Word: guernica
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...terror and risk and awful surprise: television verite abruptly pouring bulletins into the global village, the images of anchormen nervously fighting for a grip on things. The mind behaved like the hand-held television cameras that reeled wildly from sky to earth and then zoomed in on that Guernica of tumbled chairs and shot bodies and blood smears...
This note is struck at the beginning of the show, which tries to describe the reactions of French artists to the Spanish Civil War. Spain was the test of political alignment for artists and intellectuals. It inspired the most famous political image in modern art, Guernica, and evoked some remarkable images from Spaniards other than Picasso, such as Salvador Dali and Joan Miró. Guernica could not be lent to this exhibition, although one gets some hint of the fervors from Miró's design for a poster, Aidez l'Espagne, and from Dali's hallucinated Cannibalisme...
...jubilant occasion was the repatriation of Guernica, Pablo Picasso's stark protest against the savagery of war, which had come to symbolize Spanish hopes for democracy. Picasso had been commissioned by the Republican government of Spain to paint the mural for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris...
Spanish civil war had already begun, and when German bombers supporting General Francisco Franco's fascist forces leveled the Basque town of Guernica, Picasso made the act the theme of the painting. After Franco's forces won the war, Picasso-who never returned to Spain as a protest against the Franco dictatorship-decreed that Guernica not be delivered to Spain until "public liberties" had been restored. Picasso died in 1973, two years before Franco...
...tight security, the painting was transferred from New York's Museum of Modern Art, where it had hung since 1939, to Madrid's Prado Museum. Ironically, one of the 20th century's most passionate protests against violence will have to be protected by special bulletproof glass. Guernica will be formally unveiled on Oct. 25, the centenary of Picasso's birth...