contempt satisfactorily.1
ANTONIO SAURA
Contra el Guernica, 1982
– I –
Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica has always been at the centre of things: a magnetic attractor of attention, discussion, eulogies and argument in equal measure. Created in 1937 for display at an international exhibition in Paris, it was born onto a world stage, a position it has never relinquished. After it left Paris, it remained outside Spain for the first forty-four years of its life, its location as much a statement as its subject matter. Wherever it has been shown it has stirred debate. Critics have seen it as either its creator’s career masterpiece or his fall from grace; the route by which he reconnected with his social conscience or the moment he lost his way. Politicians have praised it and railed against it, both in print and in the forums provided by the very different nations they inhabit. Artists have had to face up to its challenge, absorbing its lessons or overthrowing it in an Oedipal struggle, in order to make their own way forward. On its final arrival in Spain in 1981, it became the only painting in history to be widely associated with the transition of a nation from dictatorship to democracy.
Inspired by a specific event, the bombing in April 1937 of an undefended Basque town during the Spanish Civil War by the German Luftwaffe, it contains nothing that refers directly to that place or the people who suffered there. Instead it features figural elements and themes that have already resonated throughout Picasso’s career and will continue to do so: a bull, a tortured horse, a woman holding up a lamp, another woman weeping over a dead child. Over the past eighty-odd years, these and other symbolic motifs that haunt Guernica, as well as the setting in which they are placed, have been variously interpreted by some of the world’s leading art historians and by countless other commentators. Much that has been written has focused on Picasso’s biography in an attempt to decode the painting’s meaning in a manner that does not always add to our understanding.
French postcard, 1937
When considering a work as overtly polemical yet stubbornly opaque as this one, it is essential to know something of the historical moment that gave birth to it; an atmosphere still adheres to its visibly aged surface, the electrical energy of a gathering storm that was soon to engulf the world. Guernica was born out of a fratricidal civil war Picasso never saw with his own eyes, but to which he was connected through bonds of friendship, family and identity. It raged in his psyche, just as a few hundred kilometres away it was playing out in reality, sinking Spain into what he described, in a famous letter to The New York Times, as ‘an ocean of pain and death’. Information travelled in a different way in 1937 to the way it does now. News of the war in Spain reached Picasso through personal letters, newspaper articles, pamphlets, posters and conversations with displaced Spanish officials, artists, poets and friends. Despite his exile, he was a combatant. Untrained in the use of a rifle or in aerial combat, the weapons he deployed were borrowed from his artistic forebears in the Prado Museum or learnt while watching the corrida de toros in the bullrings of his homeland. To trace these wellsprings back to their source is to enrich our response to the painting itself.
– II –
Once Guernica had left its moorings in Paris it toured the world, subject to new interpretations and controversies wherever it went. Released from its first function as a propaganda weapon and fundraising tool, it swiftly took on a second life as a post-religious icon, somehow able to represent the victims of conflicts as far apart in geography and time as the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Vietnam War and the conflict in Syria. When its physical fragility brought its wanderings to an end, its likeness continued to spread through global consciousness via every conceivable manner of reproduction, ranging from life-size tapestries to postage stamps, from walls of art books to the millions of versions that surround us in the digital cloud. Equally part of its story are the works it has inspired by other artists; the political debates it remains central to; the way in which, through new contexts or re-makings, it continues to acquire fresh meanings for succeeding generations of viewers. At various times its entombment in a gallery and its ubiquity in reproduction have threatened to rob it of its power, but it has never been long before it has returned to the front pages, whether through being defaced by activists, covered up by politicians or brandished as a banner in the faces of TV crews and the police. In a remarkable way it has vaulted the wall of the museum to become public property, to the extent we might be justified in asking where – or which – is the real Guernica?
