2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 109sang their songs’.^86 Doubtless of most importance in explaining the rel-
ative lack of fanfare at the 1937 exposition in regard to France’s imperial
status is the fact that, as William B. Cohen points out, under the Popular
Front government ‘colonial affairs were given little priority in the face
of what then seemed the far more pressing domestic and international
problems.’^87 Indeed, it was the pressing nature of. international prob-
lems that had caused Blum, according to Cohen, to indicate in talks in
Paris in August 1936 with Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, the Reich’s minister for
national economics and president of the Reichsbank, that France might
be willing to consider the German demand for the cession of colonies.^88
Sitting in the shadow of the muscular display of national egoism that
was the Reich’s pavilion, was the pavilion of the Spanish Republic which
was both modest in size and modernist in style. Designed by Josep Lluis
Sert, the Spanish pavilion was nothing less than a desperate cry for help
on the part of Republican Spain against the background of what had
become a struggle for national survival. El Guernica, a study in outrage
at the Nazi and Fascist aerial bombing of the Basque town of Guernica
on April 26 and the mass casualties it caused, had been especially painted
for the exposition by Picasso at his studio at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins.
The painting was displayed in the entrance hall of the pavilion which
was adjacent to an atrium where a cinematic programme devised by
the filmmaker Luis Buñuel depicted the other horrors which were then
being visited on the Spanish population. Commissioned by the Spanish
Republic, El Guernica provoked a rabid reaction in the German press.^89
(^86) Chandler, ‘Colonies and Provinces,’ in Confrontation: The Exposition internationale des
arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne (1937).
(^87) Cohen, ‘The Colonial Policy of the Popular Front,’ 393.
(^88) Ibid., 388.
(^89) Pascal Ory, ‘Paris, capitale des expositions universelles,’ in Challet-Bailhache, ed.,
Paris et ses expositions universelles: architecture 1855– 1937 , 13, and Carla Schulz-Hoffmann,
‘Max Beckmann and German Modernism,’ The Mad Square Symposium: Art and Culture
in Weimar Germany, Art Gallery of New South Wales, August 6, 2011. Notes on sym-
posium lecture in possession of author. Jay Winter records the following of the attack on
Guernica and Picasso’s artistic representation of that attack: ‘On that morning, the city
centre was destroyed by aerial bombardment. One hundred thousand pounds of explosive
were dropped on the town by bombers of the German Condor Legion. Approximately
1,600 people, or one-third of the population of Guernica, were killed. A small arms factory
and the town’s railroad station were not hit; the target was civilian life itself. On 30 April,
three days after the attack, the story appeared in the Parisian newspaper Ce soir, along with
black and white photographs. The next day, Picasso began drawings for his mural. Within