Bulletin
of the
Atomic
Scientists
Feature
Guernica: Horror and
inspiration
Richard Rhodes
Abstract
In this essay, the author describes how the destruction wrought by the indiscriminate firebombing of a small
Basque town during the Spanish Civil War came to inspire Pablo PicassoÕs most famous painting, Guernica.
Keywords
Basque, Gernika, Guernica, Pablo Picasso, Spanish Civil War
here is a room. Medium-sized, com-
T fortably furnished. Curtains at the
window. An armchair. A table
with a bowl of fruit. A saintÕs portrait or
a print of flowers on the wall. Monsters
outside, to be sure, but not in the room.
The room is PicassoÕs room, argues
the art historian T. J. Clark, the charac-
teristic space of the 19th-century bour-
geois society into which the great
Spanish artist was born (Clark, 2013).
Picasso hardly painted anything else.
Someone asked him once why he seldom
painted landscapes. ÒI never saw any,Ó he
answered. ÒIÕve always lived inside,
myselfÓ (Clark, 2013: 214).
But if Picasso and many other 20th-
century artists lived in that comfortable
room, says Clark, lived within bourgeois
society (however much they mocked it),
Òthey felt this society was coming to an
endÓ (Clark, 2013: 18). And of course it
wasÑin pathological ideologies, in mass
IT IS 5 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT
®
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
69(6) 19–25
! The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0096340213508672
http://thebulletin.sagepub.com
killing, in war and wreckage and death.
ÒThe Century of Violence,Ó Clark remem-
bers an old textbook calling it, and adds,
Òthe time of human smokeÓ (Clark, 2013: 14).
In the 20th century, the monsters
forced their way into the room. At least
insofar as one of PicassoÕs paintings is
concernedÑperhaps his best painting,
certainly his best knownÑthe problem
then was how to represent the catastro-
phe of that invasion without trivializing
it. The answer Picasso found, hard-won
over months first of resistance and then
of experimentation, was Guernica.
The subject of PicassoÕs painting was a
bombing. Until World War II, it was the
most notorious bombing of the century.
The main attack against the small Basque
town of Gernika (as the Basques spell it)
came on April 26, 1937 at 6:30 p.m., half an
hour before sunset: three squadrons of
German Junker 52 trimotor bombers,
the clattery square-sided planes the
20
Figure 1. Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937
Republicans called tranviasÑtrams,
streetcars. They were reliable aircraft,
with fuselages of corrugated duralumin
and two bomb bays capable of carrying
3,300 pounds of ordnance, the heaviest
bombers that Germany had sent to
Spain in support of the Nationalist
rebels whom the traitor General Fran-
cisco Franco commanded. The planes
were loaded that clear April night with
40 to 50 tons of bombs. The Junker 52s,
writes the Spanish historian Cesar Vidal,
Òmade their attacks arranged in succes-
sive wedge formations of three airplanes,
which meant an attack front of about 150
metersÓÑ500 feet wide (Vidal, 1997: 2).
Carpet-bombing took its name from such
wide attack fronts, planes advancing in
formation across a town like a carpet
being unrolled.
Most of the buildings in Gernika were
constructed of wood above the ground
floor. For that reason, the Junkers had
been loaded with both high-explosive
bombs and incendiariesÑthe HEs to
make kindling, as Kurt Vonnegut once
explained to me from his similar experi-
ence in Dresden, the incendiaries to
light the fires. The HEs were 100- and
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 69(6)
500-pounders. The lightweight incen-
diariesÑtubes 14 inches long and 2
inches in diameter, made of Elektron
(an alloy of 92 percent magnesium, 5 per-
cent aluminum and 3 percent zinc) filled
with thermiteÑwere packed in drop-
pable dispensers, each holding 36 bombs.
Thousands of Elektron incendiaries fell
on Gernika that night, skittering down
like icicles broken off a roofline. Pure
metal burning at 2,200 degrees Celsius,
they were almost impossible to quench.
The Australian journalist Noel Monks
describes the aftermath (Monks, 1955: 97):
[On arrival] I . . . was immediately pressed into
service by some Basque soldiers collecting
charred bodies that the flames had passed
over. Some of the soldiers were sobbing like
children. There were flames and smoke and
grit, and the smell of burning human flesh
was nauseating. Houses were collapsing into
the inferno.
In the Plaza, surrounded almost by a wall of
fire, were about a hundred refugees. They were
wailing and weeping and rocking to and fro . . . .
Most of GuernicaÕs streets began or ended at
the Plaza. It was impossible to go down many of
them, because they were walls of flame. Debris
was piled high. I could see shadowy forms,
some large, some just ashes. I moved round to
the back of the Plaza among survivors. They
Rhodes
had the same story to tell, aeroplanes, bullets,
bombs, fire.
