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Guernica (Spanish: ; Basque: ) is a large 1937 oil painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. It is one of his best-known works, regarded by many art critics as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history. It is exhibited in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.

The grey, black, and white painting, on a canvas 3.49 meters (11 ft 5 in) tall and 7.76 meters (25 ft 6 in) across, portrays the suffering wrought by violence and chaos. Prominently featured in the composition are a gored horse, a bull, screaming women, a dead baby, a dismembered soldier, and flames.

Picasso painted Guernica at his home in Paris in response to the 26 April 1937 bombing of Guernica, a town in the Basque Country in northern Spain that was bombed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy at the request of the Spanish Nationalists. Upon completion, Guernica was exhibited at the Spanish display at the 1937 Paris International Exposition and then at other venues around the world. The touring exhibition was used to raise funds for Spanish war relief. The painting soon became famous and widely acclaimed, helping to bring worldwide attention to the Spanish Civil War that took place from 1936 to 1939.

In January 1937, while Pablo Picasso was living in Paris on Rue des Grands Augustins, he was commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to create a large mural for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair. This piece was to help raise awareness of the war and raise necessary funds. Picasso, who had last visited Spain in 1934 and would never return, was the Honorary Director-in-Exile of the Prado Museum.

Picasso worked somewhat dispassionately from January until late April on the project's initial sketches, which depicted his perennial theme of an artist's studio. Then, immediately upon hearing reports of the 26 April bombing of Guernica, poet Juan Larrea visited Picasso's home to urge him to make the bombing his subject. Days later, on 1 May, Picasso read George Steer's eyewitness account of the attack, which originally had been published in both and The New York Times on 28 April, and abandoned his initial idea. Acting on Larrea's suggestion, Picasso began sketching a series of preliminary drawings for Guernica.

Guernica in ruins, 1937

During the Spanish Civil War the Republican forces, made up of communists, socialists, anarchists, and others with differing goals, united in their opposition to the Nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco, who sought to establish a fascist dictatorship. The Nationalists perceived Guernica, a quiet village in the province of Biscay in Basque Country, as the northern bastion of the Republican resistance movement and the center of Basque culture.

On Monday, 26 April 1937, warplanes of the Nazi Germany Condor Legion, commanded by Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, bombed Guernica for about two hours. In his 30 April 1937 journal entry von Richthofen noted that when the squadron arrived "there was smoke everywhere" from the attack by three aircraft, and since nobody could see the roads, bridges, and suburbs "they just dropped everything right into the center. The 250s toppled a number of houses and destroyed the water mains. The incendiaries now could spread and become effective. The materials of the houses: tile roofs, wooden porches, and half-timbering resulted in complete annihilation."

Monday was Guernica's market day, and many of its inhabitants were congregated in the center of town. When the main bombardment began the roads were already full of debris and the bridges leading out of town destroyed, and they were unable to escape.

Guernica, the capital of Biscay, was 10 kilometers from the front lines and in-between the front lines and Bilbao. A Republican retreat towards Bilbao, or an advance towards it, had to pass through it. von Richthofen's 26 April 1937 diary entry states Guernica was targeted "...to halt and disrupt the Red withdrawal which has to pass through here." The following day, Richthofen wrote in his diary, "Guernica burning". The nearest actual military target, a war product factory on the village's outskirts, went through the attack unscathed, so the attack was widely condemned as a terror bombing.

Most of Guernica's men were away fighting on behalf of the Republicans, and at the time of the bombing the town was populated mostly by women and children as reflected in Picasso's painting. Art theorist Rudolf Arnheim writes:

The women and children make Guernica the image of innocent, defenseless humanity victimized. Also, women and children have often been presented by Picasso as the very perfection of mankind. An assault on women and children is, in Picasso's view, directed at the core of mankind.

