A World Without Guernica—National Poetry Month 2024

Guernica after the bombing.

In consideration of the continuing pitiless assaults against Gaza and its captive residents by Israel abetted by the U.S. and the looming threat of an uncontrolled wider regional conflict it is time to recall again one of the first mass bombings of a civilian population center with little or no military significance in history.  German and Italian war planes bombed the market town of Guernica, a Basque village in northern Spain on April 26, 1937.  The atrocity, an episode of the Spanish Civil War—a dress rehearsal for World War II—outraged world opinion at the time.

The dead in Guernica.

Within weeks Spanish expatriate painter Pablo Picasso in Paris was commissioned by the Republican Government for a display at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne at the 1937 World’s Fair in The City of Light.  Picasso’s huge, dramatic monochromatic black, gray and white painting became an international sensation and anti-fascist icon.  It toured the world and survived the Blitz in London.

When the United Nations opened its new headquarters in New York City, a full-size tapestry reproduction was hung on a wall outside the entrance to the Security Council Chambers to remind the delegates and diplomats that their mission was to make a world where atrocities like Guernica are impossible.

Pablo Picasso's Guernica perhaps the most important painting of the 20th Century and certainly the most representative of that blood drenched age.

On February 4, 2003 United States Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the Security Council laying out America’s case for going to war against Iraq.  A press conference followed outside the chambers.  When reporters assembled they found the famous Guernica tapestry covered by blue curtains.  Officially the United Nations claimed it was in preparation for painting and renovation.  Some reporters were told that TV news crews had complained that the stark images distracted from the speakers in front of them.

No one honestly believed either story.  The picture had been masked to avoid embarrassing Powell and the Bush Administration which was preparing to launch their announced campaign of shock and awe which would include bombing Baghdad and inevitably cause civilian casualties.

That is the moment that New York born poet Gregg Mosson captured in his piece A World Without Picasso’s Guernica which was included in the 2007 anthology Poems Against War: Bending Toward Justice.

Painting representing Guernica  being covered for Colin Powell's United Nations press conference.

Mosson was a former reporter and commentator whose work has appeared In The Cincinnati Review, The Baltimore Sun, The Oregonian, The Baltimore Review, and The Futurist. His poetry has appeared in many small-press journals. He earned his MA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, where he was a teaching fellow and lecturer. He has authored two books of poetry, Season of Flowers and Dust in 2007 and Questions of Fire in 2009.  Mosson was a contributing poetry editor at The Baltimore Review.

A World Without Picasso’s Guernica

February 5, 2003

 

At the United Nations, blue drapes sheath

a tapestry rendition of Guernica, so speakers can paint

blitzkrieging dreams, burying screams affixed and aired;

killing machines can work again.

Who expunged Guernica from the U.N.,

and then did U.N. walls tremor

down to their foundation

in the “war to end all wars”

and covetous twentieth century?

Yesterday, today, or tomorrow

bombs drop and discombobulated body parts

hurl through the air, and brown limbs

burst from horses

and spin past a still-standing bystander

dumbstruck

as infernos smoke and buildings crumble.

 

—Gregg Mosson

 

Scottish poet Sheena Blackhall captured the horror of the bombing itself.  Blackhall was born in Aberdeen in 1947 and is a poet, novelist, short story writer, illustrator, traditional story teller, and singer.  She has written over 100 poetry pamphlets—chapbooks we call them this side of the Pond—12 short story collections, 4 novels and 2 televised plays for children.

 

Guernica

 

Most of the men off fighting in Civil War
Our women and children haggling over bargains.
And then three hours bombardment from the skies
Like a place of card, our town, stamped on by giants

Those who hid in the fields were soon machine gunned.
The wooden walls of our homes, a red inferno

Wives wailed over the dead, blown up by shrapnel
Horses and bulls lay crushed by masonry.

Doves flew in all directions, panic-stricken.
I ran wildly ahead towards a bomb hole
Dived inside the churned up, muddy crater.

Bullets ricocheted, and cars exploded
Riddled corpses leaked blood on the streets

Children huddled round a parish priest
Too shocked to speak. In tatters, every one

The Plaza was a wall of living flame,
All that was left, a church, a tree, a factory

Charred bodies will forever haunt my dreams.
And this was how war came to Guernica

—Sheena Blackhall

 

The 20th Century’s Most Famous Painting Captured the Screaming Horror of Modern War

Guernica, 1937 by Pablo Picasso.