The town was destroyed. In a popula-
tion that day of between 5,000 and 10,000
residents and refugees, between 300 and
1,000 died. Hundreds more were injured.
The Condor Legion fighters machine-
gunned the people trying to escape
along the roads and even the sheep graz-
ing in the fields outside of town.
ÒWhen news of the bombing of the
town of Guernica reached us in Paris,
[Picasso] was completely upset,Ó the
photographer Man Ray recalled. ÒUntil
then, and since the First World War, he
had never reacted so violently to world
or outside affairsÓ (Baldassari, 2006:
166). Picasso had at last found his subject
for a mural the Republican government
of Spain had commissioned in January
for the Spanish Pavilion at the upcoming
1937 Paris WorldÕs Fair.
ÒA thousand incendiary bombs
dropped by the aircraft of Hitler and
Mussolini reduce to ashes the city of
Guernica,Ó LÕHumanit blazoned across
Paris on the morning of April 28 (Baldas-
sari, 2006: 167). Ce Soir, the new evening
newspaper founded by the French Com-
munist Party and edited by PicassoÕs
friend Louis Aragon, published photo-
graphs of the smoking Gernika ruins on
April 30; Picasso told one of his biog-
raphers, Pierre Daix, that the Ce Soir
photographs had been the immediate
impetus for the mural he would paint
(Daix, 1993: 250).
On May 1, 1937, Picasso outlined his
initial conceptions of Guernica in quick
pencil gestures on blue paper in a spa-
cious Paris studio at 7 rue des Grands
Augustins. The form of the finished
painting was already there in that first
gesture drawing, but to test his ideas
21
the artist explored alternatives in a
series of more than 40 such studies and
sketches over the next week.
And then suddenly, on Sunday, May 9,
the whole canvas emerged in a big com-
position study, drawn in pencil on a two-
by-four-foot sheet crowded with figures.
Reading from the viewerÕs right to left: a
burning roof above a partly opened door;
a muscular arm with a raised fist extend-
ing from a lower window of the next
building; a mother and her dead baby; a
dying horse; below the horse a dead sol-
dier; behind the horse a wagon wheel;
behind the wagon wheel a building with
a tile roof, from the upper window of
which extends a womanÕs head and arm
holding a torch; to the left of the building
a bull, its body in left profile but its head
turned back to the scene of death and look-
ing surprised; other buildings behind the
bull, from an upper window of which
extends another raised fist; a woman sit-
ting in a doorway looking stricken, hold-
ing the bodies of a dead man and a dead
womanÑa jumble of figures and events.
At this point, Picasso may have been con-
sidering a crowd scene in a burning town.
Many of the figures he would use in his
finished mural painting are present, but
the composition doesnÕt yet cohere.
Tuesday, May 11, brought major
change. Confident now that he knew
where he was going, Picasso stretched
canvas on a full-sized wooden frame,
11½ feet high by 25½ feet wide, and set
it up in the big attic space. It was so large
that it had to be jammed in at a tilt under
the sloping attic rafters and painted with
long-handled brushes, sometimes reach-
ing from a stepladder. With black paint
and a narrow brush on that vast canvas,
Picasso drew in the first full version of
the painting. ÒPicasso worked fast,Ó
writes his biographer Roland Penrose,
22
Òand the outline of the first version was
sketched in almost as soon as the canvas
was upÓ (Penrose, 1981: 302).
A number of books and essays have
described the process Picasso followed
in creating Guernica, painting and over-
painting until his composition cohered.
Less well known are the many visual ref-
erences to other paintings that he layered
into the work. He did so, I think, to
anchor and extend Guernica into history,
to deepen it with the visual equivalent of
allusion and metaphor. Almost every
image in the painting has its near
double and triple in previous works by
a range of well- and little-known masters,
adding meaning much as the previous
uses of a word, back historically to its
first appearance in print, add meaning
to its present sense.
The best-documented example of this
layering process is the figure of the light-
bearerÑthe woman in the window. She
is femaleÑPicasso added breasts at the
window to make sure that was clearÑ
and in the final painting resembles his
mistress Marie-Thrse. (In some of his
earlier sketches, Picasso had given the
lightbearer his other mistress Dora
MaarÕs hair and features insteadÑDora
Maar was his partner in the production
of the work, encouraging him, sometimes
assisting in the painting itself and photo-
graphing its stages for what may have
been the first time in the history of art.)
One source of the lightbearer image is
private: Dora Maar used to extend a lamp
out of an upper-story window to see who
was knocking when guests arrived after
dark at PicassoÕs country estate at Bois-
geloup, northeast of Paris (Museum of
Modern Art, 1947: 67).