Picasso had a horror of ‘finishing’ a work. ‘Only death finishes something,’ he told his friend the photographer Brassaï. ‘To finish, achieve – don’t these words have a double meaning? To terminate, to execute, but also to put to death, to give the coup-de-grace?’ As far as he was concerned, when he stepped back from a painting it continued to mutate, remaining an active agent, only achieving its final state in the mind of the viewer. If we take him at his word there are an infinite number of Guernicas in the world, locked in the museums each of us carries behind our eyes – yet there is also just one. Today history has once more conspired to reanimate Picasso’s painting. The forces of nationalism and militarism are on the rise in Europe as old alliances fracture: demagogic politicians bestride the stage, their language eerily similar to that heard at the time the painting was created; and atrocities are committed on a regular basis, both by states determined to maintain their hold on power and by individuals gripped by apocalyptic religious ideologies. In 1937, Guernica sounded a warning of where this would all lead. As we approach the third decade of the twenty-first century, that warning note remains as relevant as ever.
– III –
Guernica is a mystery in plain sight. One of the best-known paintings of the modern period, the interpretations placed upon it jostle and contradict each other, while its location remains politically charged, a matter of dispute between central government and the Basque region of Spain. Linked forever to a particular event, its roots reach back throughout its creator’s life and beyond, into the history of art, of Spain, and on into prehistory, to the beginnings of humanity itself. How does one trace the bloodline of an icon? In order to do so, we must first survey the landscape of the time, the political and personal events that were bearing down on the artist as he began work. Let us take one day as our starting point: a day on which, after a period of hesitation and uncertainty, Picasso discovers his subject; when inner promptings and international events combine and the touchpaper is lit on a process which will result, some five weeks later, in the painting’s first public appearance, in the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the World’s Fair in Paris.
PICASSO, Guernica, 1937
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
GUERNICA
The great Spanish painter
Pablo Picasso, creator of Cubism,
who has been such a powerful
influence on contemporary plastic
art, has wanted to express in this
work the disintegration of a world
prey to the horrors of war.
Text printed on the reverse
of a souvenir postcard of Guernica
published by the Spanish
Republican Government, 1937
– I –
It is the first of May 1937, the public holiday known in France as la fête du travail. The streets of the French capital are thronged with the largest workers’ parade in the city’s history. Women sell sprigs of lily of the valley gathered in woods outside Paris and couples place them in their buttonholes. A heavily bearded man, his eyes two black holes behind his dark glasses, stares directly into the camera held by Robert Capa, who has been commissioned to capture the day’s events for Ce Soir. On the man’s shoulders, wearing his best coat and matching beret, sits a young boy. Tentatively he curls his fingers into a fist like those raised in solidarity around him, his momentary gesture captured and immortalized in Capa’s photograph. The image transforms the child into a symbol: an allusion perhaps to the figure of Julie in Romain Rolland’s play Le quatorze juillet (The Fourteenth of July), in which a little girl becomes the mascot of the crowd that bears her aloft as they storm the Bastille. Written in 1902, the play is revived in Paris in 1936, in a production for which the stage curtain is painted by a man said to be the most famous artist in the world.
In the attic studio of a seventeenth-century townhouse on the narrow rue des Grands Augustins, a minute’s walk from the river, that artist has left the streets to work through the public holiday, as is his habit. Although he might appear isolated from the electric atmosphere outside, as more than a million marchers follow the traditional route from the Place de la République to the Bastille, it is clear from the first sketches dating from that day that Picasso is portraying a moment of conflict. The drawings relate to a commission he has accepted some four months earlier and for which, so far, he has struggled to find a subject. In the first week of January, a delegation had arrived at the door of Picasso’s apartment at number 23 rue La Boétie. It includes the Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert, an old friend from Barcelona, accompanied by his architectural partner Luis Lacasa; together they will be responsible for the design of the Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life), which is due to open in Paris in May. They are joined by the writer Max Aub, the Republican government’s cultural attaché in Paris; the photographer and photomontage artist Josep Renau, director of fine arts for the Republican government, and two poets: José Bergamín and Juan Larrea. (In addition to their literary activities, Bergamín is in charge of protecting the collection of the Museo Nacional del Prado, while Larrea is director of Agence Espagne in Paris, the propaganda office for the Republic that is funded by the Comintern.) This disparate artistic group has been entrusted by the embattled government of Picasso’s homeland with the task of persuading him to contribute a major work to the Spanish Pavilion – something that will make clear his abhorrence of the Nationalist rebellion that threatens the continued existence of democracy in Spain.
ROBERT CAPA, Paris. May 1st, 1937 May Day celebrations
For their part, the French government’s intention is that the exhibition showcases the latest developments in science and technology, with a particular emphasis, of course, on the achievements of the host nation and its empire. Despite its importance, the World’s Fair comes at a challenging time. Political instability has been the hallmark of the decade so far: between 1930 and 1936 the country has seen twelve prime ministers and six different governing parties come and go. The current administration, the Front Populaire (Popular Front), elected in May 1936 under the slogan ‘Bread, Peace and Liberty’, is a precarious coalition of different factions on the left headed by Léon Blum, France’s first Jewish, socialist prime minister. Although workers have won significant rights, including the guarantee of paid holidays and union representation, economic reforms have failed to mitigate the effects of the Depression while the benefits of wage increases have largely been wiped out by inflation. Divisions in French society, between the immense wealth of the two hundred families said to own much of the nation’s resources and the rest, have never looked so extreme. As well as providing an opportunity to showcase their achievements, the Popular Front must be hoping the exhibition will provide a focus around which the nation can unite.
Picasso hates commissions; this one comes loaded with particular challenges and responsibilities. He has never created a work at the scale required by the pavilion; even more significantly, he has never looked beyond his personal artistic universe to address a contemporary situation like the civil war in Spain. It is not surprising, therefore, that he initially tells the Republican delegation he is not at all sure he can produce a picture of the kind they need.
Art, for Picasso, arises from an inner urge to unburden himself of what he has absorbed from the world around him. While it inevitably reflects external events, it has a reality independent of them. ‘In the end [art] all depends on oneself,’ he tells Roland Penrose in 1932. ‘It is a sun with a thousand rays, inside one. The rest is nothing.’ By instinct and inclination he is also apolitical; some four years earlier he had stated that he would ‘never make art with the preconceived idea of serving the interests of the political, religious or military art of a country.’ The studio is his kingdom and he defends it against distractions – whatever their source – which will get in the way of his work.
Events of the previous year, however, have seen his barricades overrun. As well as the intensely distressing news emerging from Spain, his personal life has entered a period that future biographers will pore over with relish, part of the ‘horrible penumbra of gossip and hero-worship’ that dogs him for the rest of his life.1 He has separated from his wife of nineteen years, the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, and is engaged in a bitter fight with her about a settlement. Meanwhile he has fathered a child with his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, whom he has installed outside Paris in the house of his friend, the art dealer Ambroise Vollard, which he visits at weekends. He is also deeply involved in a relationship with the talented and volatile photographer Henriette Theodora Markovitch, better known by her artist name of Dora Maar. Maar is immersed in left-wing politics and the Parisian avant-garde and also knows Spain, having travelled there on her own while completing a street photography project in Picasso’s former hometown of Barcelona in 1934. Maar’s importance in the gestation and execution of Guernica is indisputable; as she is often cited as having pointed out, Picasso’s art is at any one time a function of the changes in alignment of five elements – his mistress, his house, his poet, his circle of admirers and his dog. Perhaps one more could be added to this list: his studio. Having abandoned Olga, he is on the lookout for somewhere large enough to accommodate a canvas required to command the position allocated to it in the pavilion – a space he has been to inspect as building work in the Trocadéro Gardens continues.*
The studio he finds – or that finds him – is in the former Hôtel de Savoie, at number 7 rue des Grands Augustins. From a practical point of view it is ideal, with some of the qualities of a fortress. It is reached by a spiral staircase, on which the light bulb is often broken. A brass nameplate indicates visitors have arrived at the Association des Huissiers [Bailiffs] de la Seine, a sign Picasso hopes will deter all but the most determined. On his own door he simply pins a piece of paper with the words ‘C’est ici’. On the top floor, reached by an internal staircase, is the attic known as Le Grenier (the granary), with large windows and views across the rooftops of the neighbourhood. Its cavernous interior can accommodate the 3.51 x 7.82-metre (11.5 x 25.6 ft) canvas prepared for the commission, although it must be tilted slightly to fit beneath the exposed beams of the ceiling. The studio’s undecorated walls give it the air of an artisanal workshop which Picasso finds sympathetic, the chill of its stone floors mitigated by an enormous, cast-iron heater he has installed. It is a space in which to experiment, hoard objects of interest, receive visitors and mount impromptu juxtapositions of works in progress for his own interest. In terms of position it is a few minutes walk from his favourite cafés and bars around the Boulevard Saint-Germain and from Dora Maar’s apartment.
