Guernica and “Picasso’s War”

Travel Blog  •  Jim Benning  •  03.24.06 | 9:35 AM ET

imageSince our contributor Ben Keene featured the town of Guernica as his Place of the Week today, I thought I’d mention a terrific book about the attack on the town and the extraordinary Picasso painting of the same name. It’s Russell Martin’s Picasso’s War: The Destruction of Guernica and the Masterpiece That Changed the World, published in 2003. Martin recalls the Nazis’ attack on the Spanish village, Picasso’s work on the painting, its move to New York’s Museum of Modern Art until the death of Franco, and then its post-Franco return to Spain aboard an Iberia Airlines flight in 1981.

imageRegarding that day in 1981, Russell wrote:

THE WAR HAS ENDED were the words that headlined the national newspaper El País the following day above a lead story about Guernica’s successfully uneventful transfer from the Museum of Modern Art to its new home in Madrid; and the headline bore a remarkably important symbolic truth: nothing in the forty-two years since the civil war’s guns were stilled, nothing in the long and terrible reign of Francisco Franco, ever had signaled a deeply shared and satisfying conclusion of hostilities in the way this single painting’s repatriation to Spain had done, its complex and profoundly disturbing images of horror at last a perfect symbol of peace.

The painting now resides in Madrid, at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. But as Wikipedia’s Guernica page notes, some Basque nationalists would like to see it moved to the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum.