Photographs Of The Bombing Appeared In Paris Newspapers Within A Day Or Two

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On April 26, 1937 , at 4:40 P. M. , the Condor Legion of the German air force bombed peaceful, undefended Guernica 10 virtually install destruction. It looks three hours and five minutes. For the German high command, it was an opportunity for their fighter pilots to practice saturation-bombing and dive-bombing techniques designed to terrorize and kill fleeting civilians.
Photographers and journalists who reported the bombing described it as an atrocity of then unparalleled horror. Guernica was the first city in history to be destroyed by aerial bombardment. World War II , for which the Spanish Civil War was a military dress rehearsal, would ultimately numb the world with its terrible devastation of Dresden and Hiroshima. While a complacent world was loath to challenge the denials of France, the Germans, and the Vatican, one man decided to reveal the dimensions of the atrocity.
Photographs of the bombing appeared in Paris newspapers within a day or two. And Pablo Picasso, acclaimed by many as the artistic genius of our age, immediately began his preliminary sketches for the mural, Guernica , which he gave to the Republican ...
... government to hang in the 1937 International Exposition in Paris. Today, Guernica is widely hailed as the greatest political painting of the twentieth century.
Much Controversy has arisen as to the specific meaning of the various elements of the painting. Does the bull represent fascism? Spain? Brutality and darkness? Picasso himself, never one to be bound by other people's need for precise references, was no help. Critics have had a field day dissecting and explaining the masterpiece. What has never been in doubt is that the powerful mural is a symbolic, allegorical painting made to express an exiled Spaniard's terrible rage at the agony imposed on a defenseless town of innocent men, women, and children. He was painting their agony, Spain's agony, and his own agony.
A few years later, when German soldiers visited Picasso's studio in Paris during the occupation of France in World War II , the painter handed out postcards of the Guernica mural to his unwanted and uninvited .visitors.
"Did you do this?" one of the surprised soldiers exclaimed.
"No, " Picasso is reputed to have replied, "you did. "