On the 85th Anniversary of the Bombing of Geurnica

 

                         Guernica- Pablo Ruiz Picasso

During the Spanish Civil War on the afternoon and early evening of Monday, April 26th, 1937,  the German and Italian fascist air forces destroyed the  sacred city of Basque People, Guernica in a raid lasting three hours. The war crime was ordered by the Spanish nationalist military leadership and carried out by the Congor Legion of the German luftwaffe and the Italian Aviazone Legionairre. Designed to kill  or main as many civilians as possible, Operation Rugen was deliberately chosen for a Monday afternoon when the weekly town market would be at its most crowded. Guernica, in the Basque  country where revolutionary sentiment among workers was deep, was defenceless from the bombers, which could fly as low as 600 feet.

The prototype of all future bombing raids, the Junker and Heinkel bombers of the Legion Condor visited a hell on earth in the form of bombs weighing up to 1000lbs across the town of 10, 000 people.  Heinkel fighters, according to press reports, machine gunned the fleeing crowds as they sought escape into the surrounding fields.
The airplanes made repeated raids, refuelling and returning to drop more bombs. Waves of explosive, fragmentary, and incendiary devices were dumped in the town. In total, 31 tons of munitions were dropped between 4.30 in the afternoon and 7.30 in the evening. In the aftermath of the raid, survivors spoke of the air filled with the screams of those in their death throes and the hundreds injured. Civilians fleeing the carnage in the fields surrounding the town were strafed by fighter planes. Human and animal  body parts littered the market place and town center, a horror soon immortalised by Pablo Picasso's Guernica.
Guernica was effectively wiped of the map. From a population of 5,000 some 1,700 residents were killed and a further 800 injured. Three quarters of the buildings were raised to the ground. Farms four miles away were flattened.

The savage and barbarous attack was a deliberate attempt to terrorise and intimidate the workers of Republican Spain. Spanish nationalist general Emilio Mola had spoken of destroying the industry of Barcelona and Bilbao in order to cleanse the country. In other words, the Nationalists would endeavour to destroy the industrial proletariat. As the historian Paul Preston wrote  in Spanish Holocaust, the Nationalist forces had launched a scorched earth policy during their rapid advance through Spain, most notably in Badajoz, where many hundreds of revolutionary workers were machine gunned to death in the city's bullring.
The fascist government of Berlin and Rome were only to glad to assist Franco in his 'cleansing' of the Spanish population, as both a geo-political necessity and as a test for their military command, new military technology and fighting forces. At his trial for war crimes at Nuremberg, the leading Nazi Hermann Goering would tell the tribunal that he had urged Hitler to send German forces to stem socialism in the Iberian theatre and to test out the Luftwaffe.We should never forget. 

 Franco, who ruled Spain as a fascist dictator for nearly forty years, from 1936 until his death in 1975, claimed the attack on Guernica never took place. They tried to blame the Basques, but the truth is Germany deliberately bombed the town to destroy it and observe in a clinical way the effects of such a devastating attack, practicing a new form of warfare, where only civilians were the targets.In October 1937, a Nationalist officer told a Sunday Times correspondent: 'We bombed it, and bombed it, and bombed it and Beuno why not. ' 

Pablo Ruiz Picasso's picture still resonates with clarity, capturing the full terror and horror of this terrible moment in history.The work was an order of the government of the Second Spanish Republic during the period of the Civil War in 1937. The work commissioned to Picasso would be exhibited in the Pavilion dedicated to Spain at the International Exhibition in Paris of this same year. The aim of the artwork was to use the art to spread the horror that Spanish society was living during those years of war.

It seems that Picasso was going through a inspiration crisis, he had not advanced in the project for months, but he suddenly found a theme for his work when receiving the news of the bombings on the 26th of April of 1937 by the German Condor Legion on the Basque village of Guernica. Picasso ended his artwork in just 7 weeks.

The commander of this legion was Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, cousin of the famous I World War aviator Manfred von Richthofen, known as the Red Baron, who would also recognize the cruelty of the bombing.

