Guernica and the Veto
US Veto — Security Council — Per Krohg — Pablo Picasso — Faith Ringgold — Dia AlAzzawi.
“The people of Gaza are staring into the abyss,” said the United Nations Secretary General at the meeting of the Security Council on December 9th, 2023. Permanent representatives gave impassioned speeches on the humanitarian situation. “Beyond words”, “unimaginable”, “unprecedented”, they said. The resolution, which over ninety countries co-sponsored and took days of maneuvering and linguistic horse-trading to draft, was then put to a vote and was shot down unceremoniously, courtesy of the United States veto. In explaining the vote, the United States decried the moral failure of the Council to acknowledge Israel’s right to defend itself.
I convinced myself that the vote would have gone differently had there been another backdrop to the Security Council Hall. The current mural in the Council Hall by Per Krohg is rather too optimistic; a Panglossian image of how people can overcome the scourge of war when they work together. That is the message the Security Council apparently purports to signal. Behind the Council’s Peruvian President, you could see the mural’s rising phoenix. Only the bottom fourth or so of the painting shows images of war and destruction in ominous brown and grey tones. But the rest of the sixteen feet high painting is one of salvage and colorful hope: Men breaking their shackles and rising from the bottom of the painting to the vibrant panels above filled with joyful people from different ethnicities standing before backgrounds of intact architecture. On a panel to the right, a man waves a blue UN flag among a happy crowd. Above the phoenix, a family of three peacefully kneels, while a boy standing next to a tree leisurely observes a scene of familial bliss. Other panels show scenes of everyday life, dancing, gainful trade, industrial production, palm trees, and cypresses. Delegates and guests sitting in the hall, taking in this massive piece of art, could well be tempted to believe that, at the end of it all, the Council will deliver peace and prosperity, and that its actions will eventually lead to a world of salvation, progress, and intercommunal harmony.
There was a time when another work of art hung large inside the Hall, a tapestry replica of Picasso’s Guernica woven by Jacquline de la Baume-Dürrbach in 1955. As one of the most recognized works of art symbolizing the abhorrence of war, it was a befitting addition to the Council. It was such a powerful image that, reportedly, the U.S. delegation asked that it be covered with blue drapes during the infamous meeting in which Secretary of State Colin Powell gave concocted evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.[1] Argentinian-Chilean author Ariel Dorfman memorialized the incident of covering up Guernica in a poem he entitled “Pablo Picasso has words for Colin Powell from the other side of death”. The poem reads
Why did you not ask that the cover
be removed
the picture
be revealed?
Were you afraid that the mother
Would leap from her image and say
No, he is the one
They are the ones who will bomb
From afar
They are the ones who will kill the child
Were you afraid of my art
What I am still saying
More than sixty-five years later
The story still being told
The vision still dangerous
The light bulb still hanging
Like an eye from the dead
My eye that looks at you from the dead
Beware.
Guernica was removed from the Security Council hall sometime in early 2021. The impactful imagery would have mattered during meetings on Ukraine, on Gaza, and the wars yet to come. The painting’s subject matter is the indiscriminate murder of civilians in times of war. It is also a critique of the Nationalists, who included the fascists, conservatives, the army, and the clergy; a right-wing alliance that was determined to maintain the status quo, disregarding any human cost.
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In April 1937, Guernica was ten kilometers away from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. The nearest actual military target, a military production factory on the outskirts of the town, was left unscathed by the bombardment. The perpetrators justified the attack on the grounds of a strategic argument about the town’s location. Regardless, the attack is recognized globally as a terror bombing. Like the campaign on Gaza, most of those who died in Guernica were also women and children. Both attacks caused wanton destruction of property and infrastructure in its wake. Unlike Gaza though, the aerial attack on Guernica, which caused such a global outcry, lasted but three hours.
Famed journalist George Steer was credited for bringing the world’s attention to the event. On April 29th, 1937, Steer had the following to say in The New York Times:
Guernica, the most ancient town of the Basques and the centre of their cultural tradition, was completely destroyed yesterday afternoon by insurgent air raiders. The bombardment of this open town far behind the lines occupied precisely three hours and a quarter, during which a powerful fleet of aeroplanes consisting of three types of German types, Junkers and Heinkel bombers, did not cease unloading on the town bombs weighing from 1,000 lbs. downwards and, it is calculated, more than 3,000 two-pounder aluminum incendiary projectiles. The fighters, meanwhile, plunged low from above the centre of the town to machinegun those of the civilian population who had taken refuge in the fields.
With the rest of the world, Picasso was moved. And the vision he had for the painting was not to evoke feelings of hope or imminent salvation. It was instead a prelude to post-war absurdist thought against hope. It is messy, cacophonous, and repulsive. In the original work, not the tapestry that hung at the Security Council, one can see the ink drippings and careless splashes, signifying the haste and cluttered pace at which this work was drawn. The scene is intentionally chaotic to evoke the horror and confusion of war. Characters overlap and intersect. Destruction, violent death, and mutilation are present everywhere you look.
