On 26 April 1937 the German Luftwaffe and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria bombed the Basque town of Guernica from the air, in support of Franco's Nationalist forces; the three-hour attack destroyed the civilian population and the town centre. It is considered the first major civilian target of modern aerial bombing in Europe. Pablo Picasso had been commissioned by the Republican Spanish government for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris International Exposition; he chose Guernica as the subject and completed the painting in some five weeks, between 1 May and 4 June.

The canvas is 349 × 776 cm — almost the size of a Salon history painting. The subject is a contemporary event; the language is Picasso's mature Cubism: multiple angles, fragmented bodies, lights that are not real but symbolic. There is no colour — only black, white, and a few greys; the graphic register of newspaper photography or news reporting is recalled. Each image is open to more than one reading: the screaming horse (the people, or military loss?), the bull (fascism, or Spanish virility?), the woman with the lamp, the mother holding her dead child (the centuries-old *Pietà* tradition).

After the 1937 exhibition the painting toured Europe and the United States as an anti-war political instrument. Picasso stipulated that the painting would not return to Spain until democracy was established in Franco's Spain; *Guernica* waited at MoMA from 1939 to 1981. Only after Franco's death in 1975 did it move to Madrid in 1981; today it has its own room at the Reina Sofía Museum.

*Guernica* is the twentieth century's strongest proof that art can be political; at the same time, it shows that modernist abstraction, under certain conditions, can bear witness more sharply than a news report.