Eighty-one years ago this coming April, Picasso, irate over the bombing of a small village (Guernica) in northern Spain by fascist forces, presented his Guernica at the 1937 World Fair in Paris. It has been referred to as the most famous painting of the 20^th century and the greatest of all political art. I would agree that the painting is, indeed, masterful. But as social commentary, the painting simply fails and it fails because it does not and cannot, as an assemblage of visual symbols,[i] pass on to us the important story – that we need to learn from especially as artists – of what happened in Guernica, the small northern village in Spain, or more generally what the Spanish Civil War was all about.

A Famous Painting But Why?

First of all the painting itself is simply huge.[ii] When I stood before it, along with about 20 other museum-goers in Madrid, the sheer scale of the thing seemed to cast a spell over all of us. No one was moving. The first emotion that swelled up in me was Wow! This one small man had entered upon the world’s stage and unequivocally was saying in a visually loud and unmistakable way, FUCK YOU FRANCO! The writ large disobedience, at least to me, was as palpable as it was inspiring.

Artistically, Picasso seems to have achieved a certain impact that no other painter-chronicler of war, relying on the use of realist figures, had. His use of only black and white provides a funereal starkness while it also helps to give the painting a noticeable harmony. The layering of objects creates space. There is a sense of chaos and yet there is balance. The innovative use of flat, Picasso-styled figures is effective in portraying some kind of fighting or terror. The ape-like hands and outstretched fingers to me felt basic, carnal, grisly, honest. The ghostly face that swoops in suggests that we were in the midst of some unearthly horror.

Political philosopher Charles Taylor has written about certain works of art that transfigure but that “must be understood independently of whatever intentions the author has formulated in relation to it…No explication or paraphrase can do it justice. Its meaning must be found in itself.” Borrowing from Yeats, Taylor suggests that this type of work is “self-begotten.”[iii] Guernica is that type of art. It becomes the greatest of all political works of art not only because of what Picasso intended but also because of how the assemblage of his visual elements along with contextual elements of the painting’s initial exhibition work to create a “locus of revelation” on an unprecedented scale:[iv] that the most famous painter in the world, and a Spaniard, presented the work at a world’s fair in 1937 as an in-your-face rebuke of a Spanish and fascist general (Franco) while fascist forces, not only bombed Guernica, but were in the process of taking over Germany and Italy was a much a part of the painting as any of the visual elements chosen by Picasso.

That this is true is made evident by the fact that the painting is universally acclaimed as powerful, but no one can tell us, when just looking at the painting, what exactly is going on. John Berger, the late art critic, argues that while Guernica makes no reference whatsoever to the issues involved in the Spanish Civil War or Guernica itself, “…the work is a protest — and one would know this even if one knew nothing of its history.”[v] I’m not so sure. The painting was once shown to an actual survivor of the bombing of Guernica and she was simply flummoxed, not knowing what to make of it. Scholars confidently, and it seems rather hopefully, project their own suppositions: the light bulb, for example, is symbolic of the sun, says one. No, it is the one and only reference to modernity, says another. No says a third, it is symbolic of a bomb. Tom Wolfe, the novelist, said the painting looks like a horse choking on a banana.

As a standalone piece, its messaging is problematic, to say the least. Okay, call it a protest. That could fit. But it reminds me of a very good sculptor friend who once welded a pistol to the top of a helmet. Whenever there was an exhibition that was framed as political, out came the helmet. If one needs a painting backdrop for an anti-war action or yes, a protest of some kind of violence, Guernica will do fine. But what we as both citizens and as artists ought to learn from the Spanish Civil War and Guernica in particular remains utterly and painfully unavailable.

Self-Management and Democratic Uprisings by Artists

If artists bristle at one thing, it is someone other than themselves having control over their work. The history of resistance by artists in France leading up to Impressionist independence provides a good example. French artists spontaneously formed assemblies and pushed for control over their work, or “self-management,” not only in the French revolution itself (1789) but in the revolutionary periods of 1830 and 1848 as well. By 1870 in Paris, the “overall picture…[was] of a classic revolutionary crisis of rising expectations: demands for artistic self-government and democratic freedoms….”[vi] Then in the spring of 1871 Paris experienced a singular democratic uprising that reverberates to this day; for three months Paris was taken over by rebellious workers along with a 400-member strong Federation of Artes led, in part, by Gustave Courbet, “voicing a program for radical change in artistic self-government, education, patronage, production and museum curatorship.” This moment of full (not just political but economic) democracy was eventually and viciously crushed by French national authorities during a week dubbed “Bloody Week,” where somewhere between 30,000 to 50,000 French revolutionaries were slaughtered in the streets of Paris.[vii]

