The triumph of outrage

In this book Russell Martin seeks to explain to the common reader how Picasso’s largest canvas, measuring 11′ 6” high and 25′ 8” long, came to be called ‘Guernica’, after a small Basque market town of some 7,000 inhabitants and how it became the painter’s best known work as an icon of the radical Left throughout the world. He achieves this by putting both the painting of the picture and its subsequent fate in their historical contexts.

In 1937 Picasso had been living in France for 30 years. Yet he did not take out French nationality. Martin argues that in Paris he had become ‘more Spanish than less so’. From the outbreak of the Spanish civil war in July 1936 between Franco and the defenders of the Republic, he made clear his detestation of Franco, shared by his circle of friends – fellow artists like Max Ernst and the surrealist poet AndrZ Breton.