The Foreign Service Journal, June 2005

The Art of War Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon Gijs van Hensbergen, Bloomsbury USA, 2004, $35, hardcover, 352 pages. R EVIEWED BY L ARRY W INTER R OEDER J R . Hanging just to the left of the entrance to the U.N. Security Council is a huge copy of Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” —one of the most power- ful graphic depictions of the horrors of war ever created. In Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon , Gijs van Hensbergen gives us the historical background of the paint- ing and the atrocity it portrays, and discusses how its images have contin- ued to shape modern thinking about war and politics. As he recounts, soon after the Spanish Civil War began, a delegation representing the beleagured democ- ratic government traveled to Picasso’s home in Paris seeking a bold visual p rotest against Generalissimo Fran- cisco Franco. Specifically, they asked him to paint the centerpiece for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 World’s Fair. Though Picasso disdained overt- ly political art, he agreed. Not long thereafter, on April 27, 1937, Franco’s forces, backed by the Nazis, firebombed a Basque village in northern Spain. Fascist forces pound- ed Guernica with high explosives and incendiary bombs for over three hours, cutting down people as they fled from the crumbling buildings. Some 1,600 civilians were killed or wounded, and the town burned for three days. By May 1, news of the massacre reached Paris, where more than a mil- lion protesters flooded the streets to voice their outrage in the largest May Day demonstration the city had ever seen. Eyewitness reports and black- and-white photographs filled the front pages of Paris papers. Appalled and enraged, Picasso quickly sketched the first images for the mural he would call simply “Guernica.” Hensbergen points out that Picasso deliberately chose not to employ images from the destroyed city. Instead, he broke away from nor- mality. The paint is nearly monochro- matic, not full of gory reds. As a result, the initial reception to the work was “strangely muted.” The Spanish had wanted something partisan and the Basques felt it was too abstract. Yet the truth is that the abstraction p rovided a long-term tool, an illustra- tion of existential terror that “depicts the effects of a brutality that strikes f rom nowhere.” The victims are look- ing above them, but not at a specific enemy, adding to the terror inflicted by all who engage in mass murder f rom the skies — exactly the sort of evil the U.N. Security Council is now meant to resist and punish. The mural became a fund-raising tool, moving through Scandinavia and then arriving in London on Sept. 30, 1938, the day of the infamous Munich Pact. It was the centerpiece of the Museum of Modern Art’s Picasso retro- spective in New York six weeks before the invasion of Poland a year later. Picasso’s grim painting (now housed in the Reina Sofia, Spain’s national museum of modern art) ranks as the most effective anti-fascist work of art in the world and one of the most forceful statements of its kind in human history. Because of its abstract nature, people could apply it to any crisis, such as the Armenian genocide or the holocaust. The artist Willem De Kooning saw the mural as a description of the Luftwaffe’s destruction of Rotterdam. C reating “Guernica” also trans- formed Picasso, who became a com- munist in 1944 and painted many anti- war works, including the dove for the communist-organized Paris Peace Congress in April 1949, which was later adopted as the international symbol of peace. The irony is that Picasso hated the excesses of the Soviets, while Soviet critic Vladimir Kemenov denounced Picasso as pathological. Said Kemenov: “His pathology has created repugnant monstrosities. … In his ‘Guernica’ he portrayed not the Spanish Republic but monsters. He treads the path of cos- mopolitanism, of empty geometric forms. His every canvas deforms man —his body and his face.” But it should come as no shock that the Soviets react- ed this way, for the painting was clearly an attack on the kind of atrocities per- petrated by Stalin and others of his ilk through the ages. Too often, we prefer pretty pic- tures, simple images. But “Guernica” is not one of those. It is a deep philo- sophical statement against violence and war, a work of art that all who are interested in peace need to ingrain in their minds. Similarly, this book is a must-read for every foreign affairs agency employee, and everyone working for peace and justice. ■ Larry Roeder is the policy adviser on disaster management in the Inter- national Organization Affairs Bureau’s Office of Social and Humanitarian Affairs. 96 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 5 B O O K S u Picasso’s decision not to employ images from the destroyed city in the painting helped make it universal.