By 1874, with martial law still in place, a determined band of artists continued the rebellion against the control of elite-managed Salon. They formed their own system of self-management as painters and also sought an independent and direct relation with the public. These artists were, of course, the Impressionists, whose organizational statutes “were drawn up with the crucial assistance of four of the central figures of the Federation” that were part of the Paris Commune.[viii]

The Democratic Uprising and Push for Self-Management in Spain

Depression level poverty so clearly linked to obvious and obscene levels of corruption during the early part of 20^th century in Spain was met, by the mid-1930’s, with a spontaneous, nation-wide, democratic uprising. But the rebels, mostly peasants and workers, weren’t simply pushing for adequate representation within a parliamentary democracy. Their objective went much further. They wanted control over their work. In other words, it was a total social revolution. George Orwell, who volunteered to fight alongside the rebels, wrote:

Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the boot blacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said “Señor” or “Don” or even “Usted”; everyone called everyone else comrade and “Thou,” and said “Salud” instead of “Buenos dias….” Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom.[ix]

According to one observer, the revolution was “the greatest experiment in worker self-management Western Europe has ever seen.”[x] And who was opposed to self-management? The answer is that the experiment in self-management was opposed by large industrialists and landowners, the Catholic Church and power centers that required hierarchy, domination, and centralized control, with western democracies and the United States among them.[xi] And why was Guernica chosen as the place to bomb? Because Guernica in 1937 was a Basque village that symbolized this particular kind of independence, this particular glorious triumph of ordinary human beings, unbossed, working together in a kind of spiritual drunkenness.

I find it rather revealing that despite all the hoopla over the painting the story of the movement for self-management, its significance, and its bloody eradication is simply censored out of art history by omission, not unlike the story of Impressionism and its relation to the Paris Commune. That Guernica is a general but vague protest, while probably true, inadvertently continues that censorship. The result is that painters today are not likely to know their own history regarding self-management nor are they likely to be on guard against institutional mechanisms that like the elite-managed Salon of old promote one type of art to the exclusion of nearly all others.

Joachim Pissarro, the great-grandson of Camille, said of Camille Pissarro’s work that while it did not “carry a revolutionary message, it performed a revolutionary function.” And that is because Camille Pissarro insisted on responding to visual sensations with absolute independence. If we are to find a way out of our own “maquis” – a thicket of dense shrubbery or maze – as Matisse suggested artists must do, then complete independence or self-management is required. To make available to the rest of humanity the same opportunity to find a way out of their own maquis is to perform a revolutionary function. The people of Guernica understood this. People within the centers of power that crushed the movement understood it as well. But those who sing the praise of the profundity of Guernica as social commentary do not.

NOTE: For those of you who do not receive our newsletter, you might be interested in watching my YouTube video (2.5 minutes) with a similar theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qo5dioVGEaI or if that page doesn’t come up, search for “The Need for Self-Direction and Independence in Painting” at YouTube.

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[i] The inability of any painting to communicate clearly any social commentary of substance may be generalized: visual art as social commentary requires words, and many of them, if it is to communicate a message that moves beyond the level of simple truism. Don’t get me wrong, for protest actions in need of posters and rallying cries, and simple messaging this may be enough given the context that an action provides. For example, in the sanitation worker’s strike in Memphis in 1968 (which drew in MLK in what turned out to be his last action), the placard that read “I AM A MAN” was sufficient and powerfully effective, as is the current movement message of “BLACK LIVES MATTER.”

[ii] The painting 11’5” tall and 25’6” wide.

[iii] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Harvard University Press, 1989) p. 420.

[iv] Ibid, 420

[v] Cal Winslow, A Special Obscenity.

[vi] Gonzalo J. Sanchez, The Development of Art and the Universal Republic: The Paris Commune’s Federation Des Artistes and French Republicanism, 1871-1889, Columbia University, 1994; p. 18.

[vii] Jared Spears, Spain Through Orwell’s Eyes.

[viii] Sanchez, 14.

[ix] Spears

[x] Ibid

[xi] Noam Chomsky, Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship.