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Pablo Picasso, Guernica 1937, © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2007
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Pablo Picasso, Guernica 1937, © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2007 (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain/Bridgeman Art Library). The 20th century saw Europe transformed by war and social upheaval. Old certainties were changing and artists tried to find a form to reflect the anxiety that resulted. Some authorities resisted change though, and at the World's Fair in Paris, 1937, the Germans and Italians exhibited classically influenced art that referred to an age of heroism and ‘normality’. The USSR celebrated the role of the worker, again in the muscular classical style favoured by totalitarian states. The Spanish pavilion however, showed Picasso's Guernica, representing to the bombing of a republican town in Spain by German bombers in collaboration with Spanish fascists. Expressive, 'primitive' creatures confront the viewer from a tightly compressed space. The event is depicted very differently to how we might see it in a newspaper photograph, and in a manner in which a photograph could never depict it.
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