A very large painting arrived in London on September 30, 1938, the very day British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement with the Axis Powers.  It had previously been exhibited at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition (World’s Fair) in the exhibit of the Spanish Republic.  It had created a sensation and was soon sent on a world tour to raise support for the Republican cause in the devastating Civil War wracking that country.  This is the story of that painting which became perhaps the artistic symbol of an entire bloody century.

On April 26, 1937 aircraft of the German Condor Legion and supporting Italian forces unleashed a two hour aerial bombardment of the Spanish Basque market town of Guernica.  The Nazi and Fascist “volunteers” were supporting the so-called Loyalist forces of General Fredrico Franco against the Republicans, a loose alliance of anarcho-syndicalist unionists, Social Democrats, Communists, democrats, and Basque Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. 

In addition to supporting a fellow Fascist, the Germans and Italians viewed the war as a laboratory to test new weapons and tactics.  Guernica, a civilian population center without direct military value, was targeted because it was a cultural center of the Basque region, which was firmly on the Republican side of the war.  The aim was to terrorize and demoralize the population that supported troops in the field.  

Guernica after the bombing.

The bombing commenced about 4:30 PM on a Monday.  The first wave of planes hit bridges and roads leading in and out of the city.  General Wolfram von Richthofen, commander of the Condors, reported heavy smoke shrouded the city when flights of heavy Junker bombers came over obscuring targets, so the planes simply dumped their bombs on the center of the city, destroying most of the homes and buildings there.  Subsequent waves dropped incendiaries creating an inferno, which he officially reported “resulted in complete annihilation,” of anyone below. 

He claimed, however, that most residents were out of town because of a holiday or had time to flee.  Reports on the ground contradict that claim.  Many residents were in the center of town for a market day when the attack began and were unable to flee because the bridges were destroyed and the roads blocked with rubble.  

The dead in the Market after the Nazi air raid.

The attack was the first systematic aerial attack in force on a civilian population center.  Similar attacks behind the lines of opposing armies would become a standard tactic of the Nazi blitzkrieg of World War II. 

The fate of the town became an international cause célèbre.  Spanish-born painter Pablo Picasso was working in Paris on a commission from the Republican government for the 1937 Paris International Exhibition. He scrapped original plans and began sketching a mammoth mural commemorating the raid on Guernica.  The 11 foot by 25½ foot painting in stark black, white, and gray captured the horror of the raid in a Cubist style—a screaming woman leans from a window with an oil lamp, an injured horse whinnies in pain, a mother clasps her dead infant. 

After the victory of Franco’s forces, the painting was sent to the United States at Picasso’s request.  It formed the centerpiece of a Picasso exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA.)  During and after the war it was shown across the U.S., in Latin America, and Europe before returning to the MoMA for another Picasso retrospective, where it stayed until 1981. 

Picasso’s will had stipulated that the painting could not be displayed in Spain until it was rid of the fascist dictatorship and restored to a Republic.  He also stipulated that once returned it must be exhibited in the national art gallery, the Museo del Prado in Madrid.  After Franco died in 1978, ten years after Picasso, the reluctant MoMA finally allowed the painting to be sent to the Prado in 1981. 

In 1992 it was moved to Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía along with most of the rest of the Prado’s Twentieth Century collection.  It can be seen there today. 

Guernica, the town and the painting, remain potent symbols of modern war’s brutality.  The painting was often used by Vietnam protestors.  A tapestry reproduction hung for years at the United Nations in New York at the entrance of the Security Council Room.  

Photos of Secretary of State Colin Powell speaking in front of the covered Guernica tapestry in the United Nations Security Council are perhaps not so mysteriously hard to find.  This painting literally pulls back the curtain on the hypocrisy. 

In February 2003, as the United States was about to launch its Shock and Awe air bombardment of Bagdad, the tapestry was covered by a curtain to prevent embarrassment to Secretary of State Colin Powell as he laid out the case for war against Iraq.  In 2009 the tapestry was permanently removed from display at the United Nations and sent to London’s Whitechapel Galley occupying the same space where the painting was displayed in 1939.