The Times journalist George Steer propelled this event onto the international scene, and brought it to Pablo Picasso's attention, in an eyewitness account published on 28 April in both The Times and The New York Times. On the 29th it appeared in . Steer wrote:

Guernica, the most ancient town of the Basques and the centre of their cultural tradition, was completely destroyed yesterday afternoon by insurgent air raiders. The bombardment of this open town far behind the lines occupied precisely three hours and a quarter, during which a powerful fleet of aeroplanes consisting of three types of German types, Junkers and Heinkel bombers, did not cease unloading on the town bombs weighing from 1,000 lbs. downwards and, it is calculated, more than 3,000 two-pounder aluminium incendiary projectiles. The fighters, meanwhile, plunged low from above the centre of the town to machinegun those of the civilian population who had taken refuge in the fields."

Picasso lived in Paris during its World War II German occupation. A widely repeated story is that a German officer saw a photo of Guernica in Picasso's apartment and asked, "Did you do that?", and Picasso responded, "No, you did."

On 11 May the canvas is ready, and immediately the composition is laid down as a linear structure that covers the whole surface. Work on the mural is accompanied by more than thirty studies for the details. The rough plan exists from the beginning, but it takes three weeks before the picture receives its final form. The bull's head remains where it was first put, but the body is turned around to the left. On 20 May the horse lifts its head. The body of the soldier stretched on the floor from left to right changes position on 4 June, then head and hand take on their finished shape.

Guernica was painted using a matte house paint specially formulated at Picasso's request to have the least possible gloss. American artist John Ferren assisted him in preparing the monumental canvas, and photographer Dora Maar, who had been working with Picasso since mid-1936 photographing his studio and teaching him the technique of cameraless photography, documented its creation. Apart from their documentary and publicity value, Maar's photographs "helped Picasso to eschew color and give the work the black-and-white immediacy of a photograph", according to art historian John Richardson.

Picasso, who rarely allowed strangers into his studio to watch him work, admitted influential visitors to observe his progress on Guernica, believing that the publicity would help the antifascist cause. As his work on the mural progressed, Picasso explained: "The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. How could anybody think for a moment that I could be in agreement with reaction and death? ... 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."

Picasso worked on the painting for 35 days, and finished it on 4 June 1937.

The scene occurs within a large room. On the left, a wide-eyed bull, with a tail suggesting rising flame and smoke as if seen through a window, stands over a grieving woman holding a dead child in her arms. The woman's head is thrown back and her mouth is wide open. A horse falls in agony in the center of the room, with a large gaping hole in its side, as if it had just been run through by a spear or javelin. The horse appears to be wearing chain mail armor, decorated with vertical tally marks arranged in rows.

A dead and dismembered soldier lies under the horse. The hand of his severed right arm grasps a shattered sword, from which a flower grows. The open palm of his left hand contains a stigma, a symbol of martyrdom derived from the stigmata of Christ. A bare light bulb in the shape of an all-seeing eye blazes over the suffering horse's head.

To the horse's upper right a frightened woman's head and extended right arm reach through a window. As she witnesses the scene she carries a flame-lit lamp in her right hand, and holds it near the bare bulb. Below her a woman in shock staggers from the right towards the center while looking into the blazing light bulb with a blank stare.

Daggers that suggest screaming have replaced the tongues of the horse, the bull, and the grieving woman. To the bull's right a dove appears on a cracked wall through which bright light from the outside shines.

On the far right of the room there is a fourth woman, her arms raised in terror. Her wide-open mouth and thrown back head echo the grieving woman's. She is entrapped by fire from above and below, her right hand suggesting the shape of an airplane.

A dark wall with an open door defines the right side of the room.

A "hidden" image formed by the horse appears in Guernica: The horse's nostrils and upper teeth can be seen as a human skull facing left and slightly downward.

Another hidden image is of a bull that appears to gore the horse from underneath. The bull's head is formed mainly by the horse's entire front leg which has the knee on the ground. The leg's knee-cap forms the head's nose. A horn appears within the horse's breast.

Interpretations of Guernica vary widely and contradict one another. This extends, for example, to the mural's two dominant elements: the bull and the horse. Art historian Patricia Failing said,

"The bull and the horse are important characters in Spanish culture. Picasso himself certainly used these characters to play many different roles over time. This has made the task of interpreting the specific meaning of the bull and the horse very tough. Their relationship is a kind of ballet that was conceived in a variety of ways throughout Picasso's career."

When pressed to explain the elements in Guernica, Picasso said,

...this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse... If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.

