Gernika, 1937: The Market Day Massacre

Guernica was still a long way from being finished. It was like a cartoon just laid in black and grey, and he could have coloured it as he coloured the sketches. Anyway, you know the woman who comes running out of the little cabin on the right with one hand held in front of her? Well, Picasso told us that there was something missing there, and he went and fetched a roll of [toilet] paper and stuck it in the woman’s hand, as much to say that she’d been caught in the bathroom when the bombs came.
The artist then announced to his guests: “There, that leaves no doubt about the commonest and most primitive effect of fear.” Moore commented, “That was just like him, of course—to be tremendously moved about Spain and yet turn it aside with a joke.”
Dora photographed every major change in Guernica’s astonishingly rapid development. Her photographs of the successive states of the painting are not dated, but their order is self-evident. Picasso completed the great canvas on June 4. It had taken him thirty-five days. Dora was also in charge of the flow of visitors whom the artist was obliged to receive. Although Picasso had always discouraged strangers from watching him at work, he felt that the painting needed to be publicized for the sake of the antifascist cause. He was ready to welcome into his studio fellow artists and influential politicians, as well as other members of the European avant-garde. Guernica established Picasso as the world’s most celebrated modern artist, as beloved by the young as he was loathed by fascists, right-wing bigots, and academic hacks.
In later years Dora dismissed most of what had been written about Guernica. After breaking with Picasso, she would become a fervent born-again Catholic. She disliked discussing her feelings, except when it came to her all-important role as photographer. It was Dora’s masochistic nature that Picasso had evoked in his most harrowing studies for Guernica, and above all in the Weeping Woman series begun on May 24, before the great painting was finished.
As he later stated, Picasso could never have portrayed Dora laughing: “For me she’s the weeping woman. For years I’ve painted her in tortured forms, not through sadism, and not with pleasure, either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me. It was a deep reality, not a superficial one.” Smeared lipstick, smudged eye makeup, tears seemingly wired to the eyes, and the soaked handkerchief clutched in her spiky finger-nailed hands capture her extreme states of agony, mental as well as physical. The Weeping Woman images emerged from Guernica. They too gave a personal form to the horrors of the Spanish civil war. In December 1937, Picasso declared: “Artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to a conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilization are at stake.”

Despite Picasso’s fame, the French press virtually ignored Guernica. Even the Communist newspaper L’Humanité’s star contributor Louis Aragon failed to mention it. Only the art publisher Christian Zervos celebrated the painting in an impeccably illustrated double issue of his avant-garde magazine Cahiers d’Art. It reproduced many of the preliminary sketches and Dora’s photographs with commentaries by Michel Leiris and the Spanish poet and playwright José Bergamín, as well as a poem by Paul Éluard, “La victoire de Guernica.”

When Guernica went on display at the Exposition Internationale, the organizers at the Spanish pavilion questioned its merits. Some disapproved of its modernist style and clamored for its removal. As a result, Max Aub, cultural attaché to the Spanish embassy in Paris and a fervent backer of Picasso, felt compelled to defend Guernica:
This art may be accused of being too abstract or difficult for a pavilion like ours that wishes to be above all and before everything else a popular expression. But I am certain that with a little will, everyone will perceive the rage, the desperation, and the terrible protest that this canvas signifies.
Other Spanish officials did indeed feel that Guernica was too avant-garde for visitors to appreciate, and tried to replace it with another work commissioned for the pavilion: Horacio Ferrer de Morgado’s corny Madrid 1937 (Black Aeroplanes). This composition exploited some of the same motifs used by Picasso—air-raid victims and gutted buildings—but Morgado’s kitschy representationalism was more to the taste of the public than Picasso’s bleak monochrome modernism. The raised fists and red-scarved figures depicted by Morgado also had far more appeal to Spanish Communists. Prominently displayed, Black Aeroplanes was described to Republican leaders as “the greatest popular success” of the pavilion. Whereas Guernica, according to Le Corbusier, “saw only the backs of visitors, for they were repelled by it.”
Some Spanish modernists took against Guernica. The movie director Luis Buñuel later confessed:
I can’t stand Guernica, which I nevertheless helped to hang. Everything about it makes me uncomfortable—the grandiloquent technique as well as the way it politicizes art. Both Alberti and Bergamin share my aversion. Indeed all three of us would be delighted to blow up the painting.
Even more galling was the Basque government’s reaction. Picasso had generously offered Guernica to the Basque people but, to his fury, their president disdainfully refused. Picasso felt the Basques should be grateful to him for memorializing their ancient capital. Instead, the Basque artist Ucelay, who loathed the painting, believed the commission should have gone to a fellow Basque, and denounced Guernica:
As a work of art it’s one of the poorest things ever produced in the world. It has no sense of composition, or for that matter anything…. It’s just seven by three meters of pornography, shitting on Gernika, on Euskadi [Basque country], on everything.
As was to be expected, the Nazis reacted to Guernica with contempt. The German guide to the World’s Fair called the painting a “hodgepodge of body parts that any four-year-old could have painted.” Ironically, the opening of the Spanish pavilion in Paris roughly coincided with the opening of the “Entartete Kunst” (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich.
On November 1, Paris’s Exposition Internationale closed and Guernica was returned to Picasso. Eight days later, he attended the annual ceremony at the Père-Lachaise cemetery in honor of Guillaume Apollinaire (who died in 1918), who had been the closest and most influential of his poet friends. Up till then, Picasso’s magnificent model for a monument in honor of the poet had failed to find favor with Apollinaire’s widow and others who wanted a traditional memorial. Admirers from all over Europe attended the ceremony. Larrea, the Spanish director of information, recorded a dramatic confrontation between Picasso and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of Futurism and “Fascist Italy’s bigwig intellectual, rather a curiosity to those hanging around him.”
Not far away, in another group of more modest appearance, stood Picasso. All of a sudden, full of himself and arrogant, the bearer of Fascist infamy approached the Spanish painter, his hands outstretched and saying for everyone to hear: “I assume that in front of Apollinaire’s tomb you won’t see any inconvenience in shaking my hand.” To which Picasso replied, “You seem to forget that we’re at war.”
After Guernica was returned to him, Picasso arranged for it to tour Scandinavia and England. It arrived in London on September 30, 1938, and was exhibited at the New Burlington Galleries where I, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, was overwhelmed by it. A meeting with Picasso thirteen years later developed into friendship, which would inspire a biography.