By Fr Armand de Malleray, FSSP
Pablo Picasso died fifty years ago last year but Holy Saturday eclipsed his anniversary. On April 8, 2023 Catholics were preparing for the Resurrection. They were still celebrating the rising of Christ later that month when another anniversary occurred: the bombing of Guernica in northern Spain, on April 26, 1937. Picasso painted a picture after the same name: Guernica was a turning point in his career. Let us look at it again.
Guernica is a masterpiece, not of art, but of propaganda. I use this word here not derogatorily. Propaganda is a subtle form of communication that entails the use of fine arts, of intelligence and politics in general. Artistic propaganda reminds us that no depiction is ever neutral. Any artistic representation implies selecting a vantage point, illustrating a worldview and colouring it with one’s ideological preferences. Allow me to be forthright. Visually I consider Guernica a pompous and unimaginative grey collage. From a propaganda perspective, I admire its efficient conflating of the injustice of war with General Franco’s Government; and reciprocally its equating the innocent victims with Communists in general.
Let me quote a few public figures to give us perspective. Indeed, if between three hundred and one thousand people died in Guernica’s bombing, just one year earlier the Communists had assassinated between thirty-eight thousand and seventy-two thousand three hundred and forty-four Catholics priests, monks and nuns during the Spanish Red Terror. Three years after Guernica, in Katyn only, the Soviets assassinated twenty-two thousand Polish army officers. Adolf Hitler, a failed painter, killed about six million Romani, Jews, Western Christians, Poles and Ukrainians in concentration camps. In Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, Joseph Stalin orchestrated the Terror-famine causing three and a half to five million victims. Mao Zedong starved thirty-five million innocents to death in 1959-61, not counting political torture and assassinations.
But let us limit ourselves to city bombing, more relevant to Guernica. During the Blitz in London, from September 1940 to May 1941, the Nazi Luftwaffe killed some forty-three thousand British civilians. In Dresden on February 13, 1945, American and British bombs killed thirty-five thousand German civilians. In Japan, when bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 respectively, the Americans killed between one-hundred and thirty thousand and two hundred and twenty-five thousand people, most of whom were civilians. In comparison, neither the number of victims nor the degree of injustice explains why Guernica, one of the smallest of modern war episodes, seems to have risen to archetypal status, outshining carnages atrociously more lethal and unwarranted. Certainly, the artistic quality of its eponymous painting fails to justify this.
Does some secret meaning, then, some hidden code account for Guernica’s fame? Do any pentimenti, these hidden depictions lying under the surface of famous paintings, explain the success of the picture, as was found in some other works by Picasso such as his Crouching Beggar? The answer is yes. Guernica is a giant pentimento. Beneath the alleged war scene, there truly lies …a corrida. Let me clarify this.
The painting was first about bulls, not bombs. Later, the picture was given a new meaning despite no significant changes affecting its composition. This lack of conceptual integrity was concealed through the masterly opportunism of the painter. Pablo Picasso admitted that his painting had nothing to do, originally, with the bombing of Guernica, for the very simple reason that the town had not yet been bombed and no major artist, not even the Catalonian painter, had ever heard of the little Basque locality. It would make news only in late April 1937. But three full months earlier, in January 1937, Picasso had received the commission from the Republican Government to paint a mural for the Universal Exhibition to be held in Paris that July. He banally selected bullfighting, a Spanish cliché recycled from Minotauromachy, his last significant engraving on bulls less than two years earlier. The composition of that picture resembles that of Guernica as if reflected in a mirror. No mystery here if one recalls that etchings are inverted in the printing process, swapping left and right.
Inspiration was wanting though. He did not know how to make his painting strikingly original. Winter was gone, spring had arrived, and still no creative spark. How was he to present his completed work by July that summer? After three months of fruitless labour, Picasso heard of a small Basque town which had just been bombed on April 26, 1937. That was his chance, he realised. Creatively, he decided to twist and bend his corrida into a war scene. His close collaborator and model Miss Dóra Maar took photographs of the painting process. A member of the French Communist Party, Miss Maar inspired Picasso’s shift from art to propaganda. Until then, he had not been political. He cautiously waited until the Nazis had left Paris in 1944, though, to join the Communist Party, giving in to Miss Maar. Salvador Dalí commented: “Picasso is a Communist. Neither am I.”
