Last week we talked a little about Picasso’s famous painting Guernica, that portrays in his distinctive cubist forms the destruction of the Basque city of Guernica in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. After the Paris International Exposition in which it was initially displayed, from January to April 1938 the painting toured around Europe to places like Oslo, Copenhagen, and Stockholm, raising money for Spanish relief efforts, and, as we would say, awareness of the brutal campaign against the Spanish republic.If you like historical coincidences with ominous overtones, here’s one for you:The painting arrived for display in London the day the British Prime Minister signed the Munich Agreement with Adolph Hitler.
In 1960, looking back, a Dutch writer, curator, and graphic designer who had seen the painting at the Paris exhibition wrote that “Hundreds of thousands of exhibition-goers wandered by, looking on it as a wall decoration, just as Europe wandered by the human drama of the Spanish Civil War—as if it were a matter concerning only the inhabitants of the peninsula. They disregarded the warning, did not understand that democracy on the whole continent was at stake.”An even more terrible catastrophe was the result of such close-mindedness.That writer went on to become part of the Dutch resistance against the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
By May 1939 the Spanish Civil War was over and the painting was in New York.For his part, Picasso was determined that the painting would never go to Spain until a republic was restored.“The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom,” he said.“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 1939 the painting wound up in the custody of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.It continued to travel almost continually through the United States during WWII however and then after the war to much of the world—but not to Spain.
After Franco died in 1975 Spain became a constitutional monarchy.But by then the Museum of Modern Art really didn’t want to part with the work so it said that since Spain still wasn’t a republic, it could hang on to it.This didn’t go down very well with anybody, and Spain finally got the painting in 1981.Since then, it’s been in Madrid at one museum or another as a symbol of Spanish history and nationalism.
But there’s another group that believes they have an equal claim to it for that same symbolic reason.More next week.
