Pablo Picasso
Guernica

From the Times, April 28, 1937:

"On April 26, 1937, the Falangist Air Force, with German planes and pilots, attacked and razed the Basque town of Guernica to the ground, killing about two thousand people in three and a half hours. From a military point of view, Guernica was a completely insignificant target; the action, carried out on a market day, was an inhumane massacre, conducted to sow terror among the civilian population and to experiment with an air warfare tactic: carpet bombing. [...] The entire town, with seven thousand inhabitants and more than three thousand refugees, was systematically shattered. For a radius of eight kilometers around Guernica, raiders struck isolated farms. At night, bombed-out farms were ablaze like candles lit on the hills."

Man!

No, don't worry, it is not the voice of the God you have now relegated to a secondary, spiritual entity. It is the virtual scream of a famous artist of more or less appreciated works, who invokes your Name and your species.

Observe the canvas. Carefully carry out the imperative I have requested of you. Don't you notice anything that could be traced back to your damned will? To your nefarious act of mass destruction?

You see the dismemberment of bodies reduced to formless and hideous subjects/objects. You see the absence of any warm tone, you scrutinize the deprivation of light that traditionally radiates the canvas of the Renaissance or Impressionist artist. Before this immense work, cold malevolent perceptions knock at the door of your soul, subjected to a beastly body. Bizarre sensation! Art deprived of any positive connotation! The Art of Nothingness and Nullification! Poor Leonardo, Caravaggio, Monet, Giotto! What will become of their exemplary teachings, what will become of that pictorial, perspective, vigorous, flamboyant Renaissance, aiming for the perfection of the Human? You, Artist, reckless, mad composer of the naturally multidimensional reality, have you dared to negate the work of your Masters through a misleading and unheard-of DIY revolution? Don’t you consider the consequences of your nefarious attitude? These could theoretically be the questions you have asked yourself at the end of the scrutiny.

Man, I, Pablo Ruiz Picasso, from Malaga, Spain, have artistically represented your destructive contemporaneity. Your new acting. Nothing more. No frills and/or aesthetic pretense.

You have placed War on the pedestal of mass society. You have mobilized millions of your kind, ignorant, degenerate, towards ideals of totalitarian asceticism. You defy nature, its stern and ruthless laws, you mercilessly exploit the rationality that Providence has decided to embed in your brains, differentiating you from the insect, the fish, and the reptile. Your rationality is, nevertheless, food for Death's teeth.

Observe Guernica, rather, what remains of the small human settlement in Basque land. You have dared to annihilate thousands of your kind from above. Through white phosphorus bombs, you have martyred, vaporized, dried, erased their flesh, you have stolen their souls. Your Aviation, technological, advanced, empirically developed, has traded monstrous devices for individuals, innocent bodies, single life stories, perhaps, indeed, certainly unique in their local smallness.

You slipped away, proud, full of merriment, like a bullfighter who has just defeated the horned bovine, laughing, mocking above the immense fire that stood out against the tormented landscape below. From the peaceful and ethereal atmosphere in which your propellers were immersed, you returned to your native land, toasted for the feat, toasted with you, too, did the sender, the demander of the same, glasses are raised to the scarlet infernal sky.

I - Pablo Ruiz Picasso - take on the humble task of redesigning, with extreme simplicity and effective expressiveness, the act you committed. Therefore, the canvas that, static and dynamic at the same time, is interposed between your body and the support wall.

On it, I have depicted heads, feet, limbs, lifeless body elements, abruptly cut by the murderous fire. I have deliberately confused objects and subjects, overlapping them, overturning them, the contours are disorderly lines, uniting human bodies, animals, objects that in front of Nothingness assume the same dignity and the same appearances, a valid reason to explain the absence of any perspective arrangement, absolutely useless in front of what is really destroyed and disintegrated. Before you, Man, the Essential.

I later added two lit lights, symbolizing any benign hope to come, I attempted an ancestral reconstruction of your moral/spiritual World through a small, almost invisible, flower, whose exegesis of several critics after me undoubtedly coincided with what I have just stated above.

Man, do not be horrified before pure artistic abstraction. Be horrified of your concreteness and of the reality you have produced and conceived. And do not even think for a moment that this work is some kind of "reprimand" to your species. Because I too belong to it.

Pablo Ruiz Picasso, Guernica, 1937, Oil on canvas, 349x776 cm, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, Madrid