What is Guernica and why did Picasso paint it?

On April 26, 1937, Nazi Germany's Condor Legion bombed the Basque town of Guernica in northern Spain during the Spanish Civil War. It was a deliberate attack on a civilian population — one of the first terror bombings of the modern era. Hundreds were killed.

The Republican Spanish government had already commissioned Picasso to create a mural for the Paris International Exposition. After the bombing, he abandoned his original concept and painted Guernica in five weeks. It is 11 feet tall and nearly 26 feet wide, in black, white, and grey — no color to flatter or sentimentalize.

What does the painting show?

Screaming women. A dead baby. A horse in agony. A bull. A fragmented soldier. A lamp held at the scene's edge. The composition refuses conventional narrative — everything happens simultaneously, in fractured Cubist space that mirrors the fracture of bodies and lives in bombing.

There is no enemy shown. No bombs. No ideology. Only suffering — human and animal, undifferentiated, total.

What happened to the painting after its creation?

Picasso refused to allow it to return to Spain while Franco ruled. It was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1939, on loan. He stipulated it could only return to Spain after the restoration of democracy. Franco died in 1975. The painting returned to Spain in 1981, after Picasso's death. It now hangs in the Reina Sofía in Madrid.

The painting traveled as a kind of ambassador, a proof of what the Spanish Republic had been destroyed to prevent.