But Picasso’s studio has more important attributes than these – imaginative, even spiritual ones that must have made its appearance in his life seem fated. In recent years it has served as a focal point for the avant-garde on the left bank. Theatre director Jean-Louis Barrault has used it for rehearsals and as a bohemian, communal live–work space, where, as he was to recall later, ‘often, when I returned at night I found people in my bed. I had founded a “company”’. After Barrault moved on, Le Grenier hosted meetings of the left-wing group Contre-Attaque, founded by Surrealist author Georges Bataille, whose writings are a strong influence on Picasso. Dora, previously Bataille’s lover, attended these meetings and is often credited with finding the studio. In fact, she is only one in a series of links connecting the artist and 7 rue des Grands Augustins. In the opening months of 1937, the building had been used as a storeroom by the contractors working on the Spanish Pavilion, and it is Juan Larrea who secures its use for Picasso.
In a more extraordinary coincidence, the building is the setting of a story by Honoré de Balzac called Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (‘The Unknown Masterpiece’), published in Études philosophiques in 1837, a century before Picasso takes possession. The story has many resonances for Picasso, as it does with other artists of his generation; he has even illustrated a new edition of it published by Ambroise Vollard in 1934. It features three painters: Nicolas Poussin, a young Bohemian from the provinces who has just arrived in the city and whose threadbare clothes and burning ambition cannot fail to remind Picasso of his younger self; Porbus, who is a successful court painter; and Frenhofer, a mysterious genius who believes he has discovered a new visual language that is able to transcend ‘art’ and conjure reality itself. When Poussin and Porbus eventually come face-to-face with the painting Frenhofer keeps locked in his studio, the culmination of his life’s work, they wonder if the painter has been pulling their leg; instead of a masterpiece they can see only one remarkably lifelike naked foot, emerging from beneath ‘colours daubed one on top of another and contained by a mass of strange lines forming a wall of paint.’ Picasso has faced critical onslaughts worse than this; he will do so again when Guernica enters the public realm.
The tensions that exist beyond the studio walls are echoed throughout Europe. Italy has rekindled its dreams of conquest in Africa by invading Abyssinia with half a million troops. The Nazi regime in Germany appears increasingly belligerent, demonstrating its contempt for the terms of the Treaty of Versailles by occupying the Rhineland in March 1936. But it is the civil war in Spain which is the ghost at the feast at the May Day celebrations in 1937. Workers from the Renault factory, veterans of several industrial actions over the past twelve months, gather to listen to a speech by Pascual Tomás, a delegate from the Spanish UGT union. He movingly describes the deaths of women and children during the Nationalist bombing of Madrid, as well as sharing breaking news of an attack on the undefended Basque town of Gernika that has happened a mere four days previously, on 26 April.
