Word: guernica
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...dogs, Greek heroes, horses and table lamps into paroxysms of rage or frustration. He built monuments of painted bones, drew "pictures" that were nothing but dancing lines and dots, made a "Bull's Head" out of a bicycle seat and handle bars. He protested the German bombing of Guernica (in the Spanish Civil War) with a massive mural whose ugliness is its strength. "What do you think an artist is?" asked Picasso. "An imbecile who has only his eyes? . . . No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against...
...which will never fit anyone's idea of interior decoration. Entitled The Charnel-House, it is still in the drawing stage (see cut). Says Barr: "Its figures are facts-the famished, waxen cadavers of Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen. The fury and shrieking violence which made the agonies of Guernica tolerable are here reduced to silence. For the man, the woman and the child this picture is a Pieta without grief, an entombment without mourners, a requiem without pomp...
Monday, April 26, 1937 was a market day in Guernica. The town's 7,000 population was swollen by 3,000 Loyalist refugees. Francisco Franco's rebel armies were still far away-but at 4:30 p.m. German Junkers and Heinkels started coming over in waves, every 20 minutes. They dropped 1,000-pounders (monsters at that time) and great showers of incendiaries, and since there was no antiaircraft they flew low and machine-gunned fleeing victims...
Said Herbert L. Matthews in The Education of a Correspondent: "The destruction of Guernica will forever rank as the prototype of totalitarian bombing. There one had the systematic and complete obliteration of a town far behind the front lines-which was going to be taken without difficulty anyway, since the Loyalist troops were routed. ... It was the heart of Vizcaya, and to smash it was to break the heart of the Basques...
Hermann Wilhelm Goring, the man who was said to have ordered the Guernica job as practice and demonstration for his Luftwaffe, was ignominiously dead last week, his ashes scattered to the four winds. But the man for whom Goring did the job-Francisco Franco-was very much alive. Moreover, Guernica had been completely rebuilt. In gratitude, the citizens of Guernica last week honored Franco with the "freedom of the borough...