Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art

Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s extensive discussion of Guernica and quotation of Pablo Picasso statements compiled in this extended version of the catalogue of the exhibition Picasso: Forty Years of His Art (MoMA, New York, November 15, 1939 – January 7, 1940) acknowledge the political significance of the mural. For example: “In the panel on which I am working which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death…”, 1937 (Barr, 202 and 264); “no, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy”, 1945 (Barr, 248 and 269). Although Barr discusses Jerome Seckler’s “Picasso Explains” interview in New Masses, vol. 11, from March 13, 1945 (Barr, 247 and 268), he omits parts of Picasso’s replies to Seckler, for instance: “In that [Guernica] there is a deliberate appeal to people, a deliberate sense of propaganda…”. Two decades later, in the catalogue Guernica: Studies and Postscripts, 1967, Barr marginalised the whole political significance of the mural in his analysis.