“Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It’s an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.”
-Pablo Picasso
80 years ago, on May 1st, 1937, Pablo Picasso began work on a mural on canvas, an 11 foot by almost 26 foot abstract depiction of the recent fire-bombing of Guernica, a town in the Basque region of Spain. The painting, which takes the name of the town, has come to be seen as perhaps the greatest depiction of the horror of war ever painted.
A departure from the artist‘s usual colorful style, Guernica is chilling in its starkness. In black, blue and white, it depicts the dawn of the era that we are still living in; an era of bombs falling from the sky and missiles launched from the sea.
The figures in the painting: a mother wailing over the body her dead child; a horse, its body distorted and its head thrown back in a full throated scream of terror; a man, seemingly on fire, throwing his arms up to the heavens; a dead soldier, still holding his broken sword, tell this all too real story better than the photographic record that shocked the world in the wake of the bombing.
In the background, a bull, heedless of the destruction, charges onto the scene, representing, in the artist’s words, “brutality and darkness”. Far from defeated, this force still rages throughout the world, usually in places far from the cameras that seem to be there to record every triviality of our contemporary lives.
The examples of daily Guernicas are unending and are not limited to the actions of one nation.
Somehow, out of sight, our Western allies in the Middle East, led by the despotic monarchies Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, have been visiting their own daily Guernicas on the people of Yemen, some of the poorest in the world. They supplement their bombing with a blockade, leaving as many as 2 million children at risk of starvation.
Russia, invited by the Syrian government, has killed hundreds, if not thousands, of people in that country’s barbaric proxy war. Contrary to the exhortations of Western pundits the dead don’t care about the intentions of those who incinerate them, they only know the agony that Picasso depicted decades ago.
Meanwhile, the last US president ran out of bombs to drop on the Syria and its neighbor, Iraq.
Not to be outdone, the newly installed US President dropped the so-called Mother of All Bombs (MOAB), said to be the largest non-nuclear weapon in the US arsenal, in Afghanistan, close to that country’s border with Pakistan. We were told that it was directed at the country’s tiny, newly established ISIS affiliate. The people living in the area weren’t warned of the MOAB’s arrival, an explosion of such force that it causes deafness in anyone within two miles of its blast radius.
There’s a certain irony in the fact that arguably the most famous work by an artist famed for his titanic ego is also his most humanistic and least personal. Still, no matter how powerful the statement made by an individual work of art, recent history shows that against the tide of propaganda we are fed each day, in which missiles and other killing machines are called ‘beautiful’ by empty headed news readers, the bombs will keep falling and the Guernicas will keep piling up.
Picasso’s great painting was more prophecy than anything else, a window into a future that’s still with us today.
-Derek Royden