From the top left of the painting, the bull menacingly stares down the viewer, coldly challenging them to take a stance against the atrocities of war if they dare. Its tail smolders like the rubble left behind in the carnage. Beyond the bull, the screaming horse is collapsing from its gaping wound, but its head remains upward as it struggles to live. Between the bull and the horse lies a dove, but with a pained expression and broken body, suggesting that hope for peace is all but lost.
Underneath the Bull is a woman holding a dead child. After incessant crying, her eyes have perpetually taken on the shape of tears, and her bare breasts symbolize lost providence or perhaps lost dignity. The dead soldier below the grieving mother is the starkest indicator of the futility of hope. His disjointed parts are strewn about the floor, as his severed arm holds on to a broken sword of failed, asymmetric struggle. The open palm of his other hand bears the stigmata of ultimate sacrifice.
The woman burning on the right side is perhaps the strongest symbol of the painting’s anti-war sentiment. A woman is trapped in a burning building, pleading at the sky, maybe to God, or the bombarding planes up above, as her world continues to crumble and burn around her. Another terrified woman is injured but is looking longingly towards the oil lamp. The oil lamp is the source of light in the scene and not the light bulb above.
The lightbulb high in the center of the painting is the only image of modern technology. I am partial to the interpretation that its presence is a critique of the destructive effects of technology. In Spanish, the word for lightbulb is Bombilla, which brings to mind the very weapon that caused the indiscriminate death and destruction brought about from above.
Picasso drew inspiration from other works about the brutality of conflict. Guernica echoes Peter Paul Rubens’ “Consequences of War,” now hanging at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. That painting from 1638, influenced by the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War, also showed a woman with raised flailing arms towards the heavens, the flying fury of war holding a torch, and a weeping woman with a child in her arms. The weeping woman in both paintings could have been inspired by Michelangelo’s Madonna della Pietà in Saint Peter’s Basilica. Goya might have been another inspiration. The central figure in his 3rd of May 1808 painting at the Prado also had his arms flung in desperation towards the skies with the stigmata on his open palm.
Picasso once said in 1923, “To me,there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present, it must not be considered art at all.” Because Guernica had no specific references to the actual bombing of the city, it became a timeless representation of the scourge of war. Public reaction was mixed when the four-by-eight-meter work was first unveiled in 1937, but its reputation steadily grew, especially with the advent of World War II. By 1940, it landed in New York’s MoMA and would be on display there for the most part of forty years. It would be a direct inspiration to painters from either side of World War II, warning about the annihilation that nuclear weapons can cause: Boris Deutsch in What Atomic War will do to you and Japanese artist Yamamoto Keisuke in Hiroshima.
Guernica then became a symbol for the anti-Vietnam War movement. InMarch 1970, over 200 artists affiliated with the Art Workers’ Coalition signed a letter proclaiming that they wanted “to raise their voice against the hundreds of Guernicas … which are taking place in Vietnam”.
With the advent of the new millennium, it became an allegory for the disregard of jus ad bellum in the Middle East. In 2003, a photograph of the painting was the header for a pamphlet produced by the California collective known as RETORT to protest the imminent war against Iraq.
In 2009, Polish artist Goshka Macuga borrowed the tapestry of Guernica, which had hung inside the Security Council, and made it the centerpiece of an exhibition in London that linked Guernica’s history with the Iraq War.
Incidentally, as the Security Council debated the newest failed resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, thousands of protestors gathered in the real town of Guernica in protest of the ongoing war. Speakers at the rally drew direct comparisons between Gaza and Guernica and raised a call to “never forget”.
I first saw the painting in its full chilling size at the Museo Riena Sofia in Madrid in 2009. A replica hung at the Security Council during my short tenure there. In my few visits to the hall, I would be taken by the emotive force of the painting, and I convinced myself that it must have a tempering effect on delegates and permanent representatives engaged in saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war. Guernica is a treatise on the brutality and injustice of war. It is an evocative sermon on the effects of indiscriminate slaughter and one that the Security Council needs to hear over again. But is it naïve to think that a painting could manage to accomplish what hundreds of photographs and hours of footage from the most documented genocide in history could not?
Art never stopped a missile, never ended a war. It cannot change events, but I continue to think it might change people in a way that encourages them to challenge the course of events by the way they vote, the way they behave, the way they speak or think about current events. Sometimes the imagination of an artist can incite a repugnance towards war in more ways than victim testimonials, live coverage, or a dozen pictures of burnt babies ever can. And maybe its true that for every Guernica or May 3rd there will be a Washington Crosses the Delaware or a Napoleon at the Great St. Bernard; a painting that glorifies war and mythologizes generals. But for people who have experienced its harrowing consequences, or for those who are not so readily swayed by saber-rattling, ideological isms, maybe a work of art could be just the rallying banner for anti-war and political protest that they need.
