Images of war: Picasso'sGuernica

Abstract

Picasso painted Guernica following the bombing by German aeroplanes of the Basque town of that name during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39. The painting provoked controversy and remains controversial. Its symbolism puzzles because of the discrepancy between its central images and the bombing. This paper resolves the puzzle first by distinguishing “Picasso's Guernica”, as a symbolic object in itself, from "Guernica”, as a composition of symbolic images, and arguing that it is the first, not the second, that represents the bombing; and secondly by drawing on an anthropology of Spanish culture to interpret the images.

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