The Great Guernica Fraud

If you visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York, you cannot miss the gigantic Picasso painting Guernica, suitably displayed in isolation, so that the visitor can make it an object of contemplation and even reverence. There it is, with its tortured horses and funny lightbulbs and weird distortions—the idea is that we live in a violently distorted time, and that violence is being done to truth and nature, and that the innocent are suffering. Picasso painted Guernica in black and white, presumably because into a world so violated no color—no joy, no variety, no humor—could enter. As we will see, there is a tremendous irony here, but it is too awful an irony to disclose at once.

If you visit the Museum of Modern Art on a given afternoon, you may even view the Guernica painting with a group of elementary schoolchildren under the benign supervision of their teacher. Standing before the painting, Picasso’s “masterpiece,” she will patiently tell them the story. Here is the accepted version, and it is a moving one. You can find it told very effectively in Chapter 51 of Hugh Thomas’ The Spanish Civil War, a book of near-official status. “Guernica is a small town,” begins Thomas, “lying in a valley ten kilometers from the sea and thirty from Bilbao.” There it is, a “small town,” like many another. But then, so the story goes, on April 26, 1937, a market day, while the “small farmers” were bringing in their goods, the “church bells” announced an air raid. Wave after wave of German bombers flew over Guernica, blasting it off the map: their reason— an experiment in terror. They wished to test the effect of terror-bombing on a civilian population. The modern era of terror was born: Guernica!

About the Author

Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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If you visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York, you cannot miss the gigantic Picasso painting Guernica, suitably displayed in isolation, so that the visitor can make it an object of contemplation and even reverence. There it is, with its tortured horses and funny lightbulbs and weird distortions—the idea is that we live in a violently distorted time, and that violence is being done to truth and nature, and that the innocent are suffering. Picasso painted Guernica in black and white, presumably because into a world so violated no color—no joy, no variety, no humor—could enter. As we will see, there is a tremendous irony here, but it is too awful an irony to disclose at once.

If you visit the Museum of Modern Art on a given afternoon, you may even view the Guernica painting with a group of elementary schoolchildren under the benign supervision of their teacher. Standing before the painting, Picasso’s “masterpiece,” she will patiently tell them the story. Here is the accepted version, and it is a moving one. You can find it told very effectively in Chapter 51 of Hugh Thomas’ The Spanish Civil War, a book of near-official status. “Guernica is a small town,” begins Thomas, “lying in a valley ten kilometers from the sea and thirty from Bilbao.” There it is, a “small town,” like many another. But then, so the story goes, on April 26, 1937, a market day, while the “small farmers” were bringing in their goods, the “church bells” announced an air raid. Wave after wave of German bombers flew over Guernica, blasting it off the map: their reason— an experiment in terror. They wished to test the effect of terror-bombing on a civilian population. The modern era of terror was born: Guernica!