The former Madrid Hospital, now the Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in the centre of Madrid, houses one of the most iconic paintings of the 20th century: Guernica by Pablo Picasso. Flanked by two museum attendants keeping a watchful eye on the visitors, the painting depicts the aerial attack on the Basque town of the same name during the Spanish Civil War. Almost 90 years after it was created, it remains a powerful anti-war manifesto. Angry and anguished, it is both an accusation (with the perpetrators of the attack invisible outside the borders of the canvas), and an act of mourning for the lives lost.
The aerial bombardment of Guernica by the German Condor Legion and Italian fascist forces, which caused the death of over a thousand civilians, is widely considered the first to deliberately target civilians. This dubious honour, though, belongs to the French colonial air force in Indochina, which in 1930 used its Potez Biplanes to mow down about 700 peaceful protesters near the provincial town of Vinh. The real significance of Guernica is that it served as a bloody dress rehearsal for the horrors Nazi Germany would inflict on the rest of the world only two years later.
The genesis of Picasso’s Guernica has undoubtedly contributed to the painting’s legendary status. Picasso accepted the offer from the Spanish Republican Government to contribute a painting for the World Fair in Paris in 1937, at a time when the Civil War had entered its second year and the Republican forces were in retreat. Outraged by the attack, which occurred only a month before the commission, he decided to make it his topic.
Helped by his lover, Dora Maas, a distinguished photographer in her own right and said to be the inspiration for his choice to only use black and white paints, Picasso set up a studio in the Rue des Grands Augustine in Paris large enough to accommodate the canvas and created the painting in only 36 days. When first exhibited at the Spanish pavilion, the reception was mixed but its reputation as a work prescient of the carnage of the Second World War quickly grew.
Following the World Fair, Guernica toured Scandinavia before being exhibited at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. In a historical irony, it arrived in the UK on the day of the Munich Agreement which ushered in the Second World War. After Franco’s victory the painting got shipped to the United States where it ended up for many decades in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Picasso had famously declared that Guernica must not be displayed in Spain during Franco’s lifetime, and it was shown for the first time in Madrid in 1981, six years after the dictator’s death, drawing almost one million visitors in the first year of being exhibited.
At the Reina Sofia, Guernica is the centrepiece of a suite of rooms preparing the visitor for the painting with smaller collections of political art of the 1930s, posters of the Spanish Civil War, war photography by Frank Cappa and his contemporaries, but also choice examples of the predominant art movements of the period, Surrealism and Cubism.
Despite its large scale of about 3.5 by 7.5 metres, the picture appears crowded. Animals and human figures painted in cubist contortions with their mouths agape with inaudible cries speak to a world of confusion and agony. Its monochrome colour palette of greys and blacks adds a sombre and stark note, giving it ‘the urgency of a newspaper photo’ as a Guardian editorial once noted.
For the contemporary visitor, Guernica emanates an aura that its countless reproductions cannot emulate. This undoubtedly is due to its sheer size, which threatens to overwhelm the viewer. While imbued with the brutal history of the last century, it sadly feels contemporary again, resonating with the images of atrocities against civilians from more recent wars, not least in Ukraine, and particularly Gaza.
At the centre of the painting is a horse, rising above the carnage of entwined bodies, neck elongated and writhing in agony. The image of the horse reminded me of the famous anecdote involving the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. One cold January morning in 1889, he witnesses a horse being savagely whipped by its owner. Nietzsche rushes towards the animal, throws his arms around its neck, tears streaming down his face, repeating the phrase ‘I understand. I understand’, before bystanders manage to drag him away.
Although it is questionable whether the incident really happened that way, the anecdote has been widely used to illustrate Nietzsche’s descent into mental illness. But the episode also points to the deeper truth: that unmediated exposure to cruelty and suffering can rarely be sustained without adverse psychological effects. Now known as ‘secondary traumatic stress’ (STS), it is a condition common among aid workers or paramedics and forces emotional withdrawal to protect sufferers from a breakdown of Nietzschean proportions.
Artworks like Guernica though, allow us to look and to feel, because they mediate atrocities through aesthetic choices. This is the power of imagery. It also applies, albeit to a less obvious extent, to photographs such as the ones that reach us from Gaza, which are also characterised by the subjective view of the photographers.
Another anecdote: A Gestapo officer searches Picasso’s apartment and studio in occupied Paris in the 1940s. The officer spots a photograph of Guernica and asks Picasso ‘Did you do that?’ to which he answers ‘No, you did.’
The anecdote highlights the dialectic nature of images of war. Images heighten and transform suffering, but at the same time, and necessarily so, remove its immediacy. This creates a distance between us and the atrocity, thus allowing us to look closely, to engage with the brutality of war. In doing so these images sow the seeds of political change. It is one of the reasons why we need more political art. Which countries these days would have the courage to commission another Guernica? Certainly not Australia, it seems, judging by the sad debacle of first nominating, then cancelling and finally, and begrudgingly, reinstating artist Khaled Sabsadi and curator Michael Dagostino to represent us at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
By the same token, a painting like Guernica or the harrowing photographs from the war zone that is Gaza are always in danger of being inconsequential, precisely because the gap between reality and representation makes it easier to ignore them. Picasso himself, for example, did not face any repercussions for his painting, nor for challenging the Gestapo officer. Seeing, becoming aware, precedes action, but not as an inevitable cause-and-effect relationship. Speaking truth to power is not enough if it does not result in genuine transformation.
The Spanish Civil War was extensively documented and is often considered the birth place of modern war photography. In contrast, the Israeli military has blocked access to Gaza by international media and has killed at least 189 local journalists, which has resulted in a comparatively small number of photographs to emerge from the territory. Despite this, the tide of public opinion is slowly changing and has dragged a reluctant Labor Government into some minor and largely symbolic action. Yet, our response to the few images of starving children, killed aid workers and other civilians, and the wanton destruction of infrastructure, still seems woefully inadequate given the genocidal realities on the ground.
It is worth considering the lessons from history here. In 1938, the European and Australian non-interventionist and appeasement policies ensured the defeat of the Republic and ushered in decades of Franco’s military dictatorship. Similar policies run the risk of causing something infinitely worse in Gaza. This highlights the even greater need now than during Picasso’s time for art to document and illuminate the violence perpetrated to achieve maximum political impact.