It is said that in the middle of the creative process in his studio in Paris, a group of Gestapo officials knocked on Picasso’s door and got stunned with the Guernica. Staring at the magnificent work and the horror that it spread, they asked him: Have you done THAT? To that question, Picasso answered, full of hate: “You did THAT, Nazis”.

Picasso never wanted to give his own explanation about the artwork and so, many theories have arisen trying to explain the symbolism of the painting and the intentions of the artist.

What can be assured is that the painting symbolizes the barbarism and terror produced by the war. It became the emblem of the harrowing conflicts of European society of the early twentieth century as well as the premonition of the suffering caused by the Second World War.

Guernica , massive in size, composed in mixture of black and gray and white, is a picture of an air raid, and all it's horror. It is twenty-fivee and a half feet long and more than eleven and a half feet in height. 

Concerning the symbolism of this cubist work, we find several elements worthy of analysis. The work is divided into two groups: the one of the animals and the one of the human beings. At the center of the composition horse stands trampling on a warrior. This is a symbol of the European totalitarian regimes and the repression exerted by their dictators – Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. The horse is a clear allusion to death, as its nose and teeth forms a skull.

 

Detail of the skull in Guernica.

The warrior holds in his right hand a broken sword, a symbol of defeat. In it, a hidden flower can also be found. It represents the renewal of life, which would be a neccesary but tough and not so clear period for the victims.

Detail of the flower and sword in Guernica

The mythological figure of the Minotour, half bull half human, perfectly reflects the struggle between the human and the bestial side of the war.
Regarding the people depicted in the painting, the protagonism of one women stands out.  In spite Picasso was married to one woman and expecting a child from another one,  When Picasso painted Guernica, he was maintaining a relationship with the French artist Dora Maar, whose face appears holding a candle in the painting, reflecting  with this the little light that illuminated the life of Picasso in that tragic moment. As an allusion to his sentimental situation, they also appear in the picture.

Alleged portrait of Dora Maar in Guernica

Dora photographed the entire creation process leaving by doing it a very important document for the history of Art.

Pablo Ruiz Picasso painting Guernica

The photographs published by the press of the bombing over Guernica and its brutallity were the inspiration of Picasso and the reason for the lack of color in his work. It is a symbol of the darkness of that terrible period of the Spanish history. 

 From 1937, it was exhibited in Europe and the US to raise money for Spanish refugees. Then in 1939, Picasso entrusted his masterpiece to  New York's Museum of Modern Art, where it stayed more than 40 years.

 The painter gave the museum clear instructions - the canvas belonged to the Spanish people and would only be given back "when they have recovered the freedoms that were taken away from them."
Finally in 1981, the painting arrived in Spain, which was transitioning to democracy after the death of Franco. 
It was first put up for show in an annex of the Prado Museum, behind explosion- and bullet  proof glass to protect it from possible harm in a country still struggling to deal with its very recent, dark past. Now at the Reina Sofia, it has become the star attraction.

The prophetic description of anonymous warfare, the blankets of darkness and death dropped over civilian populations still resonate. To the degree we realise the truth expressed in this work, Guernica stands as possibly the greatest painting of the 20th Century.

The atrocity that was Guernica  horrified the world and helped shift public opinion towards the Spanish Republican Cause, but shamefully the British Government stuck steadfastardly to its non intervevention line. The fascists hated liberalism and humanity, their ideology was one of evil destruction, 'Long Live Death' they cried.  Guernica represented their creed, with one of the Fascist Generals declaring " Like a resolute surgeon, free from false sentimentality, it will cut the diseased flesh from the healthy body and fling it to the dogs. And since the healthy flesh is the soil, the diseased flesh, the people who dwell on it, fascism and the army will eradicate the people and restore the soil to the sacred national realm... Every socialist, Republican, every one of them, without exception, and needless to say, every Communist, will be eradicated, without exception.' An ideology of unfettered hate, and evil., an  ideology that is still trying to tear the world apart.

