Guernica is Pablo Picasso's painting of the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on 26 April 1937, when German and Italian aircraft attacked it for General Franco's side in the Spanish Civil War. It means anger at the killing of civilians from the air, painted in black, white and gray. Picasso said plainly what the picture was for, and much less about the animals in it.
The Spanish Republic, the elected government then fighting Franco's rebellion, had asked Picasso, who lived in Paris, for a mural for its pavilion at the city's 1937 World's Fair. The canvas he delivered is about 3.5 meters tall and 7.8 meters wide. It shows a horse in agony, a bull, a mother holding her dead child and a soldier lying in pieces on the ground.
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The most famous painting of an air raid has no aircraft in it. No bomb falls anywhere on the canvas, and the only thing that ties it to a town is the title.
Picasso had been planning a different picture. The Republic asked for the mural at the start of the year, and he spent the early months on another subject entirely. The raid on Guernica ended that idea. What he painted instead was not an account of the bombing, and the figures in it carry no labels.
Two things about it are hard to dispute. The bombing was real, and The Times of London reported it two days later. Almost everything else attached to the painting, from the bull to the lamp, is interpretation, and the interpretations do not agree.
What You'll Discover
What Picasso meant to paint instead.
What happened on market day.
Who is in the picture.
What Picasso said about it.
Why Spain waited until 1981.