In the same way Picasso was influenced by those before him, others found inspiration in his work. My favorite example is Faith Ringgold’s “Die”, part of her American People Series. I was in MoMA in 2016, just a few days after the museum acquired that painting. Its imagery and sheer size were overpowering, as was the direct, no-nonsense message it aimed to convey. And one could easily detect throwbacks to “Guernica”, from the choice of size to the sprawled bodies and translucent drapery donned by the central figures.
The grey hues, splattered blood and harrowed expressions on Die’s protagonists was meant, I believe, to force a visceral reaction against violence and the ensuing race riots that engulfed the United States the year the painting was made. The events of the long, hot summer of 1967 must have driven Ringgold to abandon any attempts at subtlety and symbolism, and instead reach for unwavering, unequivocal denunciation of violence through activist expression. Infants huddled in the centre serve as a representation of hope, and a message that nationalism is anathema to childhood innocence, that it is a rather unnatural inculcation hammered home by politics of fear and scapegoating.
Ringgold, though, was apparently an adherent of the “many sides” argument, as Die seemingly refused to direct blame or reprehension towards a specific group. Perhaps she deliberately wished to distance herself from, and equally condemn, violent Black Nationalism that was on the rise as an alternative to the peaceful civil rights movement. The message from Die, like that of Guernica, was that nationalist violence is abhorrent and uprooting, regardless of the perpetrator’s colour or creed.
In 1945, Orwell gave the simplest definition of Nationalism I have come across: the tendency to classify people as one would insects, and confidently label them as either good or bad. All nationalism is quintessentially racist in outlook and temperament, characterized by narcissism and an indifference to reality.
Whereas Guernica employed the bull and horse, perhaps as symbols of nationalism, bestiality or other histrionic displays of vilification, Ringgold avoided such symbolism. The lack of figuration compels the notion that white collar racism cannot be excused by hard economic times or the presence of divisive politicians. It becomes incumbent upon each individual to refute narratives of hate. Politicians, like nationalist symbols, are fed on collectively constructed beliefs, for without the discursive performativity of their believers, nationalism and its ilk of supremacist ideologies would fail to take hold.
Another work of art that draws its inspiration directly from Guernica was Dia AlAzzawi’s Mission of Destruction, which the famed Iraqi artist paintedin response to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Azzawi’s large mural, 15x2.5 meters, was displayed at the MoMA PS-1 for some time in 2019. From the right side, black-eyed aggressors confront what seems to be Iraqis on the right side of the painting. Bayonets, jumbled army boots and tanks are jutting towards the right, moving the aggressors forward. The images representing the Iraqis have their eyes closed, perhaps in resignation to death, their head tilted upwards in the direction of the sky from where the bombs fall, or maybe in desperate hope for some divine deliverance. Limbs are scattered through the scene. A dog barks amidst the horror, echoing Picasso’s braying horse in Guernica. At the canvas’s center Azzawi placed a void in which a corpse falls, and that empty void is the focal point of the entire scene, much like the void at the center of Fahrelnissa’s My Hell. Al-Azzawi’s work is an indictment of the war that led to the death of more than 124 thousand Iraqi civilians in the first ten years of the war, before ISIL’s existence.
Sardonically, the museum which hosted Guernica for over forty years as a refugee from war, then went on to train a president-cum-artist who was regarded in some places as one of the world’s bloodiest war criminals. During the Iraq War, MoMA created online courses that were posted freely on the web. In his attempt at painting after he left office, President George W. Bush took an online class called “Modern Art: 1800–1945” to help his budding art, where he depicted dogs, foreign leaders, war veterans, and various self-portraits of himself in the bathtub or looking into a mirror. He signed his paintings “43” rather than by his monogram, as if he drew his value not from who he was or the values he held as a person but from the title he was surprisingly given. Bush then published a book with some of his paintings in 2021, a collection celebrating immigrants to the United States.[1] Unsurprisingly, the President never painted Iraqis.
We might, in our naivety, think that art can haunt some people in power into pacifism; that it could somehow provide meaning to meaningless violence or that it can provide some therapy to those who were affected by war’s monstrosity. More often though, art will stop nothing. So is it completely useless in effecting change to the course of war and suffering?
A famous line from W. H. Auden’s poem eulogizing W. B. Yeats is almost always taken out of context: poetry makes nothing happen. Auden says that. True. But that is not to say he thought that poetry was meaningless. After all, he was a poet.
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
Poetry, and by extension art, does not undo the evils of war, nor does it touch the executives entrenched in their own righteous justifications of murder. Yet, poetry/art survives. The expression is in itself an occurrence that lends a mouth; that gives voice to those who are too busy quietly grieving in their pockets of ruin and isolation. Art changes nothing, but survives at least as a measure of defiance, as an audible wail for the distraught. It is less helpful than tangible acts of protest or political action, but more effective than a fiery speech or a political pamphlet. It survives, giving us hope that humanity, too, might survive the onslaught of avarice and bigotry.
