Guernica

The power of art: 81 years ago, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, the most political and polemic artwork of its time, was painted for the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exhibition in Paris in the summer of 1937.

Picasso refused to set foot in Spain as long as Franco was in power. By the time the exhibition took place, the Spanish Civil War had been raging for a year, Madrid was under siege by Franco.

The Republican Government commissioned Picasso in Paris to make a mural, tentatively called, Dreams and Lies of Franco. But during the spring of 1937, Hitler carpet-bombed the small Basque town of Guernica into rubble on Franco’s orders, ushering in a new kind of warfare, terror from the sky, indiscriminately killing 300 civilians on market day.

This war crime became a symbol of fascist barbarity.

When Franco’s propaganda machine tried to blame on the Basques, Picasso set to work to tell the truth of Guernica. The painting became a world-famous icon against fascist barbarity and the horrors of war.

Following Picasso’s wishes, Guernica was eventually housed in the Prado, Spain, behind a bullet-proof glass screen, once Franco had died and democracy had been restored.

Picasso said, “a painting isn’t made to decorate rooms. It’s an offensive and defensive instrument in the war against the enemy…”

Like Goya's Los Disastros de la Guerra, reduced to the stark reportage of black and white, Picasso's painting Guernica denounces the bloodshed without using a drop of red, it's painted in monochromes, to resemble newsprint.

It is difficult getting the news....

I have seen Guernica twice, and I have wept, more than twice. The first time I did not know the full backstory, the second time was during the second Gulf War, when carpet-bombing had become the norm.

And now, Syria.

2 FREEWRITES WITH PICASSO

GOD IS IN THE CRACKS

In a world of no
there is no room for conflagration
astral core samples, the hunger to know.
In the beginning was the crenulation of the brain.
What came first, the universe or the blackhole?

A psalm story
Earth-based spirituality
Dogs speaking from the other side.
Death is an illusion, or so people say
Heaven is a place that cannot be found.

God is in the cracks, a tiny crack
that separates this world from the next.

7/8 of everything there is is invisible.

Your feet know the way to the other world.

You can't just chase the invisible.

There is only one thing we all equally possess,
and that is our loneliness.

Like fortitude, the struggle with the angels,
where would the words go, the strength of mind,
will, or choice, what we represent.
We are here for the the lesson of fate, or of passion,
what arises out of consciousness
and oppression is art. Solely art.


AH, PICASSO, PICASSO

Ah, Picasso, Picasso,
painting is just another way of keeping up,
another way of keeping a dark circle
on the head of the horse rendered
in dappled beauty while the dancers take flight.
On the table, a frugal meal is laid out,
a white potato, an apple. Some wine
for La Celestina.

A scarf, the laying of the brush.
Oh death and las damseilles.
Azure landscapes with two figures.
Every act of creation is too strong
of an act of destruction.

Painting is a form of magic
designed as a mediator
between the strange and hostile world.

Picasso said: it took me four years
to paint a rock like Rafael
but I know how to paint something.
When I paint I feel that all art
is in the past.

Let's go dancing, it's in the cards,
she said, the city folds in on itself.
The sound of an empty room.
After she left, they were thick as thieves
at the circus.

She pulls the self-portrait over her lips,
his eyes follow her every move,
but the viper was just a pipe,
it's in the cards, she said.

A small blue door,
two women running on the beach
22 breasts adrift in the breeze.
Such blue to contend with,
such monumental flesh,
Ruben's women turned to stone.

Picasso said: Art is never chaste.
A nude in the garden, and green cats.
Portrait of Dona Maar
the hands, tuberous clusters.
Weeping women in red dresses.
Art is that which makes us realize the truth.
Said the weeping women.

A cat and a bird, an unequal war.
Art is something of the senses,
a weapon of self defense against the enemy,
the symbolization of women
in the studio in Algiers.

Picasso said: painting is stronger than me.
It makes me want what it wants.
Oh the Women at Dachau and the Minotaur,
finally the Minotaur, the bullfight,
the disembodied horse, a goat skull,
an empty bottle, the candle of war,
and of course, Guernica,
that is the dissolution of life, of art.

transcribed and revised, 10/17/14