Picasso painted Guernica in 35 days after a Basque town burned
On 26 April 1937, German Condor Legion planes under Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen—and Italian fascist support—bombed the Basque town of Guernica. Pablo Picasso, already commissioned for Spain’s pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition, dropped his artist-studio sketches after reading George Steer’s Times report and began the vast grey mural now in Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía.
The oil painting measures 3.49 metres high by 7.76 metres wide. Picasso worked at home on Rue des Grands Augustins in Paris; Dora Maar secured a large studio nearby once used by the Contre-Attaque group, photographed the mural across roughly thirty-six days, and at his request painted part of the dying horse. Matte house paint mixed for minimal gloss, with help from American artist John Ferren on the canvas, gave the work photographic starkness. He finished on 4 June 1937 after thirty-five days of painting.
Steer, publishing on 28 April in The Times and The New York Times, described more than three hours of Junkers and Heinkel attacks with bombs and thousands of aluminium incendiaries, then fighters machine-gunning civilians. Monday was market day; many men were at the front, so women and children crowded the centre as roads clogged and bridges fell. A war-product factory on the outskirts went unscathed—one reason critics called it terror bombing. Richthofen’s diaries speak of disrupting Republican withdrawal and of total annihilation once incendiaries caught tile roofs and timber.
The composition stages a gored horse, bull, screaming women, dead child, dismembered soldier, and flames beneath a bare bulb like an all-seeing eye. Rudolf Arnheim read the women and children as Picasso’s image of defenseless humanity. Asked to decode bull and horse, Picasso refused fixed allegory: the bull is a bull, the horse a horse. Shown first at the Spanish pavilion, then touring for war relief, Guernica fixed worldwide attention on the 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War—and still anchors anti-war looking. Picasso rarely let strangers watch him work, yet invited influential visitors for antifascist publicity, declaring the mural his abhorrence of the military caste that had sunk Spain in pain and death.
Source: Guernica (Picasso)
