Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon
Gijs van Hensbergen, Bloomsbury, hardback £20

For most art historians, it’s not the life of a painting that commands interest, but its birth. We relive every brush-stroke and each subtle change of composition in our effort to experience the moment of creation. Even more alluring is the painting’s conception, that first intuitive scribble or the flash of inspiration that reveals the truest essence of the final work. Once the painting is born into this world, like busy obstetricians we move onto the next difficult labour. We condemn the newborn to the fluctuating whims of salesrooms and galleries, a passive plaything whose moment of power has passed.

Gijs van Hensbergen doesn’t see it like that. His biography of Picasso’s masterpiece, Guernica, portrays the painting as an active player on the world stage. More than just a symbol or a political instrument, Guernica has fought in wars, from the Spanish Civil War to the Cold War. It has spoken out against atrocities in Vietnam and in Iraq. It was Franco’s nemesis and his desire. More than 30 years after the death of its maker, the painting continues to make its voice heard today.

This is a dramatic story with all the twists and turns of a political thriller, all the danger of an action adventure, and all the sexual intrigue of a romantic novel. A racy narrative is combined with the fruits of encyclopaedic research, a challenge which brings with it inevitable problems. The author’s lively prose is regularly tripped up by cumbersome lists of extraneous names, places and events. While he writes with authority, van Hensbergen occasionally describes historical events as if he were there, stretching credibility just short of breaking point.

Famous for his Gaudí biography, van Hensbergen is primarily an expert on architecture. Although he devotes a great deal of attention to Guernica’s impact on modern art, and on Jackson Pollock in particular, stylistic analysis of the painting itself is scant. That is left to countless other experts in “the world of Guerniciana”, while van Hensbergen examines the painting’s political role over the 67 years since its bloody birth.

Gernika (the Basque spelling of the town) was the first place in Europe ever to suffer saturation bombing. For three hours in April 1937, the town was bombarded by pro-Franco aeroplanes, reducing buildings and people to one burning fireball. Picasso’s huge monochrome canvas, dedicated to the unspeakable pain of that event, is recognised universally as a painful symbol of the horrors of war.

Right from page one, the author doesn’t pull his punches. We are reminded of how, in January 2003, the United Nations’ copy of Guernica was hastily covered over while Colin Powell extolled the virtues of Shock and Awe. “What the picture showed up,” says van Hensbergen, “was the embarrassing contradiction of presuming to take the moral high ground while simultaneously campaigning for war.”

War and witch-hunts are the recurring themes of this book, just as they are the recurring themes of our times. As fugitives from the Spanish Civil War, neither Picasso nor his painting were safe to return to Franco’s oppressive regime. Touring the USA, Guernica provoked right-wing demonstrations with its abstract style and socialist origins. In occupied France, the artist was in constant danger from the Nazis, whose loathing for ‘degenerate art’ made Picasso a prime target.

After joining the Communist Party in 1944, Picasso became a target too for the FBI, under direct instruction from J Edgar Hoover. The artist was to be refused access to the USA, while Guernica remained in pride of place at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Any reference to Franco and the Spanish Civil War was, however, removed from the interpretative label.

In the 1960s the painting became associated with the Vietnam peace movement; as one commentator put it, Guernica was “replacing the Crucifixion as an icon of cruelty and inhumanity for our secular age”. After the Mylai massacre in 1968, when US soldiers slaughtered 500 unarmed villagers, Picasso was called upon to remove it from New York. He considered the question carefully, and concluded that he would prefer to remain a thorn in the American side. “By means of Guernica,” said Picasso, “I have the pleasure of making a political statement every day in the middle of New York City.”

The artist promised to return Guernica to Spain as soon as democracy was restored, and Franco craved it as a seal of international approval. Neither of them lived to see the day. Van Hensbergen gives Picasso’s death in 1973 a whole three lines and continues with the tale.

Diplomatic negotiations continued with Picasso’s family, who used the painting as leverage in civil rights battles with the government, until eventually it was agreed that Spain had done enough to deserve Guernica. In 1981, the painting arrived triumphantly on Spanish soil. Even its packing case was treated as a holy relic. The Minister of Culture declared that ‘Guernica’s return to Spain symbolises the consolidation of democracy and the end of the transition.”

It is what Guernica symbolises that makes this book work. Far from being an art-historical analysis of a painting, it’s the story of the western world in three score years and ten. At the centre is an image of human destruction which is shocking and poetic, and sadly just as relevant today as it was 70 years ago.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 10.10.04