The commission for the pavilion is not the first public recognition Picasso has received from the Spanish Republic. Two months after the outbreak of the civil war, he is appointed director of the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid. The role is largely symbolic; despite repeated invitations, he never visits the museum, a strange omission given the fact that for him the Prado is holy ground: a temple containing the artists he most reveres, whose works he studied and made copies of as a student. Goya, Velázquez, Zurbarán, El Greco – these are his true family, their works the highlights of the mental museum he draws on throughout his career. On 16 November, during weeks of bombing raids on Madrid, the Prado is hit. The priceless collection is hurriedly wrapped and packed in the back of trucks by Republican soldiers and evacuated to Valencia, leaving Picasso, as he puts it to a friend, director of a ‘phantom museum’. Like the besieged government, the art collection has to keep moving as the war front advances. Two paintings by one of Picasso’s favourite artists, Francisco Goya – El 2 de mayo de 1808 en Madrid (The Second of May 1808) and El 3 de mayo de 1808 en Madrid (The Third of May 1808) – are damaged when a truck, passing through a village on its way to Girona, is involved in a crash, splitting the canvases and leaving fragments of The Second of May on the road. The fate of the paintings is a symptom of the upside-down world the war has created, in which artistic masterpieces are relegated to the status of everyday goods, subject to random bombardment – a blow to Picasso’s psyche as great, perhaps, as any other in the war.
While art is being rescued from destruction in Madrid, in Paris it is being put to other uses. The Front Populaire is keen to signal through the Exposition Internationale that France is a modern, technologically innovative state, open for international trade and investment despite the civil unrest of the previous twelve months. The Spanish Republic has rather different priorities in mind: above all, they need guns. For Luis Araquistáin, who combines the role of Spanish ambassador in Paris with acquiring weapons for the Republican forces, the exhibition is a unique opportunity to argue for an end to the Non-Intervention Treaty, signed by Britain, France and Germany, which places an embargo on the supply of arms to the Spanish Republic. Without a major military transfusion, loyalist forces have no chance of overcoming the combined might of Franco’s army and the troops and airpower being provided by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in contravention of the treaty. This, then, is the first and perhaps the greatest irony associated with a painting now recognized internationally as a symbol of peace; it was commissioned in the hope it would help end an arms embargo and allow the equipping of an army.
Alongside the Republic, forty-two other countries will be represented: the exhibition will be a city within a city, a microcosm of the world. The Spanish Pavilion’s contents will showcase the Republic’s achievements in education, industry, agriculture and the arts, while also highlighting the Spanish people’s heroic resistance to Franco’s Nationalist assault. Persuading the greatest living Spanish artist to participate will both boost visitor numbers and achieve a propaganda coup equivalent, Araquistáin believes, to a major military victory.
Ranged against the Republican government are the supporters of the strongly centralized and hierarchical ‘Old Spain’, determined to protect their wealth, property and ancient privileges; they include the owners of huge landed estates, industrialists, bankers, members of the fascist Falange party, military families, monarchists and high-ranking clerics in the Catholic Church. Three generals, José Sanjurjo, Emilio Mola and Francisco Franco, answer their call for a second reconquista to rid the nation of communism, atheism and troublesome Basque and Catalan nationalists. General Franco, who has openly called for the annulment of the election of 16 February, has been dispatched by the government to the Canary Islands in the hope such physical isolation will prevent him plotting against the Second Republic. His acquiescence to this banishment, along with his apparent reluctance to back an armed insurrection, earns him the mockery of some on the right – he even acquires the nickname ‘Miss Canary Islands 1936’ – but he is galvanized by the assassination on 13 July of the right-wing politician José Calvo Sotelo in Madrid by the Republican police force. In a sign of the shared interests of the ruling classes within and beyond Spain’s borders, it is a civilian plane flown by an English pilot from a British airport that collects him from Las Palmas and flies him to Tétouan, capital of the Spanish protectorate of Morocco.
The revolt begins with the mutiny of the army in Spanish Morocco on 17 July 1936; a day later troops attempt a coup on the mainland. In Spain itself, the insurrection falters. Nationalist forces take Seville, but working-class militia and loyal elements in the police and military, with support from the public, defeat uprisings in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona while loyalists hold on to other important cities including Málaga and Bilbao. The country is divided. General José Sanjurjo decides the time is right to return from exile in Estoril to take up the role of caudillo of Nationalist Spain. However, he is killed when the small biplane he has chosen to fly in crashes on 20 July, allegedly because of the weight of the large number of dress uniforms it is carrying that he feels are essential to his new role. The reprieve is only temporary; the Republic now faces an existential threat from across the straits of Gibraltar.
