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Gaza and Guernica: Art and Atrocity
The Success and Failure of ‘Guernica’ (1937) by Pablo Picasso
“Whereas representation attempts
to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum. Such would be the successive phases of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever;
it is its own pure simulacrum.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
Pablo Picasso painted Guernica at his home in Paris in response to the 26 April 1937 bombing of Guernica, a Basque Country town in northern Spain that was bombed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy at the request of the Spanish Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939).
This painting helped bring worldwide attention to the fight in Spain, which we now know was only a precursor to a full-on World War but did not stop and has not stopped, atrocity after atrocity. But Guernica is prophetic in its depiction of the further violence, inhuman slaughter, and even genocide that was to come.
Guernica connects Spain directly with its portrayal of dismembered pieces of the human body and the bull on the very left of the painting. The head of a bull is placed above a screaming, terrified woman who holds her dead baby in her lap. This is like a real human pieta without the consolation of the resurrection. Other scenes correlate to the aerial bombing of the city as we vividly witness a person trapped in a burning building with flames all around, to the far right. Sound familiar?
Picasso creates a painting both highly symbolic and viscerally damning and disturbing. This is the human cost paid by the innocent civilians, NOT the soldiers or politicians who have decided to fight and kill. Modern warfare is now urban warfare and Picasso was warning humanity in 1937 that warfare had changed.
Unarguably one of the greatest paintings ever made in the History of Art and the History of Human Culture and, regretably, one made of and about the utter brutality of war.
Once seen, it is unforgettable, as it should be, given its real subject matter, not the…
