GUERNICA
 -2-

Guernica is a small town in the Bask country in the North of Spain. During the Spanish civil war the Spanish leader Franco asked the befriended leader of Germany, Hitler, for help. This resulted in the bombing of this quiet town by the German airforce in 1937, which the Germans saw as a good rehearsal for the real work that was to come later.
Pablo Picasso was so overwhelmed by the horror of this massacre, that he made his worldfamous painting not much later and named it "Guernica". It was first exhibited in Paris during the World Exposition and is now in the National Museum in Madrid.

I must have been 14 or 15, when I first saw the painting during an exhibition in the Municipal Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam. It was not only the size -the painting measures 3.50 by 7.80 meter- but more the depicted mutilation of life that made an everlasting impression.

-1-  -2-  -3-  -4-  -5-  -6-
ARTHOME or ARCHIVES