From there the trail leads to PicassoÕs
own work, in particular the Minotauro-
machy of 1935, one of GuernicaÕs
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 69(6)
precursors, in which a virginal young
girl holds out a candle to give pause to a
huge-headed minotaur that has just
killed a female matador with a sword.
Peter Paul RubensÕs 1638 The Horrors
of War is another evident precursor
to PicassoÕs painting; if you reverse
RubensÕs image, it depicts, from right to
left, a partly opened door, a woman
reaching up with both arms in horror, a
nude woman reaching left across a sol-
dier in armor with an upraised fist, and
various figures of soldiers standing and
fallen, one of whom holds up a torch.
Picasso clearly associated the soldierÕs
upraised arm with the raised arm holding
a hammer and a sickle that he had drawn
once in disgust on the front page of the
right-wing newspaper Paris-soir and had
included in early versions of Guernica.
As the painting developed, he gradually
replaced that propagandistic arm with a
representation first of the sun and then of
a sun-like eye with a light bulb for a pupil.
That representation in turn clearly
alludes to the Ojo de Dios of some Span-
ish churches, the Eye of God painted or
inlaid on the interior of the dome that
looked down on the congregants and
saw and judged all, much as does the
sun-light-bulb-eye in Guernica.
Another torch-bearer to whom the
one in Guernica alludes is the winged
figure of Justice in Pierre-Paul PrudhonÕs
c. 1805 Justice and Divine Vengeance Pur-
suing Crime, which includes a fallen male
nude bleeding from a chest wound and a
criminal running away to the left. A less
obvious allusion, but a likely one, is to
Jacob JordaensÕs 1642 Diogenes Searching
for an Honest Man, which bears compos-
itional similarities to PicassoÕs paint-
ingÑDiogenes at the center holding up
a lantern, a figure on the left looking out
of an upper window, cattle looking on
Rhodes
below where Picasso would paint a bull,
a horizontal format. The story of Dioge-
nes going about in daylight with a lantern
looking for an honest man resonates
with the lightbearerÕs action in Guernica,
holding out a lamp to reveal the horror
of the bombing of Gernika to the world.
Finally, and perhaps most surpris-
ingly, the lightbearer with her lantern
and her spiky hand at the window
evokes the Statue of Liberty with her
torch and spiky nimbus of light, a statue
constructed in France and donated to the
United States in 1886. The Spanish poet
and critic Juan Larrea, who first com-
mented on the connection, believed the
allusion to Liberty to be unconscious on
PicassoÕs part, but there were at least
three smaller-scale but still monumental
models of the Statue of Liberty in Paris.
ItÕs probable that Picasso had seen them
all, and his visual memory was immense.
Picasso worked intensely on Guernica
day and night and through the weekends
throughout the month of May and into
June; cigarette butts litter the attic floor
in Dora MaarÕs sequence of photographs
of the work in progress.
In May as well, the Spanish artist
responded to rumors circulating in
Paris that he was pro-Franco with the
first public statement of his political
beliefs (OÕBrian, 1976: 321):
The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction
against the people, against freedom. My
whole life as an artist has been nothing more
than a continuous struggle against reaction and
the death of art. How could anybody think for
a moment that I could be in agreement with
reaction and death? When the rebellion
began, the legally elected and democratic
republican government of Spain appointed
me director of the Prado Museum, a post
which I immediately accepted. In the panel
on which I am working which I shall call Guer-
nica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly
23
express my abhorrence of the military caste
which has sunk Spain in a sea of suffering and
death.
ÒThe mark of the actual eventÓ in
PicassoÕs painting, writes Daix, meaning
the bombing of Gernika, Òis in the horse,
of trompe lÕoeil newspaper collage, and
in the immense canvas, which like the
illustrated journals and magazines of
the time, is almost without colorÓ (Daix,
1993: 251). Which is true but incomplete.
The canvas is scaled like a movie screen,
and the figures it projectsÑblack-and-
white as films still were, as newsreels
certainly were, in 1937Ñare imaged not
at normal scale but larger than life size, as
films image their moving subjects.
Picasso enjoyed motion pictures; he
saw them not only as entertainment but
also as a new technology, a new art form,
and he borrowed from them as he bor-
rowed from every process and technol-
ogy that came his way. The recording
camera implied in GuernicaÑthe eye of
the viewerÑstands on the ground. It
doesnÕt see the planes shuttling over-
head: It registers the reactions of the ani-
mals and the people below.
