One Work: Guernica

Imagine just going about your business, getting on with life, when suddenly your world is ripped apart by terror from the skies. By an enemy you never stood a chance against.

And they knew it.

People are quick to talk about valour and bravery. Honour and courage in war.

Are any of those things present in Guernica?

I won't go into detail about Picasso's choices of imagery—the lightbulb hanging ominously above the horrific scene, or the monochromatic palette that drains away any warmth or comfort.

What I will say is this: Picasso does not romanticise war. He doesn't attribute glory to sacrifice or nobility to death.

Rather, he tears down those illusions, much like the bombs tore away the illusion of peaceful life the people of Guernica believed they had.

Using his own tools—his own kind of weaponry, his own magic—he distorted and abstracted the scene until it became virtually impossible to ignore.

Where Van Gogh satirises and sardonically points to the inevitability of death—as though it simply awaits us all as another stop on life's journey—Picasso is fuelled by rage. He reminds us that death is not always inevitable. Sometimes it is chosen for us by other human beings.

Guernica, one of the twentieth century's most powerful anti-war paintings, was inspired by the bombing of the small Basque town of the same name. The target wasn't an army base or a weapons factory. It was an ordinary town filled with ordinary people.

There is nothing noble about that.

There is nothing funny about that.

Irony works—until it doesn't. What happens when you can't iron away the horror? When it clings to you like gunpowder and shrapnel?

Author's Note: This piece is connected to Veva Jacques' One Work: Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette by Vincent van Gogh.

Van Gogh's sardonic meditation on mortality led me to Picasso's Guernica, where death is no longer inevitable or ironic, but inflicted by human hands.