Word: guernica
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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History is at best violent, doubly so in such periods. Bombers over Shanghai and Guernica, refugees from Barcelona and Prague, tell stories whose raw horror blurs the minds of those who try to understand the causes of war. When philosophers, economists, historians try to penetrate the wild surface of events, to see the forces that have created them, their dry generalizations and statistics seem cold beside the living reality of the headlines. In different terms they state the causes of international conflict-as rivalry between the Haves and the Havenots, between the countries struggling to keep what they have...
CHILDREN OF GUERNICA - Hermann Kesten-Alliance ($2.50). On April 26, 1937, a row comes to a head in the large Espinosa family of Guernica, Spain; Uncle Pablo, the black sheep, mocks his kindly brother for his liberalism in the civil war; son and daughter are innocently involved in the murder of an anarchist leader; Father Espinosa cannot sell his chemist's shop and escape to France. German bombers sailing overhead end the family row and the Basque city of Guernica at the same time. Young Carlos escapes to Paris where he tells his powerful, grim story to German refugee...
...There seems to be little doubt that, when he began to paint again it was in response to a political event -the war in Spain. In any case, the two works which have put him in the news since 1936 have been public, polemical jobs: his big, lacerating mural, Guernica, for the Spanish government pavilion at the Paris exposition of 193 7, and a series of hairy-nightmare etchings entitled Dreams and Lies of Franco. At the same time, Picasso's previous work has begun to emerge from the smoke of controversy into the lucidity of history...
...money. There are few stories of his personal generosity, though it is a fact that any poor but promising poet can get a Picasso etching for his book by asking for it. He has certainly contributed a great deal to the Loyalist side in the Spanish civil war: the Guernica mural free, all proceeds from exhibiting it (to date about $5,000), at least two fully equipped fighting planes, and during the last few weeks a cash gift of 300,000 francs...
Done in grey, with staring whites and blacks, Guernica had a visceral effect on Londoners who had just got over the war scare, an esthetic kick for the critics. The Times's, Eric Newton noted that in his studies for a screaming woman (see cut) Picasso had drawn each feature from the most expressive angle (eyes from the front, nose from the side, nostrils from below) for intensity. The Observer's Jan Gordon observed that the big composition employed Abstraction in its jagged design, Expressionism in its mangled figures, Surrealism in its eerie details...