How did Picasso manage to reframe his corrida as a war scene, you may wonder? Here is the trick, or the genius, if one prefers. Picasso showed himself an adroit torero. He performed a dazzling pirouette. To avoid the horns of his original bulls, that is, to hide his want of inspiration about corridas, he stuck a new label all across the canvas, calling it ‘war painting’ instead. Picasso’s friend Juan Larrea recalls how the Communist poet Paul Éluard was the one who had found the new name for Picasso’s painting in progress. At that time Éluard was writing his poem La Victoire de Guernica. On seeing Picasso’s bullfighting scene he exclaimed “Guernica!” Picasso immediately realised the benefit of connecting his image with the Basque town recently bombed. No matter that his composition included no bombs, no planes, no swastikas, no guns or any modern weaponry, nor any crumbling roofs or walls. Their absence would enhance the evocative power of the work. Guernica would be its name, then. I suggest that Guernica should be more aptly titled Muleta. The ‘muleta’ is the matador’s red cape hanging from a stick. Waved before the bull, the muleta conceals the sword about to be plunged into the neck of the exhausted beast. I say, shake off the muleta! Remove the upper layer of Guernica, that is, the alleged war description, and you will find the hackneyed corrida scene.
Look, it is all before you, hidden in plain sight. Picture yourself in Las Ventas, the large bullring in Madrid. It is 9pm and still sunny and hot. You are sitting among twenty-three thousand fellow-spectators. Suddenly they start yelling. You all rise together like a swelling wave. Why? A picador has just fallen from his horse as he tried to pierce the bull with his lance. All look in horror, as the beast paws the sand. The man attempts to crawl away, his leg broken. But the angry bull is now coming back, about to charge and trample upon the unfortunate horseman. To distract the beast (and win a scoop), a journalist flashes his camera. The wife and child of the fallen man scream with fear! ‘Daddy!’ In the middle of the painting, up here, you can see the picador’s horse. Right above it is the flashing camera. The bull is obviously on the far left. The wife and child are below it and the fallen picador lies at the bottom. He grabs the sword thrown at him by the torero (it is not regular, of course, but a human life is at stake). To the right, the audience is held in suspense, mesmerised by the imminent tragedy. To the far right, a helpless spectator turns his face away from the action, looking at the last sunrays shining over the edge of the vast circular arena. Unless he is praying for a miracle from heaven.
Thus, war depiction is about as intrinsic to the initial intent of the work, a corrida, as would be in England, where I live, a painting of a thoroughbred racehorse subsequently acclaimed as the Trojan horse outside the walls of Ilion. This could be a practical joke by the curator of the London National Gallery, swapping the signs for George Stubbs’ Whistlejacket racehorse and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo’s Building of the Trojan Horse. Perhaps the most important lesson that Guernica teaches us, then, is the power of naming. That power can be used for good when the name expresses the essence and original purpose of the thing. But it can be misused if arbitrarily assigning a name to a thing that bears no essential relation with it. As a little diversion, you may find relevant this quote from another skilled artist, Lewis Carroll, creator of Alice in Wonderland:
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 6
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’
I do not claim to have exhausted the semiotic riches of Guernica, far from it. To broaden our perspective, allow me to conclude with a couple of new interpretative suggestions.
To start with, you may recall that on February 28, 1974, in New York, artist Tony Shafrazi spread red spray paint on Guernica, writing the words “Kill lies all,” as a protest statement. One could argue that he was merely imitating what Picasso himself had done: adding a further layer. First, there was a corrida. Second, there was a war scene. Third, there were red letters sprayed, red like the torero’s muleta spread in front of the bull. Perhaps, I don’t know, perhaps Shafrazi was only bringing the painting to its original stage—a corrida. I suppose it was no defacing then, but dutiful restoration.
My second conclusive hypothesis is that Miss Dóra Maar’s influence might not have been solely political, but multi-layered. As a surrealist photographer, she would have been acquainted with René Magritte’s 1929 seminal surrealist painting, Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Magritte’s picture is titled This is not a pipe despite depicting what objectively is a pipe. Just like Salvador Dalí surrealistically said of Picasso “This is a Communist,” Guernica could be interpreted as Pablo Picasso’s surrealist try, if a more explicit title had been chosen, such as This is not a corrida. In this fiftieth anniversary year of the death of Picasso, we may pray for his soul. To Dominican Fr Severino Alvarez in 1963, Picasso had expressed his desire for reconciliation with the Church, as Dóra Maar had done earlier. Please God, this time her influence might have been salutary. R.I.P.
Article first published in Dowry No61, Spring 2024