Episode Details

Picasso’s Guernica, painted in Paris in 1937, is one of the most powerful anti-war paintings ever created. It was inspired by the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War by German and Italian aircraft supporting Franco. Picasso depicts not the bombing itself, but its human consequences: screaming mothers, a dead child, a wounded horse, a fallen soldier and terrified figures trapped within a shattered world. Painted almost entirely in black, white and grey, its fractured Cubist forms convey chaos, grief and brutality. What began as a response to one particular atrocity became a universal image of the suffering and destruction caused by war.