Guernica is Picasso's protest against the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on 26 April 1937. He painted it in black, white and gray as a picture of civilians killed from the air: screaming figures, a dying horse, a bull that watches.
The Spanish Republican government had ordered a mural for its pavilion at the Paris International Exposition. Picasso began with an idea set in his studio, then dropped it. The canvas he delivered is 3.49 meters tall and 7.76 meters wide.
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The usual line is that Picasso never explained Guernica. Scholars have read the bull as Franco's forces, as brute political power, or as Spain itself, and each reading is offered as the best guess about a painter who kept silent.
He did not keep silent. At least once, he answered the question to a man with a notebook, and the answer was printed in a magazine two months before the war in Europe ended.
Then he is reported to have said the opposite to someone else. The two answers cannot both stand, and the gap between them says more about the painting than either one does.
What You'll Discover
What Picasso told a stranger about the bull.
What is hidden inside the horse.
Why the painting has no color.
Who watched it being painted.
Why it took until 1981 to reach Spain.