All the human beings still alive in Guer-
nica are women. ÒThe horror and inquisi-
tiveness of the women,Ó Clark comments,
ÒÑtheir bearing witness even at the point
of extinctionÑhave been given sufficient
substance [in the painting]. What fixes
and freezes them is felt as a mechanism,
a rack. The bomb is the abstractness of
warÑwar on paper, war as war rooms
imagine it, war as Ôpolitics by other
meansÕÑperfected. Here is what happens
when it comes to earthÓ (Clark, 2013: 270).
ÒA machine for suffering,Ó Picasso once
called woman in a remark that some have
judged to be misogynistic, but which was
also a secret revealed: ÒI am a woman,Ó
24
the Spanish artist, late in life, lowered his
guard enough to admitÑthat is, a machine
for suffering as well (Clark, 2013: 225). A
woman, yes, and a man, and an artist: the
bull in Guernica, staring ahead with an
aurochÕs opaque carriageÑÒhere a noble
adversary,Ó says Daix, Òturning away from
the killing which humiliates him,ÓÑthe
bull has PicassoÕs eyes (Oppler, 1988: 97).
ÒPicasso continued his picture during
May and June,Ó the Catalan architect
Josep Llu’s Sert recalls, Òand one day he
brought it to the Pavilion. I think it was
late June. I donÕt remember the date
exactly. He brought it there. He was in
love with his picture and he really con-
sidered it very important and a part of
himself. . . . He brought the Guernica to
the pavilion. He put it on the concrete
floor and put it on a stretcher and put it
on the wallÓ (Freedberg, 1986: 661).
Part of the power of PicassoÕs great
painting is its ambiguity. Its events take
place simultaneously inside and outside
of the interior space it seems at first to
define; its foreground and background
overlap. Is it a town square, the feria
the people of Gernika were closing
down at the end of the day when the
German bombers struck? Is it the
anchorage of a 19th-century bourgeois
interior as well? ItÕs both, and the mon-
sters have penetrated and overwhelmed
its fragile security, leaving behind a dead
infant, a mother screaming in grief, a
decapitated dead soldier, a spear-pierced
dying horse, and a woman falling terri-
fied from a burning roof.
Picasso suspected, but he could not
know, that his painting was a vision not
only of the present but also of the future.
The bombing of Gernika was the first
intentional aerial destruction of a city, a
city targeted not for its military valueÑit
had noneÑbut deliberately to terrorize
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 69(6)
its civilian population. The technology
would evolve to terrorize the Germans
in turn at Hamburg and Berlin and Dres-
den; Britain and the United Sates would
drop a total of 2.8 million tons of bombs
on German and Italian cities during World
War II, producing a death toll in Germany
alone of 400,000 to 600,000 lives. And
then Hiroshima, and then Nagasaki.
PicassoÕs only weapon was painting.
The clear-eyed young woman with her
torch and then her lantern had already
taken her place at the window in his
first Guernica sketch. The raised fist
with its hammer and sickle went early.
Picasso gradually overpainted it in Guer-
nicaÕs successive iterations, replacing it
with a glaring sun. Then the sun itself
acquired a pupil, a light bulb like the
lights Dora Maar set up to photograph
the paintingÑthus a resonance, the light
that illuminated the painting illuminating
the light that illuminated the massacre.
What else is there in the world with
which to confront terror except light,
light and the naked truth? Even today,
unsuspecting visitors walk into the gal-
lery devoted to Guernica at MadridÕs
Reina Sofia museum and burst into tears.
Funding
This essay received no specific grant from any fund-
ing agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.
References
Baldassari A (2006) Picasso: Life with Dora Maar,
Love and War, 1935”1945. Paris: Flammarion.
Clark TJ (2013) Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to
Guernica. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Daix P (1993) Picasso: Life and Art. New York:
HarperCollins.
Freedberg CB (1986) The Spanish Pavilion at the Paris
WorldÕs Fair. 2 Vols, New York: Garland.
Monks N (1955) Eyewitness. London: Frederick
Muller.
Rhodes 25

Museum of Modern Art (1947) Symposium on Guer- Author biography

nica. Transcript. New York.
OÕBrian P (1976) Picasso: A Biography. New York:
Richard Rhodes is the author of four volumes
WW Norton. of nuclear history, one of which, The Making of
Oppler EC (ed.) (1988) PicassoÕs Guernica. New York: the Atomic Bomb (Simon and Schuster, 1987),
WW Norton. won a Pulitzer Prize, and 20 other works of fic-
Penrose R (1981) Picasso: His Life and Work, 3rd ed. tion, history, and memoir.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Vidal C (1997) La Destrucci—n de Guernica, trans.
Peter Miller. Chapter 9, Guernica, demolished.
Available at: http://www.buber.net/Basque/
History/guernica-ix.html.