‘down in the terraces between the targets’ focal centre of the creative outcry against this act are Picasso’s weeping women.^34
Guernicais a key symbol not least because, as mentioned above, the Condor Legion
that bombed the city supported by Italian planes on the 26 April 1937 suffered no
losses, and the city they attacked had no air defences.^35 Among the many poems
about this act of total war, two of the most famous are Paul Eluard’s ‘La victoire de
Guernica’^36 and the Basque-born Blas de Otero’s ‘Caniguer’—its title a scrambling
of the town’s three syllables.^37 J. F. Hendry’s ‘Picasso: for Guernica’, and ‘Guernica’
by A. S. Knowland, are two English-language pieces from the time.^38 This is the first
war in which there was sustained bombing of civilian targets, the first war in which
there could have been a ‘Song of the Antiaircraft Gunner’ by Miguel Hernandez,^39
and certainly the first war to harvest a crop of poems about aerial bombardment.^40
The Spanish War is significant also because it is the first modern war in which,
because of the development of media news, there could be organized public outcries
and a public protest poetry that arose in direct response to it.
Some of the difficulties for making art from the mass killing of civilians can be
identified by considering Picasso’s famous painting. Stephen Spender wrote about
the work when it was on display in London: ‘So long as a work of art has this
explosive quality of newness it is impossible to relate it to the past.’^41 This may
be a fair assessment of a recent work that aims to make a telling statement, but
it can hardly be true of Picasso’s work on the painting. Recent research proposes
that the artist drew consciously on the style of antique friezes.^42 Spender also
associates the painting mimetically with the experience that it evokes. The painting
is ‘explosive’. This is a case of the journalistic low mimetic, and underlines the fact
that Spender is also engaging in propaganda on behalf of the Spanish Republic:
‘People who say that it isexcentric[sic]...are only making the gasping noises they
might make if they were blown off their feet by a high-explosive bomb.’^43 Later,
he interprets the picture both as a response to second-hand experience and as
highly suggestive of what it is like to be in an air raid. The largely monochrome
picture evokes ‘despair of the darkness because it is too complete and you are lost;
(^34) See Elizabeth Cowling,Picasso: Style and Meaning(London: Phaidon Press, 2002), 591–603.
(^35) Foranaccountoftheraid,seeRussellMartin,Picasso’s War: The Destruction of Guernica and the
Masterpiece that Changed the World 36 (New York: Plume, 2002), 31–45.
Paul Eluard, ‘La victoire de Guernica’, in William Rees (ed.),French Poetry 1820–1950(Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 715–18.
(^37) Blas de Otero, ‘Caniguer’, inCon la inmensa mayor ́ıa(Buenos Aires: Losada, 1960), 170–1.
(^38) J. F. Hendry, ‘Picasso: For Guernica’, and A. S. Knowland, ‘Guernica’, in Valentine Cunningham
(ed.),The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 418 and 167.
(^39) Miguel Hernandez, ‘Song of the Antiaircraft Gunner’, inThe Selected Poems of Miguel Hernandez,
ed. and trans. Ted Genoways (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 218–21.
(^40) See the ‘Junker Angels in the Sky’ section of Cunningham (ed.),Penguin Book of Spanish Civil
War Verse 41 , 157–71.
42 Stephen Spender, ‘Guernica’, ibid. 419.
43 For a recent account of Picasso’s work, see Cowling,Picasso, 571–89.
Spender, ‘Guernica’, 419. Andre Gide had commented on the painting’s eccentricity. ́