In The Dream and Lie of Franco, a series of narrative sketches Picasso also created for the World's Fair, Franco is depicted as a monster that first devours his own horse and later does battle with an angry bull. Work on these illustrations began before the bombing of Guernica, and four additional panels were added, three of which relate directly to the Guernica mural.

According to scholar Beverly Ray, the following list of interpretations reflects the general consensus of historians: "The shape and posture of the bodies express protest"; "Picasso uses black, white, and grey paint to set a somber mood and express pain and chaos"; "flaming buildings and crumbling walls not only express the destruction of Guernica, but reflect the destructive power of civil war"; "the newspaper print used in the painting reflects how Picasso learned of the massacre"; "The light bulb in the painting represents the sun"; and "The broken sword near the bottom of the painting symbolizes the defeat of the people at the hand of their tormentors".

Alejandro Escalona said, "The chaos unfolding seems to happen in closed quarters provoking an intense feeling of oppression. There is no way out of the nightmarish cityscape. The absence of color makes the violent scene developing right before your eyes even more horrifying. The blacks, whites, and grays startle you-especially because you are used to see war images broadcast live and in high-definition right to your living room."

In drawing attention to a number of preliminary studies, the so-called primary project, that show an atelier installation incorporating the central triangular shape which reappears in the final version of Guernica, Becht-Jördens and Wehmeier interpret the painting as a self-referential composition in the tradition of atelier paintings such as Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez. In his chef d'oeuvre, Picasso seems to be trying to define his role and his power as an artist in the face of political power and violence. But far from being a mere political painting, Guernica should be seen as Picasso's comment on what art can actually contribute towards the self-assertion that liberates every human being and protects the individual against overwhelming forces such as political crime, war, violence and death.

Spanish flag marking the place of exhibition of Picasso's painting Guernica in Paris during the World Expo in 1937 (Agfacolor).

A replica (built in Barcelona in 1992) of the pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition.

Guernica was unveiled and initially exhibited in July 1937 at the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition, where Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had huge pavilions. The Pavilion, which was financed by the Spanish Republican government at the time of civil war, was built to exhibit the Spanish government's struggle for existence contrary to the Exposition's technology theme. The Pavilion's entrance presented an enormous photographic mural of Republican soldiers accompanied by the slogan:

We are fighting for the essential unity of Spain.

We are fighting for the integrity of Spanish soil.

We are fighting for the independence of our country and for the right of the Spanish people to determine their own destiny.

The display of Guernica was accompanied by a poem by Paul Éluard, and the pavilion displayed by Joan Miró and Mercury Fountain by Alexander Calder, both of whom were sympathetic to the Republican cause.[citation needed ]

At Guernica's Paris Exhibition unveiling it garnered little attention. The public's reaction to the painting was mixed. Max Aub, one of the officials in charge of the Spanish pavilion, was compelled to defend the work against a group of Spanish officials who objected to the mural's modernist style and sought to replace it with a more traditional painting that was also commissioned for the exhibition, Madrid 1937 (Black Aeroplanes) by Horacio Ferrer de Morgado. Some Marxist groups criticized Picasso's painting as lacking in political commitment, and faulted it for not offering a vision of a better future. In contrast, Morgado's painting was a great success with Spanish Communists and with the public. The art critic Clement Greenberg was also critical of Guernica, and in a later essay he termed the painting "jerky" and "too compressed for its size", and compared it unfavorably to the "magnificently lyrical" The Charnel House (1944-1948), a later antiwar painting by Picasso.

Among the painting's admirers were art critic Jean Cassou and poet José Bergamín, both of whom praised the painting as quintessentially Spanish. Michel Leiris perceived in Guernica a foreshadowing: "On a black and white canvas that depicts ancient tragedy ... Picasso also writes our letter of doom: all that we love is going to be lost..." Jean Cocteau also praised the painting and declared it a cross that "[General] Franco would always carry on his shoulder."

Guernica, for which Picasso was paid 150,000 francs for his costs by the Spanish Republican government, was one of the few major paintings that Picasso did not sell directly to his exclusive contracted art dealer and friend, Paul Rosenberg. However, after its exhibition Rosenberg organised a four-man extravaganza Scandinavian tour of 118 works by Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and Henri Laurens. The tour's main attraction was Guernica.[citation needed ]

From January to April 1938 the tour visited Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Göteborg. Starting in late September Guernica was exhibited in London's Whitechapel Art Gallery. This stop was organized by Sir Roland Penrose with Labour Party leader Clement Attlee, and the painting arrived in London on 30 September, the same day the Munich Agreement was signed by the leaders of the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Germany. It then travelled to Leeds, Liverpool, and, in early 1939, Manchester. There, Manchester Foodship For Spain, a group of artists and activists engaged in sending aid to the people of Spain, exhibited the painting in the HE Nunn & Co Ford automobile showroom for two weeks. Guernica then returned briefly to France.

After Francisco Franco's victory in Spain, Guernica was sent to the United States to raise funds and support for Spanish refugees. It was first shown at the Valentine Gallery in New York City in May 1939. The San Francisco Museum of Art (later renamed the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) gave the work its first museum appearance in the United States from 27 August to 19 September 1939. New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) then mounted an exhibition from 15 November until 7 January 1940, entitled: Picasso: 40 Years of His Art. The exhibition, which was organized by MoMA's director Alfred H. Barr in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago, contained 344 works, including Guernica and its studies.

At Picasso's request the safekeeping of Guernica was then entrusted to the Museum of Modern Art, and it was his expressed desire that the painting should not be delivered to Spain until liberty and democracy had been established in the country. Between 1939 and 1952, Guernica traveled extensively in the United States. Between 1941 and 1942, it was exhibited at Harvard University's Fogg Museum twice.

Between 1953 and 1956 it was shown in Brazil, then at the first Picasso retrospective in Milan, Italy, and then in numerous other major European cities before returning to MoMA for a retrospective celebrating Picasso's 75th birthday. It then went to Chicago and Philadelphia. By this time, concern for the state of the painting resulted in a decision to keep it in one place: a room on MoMA's third floor, where it was accompanied by several of Picasso's preliminary studies and some of Dora Maar's photographs of the work in progress. The studies and photos were often loaned for other exhibitions, but until 1981, Guernica itself remained at MoMA.

During the Vietnam War, the room containing the painting became the site of occasional anti-war vigils. These were usually peaceful and uneventful, but on 28 February 1974, Tony Shafrazi-ostensibly protesting Second Lieutenant William Calley's petition for habeas corpus following his indictment and sentencing for the murder of 109 Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre -defaced the painting with red spray paint, painting the words "KILL LIES ALL". The paint was removed with relative ease from the varnished surface.

As early as 1968, Franco had expressed an interest in having Guernica come to Spain. However, Picasso refused to allow this until the Spanish people again enjoyed a republic. He later added other conditions, such as the restoration of "public liberties and democratic institutions". Picasso died in 1973. Franco, ten years Picasso's junior, died two years later, in 1975. After Franco's death, Spain was transformed into a democratic constitutional monarchy, ratified by a new constitution in 1978. However, MoMA was reluctant to give up one of its greatest treasures and argued that a monarchy did not represent the republic that had been stipulated in Picasso's will as a condition for the painting's delivery. Under great pressure from a number of observers, MoMA finally ceded the painting to Spain in 1981. The Spanish historian Javier Tusell was one of the negotiators.[citation needed ]

Upon its arrival in Spain in September 1981, it was first displayed behind bomb-and bullet-proof glass screens at the Casón del Buen Retiro in Madrid in time to celebrate the centenary of Picasso's birth, 25 October. The exhibition was visited by almost a million people in the first year. Since that time there has never been any attempted vandalism or other security threat to the painting.

A tiled wall in Gernika claims "Guernica" Gernikara, "The Guernica (painting) to Gernika".

In 1992, the painting was moved from the Museo del Prado to a purpose-built gallery at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, both in Madrid, along with about two dozen preparatory works. This action was controversial in Spain, since Picasso's will stated that the painting should be displayed at the Prado. However, the move was part of a transfer of all of the Prado's collections of art after the early 19th century to other nearby buildings in the city for reasons of space; the Reina Sofía, which houses the capital's national collection of 20th-century art, was the natural place to move it to. At the Reina Sofía, the painting has roughly the same protection as any other work.

