Paint the horror

I just read a report on the replica of that famous anti-war painting, Guernica, done by Pablo Picasso in 1937. He was expressing his protest against the bombing of the little town of Guernica, in Basque country, by Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War. The work was shown in select galleries around the world – at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1939 - until Picasso realized that the painting was suffering rather from the wear and tear of constant travel and toing and froing from Spain to wherever. So he gave permission for three exact copies to be woven - yes, as a tapestry – by two weavers from Paris in 1950. Today, one copy is in Japan, another finds a home in France and the third is part of the property of the Rockefeller family and on loan to the United Nations, hanging just outside the Security Council chamber in the landmark New York building for 24 years. It is this replica that is now on display in London, again at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. The tapestry is part of a just-opened show by a Polish sculptor, Goshka Macuga, who ‘speaks’ of the controversy generated by the original work, now at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.

There has always been debate over this particular work. After some argument, Picasso undertook to paint the piece for the World Fair in Paris, but few paid any attention to it at the time. It was only when it went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the 1940s, and was kept there during World War II – Picasso wanted it to stay there until democracy was restored in Spain – that it gained the adulation that it is mentioned with today. Perhaps the most recent furore came when blue curtains were drawn across the tapestry version at the UN in 2003; the synchronicity was a bit off, since the Security Council was meeting to listen to the US’s argument for starting the war on Iraq and an anti-war artwork would hardly induce the right mood. It could, of course, as cynics have said, be for reasons more mundane – blue has a great television presence!

In my own mind, Guernica is replete with controversy. I know it is a hugely significant work, a piece that should be seen and experienced at least once in a lifetime. It has depth, meaning, symbolism, greatness…everything that makes any work of art a must-do for event hose who do not hunger for cultural exposure. But it is also – or at least it was for me – an excruciatingly painful experience. Standing in front of the work, placed in a niche in a shadowed room, the first thing that hit me was how small it is. When you see photographs of it, you expect scale, vastness, almost a landscape across which the eye can travel. What you see is bodies – humans and horses - with limbs and necks at strange angles, agony in every twist and anguish in each oddly placed eye. There is death, of course, but there is an immeasurable pain in the dying. And a lot of that pain is transmitted to the viewer, cutting through all the insulation of so many critiques read and so much hype seen beyond. It has to be seen, but the seeing needs to be done at a distance, where it cannot hurt the heart, the mind and the sensibilities. The controversy is obvious - you have to see it once, but do you really need to see it?

I stood in front of the painting once, some years ago. I am not sure I ever want to see it again.