The attempts by the Francoist rebels for many years to make the world believe that this war crime, this crime against humanity, was the work of the democratic Basque authorities was fortunately rendered useless by foreign correspondents, such as George L Steer and Noel Monks, who told the world the truth about what happened.  Following this first attempt, more have followed, even to today, to downplay its historical importance and reduce the number of victims.

The destruction of Guernica was part of Franco's wider, brutal campaign against the existence of the Spanish Republic. This campaign led not just to widespread destruction of property, but thousands of civilian casualties too, as well as widespread displacement. Many sought refuge abroad, as many as 3,800 Basque children were evacuated to England and Wales for the duration of the war. The British Government at the time callously refused to be responsible for the children, but  throughout the summer children were dispersed to camps throughout Britain. Eight of these colonies were here in Wales. They were received with a mixture of hostility and kindness, but they had all managed to escape the grips of Franco's fascist Spain.
After Guernica , George Steers eyewitness account in The Times described what he saw as 'without mercy, with system', words that remain tragically pertinent to the bloody legacy of carpet bombing in conflicts ever since. Conflicts that continue across the world, that allow humanity to descend into darkness.Guernica represnted the first instance of a new kind of war. The Blitz followed it, then Dresden and the fireboming of Tokyo. Then Hiroshima, followed by the saturation bombing of Vietnam, on to the tragedies of Afghanistan, Iraq, Temen, Somalia, Syria, Palestine, Ukraine etc.

So we must remember Guernica ,and  its legacy, we must make sure the fascists are stopped in their tracks, we must not let them pass., we must carry on singing no pasaron to whatever disguise they dress themselves up in, because today , throughout Spain and Europe, there is an ideological current that feeds into the same hatred and misery and ' principles' that guided the births of fascist, nazi, Francoist totalitarians.

Since the bombing, Guernica has become a symbol for peace. The town has a pace museum and a peace park. and survivors  of the air raid have over the year joined forces with others from Dresden and Hiroshima to campaign against war.

Sirens symbolically blare across Guernica today at the precise moment when fascist  warplanes  carpet-bombed it during the Spanish Civil War. We should never forget.It is important to remember for future generations, so that horrors like this never happen again.We much continue to be enraged by crimes against humanity, and together we should try to work together for  peace

Extract from poem written by Paul Eluard, a surrealist poet and friend of Picasso, in August, 1937.

Lovely world of cottages
Of the night and fields
Faces good in firelight good in frost
Reusing the night the wound and blows

Faces good for everything
Now the void fixes you
Your death will serve as a warning

Death the heart turned over

They made you pay your bread
Sky earth water sleep
And the misery of your life.

 
Guernica - A.S Knowland

Irun- Badajoz - Malaga - and then Guernica

So that the swastika and the eagle
might spring from the blood-red soil,
bombs were sown into the earth at Guernica,
whose only harvest was a calculated slaughter.
Lest freedom should wave between the grasses
and the corn its proud emblem, or love
be allowed to tread its native fields,
Fascism was sent to destroy the innocent,
and, goose-stepping to the exaggerated waving
of the two-faced flag, to save Spain.

But though the soil be saturated with blood
as a very efficient fertiliser, the furrow
of the ghastly Fasces shall remain barren.
The  planted swastika, the eagle grafted
on natural stock shall wither and remain sere;
for no uniformed force shall marshall the sap
thrilling to thrust buds into blossoms, or quicken
the dead ends of the blighted branches;
but the soil shall be set against an alien crop
and the seed be blasted in the planting.

But strength lies in the strength of the roots.
They shall not pass to ruin Spain!

Reprinted from
The Penguin Book of
Spanish Civil War Verse (1980)

Further Reading:-

The Spanish Civil War - Hugh Thomas
Penguin (1965)

They Shall Not Pass:
The Spanish People at War
-Richard Kissh (1974)

Guernica: The history and art of:-

 

 

Guernica - Paul Eluard - P Picasso  - Victory at Guernica
Music: Richard  Wagner and Herbert Von Karajan