‘Picasso’s War’ is a message of peace

Picasso’s WarPicasso’s War

The Destruction of Guernica, and the Masterpiece That Changed the World

Russell Martin

Dutton: 276 pp., $23.95

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“Picasso’s War” is a fetching and well-crafted account of Pablo Picasso’s huge and astounding painting, “Guernica,” that has come to symbolize the elemental barbarism of the recently deceased 20th century.

In measured paces, Russell Martin, the author of the recent best-selling “Beethoven’s Hair,” tells how the painting sprang from the bombing by German planes during the Spanish Civil War of the ancient and nearly sacred Basque town of Guernica and the world’s horrified reaction to this first deliberate aerial attack upon civilians.

Martin deftly weaves the story of the painting into the background of the rise of Fascism and the course of the Spanish war, with all its overtones of the greater war to come. He is knowledgeable about the place of “Guernica” in the development of Picasso’s art. He recounts the painting’s long residence at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and its eventual return to Madrid in a peaceful, democratic Spain.

“Picasso’s War” could be, in short, a model of a guide to a most engaging subject -- even in tone, illuminating, deft -- indeed a painterly little book. Except for one thing: Martin must claim for the painting something it was not. It did not change the world or, as he writes, ensure that “the often uncomfortably intersecting realms of politics and art -- and of human misery and aspiration -- never would be the same again.”

Is it not enough that the painting simply is? In “Guernica,” Picasso broke no new stylistic ground for himself or for any other artist. He changed no history, stopped no massacres. He simply expressed in images of uncertain meaning, but of the greatest power, the anguish of a small town, and of an age. Surely an artist can do no more, nor should he be asked to.

Martin aptly quotes the always enigmatic Picasso as saying that his art is not propaganda, and as saying also that “no, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”

Martin’s excesses aside -- and they are few -- his book is beguiling. He tastefully works into it his own personal encounter with Spain, with Catalonia and the Basque country, as a visiting student from Phillips Andover Academy to Barcelona in 1968. A wise teacher named Angel Vilalta introduced him to the bloody history of Spain in the 1930s and its aftermath under the victorious dictator Francisco Franco.

Martin’s sympathies are with the beleaguered Spanish Republic. What democrat’s would not be? But as Martin points out, many in the world were only too willing, for too long, to believe Franco’s lie that Guernica was destroyed not by German bombers but by the defending “Reds.”

As the author knows well, the Spanish Civil War was a tangle of ideologies, idealism, opportunism, cruelty, hate, the whole panoply of human characteristics. As the Nazis and the Italians intervened on one side, the Soviet Union did on the other; both sides indulged in atrocious behavior.

But nothing like the deliberate attack on civilian Guernica had happened in modern Europe before. As soon as the news reached Paris, Picasso, already commissioned to do a large mural for the pavilion of the Spanish Republic for the 1937 Paris world’s fair, began drawing sketches for the work that would become his most widely known. Its development was well-documented by Picasso’s changing designs and the photographic record by his mistress, Dora Maar.

Finished, it was 20 feet wide by nearly 12 feet high, oil on canvas, no color, only black, white and gray. At its center is a shrieking horse; a dead or dying man lies on the ground; on the left a screaming woman with a dead child is under the thoughtful gaze of an enigmatic bull; on the far right a man, yelling, with upstretched arms, then a woman who seems to be pleading; at the top, illuminating all, a sun/lightbulb; near it, entering at the top, is a compassionate-looking woman with a lamp.

Picasso refused to explain it. As Martin makes clear in his absorbing book, “Guernica” did not need explication. It spoke, in all its mysterious force, of a world in destruction. Some, too, saw in the face of the woman carrying the lamp a sign of hope.