P.S. Picasso, Photography, and Guernica

“It would be very interesting to preserve photographically, not the stages, but the metamorphoses of a picture."

In two weeks, we will mark the anniversary of the German bombing of Guernica on April 26, 1937.¹ Spain was in the throes of a civil war that the town of Guernica had not joined. Thus, Guernica was defenseless when the Luftwaffe experimented on the Basque town to see if their weapons had the power to decimate an entire city. When the attack concluded, over fifteen-hundred civilians lay dead in their annihilated town. The man who orchestrated the attack, Colonel Wolfram von Richtofen, described the bombings in his journal as “absolutely fabulous…a complete technical success.”²

Photograph of Guernica after the bombing in 1937

At the time of the bombing, Picasso was working on a painting titled “The Studio: the Painter and His Model,” which had been commissioned by the Republican government of Spain for the International Exhibition of Arts and Sciences in Paris. However, as soon as Picasso saw photographs of Guernica, strewn with corpses, he set to work on a new project. He would represent the destructive force of war in what would become his most famous painting: Guernica.

Guernica, 1937, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Picasso’s partner, Dora Maar, a photographer and painter, documented the entire composition, giving us the first photographic representation of a work of art in process. So let’s explore how Picasso conceived of Guernica and how he modified it to become the work we recognize today.

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