IN-PERSON London Heritages. Section B

Abstract

This paper presents insights from the British Academy & Marie Curie-funded postdoctoral project, ‘Gernika as Orient: Bombs, Art & Fake News’. It connects the bombing of the Basque town of Gernika in 1937 to the two preceding decades of aerial attacks which had been conducted by European powers across the African and Asian continents. This prehistory helps to explain why Asian, Arab and African artists have continued to draw on, reference and reinterpret Picasso’s painting, from its initial unveiling at the Paris Expo in 1937 right up until the present day. In doing so these artists have advanced an alternative set of interpretations of the painting’s meaning and significance. To cite two examples, while the British A Level Art History curriculum states confidently that Picasso’s masterpiece was inspired by the “first” aerial bombardments to target civilians, Arab contemporaries saw Guernica instead as the first European condemnation of the carnage to which their own communities had long been subjected. And while the painting is frequently interpreted by the European Commission, the Reina Sophia and other major Western institutions as an “anti-war” painting, artists from Asia, Africa and the Levant are more likely to cite Picasso’s leftist, anticolonial politics, and the immediate impulse behind the painting: namely, to lend support to the Republican government in its war against the forces of European fascism. This alternative reading of Guernica has evolved, over the course of almost ninety years, into a visual vocabulary all its own, which my project traces from 1930s Cairo to Cold War South Africa, Pakistan and Vietnam, and on to 21st century conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel-Palestine. In doing so it both reaffirms the importance of a great European work of the 20th century and insists on a more nuanced and transnational understanding of the historical and political forces which shaped it, and have been shaped by it in turn.