Guernica

 

     In September, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid  announced that it is lifting its 30-year ban on visitors photographing Pablo Picasso's masterpiece "Guernica." Which sparked a brief flicker of envy in me — I was there a year ago, and of course itched to capture Picasso's stark images of the horror of the first aerial terror bombing of a civilian population.  I figured the scenes could be useful someday. Never realizing just how soon or just how awfully apt.
     Before the artwork, I was tempted to flout the rules, and take a picture anyway. But it was their painting, their museum, their country, their history, their grief. I was a guest, and so tried to be respectful and behave. No pictures.
     And you know what? Freed of the distraction of trying to capture a photo of the painting, which is 25 feet across, I was able to just look at it. 
      Able to look at it and shed tears. It was an overwhelming moment. Thinking of the people and the horses and the bull, all broken and shrieking, the mother wailing with the dead baby in her arms and the alarms at night.

     Picasso had a commission to paint something to display to bring attention the cause of the Republicans — a motley of socialists and communists and anarchists, fighting Franco and his Nationalists, who had the Nazis and their Luftwaffe on their side. But Picasso was stymied until the bombing on April 27, 1937. Horror has a way of squeezing out those creative juices. He created an enormous canvas, 11 feet tall, using black and white matte house paint. This, I thought, this is what cubism was made for. I was never a particular fan of either Picasso or his style. But this redeems both, conveying such as stark and fractured chaos, the suffering and death.

     The painting was shown in Paris — which surrendered too quickly to be bombed — then spirited to the United States, and placed at the Museum of Modern Art. Picasso, and later his estate, would not allow "Guernica" to return to Spain until the fascists were gone, and it did not get there until 1981.     
     I thought of "Guernica" of course as Israel started to pound Gaza, the shocking human toll of destruction from above. A horror that they obviously find necessary to inflict, but that no feeling human being can welcome. Something no feeling human can do anything but mourn. Most of the 1,600 dead at Guernica were women and children — the men were off fighting — and there is little question that the attack on Gaza will mostly slaughter innocents as well. 
     Whose fault is it? All the furious finger pointing misses, to me, the essential, obvious truth: it's everybody's fault. The two parties involved. How could it be anything else? The Palestinians for holding out for the impossible — to return to Israel and find the Jews vanished and their great-grandparents magically alive again, tending to their olive groves. Not to forget for supporting Hamas, a terrorist group dedicated to Israel’s destruction, which started the present cycle of mayhem and death. And the Israelis for their out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach,  for decades, packing Palestinians into their ghetto, nibbling away parcels of land for another settlement. A role so inverted, such a parody of the treatment of Jews over a thousand years, it almost makes me believe in a God, a devious, malicious deity, crafting the ultimate contrapasso punishment for Jewish pride, pressing us into the role of the oppressor. Left unsolved, the problem festers and grows, as both sides saw away at the same old failed tactics. 

      "For they sow the wind," the Bible says, in Hosea. “And they shall reap the whirlwind."
     After I posted a photo of the painting — not taken by me — on the cover of my Facebook page, as a sort of indication of general feeling, one reader shared this story, probably too neat to be true: A German officer sees a photo of "Guernica" in Picasso's studio. "Did you do this?" he asks. "No," Picasso replies. "You did."