Once again, when Franco finds himself cut off by the sea, it is foreign aircraft that come to his aid. Benito Mussolini does not hold the Spanish in high regard, partly because he believes there is an Arab constituent to their racial makeup, but he is keen to end British naval supremacy in the Mediterranean and also urgently needs to recoup some of the expense of the Abyssinian war. The latter has left Italy with huge debts and the prospect of arms sales to the Nationalists overrides any misgivings he might have. Adolf Hitler hears about the attempted coup during his annual visit to the Wagner festival at Bayreuth. In classic Hitlerian manner, events are simplified to become the stuff of operatic drama. ‘Soviet wire-pullers’ are behind the crisis in Spain, he tells the crowd at a Nuremburg rally on 9 September, agents of an ‘international Jewish revolutionary headquarters in Moscow’; they must be resisted at all costs. Inspired by the third act of Wagner’s Siegfried, in which Brünnhilde is encircled by protective flames, he sets in motion Unternehmen Feuerzauber (Operation Magic Fire), the code name for the first mass airlift of troops and equipment in military history.
Fourteen thousand soldiers, including thousands of Moorish troops in chilaba robes, red fezzes and turbans, board German and Italian planes in Morocco and disembark in Seville, from where they march north. The campaign is immediately marked by atrocities of the most brutal kind, encouraged by Nationalist commanders: the shooting of pregnant women, the branding of women’s breasts with Francoist emblems, indiscriminate murder and widespread looting. Any measures, it seems, are justified; speaking to the Chicago Tribune on 29 July, Franco declares himself prepared to kill fifty per cent of Spain’s population in order to complete his mission. On the 14 August, the city of Badajoz falls to Nationalist forces led by General Yagüe. For the next few weeks his troops carry out the massacres known in Spanish as the limpieza (cleansing): the city’s bullring becomes a place of execution where thousands of alleged Republican sympathizers are held in bullpens with no access to lawyers or trials, awaiting their turn to be machine-gunned in front of cheering onlookers, before their bodies are soaked in petrol and burnt.
The French government’s reaction to these events has polarized public opinion so sharply that some compare it to the Dreyfus Affair that divided the nation at the turn of the twentieth century. Although the Spanish Republican administration would seem to be a natural ally for France’s Popular Front, since its election observers in Paris have been alarmed not only by reports of the mass killings of supporters of the coup during the Battle of Madrid, but also by those of church burnings, violent strikes and land seizures – exactly the kind of incidents they wish to avoid at home. Nevertheless, Léon Blum’s first instinct is to supply the Republic with military resources. His intentions leak to the press and reach the ears of the British government, France’s chief ally against Nazi expansionism. Stanley Baldwin, a strong advocate of non-interference in the Spanish Civil War, makes his displeasure clear. Under pressure both from abroad and from within his own administration, and fearing a fascist uprising at home, Blum decides in August 1936 that France should sign the Non-Intervention Agreement, along with twenty-six other European nations. This effectively prevents the Republic from acquiring arms, despite the fact that as a democratically elected national government it has every right to do so. Meanwhile Nazi Germany and fascist Italy continue to pour weapons and military support via Portugal to Franco’s rebel troops unchallenged. Throughout the war, Franco is able to access unlimited petrol from large American producers, including Standard Oil and Texaco, all of which is provided on credit. The Nationalist rebellion is bankrolled to the tune of many millions of dollars by the United States oil industry, while at the same time the United States government actively seeks to prevent Mexico from providing material support to the Spanish government.† Far from remaining neutral, Britain, America and France are effectively signing the Republic’s death warrant.
