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| Photo sourced here (Museo Reina Sofía) |
Picasso's violent study of the horror of war is instantly recognisable. As a nerdy former student of Spanish history, it's something I go back to again and again. All of my visitors are marched straight to the museum to see it, willing or not.
On an unexpected Friday afternoon off work, I signed up for the museum's weekly tour, Historia de un icono ("History of an Icon"), an intimate, guided-tour style discussion of how and why Guernica became such a universally-appropriated symbol.
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| Photo sourced here (Museo Reina Sofía) |
Rather than speculating on the meaning of the individual elements of the painting itself (there are several conflicting interpretations), the talk was more about what happened after it was first displayed, and how it came to represent so much more than may have first been intended.
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| On display at the Fogg Museum, Harvard, in 1941 Photo sourced here (Harvard Art Museums Archives) |
After being commissioned by the Spanish Republic for Spain's pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, the painting toured Europe, before being sent to the US to raise awareness and money for Spanish refugees. It stayed there until the end of the Franco regime and Spain's transition to a democratic monarchy.
During the Vietnam War, the room housing the painting was the site of several anti-war protests, and copies of the painting were waved aloft in Spain's demonstrations against the war in Iraq in 2003. A tapestry copy was on display at the United Nations until 2009, acting as a inescapable, visible conscience. Controversially, the copy was covered up when Colin Powell gave a press conference advocating US intervention in Iraq in 2003.
The discussion ended with the idea that, although the painting had been appropriated for various political purposes over the years, its message, in the end, is simple and universal.
If you're coming out to Madrid to visit me, I'm afraid you won't have a choice. You'll be visiting Guernica too.
