“Guernica, the Apocalypse of Saint-Sever”

In 1958, artist Leon Golub wrote this unpublished paper on an 11th century European manuscript, known as the Apocalypse of Saint-Sever, which for Pablo Picasso could have been a source of imagery and symbolic meaning for Guernica. He and many other US-based artists, including Jackson Pollock, were fascinated with Guernica. Pollock’s series Drawings Presented for Psychoanalysis (ca. 1939–1940) closely echo Picasso’s preparatory studies and his Mural (1943) is arguably an abstract version of Guernica. For Golub, the work by the Spanish artist exemplified a mural-size engagement — in the European figurative tradition — with social and political issues, without falling into a particular leftist political analysis or ideal such as the social realism of 1930s USA or the official Socialist Realism of the Soviet Union and its affiliated communist parties in Europe.