picasso's guernica

On April 26th 1937, a massive air raid by the German Luftwaffe on the Basque town of Guernica in Northern Spain shocked the world. Hundreds of civilians were killed in the raid which became a major incident of the Spanish Civil War.

The bombing prompted Picasso to begin painting his greatest masterpiece...

Guernica

Guernica is a painting by Pablo Picasso, depicting the Nazi German bombing of Guernica, Spain, by twenty-four bombers, on April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, in which a number of people variously estimated between 250 and 1,600 were killed and many more were injured.

A huge mural had already been commissioned from Picasso by the Spanish Republican government to decorate the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition (the 1937 World's Fair in Paris). Picasso's first sketches were done on May 1st, a week after the bombing. Picasso said as he worked on the mural:

“The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. How could anybody think for a moment that I could be in agreement with reaction and death? ... In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.”

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