Picasso's War: The Destruction of Guernica, and the Masterpiece That Changed the World (review)

To some, Picasso's Guernica is perhaps the epitome of Spanish art, a touchstone of a people and a time, both reflective of an age and transcendent of historicism. The epic, red-blooded qualities of the Spanish hero—by turns dashing, despairing and fully quizzical—have also tended to be overwhelmingly artistic in nature. Think of the rampant, wild imagination of Cervantes's Don Quixote or the quixotic yearnings and failings of a Luis Buñuel protagonist. In Russell Martin's well-crafted book, Picasso himself is the beguiling type of the Spanish hero, a seeker of deathless ideals. Martin traces the developments that resulted in Picasso's most famous commission and the work that was born out of a struggle of a world at war and the passions of Spain's beloved master.

Martin's Picasso's War is a book on a scholarly subject, addressed from a layperson's point of view, with enough detail to sustain a reader better acquainted with the subject matter. Beginning with the German bombing of Gernika in the Basque countryside of Spain, Martin describes the events and topical inspiration that soon had Picasso, living in Paris as he had for more than thirty years, thinking about the composition of a painting that would be displayed at the Paris fair in 1937 (the first of its several stops around the globe).

For those seeing Guernica for the first time in person, its sheer size is simply overwhelming. The animated, almost cartoonish images of broken bodies, displaced limbs and faces caught with their expressions in the precise moment of terror, all contrasted with the symbol of the Spanish bull, make for a juxtaposition of dystopian finality. Martin is adept at untangling the political motivations and cover-ups, the surfeit of evil, that transpired on and around the day Gernika was bombed to ashes. And yet the spirit of Picasso in creating the painting is lost to us, vague and untouchable despite Martin's supply of dates for drafts, modifications and overhauls. The painting itself has led a life of its own, meeting resistance and criticism, even being vandalized at MOMA, and finally settling down to its status as perhaps the best-known modern painter's best-known creation. In its vastness, its rich, symbolic topography—its unholy holiness, if you will—Guernica, as one gleans from Martin's text, is also, quite plainly, a reminder of all wars that have gone before and a portent of all wars yet to come.