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 tall and 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. Picasso, who had last visited Spain in 1934 and would never return, was the Honorary Director-in-Exile of the Prado Museum.
Historical context
Bombing of 26 April 1937
right|thumb|Guernica in ruins, 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 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.
Guernica was 10 kilometers from the front lines, and in-between the front lines and Bilbao. A Republican retreat towards Bilbao, or an advance towards it, had to pass through Guernica. The nearest military target, a war product factory on the town's outskirts, went through the attack unscathed, so the attack was widely condemned as a terror bombing.
Aftermath
thumb|300px|Damage sustained during the air attack
The Times journalist George Steer propelled this event onto the international scene, and brought it to Pablo Picasso's attention, in an eyewitness account published on 28 April in both The Times and The New York Times. On the 29th it appeared in L'Humanité. Steer wrote: