Guernica is famous because it was one of the first great paintings to show what bombing does to a town, because it was sent around the world to raise money for Spanish refugees, and because it hung for 42 years in New York, where one war after another found a use for it.
The Spanish Republic had ordered a mural for its pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris. After German and Italian planes bombed the Basque town of Guernica on 26 April 1937, Picasso dropped his first idea and painted the raid instead.
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The fame did not arrive with the paint. When the mural went up in the pavilion in the summer of 1937, the reviews were mixed. Some Marxist groups said it lacked political commitment, and some officials objected to its modernist style. The Republic that had commissioned it lost the war less than two years later.
What made Guernica a symbol happened elsewhere, long after the bombing, in a country that had nothing to do with it. Picasso kept the canvas out of Spain on purpose, and it spent 42 years in New York. I think its fame belongs less to the Basque town than to every war that came after.
How did Paris receive Guernica in 1937?
With admiration from a few and an argument from the rest, and the argument was about politics as much as paint. The mural hung near the entrance of the Spanish pavilion, unveiled in July 1937. Among its admirers were the poet Jean Cocteau and the writer Michel Leiris. The writer Max Aub defended it against its critics.
Scholars still debate how well the picture worked as a political statement, and how much attention it drew in Paris at all. Part of the argument was over what the painting meant, a question Picasso never settled for anyone.
The Republic wanted it to work abroad, so after the fair it sent the canvas on tour to raise money for Spanish war relief, through Scandinavia and then England. In January 1939 it reached the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London's East End and stayed 15 days. About 15,000 people came in the first week. The organizers were collecting "a million pennies" to send a boat of food to Spain.
Those crowds came for the cause. A few months later the cause was lost, because the Republic fell to Franco's forces in 1939. The painting had lost the government that ordered it, and it crossed the Atlantic.
What You'll Discover
Who stood before it in New York.
Why Picasso refused to take it home.
What was unfurled in front of it.
What the UN did to its copy.