The anguish and horror on the faces of the small group of people assembled in front of Guernica at Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, were almost a real-life mirror image of the 1937 Picasso mural.
How many paintings illustrating the grotesqueness of war and the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians can make their audience crawl with an outpouring of visual disgust?
Non, I imagine, to the extent of Guernica, where they start contorting their cheeks, jaws, mouths and brows, as wide unbelieving eyes roam around this iconic mural. Watching these pained faces was almost as enjoyable as seeing the greatest painting by the greatest ever artist…
Guernica: On the afternoon of April 26, 1937, squadrons of German bombers attacked the market town of Guernica, about 40 miles from Bilbao. The purported reason for the bombing was to destroy a bridge on the outskirts of the town, but an inferno of smoke and fire was unleashed in the town and thousands of people died on that spring afternoon. The town of Guernica was, in the words of Luftwaffe commander Goering, an opportunity to put his young air force to the test. Two months after the bombing, Picasso took an artist’s revenge with his mural Guernica, painted for the Spanish Pavilion at Paris International Exposition.
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