– II –
The Fête du Travail in 1937 takes place during a media blackout of a kind: it is the first day in the history of French newspapers when none has appeared on the newsstands. Instead, pamphlets and reviews circulate, among them Durango Ville Martyre (Durango Martyred City), an account of an attack by the rebel air force on a Basque town at the beginning of April that features the bombing of a church full of worshippers. A dramatic photograph in the pamphlet shows the body of the priest dressed in full vestments spreadeagled on the floor of the ruined church. Rebel forces under the command of General Mola have opened a new offensive in northern Spain, close to France’s border, with the aim of taking the heavily fortified city of Bilbao. Over the previous few days, news has broken, in conflicting and contradictory newspaper reports, of another massacre in the Basque country; the undefended town of Gernika has been reduced to smoking rubble. While some French newspapers correctly attribute the damage to bombing raids by the Condor Legion of the German Luftwaffe, with a small number of Italian planes in support, others uncritically publish Nationalist claims that this is a Republican lie and that the retreating ‘Reds’ have destroyed Gernika themselves, burning it to the ground to gain a propaganda victory.
These competing claims are the first salvo in a war of pamphlets, dispatches, investigative reports and newspaper articles unleashed by the event, of which Guernica will become a part. The visual arts have a vital role in winning hearts and minds among the poorly educated public in Spain, just as the religious imagery in the country’s churches and cathedrals has done for centuries. The Spanish Civil War is perhaps the first full-blown media conflict, fought as fiercely by the press officers on both sides as by regular troops, with film, posters, photography, photomontage and graphic design playing roles as important as bullets and shells.
Just as the Republican government is adapting the new visual language developed by Constructivist artists in Russia and the Bauhaus in Germany to make their case, Nationalist military commanders in Spain are keen to put new theories of warfare to the test. Among the most influential of these arise from the writings of the Italian military theorist Colonel Giulio Douhet, whose book Il domino dell’aria (The Command of the Air) was first published in 1921. In it Douhet argues the air force will play a critical role in wars of the future, its task to ‘inflict attacks on the enemy of a terrifying nature to which he can in no way react’. Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, commander of the German Condor Legion, is one of a new breed of military leaders eager to try out Douhet’s theories in a European theatre of war. ‘Fear,’ he writes in his diary, ‘which cannot be stimulated in peaceful training of troops, is very important, because it affects morale. Morale is more important in winning battles than weapons. Continuously repeated, concentrated air attacks have the most effect on the morale of the enemy.’ For him, the Condor Legion is as much a psychological as a physical weapon, rather like Franco’s Moorish shock troops, whose presence in Spain trigger deep, atavistic fears dating back to the Islamic conquest of the Iberian peninsula centuries before. Ettore Bastico, the commander of Italian troops in the north of Spain, although an early critic of Douhet’s theories about the supremacy of aerial power in the 1920s, has subsequently masterminded bombing campaigns in Abyssinia using mustard gas on civilians to devastating effect, earning himself the nickname among his troops of ‘Bombastico’.
Like many of his generation, Picasso is both fascinated and terrified by aerial warfare. ‘That death could fall from heaven on so many, right in the middle of rushed life has always had a great meaning for me’, he will tell an interviewer as an old man, some forty years later.2 The shift in point of view and velocity provided by aeroplanes has been central to the work of Futurist artists in Italy since early in the century, fracturing vision in a way that is as radical as that effected by his own invention of Cubism. Flight is deeply embedded in the iconography of modernism, yet it is also associated with something much darker. His friend, the writer André Malraux, served with the Republican forces in 1936. In L’Espoir (Man’s Hope), the novel he based on his experiences, he describes the birth of a new religion in Spain: the religion of fear, felt by a people dwelling ‘under the menace of the sky’. Picasso tasted something of that fear during a Zeppelin air raid on Paris in March 1915, when he spent much of the night sitting under a table with Gertrude Stein, from which position he was able to observe Alice B. Toklas’s knees knocking together.
The air raids of the current war are far more brutal and intense, happening in a place from which he is exiled but where his family still lives, at the mercy of the menace Malraux describes. One by one, locations in Spain that have formed him, and that he still carries with him in his head, are being pounded into dust. He is particularly affected by the reports of the bombing of Madrid written by French journalist Louis Delaprée, the correspondent in Spain for the mass-circulation newspaper Paris-Soir.putain royaleMadrid sous les bombesMarianne