Pablo Picasso created Guernica for the 1937 Paris International Exposition, responding to the bombing of the town during the Spanish Civil War.
Its black, white, and gray palette and stark distortions convey suffering through human and animal figures. The symbols have inspired multiple interpretations rather than a single definitive reading.
Creation, and the influence of Dora Maar on the painting
On 11 May the canvas is ready, and immediately the composition is laid down as a linear structure that covers the whole surface. Work on the mural is accompanied by more than thirty studies for the details. The rough plan exists from the beginning, but it takes three weeks before the picture receives its final form. The bull's head remains where it was first put, but the body is turned around to the left. On 20 May the horse lifts its head. The body of the soldier stretched on the floor from left to right changes position on 4 June, then head and hand take on their finished shape.
At the last moment the artist makes one decisive adjustment: the drama first took place on a street with burning houses in the background. Now, suddenly, the diagonals are accentuated, and thereby space becomes ambiguous, unreal, inside and outside at the same time. The lamp is hung over the horse's head, looking on the dreadful scene like a wide-open eye. The construction is strengthened, the mural more strongly integrated within Sert's architecture. Into the hand of the dying soldier, next to the broken sword, Picasso puts the little flower of hope.
The picture was finished about mid-June. 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.
Dora Maar found a large enough studio for Picasso to paint Guernica in. Through her connections in the left-wing community, she gained access to a space on Rue des Grands-Augustins, near Notre-Dame. This building had previously served as the headquarters of the ‘Contre-Attaque’ group, of which Maar was a dedicated member. Having listened to anti-fascist speeches there, she recognized it as the ideal location for Picasso's monumental protest artwork. Not only did she find the studio large enough for Picasso to paint Guernica in, she also had exclusive access to photograph the work in progress.
Dora Maar accompanied Picasso in the studio and photographed successive stages of Guernica's creation. Her documentation preserves a record of the painting developing over 36 days, including changes that the finished canvas alone cannot show. Curators and scholars have also discussed her influence on Picasso's political and artistic choices. Some accounts credit her with painting part of the dying horse. Her black-and-white photographs form an important companion to a painting whose restricted palette gives the suffering figures a stark, concentrated presence.
Composition
The scene occurs within a large room. On the left, a wide-eyed bull, with a tail suggesting rising flame and smoke as if seen through a window, stands over a grieving woman holding a dead child in her arms. The woman's head is thrown back and her mouth is wide open. A horse falls in agony in the center of the room, with a large gaping hole in its side, as if it had just been run through by a spear or javelin. The horse appears to be wearing chain mail armor, decorated with vertical tally marks arranged in rows.
A dead and dismembered soldier lies under the horse. The hand of his severed right arm grasps a shattered sword, from which a flower grows. The open palm of his left hand contains a stigma, a symbol of martyrdom derived from the stigmata of Christ. A bare light bulb in the shape of an all-seeing eye blazes over the suffering horse's head.