‘Guernica’ and Ukraine: Picasso’s disasters of war

The current bombing of cities and towns in Ukraine recalls the savage attacks on civilians in the Spanish Civil War. In Picasso’s violent, powerful masterpiece, Guernica, a great artist responded to the cruel massacre of the innocents. His portrayal of the bombing of a small town, with no defences and no military importance, evokes the same shock and horror as the Russian bombs and atrocities committed against defenceless citizens during their invasion of Ukraine.

On April 27, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, The Times reported the attack on Guernica, a town near Bilbao in northern Spain: “Guernica, the most ancient town of the Basques and the centre of their cultural tradition, was completely destroyed yesterday afternoon by insurgent air raiders. The bombardment of the open town far behind the battle lines occupied precisely three hours and a quarter, during which a powerful fleet of German aeroplanes did not cease unloading on the town bombs and incendiary projectiles. The whole of Guernica was soon in flames.” At the request of the Spanish fascists, 43 German planes killed 1,600 people, mostly women and children (the men were away at war), and destroyed 70% of the town.

Picasso explained the humane principles that inspired his painting: “I have always believed and still believe that artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to a conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilisation are at stake. . . . I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.” Picasso completed the huge mural, 25 by 11 feet, in one month of furious work. It was first exhibited in the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris World’s Fair, toured throughout Europe to raise money for the Republican cause and was placed on extended loan in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is now in the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.

This complex picture should be read, like a book, from left to right. The scene is painted entirely in black, white and grey, and the victims are confined indoors and in darkness. There are six human figures with thick, twisted fingers and wide-open mouths, three of them screaming. Picasso was passionate about bullfighting and that spectacle dominates the painting. He said, “the bull is brutality and darkness, the horse represents the people.” In the center, facing the bull as if controlled by a picador in a corrida, the horse with snout-nose, gravestone teeth, bladelike tongue, jagged mane and flowing tail screams in agony. Padded but not protected, the horse is pierced by a matador’s sword and gored by a bull’s horn. With its head twisted back, the horse tramples the matador lying on the ground.

On the upper left, the triumphant bull stands immobile with bladelike ears, white head and flaming white tail. Below the bull’s black body, a weeping woman with a bare drooping breast holds her dead baby and stretches her long neck that almost touches the chin of the massive bull. The bull is also dramatically opposed to the woman on the upper right. With streaming hair and large ghost-like white head, modelled on Picasso’s lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, she thrusts through a narrow window, extends her long arm and flows into the room. She holds a lighted oil lamp behind the horse’s head and beneath a glowing electric-bulb sun, which has the shape of an eye and sharp eyelashes that radiate like flames. Below her, a bare-breasted, head-thrusting woman crouches defensively with one leg extended behind her. She rushes away from the fire that consumes the woman on the upper right, and strains toward the two high lights.

On centre foreground a gaping-mouthed matador, lying on his back with outstretched severed arms, is trampled by the speared and mortally wounded horse. Reversing their traditional roles, he is defeated by the bull and holds a broken sword. On the far right, matching the woman with the baby, another woman tilts her head backwards, hopelessly raises her arms and spreads her fingers. Trapped in a house collapsing in flames that surge above and below her, she cannot escape through the small open window. The two distant lights contrast with the glow of the flaming building.

In Picasso’s portrayal of defenceless civilians destroyed by overwhelming force, the bull, horse and matador symbolise the bullfight. The baby and the matador are dead; the horse will die; the grieving mother, the woman in flames and the crouching woman are doomed. As in Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War, the cruelly tormented victims cry out for help that cannot come. The white, round-faced woman, carrying the oil lamp, offers the only weak ray of hope. She illuminates the horrors, but cannot save the victims. As W. H. Auden wrote in “Spain”: “History to the defeated / May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.”

The Spanish Republicans or Loyalists lost the Civil War, as Ukraine could lose this war. Spain was oppressed by the fascist or falangist regime from 1939 until Francisco Franco died in 1975. Picasso called his monumental work, seen from the victims’ viewpoint, “an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.” It remains a noble portrayal of victory in defeat, a humane protest against the overwhelming forces of war and death. But his warning has once again been ignored, as Hitler returns in the guise of Putin to destroy the civilised values of Europe.

Jeffrey Meyers has recently published Robert Lowell in Love and Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy

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