Guernica: Painting the End of the World

By James Attlee

A brilliant, concise account of the painting often described as the most important work of art produced in the twentieth century, as part of the stunning Landmark Library series.

Pablo Picasso had already accepted a commission to create a work for the Spanish Republican Pavilion in 1937 when news arrived of the bombing 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 the painting sprang and the meanings it accrued during its travels across Europe and the Americas, as well as its influence on artists both living and dead. Finally, he argues for its continuing importance as a warning of what happens when the forces of darkness go unchallenged.

Praise for Guernica:

'Helps you appreciate Guernica's daring and resonance' Literary Review

'An impressive overview of the painting's conception and execution, and its subsequent life as an exhibit and a symbol... Attlee's book succeeds in showing how influential Guernica has been' Sunday Times

'Attlee digs up rich examples of the debate and devotion that invariably attended the painting... Guernica literature abounds; but this book is a worthwhile addition' Spectator

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Oct 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781786691439

James Attlee

James Attlee worked in art publishing for 25 years and then as editor-at-large for Chicago University Press. He is the author of the acclaimed Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey; Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight; and Station to Station.

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GUERNICA

James Attlee

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Table of Contents

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About Guernica

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

Contents

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

img2.jpg

DORA MARR, Picasso working on Guernica in his studio in the rue des Grands Augustins, 1937

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

INTRODUCTION

A Mystery

in Plain Sight

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.

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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.

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PICASSO, Guernica, 1937

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

1

The Disintegration

of the World

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.

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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