Guernica: Art,War & Peace by John Cat

Guernica, the 11 foot tall x 25 foot wide painting on canvas by Pablo Picasso in 1937.

"Painting was not invented to decorate houses but is an instrument of war to be waged against brutality and darkness."
"No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy. The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web."-- Picasso On Guernica
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Have you heard of the artwork Guernica?
Guernica is a very large year 1937 oil painting on canvas  by artist Pablo Picasso (b.1881 Spain - d.1973 France) painted in Paris, France & named after Guernica, a small town in Basque Spain which was bombed by the Spanish Fascists & German Nazis  in 1937.
Many people think of Guernica as an anti-war statement and a prescient warning about the war (WW2)  that would soon engulf the world. 
Much of the painting’s emotional power comes from its overwhelming size, approximately 11′ 6″ x 25′ 6″ (eleven feet tall and twenty five feet wide) and it's limited color palette of black & white with muted blue grays.
Guernica is in black and white because it is digging into the truth behind pictures. The discarding of color intensifies the drama, producing a reportage quality as in a photographic record.
     It is one of Picasso's best-known works, regarded by many art critics as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history. This work has gained a monumental status, becoming a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war & it challenges rather than accepts the notion of war as heroic.
      While art critics and historians have different opinions about the symbolism in Guernica, there is general agreement that the painting represents the horrific tragedy of war and the suffering it inflicts on individuals, particularly innocent civilian populations.
With unjust wars and crimes against humanity being committed even today in 2024 against civilian populations, anyone with any degree of higher consciousness would agree that ART is still the only answer to this evil carnage of cicular violence. The same lower primitive mind set of toxic masculinity which created these situations will not be the same ones to solve it to help the humanities heal.
Guernica WAS controversial when it was made (intentionally), but for political reasons, not artistic ones.
   Probably Picasso's­­­ most famous work, Guernica is certainly his most powerful political statement, painted as an immediate reac­­tion to the Nazi's devastating casual bombing practice on the town. It was history's first intentional aerial saturation bombing of a civilian population by a State Army.

Detail of the artwork Guernica by Pablo Picasso.

Based on the testimony of medical personnel in Guernica on the day and in nearby hospitals that received casualties, the Basque government estimated that 1,645 innocent civilian ­­­people were killed and a further 889 injured in the attack. A third of the population were wounded or killed. by the Fascist government of Spain, which was allied with the Nazis.
 For over three hours, twenty five bombers dropped 100,000 pounds of explosive and incendiary bombs on the village, reducing it to rubble. Twenty more fighter planes strafed and killed defenseless civilians trying to flee. The devastation was appalling: fires burned for three days, and seventy percent of the city was destroyed.
Because of this painting Guernica and his art in general, Picasso was labeled as a degenerate artist by the Nazis, along with many other notable artists of the day. Prior to the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940, Picasso was offered safe haven out of Europe by friends and collectors abroad who were worried about his safety but he chose to stay in France.
During the German occupation of Paris, Picasso was forbidden to publicly exhibit his art or sell it. All during the war the artist was monitored by the Nazis Gestapo with frequent visits to his studio. Other artists, writers and some of his friends had already been hauled off to the camps but Picasso bravely chose to stay in Paris.

When one Gestapo officer visited his studio and saw a postcard of the Guernica art he asked him “Did you paint that? Picasso’s famous answer was “No you did.”
As well, all during the war the fascist government of Spain tried repeatedly to have Picasso arrested and extradited back there ( his birthplace), where he surely would have been imprisoned or executed by them.
The Fascists in Spain had already show an affinity for executing many of their poets, writers and artists.

Yet despite the Nazi monitoring of Picasso & at peril to his own life during the occupation, he still managed to help the underground French Resistance when he could. Sometimes hiding resistance members in his studio who were wanted or on the run from the Nazis, as well as passing messages and even donating money.

Guernica, like most of Picasso’s greatest works, is pervaded with his own problems and preoccupations, it has become an emblem warning of the dangers and devastation of a war he lived through yet still resonates in today's times with continuing atrocities committed against civilians perpetuated by various state entities.

Here in year 2024, a war is going on in the European country of Ukraine with country of Russia targeting civilian populations as a means of dominance over them. The modus operandi seems to be the total destruction of the Ukraine people and their cities.
Not to be outdone, in the Middle East a group called the Zionist Entity have been massacring the civilian population of a place called Gaza under the guise of defense or looking for their enemies, after they were attacked by them on Oct. 7-2023.  A tit for tat merry go round of insanity & egoistic greed.
Even before these crimes against humanity on the Palestinian men, woman and children of Gaza today, virtually every human rights group in the world had labeled it as the world’s largest open air prison & is a repressive system of apartheid against civilians under the Zionists. The driving fuel is Zionism itself, an aggressive and discriminatory ideology that has forcibly pushed out Palestinians from their homelands.
Zionism is not unlike Nazism & Third Reich before them in Europe who had a system called the "Final Solution" in which they rounded up the perceived undesirable Jewish populations (along with the Roma, writers, artists, homosexuals etc)  into ghettos and death camps.
One of the cute nicknames today's Zionists has for their crimes on the civilian populations of Gaza is called "Mowing the Grass", in which the current body count is over 40,000 dead at this time, with many many more wounded and maimed daily, notably children.
Picasso's determination in his career made him into a hero. Overall, because of his artwork, Pablo Picasso was and still is an international hero to artists all over the world.
Picasso used paint on canvas to express his protest against ignorant brutalities in the world, but in the ensuing decades new communication methods have been perfected to express ideas about things in other creative ways via art online.
Another famous Picasso anti-war symbol is the dove so artists from ART-TO-GO have made unique artwork inspired by this and put on a 100% cotton tee shirt.

Peace Dove by Jimmy Sasso 2024 on 100% cotton tee shirt.

The Art To Go has also designed other unique PEACE related artworks such as Peace Cat & Peace Skull, available on 100% cotton tee shirts. The intelligent artwork invites dialogue with others and seeks to be a bridge for better communications of higher consciousness.