Gijs van Hensbergen
Picasso learnt much from the old masters, but one lesson he failed to draw was that it’s a bad idea to have everyone in a picture going “AAAAAAH!” Or rather, it’s a very good idea if you’re HM Bateman, but a tragic drama requires some variation of intensity. The failure is deliberate, of course. In response to the saturation bombing of the city of Gernika (Basque spelling) by German planes in 1936, Picasso painted an image whose exclamation of outrage and agony conspicuously defies the rules of art, an image that climaxes at every point.
It’s possible to find Guernica a stupid and ridiculous painting, just for that reason: a barnstormer, inert through its desire to be unmitigatedly horrified and horrifying. But this is a minority opinion. Guernica’s viewers have more frequently been – as Gijs van Hensbergen puts it – “dumbstruck and mesmerised by the power and scale of the image as they stare wide-eyed at the painful drama acted out before them”. And whatever its pictorial force, Guernica has other powers. It is indelibly saturated with 20th-century history and its struggles. It is by now exceedingly famous. It can still carry a live charge: when I put that negative view into print a few years ago, I was shocked to get a warm letter from a supporter of the late General Franco.
Art, war, politics, fame: it looks like a subject all right – and because the picture has travelled a lot, it looks like a story too. In Guernica: The Biography of a 20th Century Icon, Van Hensbergen tells it. It’s a story with no particular moral, except that an artwork can take on different meanings in different contexts. But it’s rich in odd and telling incidents.
At the start of the Spanish civil war, Picasso, mid-50s, top artist, was living in France. The Republican government had commissioned a large work for the 1937 International Expo in Paris. Then came the atrocity. The picture took six weeks. At its first showing in the Spanish pavilion, Guernica was hung more or less in the café area, with folk dance troupes performing in earshot.
Then it began its travels, touring to raise support for the republic. At the London Whitechapel Gallery exhibition, “ranks of working men’s boots were left like ex votos at the painting’s base: the price of admission was a pair of boots, in a fit state to be sent to the Spanish front”. But the republic was falling fast, and Guernica soon found itself the property of a non-existent state. For decades it was housed in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1981, after tortuous negotiations, it finally “returned” to post-Franco Spain, home where it had never been.
It’s a full life but – given the fate of other artworks in the 20th century – a quietish one. Guernica has never been lost, stolen, kidnapped, taken as plunder or come anywhere near being bombed itself. It has been vandalised once, reparably. It has never been forcibly removed from exhibition. Reproductions were banned in Franco’s Spain, Van Hensbergen says, though he mentions only one conviction and gives no legal details.
Guernica’s vicissitudes have been mainly symbolic. A rallying cry for a socialist republic, it settled down in the US as a more universal cry against war and man’s inhumanity (a prudent response to McCarthyism, though there is little in the picture that resists such universalising). In the 60s it fell under Vietnam’s shadow; the vandalisation was a protest against the MyLai massacre. Its prestige was so great that even the Franco government briefly tried to bring it to Spain.
Thereafter it became the badge of Spain’s new democracy, with the dead artist’s heirs determining whether Spain had sufficiently democratised to deserve it. Picasso’s express stipulation of a Spanish republic was ignored. It now hangs in the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid. It hasn’t yet visited the Basque country.
The most vivid tales are often about reproductions of Guernica. There is Picasso’s legendary reply to a German officer visiting his studio in occupied Paris: “Did you do this?” (indicating a photo of the painting). “No, you did.” There’s a bizarre follow-up, too: in 1990 the German army, of all bodies, used Guernica as its recruiting poster, adding the baffling slogan “Hostile images of the enemy are the fathers of war”.
It would be too much to ask whether Guernica has ever actually prevented hostilities – though, as with any anti-war art, testimony to its abiding power is always also testimony to its abiding impotence. It’s still impressive that, in the countdown to the Iraq war, the Guernica tapestry in the UN building was covered over to save the warmakers’ blushes. Fame should have evacuated the image by now, reduced it to invisible high-mindedness, but plainly it has not. It’s a picture that must be honoured, even if (as I think) it can’t really be admired: I mean, that bellowing figure on the left, it’s clearly Lisa Simpson in a tantrum.
Tom Lubbock in The Guardian
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