Gernika, 1937: The Market Day Massacre

In Gernika, 1937: The Market Day Massacre, the historian Xabier Irujo reveals the hitherto unknown fact that the destruction of the historic Basque town of Guernica was planned by Nazi minister Hermann Göring as a gift for Hitler’s birthday, April 20. Guernica, the parliamentary seat of Biscay province, had not as yet been dragged into the Spanish civil war and was without defenses. Logistical problems delayed Göring’s master plan. As a result, Hitler’s birthday treat had to be postponed until April 26.
Besides celebrating the Führer’s birthday, the attack on Guernica served as a tactical military and aeronautical experiment to test the Luftwaffe’s ability to annihilate an entire city and crush the morale of its people. The Condor Legion’s chief of staff, Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, painstakingly devised the operation to maximize human casualties, and above all deaths. A brief initial bombing at 4:30 PM drove much of the population into air-raid shelters. When Guernica’s citizens emerged from these shelters to rescue the wounded, a second, longer wave of bombing began, trapping them in the town center from which there was no escape. Low-flying planes strafed the streets with machine-gun fire. Those who had managed to survive were incinerated by the flames or asphyxiated by the lack of oxygen. Three hours of coordinated air strikes leveled the city and killed over 1,500 civilians. In his war diary, Richthofen described the operation as “absolutely fabulous!…a complete technical success.” The Führer was so thrilled that, two years later, he ordered Richthofen to employ the same bombing techniques, on an infinitely greater scale, to lay waste to Warsaw, thereby setting off World War II.
The morning after the bombing, Radio Bilbao broadcast a statement by the Basque president José Antonio Aguirre breaking the news to the world that Guernica had been annihilated by the Luftwaffe. The Basque and Spanish communities in Paris went into immediate action. When the poet Juan Larrea, the director of information at the Spanish embassy, heard the news from the Basque artist José Maria Ucelay outside the Champs-Elysées metro station, he jumped into a cab and drove to the Café de Flore where Picasso hung out.
Four months earlier, the artist had been commissioned to paint a mural for the Spanish Republican pavilion at the upcoming Paris World’s Fair (L’Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne). As the most ardent promoter of Spain’s pavilion, Larrea, who had been instrumental in having Picasso appointed director of the Prado, realized that the obliteration of Guernica would provide the artist with the very subject he had been seeking. When Picasso claimed to have no idea what a bombed town looked like, Larrea replied, “like a bull in a china shop, run amok.”

Picasso had not as yet chosen a subject for his World’s Fair commission. As often before, he had envisioned his studio—a favorite setting and the vortex of the world—in a series of sketchy designs. Within a week of the attack on Guernica, he abandoned this theme and began working along the lines suggested by Larrea. By May 9, he had come up with a preliminary composition in a pencil drawing. It included most of the elements he had been playing around with but they did not as yet cohere into a viable concept. By May 11, the drawing would reemerge in full scale on the enormous canvas that would be the dominant feature of the Spanish pavilion.

Picasso’s Surrealist friends André Breton and Paul Éluard had been pressuring him for years to join the Communist Party, though both had been expelled from the Party four years before. The raised arm with a clenched fist seen in the first sketch of Guernica suggests that they were making headway. The Communist salute was also used in Spain during the civil war as a gesture of antifascist solidarity, but Picasso ultimately decided not to use it. He did not want his work to have an overly political, let alone Soviet tinge, and the fist soon disappeared from the composition. Insofar as he had any political views, Picasso was a passionate pacifist.

The artist would not become a Communist until October 1944 at the end of World War II. So impressed was he by de Gaulle’s triumphant return to Paris that he agreed to join the Gaullists, but after a dinner with some of them, he told his mistress Dora Maar, “c’est une bande de cons,” and immediately joined the Communist Party.

Picasso dealt with the subject of Guernica by personalizing it. Like most of his greatest works, it is pervaded with his own problems and preoccupations. Without understanding the artist’s votive obsession, scholars have not yet gotten around to seeing the image of his long-dead sister Conchita in the picture and the significance of Picasso’s broken vow he had made when she was ill.
In an article published in these pages, I described how Picasso, at the age of fourteen, had vowed to God that he would never paint again if Conchita, stricken with diptheria, survived.
He did paint again and she died. Henceforth, many of the women in Picasso’s life would be sacrificed for his art.
Conchita makes an appearance in the first sketches for Guernica and would remain through all the subsequent variations. Hitherto, nobody has identified her, let alone explained her votive presence. Conchita no longer figures as a child, as she does in Minotauromachie, but has been transformed into an adult who thrusts out the sacred lamp clutched in her hand in order to have it lit by the Mithraic sun. This gesture was echoed in one of the five sculptures that appeared with Guernica at the Spanish pavilion: Picasso’s over-life-size 1933 Woman with a Lamp, which he had recast for the World’s Fair. So meaningful was this sculpture to Picasso that he would later arrange for a bronze cast to preside over his grave at his country residence, the Château de Vauvenargues.

Years later, in 1992, I interviewed my old friend Dora Maar, a talented photographer, who had witnessed and documented the making of Guernica. Picasso had told her: “I know I am going to have terrible problems with this painting, but I am determined to do it—we have to arm for the war to come.” Dora confirmed that the seemingly ironical addition of a light bulb inside the Mithraic sun in Guernica was a reference to her electrical equipment that littered Picasso’s studio on the rue des Grands Augustins in Paris.

Dora’s expertise would prove immensely useful; she was able to make the first photographic record of the creation of a modern artwork from start to finish. It also helped Picasso to eschew color and give the work the black-and-white immediacy of a photograph. He did not want a shiny surface, so he asked the manufacturers of Ripolin paint whether they could develop an ultra-matte house paint. They succeeded and Guernica would be the first time it was used.
Besides making a photographic record of Guernica’s development, Dora took over when publicity people insisted on an official press photograph of the canvas. Parts were unfinished. Picasso was busy, so he had Dora do the final touches—the short vertical brushstrokes that differentiate the horse’s body and legs. The artist had told her that the dying horse in Guernica stands for pain and death—“la douleur et la mort”—and is also an allusion to the horses of the Apocalypse. The horseshoe next to the head of the dismembered soldier (bottom left) refers to the sacred crescent of Islam and Picasso’s fear of Franco’s Moroccan troops. He inveighed against the prospect of yet another Moorish occupation of Spain.
Although Dora claimed that the bull represents the people of Spain, the fact that it is based on magnificent drawings of Picasso in the role of a bearded minotaur suggests that it had a more personal significance. In the painting he portrays himself as a minotaur who coolly turns away from the carnage, seemingly unfazed by the mother figure holding a dead baby in her arms as she screams up at him. Dora referred to the table where there is a bird as a sacrificial altar. The bull and the bird are sacrificial victims.
Dora also told me that she had herself inspired the woman on fire (top right) as well as the long-legged woman in the foreground. In his memoir, the British sculptor Henry Moore describes how a group consisting of Paul Éluard, André Breton, Roland Penrose, Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst, and himself had lunched together and called on Picasso to see what new work he had been doing: