Picasso's War: The Extraordinary Story of an Artist, an Atrocity and a Painting that Changed the World
By Russell Martin
Scribner, 2003
274 pages, $39.95 (hb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
"If cities are destroyed by flames, if women and children are victims of suffocating gases, if the population in open cities far from the front perish due to bombs dropped from planes, it will be impossible for the enemy to continue the war". This was German Nazi military strategist MK Dertzen's theory.
Pilots from the Luftwaffe's Condor Legion tested the theory on April 26, 1937. Fifty bombers dropped 5800 high explosive and incendiary bombs, during the busiest hours of market day, on the town of Guernica in the Basque country. Messerschmitt fighters strafed civilians fleeing the inferno. It was an experiment in terror.
More than 75% of Guernica was levelled, one third of its population of 7000 was killed or maimed. "Simply terrific" was the assessment of the commander of the German bomber fleet, Lieutenant-Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen (cousin of Manfred, the "Red Baron" of World War I).
Pablo Picasso, the expatriate Spanish painter living in Paris, had a different view: "In the picture I am now working on and that I will call 'Guernica' ... I clearly express my loathing for the military caste that has plunged Spain into a sea of suffering and death."
As Russell Martin elaborates in Picasso's War, his book about Guernica — the war crime and the painting — Picasso was angered by Franco's fascist revolt against the left-wing coalition People's Front government of the Spanish Republic, barely five months after it was elected in February 1936. Uniting army officers, the Catholic Church, monarchists, the aristocracy and big business in a reactionary drive to restore the unfettered power to Spain's capitalist class, Franco had launched a vicious civil war.
German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and Italy's fascist thug Benito Mussolini came to the aid of Franco. The "democracies" of Europe and the US abandoned republican Spain, adhering to a non-intervention pact signed with Germany and Italy. In response, courageous volunteer anti-fascist fighters from around the world, organised in the International Brigades, could do little more than slow Franco's advance. By April 1937, the fascists were 20 kilometres from the strategic port city of Bilbao, capital of the newly autonomous Basque country.
Stalled by determined resistance, Franco and his high command, with their German and Italian partners, decided to attempt to break the will of the Basque people. Guernica was small enough to make its destruction feasible in the three hours of bombing it took to level the town, yet populous enough to awe other Basque opponents into submission. Guernica had no strategic military value — civilians were the sole target.
After the bombers had added another several thousand to the 300,000 already killed in Franco's war, Picasso made a political commitment. Four months earlier, a delegation from the People's Front government had commissioned Picasso to paint a mural for the Spanish pavilion in the World Expo to be held in Paris. Picasso had been toying with the themes and styles of surrealism and eroticism for the mural. The crime at Guernica jolted the 56-year-old painter in a different direction.
In two weeks of intense work, on a canvas twice his height, "Guernica" took shape in basic black, white and grey. Its abstract yet painfully real images captured the violence and terror, suffering and distress of war. "Guernica" was not a poster (the clenched fists of opposition to fascism, initially sketched by Picasso, were later scrapped) but a universal symbol of the protest against war.
Two weeks after Guernica was destroyed, "Guernica" was unveiled at the World Expo. Picasso wanted to disturb and shock, and his chaotic jumble of angular "cubist" figures did exactly that.
Hitler immediately denounced it, and all modern art, as "degenerate, Bolshevik and Jewish". The German guidebook to the Expo contemptuously compared "Guernica" to the doodlings of a four-year-old.
Some from the left were disappointed — Anthony Blunt, the English art historian dismissed "Guernica" as lacking "socio-political grandeur". Others were stopped in their tracks, seized by the painting's emotional power. In a short time, its bold rawness and artistic depth won over its critics (apart from political conservatives who continued to pepper it with adjectives like "revolting", "dangerous" and "grotesque").
Picasso agreed to send "Guernica" overseas to raise money for the Spanish resistance and for republican refugees. In London's (poor) East End, entry to a showing was by donation of a pair of boots for the republican army. Thousands of boots were piled at the foot of the painting.
By 1939, "Guernica" was in safe exile in New York's Museum of Modern Art. Franco had defeated the republicans; the Luftwaffe applied the lessons of its dress rehearsal in Guernica to the rest of Europe. Only Picasso's international celebrity kept him safe in occupied France — when a German army officer pointed to a sketch of "Guernica" in Picasso's Paris studio and asked him, "Did you do that?", Picasso replied: "No, you did."
After the war, Picasso joined the French Communist Party because of its role in the anti-Nazi resistance and because of the military aid that the Soviet Union had given the Spanish republic during the civil war. The response of anti-communist students was to raid a Picasso exhibition in Paris.
"Guernica" aroused political passions for decades in Franco-ruled Spain. Printers who produced the small replicas that hung in hundreds of thousands of Spanish homes were jailed or driven out of business.
Franco scrambled to rewrite history. Spaniards were told that Guernica had been burned to the ground by retreating Basque soldiers and Communists ("Basco-Soviets").
Overseas audiences, who were well aware that fascist bombing, not "Red arson", had destroyed the town, were fed the lie that the bombing was the responsibility of the German Nazis alone and not Franco (who was by then busy cosying up to the governments of the victorious Allies). Franco even went as far as to petition Picasso and Museum of Modern Art to return "Guernica" to Spain. Both said no.
Picasso also had to say no to a request by a group of radical anti-war artists in the US in 1970, who asked the artist to have "Guernica" removed from America while it was committing war atrocities in Vietnam. Picasso argued that having the painting in the US served the anti-war cause: "By means of 'Guernica', I have the pleasure of making a political statement in the middle of New York City every day."
It wasn't until Franco's death in 1975, two years after Picasso's death, that "Guernica" was able to return to Spain. Legal custody battles between the Museum of Modern Art and Picasso's heirs delayed the painting's homecoming. However, an attempted Francoist coup in 1981 convinced all parties that its return (behind bullet-proof glass) could play a part, as a focus for the anti-Franco movement, in strengthening Spain's newly won political liberalisation.
Queues stretched for blocks in Madrid to pay homage to the painting, and its commemoration of the first town to have been demolished by aerial bombardment — opening a new era of terror from the skies.
Like his famous line drawing of a dove for a poster for the Second World Peace Conference in 1950, "Guernica" remains a treasured anti-war symbol. "I stand for life against death", said Picasso in 1948. "I stand for peace against war."
Despite Martin's strategic silence on some sources of terror from the skies, Picasso's War shows why we should stand with Picasso. The 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York are rightly condemned, but in Martin's rush to celebrate "democracies" like the US, there is scant acknowledgment of how capitalist governments in the US, Britain and Australia repeatedly emulate, in Iraq and elsewhere, the Franco/Nazi atrocity in Guernica.
Picasso's "Guernica" is a rebuke to the state terrorists in Washington, London, Canberra and Tel Aviv, as much as it is to the fascist butchers who wiped the town called Guernica off the map.
From Green Left Weekly, September 17, 2003.
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