Pablo Picasso · 1937
Guernica
Pablo Picasso
Guernica
1937
Pablo Picasso painted 'Guernica' in the spring of 1937 after German and Italian aircraft acting for Franco's Nationalists destroyed the Basque town of Gernika in the Spanish Civil War. The mural-sized canvas (3.5 × 7.8 m), executed in black, white, and grey oil, compresses a bull, a screaming horse, a mother with a dead child, a fallen soldier, and a flickering lightbulb into a single cubist scream of modern war. First shown in the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair, the painting toured the world as an anti-fascist icon and returned to Spain only in 1981 after Franco's death; it is the undisputed centrepiece of the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.
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Image source: Wikimedia Commons