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Guernica is a large 1937 oil painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. It is one of his best-known works, regarded by many art critics as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history. It is exhibited in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.

The grey, black, and white painting, done on a canvas 3.49 meters (11 ft 5 in) tall and 7.76 meters (25 ft 6 in) across, portrays the suffering wrought by violence and chaos. Prominently featured in the composition are a gored horse, a bull, screaming women, a dead baby, a dismembered soldier, and flames.

Picasso painted Guernica at his home in Paris in response to the 26 April 1937 bombing of Guernica, a town in the Basque Country in northern Spain, by Nazi Germany's Condor Legion and the fascist government of Italy. Upon completion, Guernica was exhibited at the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition and then at other venues around the world. The touring exhibition was used to raise funds for Spanish war relief. The painting soon became widely acclaimed, helping to bring worldwide attention to the Spanish Civil War that took place from 1936 to 1939.

Commission

In January 1937, while Pablo Picasso was living in Paris on Rue des Grands Augustins, he was commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to create a large artwork for the Spanish pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, a 1937 Paris International Exposition. Picasso, who had last visited Spain in 1934 and would never return, was the Honorary Director-in-Exile of the Prado Museum.

Picasso worked somewhat dispassionately from January until late April on the project's initial sketches, which depicted his perennial theme of an artist's studio. Then, immediately upon hearing reports of the 26 April bombing of Guernica, poet Juan Larrea visited Picasso's home to urge him to make the bombing his subject. Days later, on 1 May, Picasso read George Steer's eyewitness account of the attack, which originally had been published in both The Times and The New York Times on 28 April, and abandoned his initial idea. Acting on Larrea's suggestion, Picasso began sketching a series of preliminary drawings for Guernica.

Historical context

Bombing of 26 April 1937

On 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the town of Guernica was razed to the ground by German aircraft belonging to the Condor Legion, sent by Adolf Hitler to support General Francisco Franco's troops. Bombs rained down on Guernica for hours in an "experiment" for the Blitzkrieg tactics and bombing of civilians seen in later wars.

During the civil war the Republican forces, made up of communists, socialists, anarchists, and others with differing goals, united in their opposition to the Nationalists, led by Franco, who wanted to establish a fascist dictatorship. The Nationalists perceived Guernica, a quiet Basque Country village in the province of Biscay, as the northern bastion of the Republican resistance movement and the center of Basque culture.

On Monday, 26 April 1937, Nazi Germany's warplanes, commanded by Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, bombed Guernica for about two hours. In his 26 April 1937 diary entry, Richthofen states that the town was targeted "...to halt and disrupt the Red withdrawal which has to pass through here." The following day, he wrote in his diary, "Guernica burning". In Richthofen's 30 April 1937 journal entry, he noted that when the squadron arrived "there was smoke everywhere" from the attack by three aircraft, and since nobody could see the roads, bridges, and suburbs "they just dropped everything right into the center. The 250s toppled a number of houses and destroyed the water mains. The incendiaries now could spread and become effective. The materials of the houses: tile roofs, wooden porches, and half-timbering resulted in complete annihilation."

Since Monday was Guernica's market day, and most of its men were away fighting on behalf of the Republicans, at the time of the bombing the town was populated mostly by women and children, and many of them congregated in the center of town. When the main bombardment began the roads were already full of debris and the bridges leading out of town were destroyed. The residents were unable to escape.

节选，摘自英文维基百科「Guernica (Picasso)」，按 CC BY-SA 4.0 使用。