Basque nationalists have advocated that the picture be brought to the Basque Country, especially after the building of the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum. Officials at the Reina Sofía claim that the canvas is now thought to be too fragile to move. Even the staff of the Guggenheim do not see a permanent transfer of the painting as possible, although the Basque government continues to support the possibility of a temporary exhibition in Bilbao.

The tapestry, at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2009

A full-size tapestry copy of Picasso's Guernica, by Jacqueline de la Baume Dürrbach, hangs at the Headquarters of the United Nations in New York City at the entrance to the Security Council room. It is less monochromatic than the original and uses several shades of brown.

The Guernica tapestry was first displayed from 1985 to 2009, and returned in 2015. Originally commissioned in 1955 by Nelson Rockefeller, since Picasso refused to sell him the original, the tapestry was placed on loan to the United Nations by the Rockefeller estate in 1985.

On 5 February 2003 a large blue curtain was placed to cover over the work at the UN, so that it would not be visible in the background during press conferences by Colin Powell and John Negroponte as they were arguing in favor of war on Iraq. On the following day, UN officials claimed that the curtain was placed there at the request of television news crews, who had complained that the wild lines and screaming figures made for a bad backdrop, and that a horse's hindquarters appeared just above the faces of any speakers. Some diplomats, however, in talks with journalists claimed that the Bush administration pressured UN officials to cover the tapestry, rather than have it in the background while Powell or other US diplomats argued for war on Iraq. In a critique of the covering, columnist Alejandro Escalona hypothesized that Guernica's "unappealing ménage of mutilated bodies and distorted faces proved to be too strong for articulating to the world why the US was going to war in Iraq", while referring to the work as "an inconvenient masterpiece".

On 17 March 2009, Deputy Spokesperson for the Secretary-General Marie Okabe announced that the Guernica tapestry had been moved to a gallery in London in advance of extensive renovations at UN Headquarters. The Guernica tapestry was the showcase piece for the grand reopening of the Whitechapel Gallery. It was located in the 'Guernica room' which was originally part of the old Whitechapel Library. In 2012 the tapestry was on loan from the Rockefeller family to the San Antonio Museum of Art in San Antonio, Texas. It was returned to the UN by March 2015. Nelson A. Rockefeller Jr., the owner of the tapestry, took it back in February 2021. In February 2022, it was returned to the wall outside the UN Security Council.

" Guernica is to painting what Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is to music: a cultural icon that speaks to mankind not only against war but also of hope and peace. It is a reference when speaking about genocide from El Salvador to Bosnia."

Alejandro Escalona, on the 75th anniversary of the painting's creation

During the 1970s, Guernica was a symbol for Spaniards of both the end of the Franco regime following Franco's death and of Basque nationalism. The Basque left has repeatedly used imagery from the picture. An example is the organization Etxerat, which uses a reversed image of the lamp as its symbol. Guernica has since become a universal and powerful symbol warning humanity against the suffering and devastation of war. There are no obvious references to the specific attack, making its message universal and timeless.

Art historian and curator W. J. H. B. Sandberg argued in in 1960 that Picasso pioneered a "new language" combining expressionistic and cubist techniques in Guernica. Sandberg wrote that Guernica conveyed an "expressionistic message" in its focus on the inhumanity of the air raid, while using "the language of cubism". For Sandberg, the work's defining cubist features included its use of diagonals, which rendered the painting's setting "ambiguous, unreal, inside and outside at the same time". In 2016, the British art critic Jonathan Jones called the painting a "Cubist apocalypse" and stated that Picasso "was trying to show the truth so viscerally and permanently that it could outstare the daily lies of the age of dictators".

Works inspired by Guernica include Faith Ringgold's 1967 painting The American People Series #20: Die; Goshka Macuga's The Nature of the Beast (2009-2010), which used the Whitechapel-hosted United Nations Guernica tapestry; The Keiskamma Guernicas (2010-2017); and Erica Luckert's theatrical production of Guernica (2011-2012). Art and design historian Dr Nicola Ashmore curated an exhibition, Guernica Remakings, at the University of Brighton galleries from 29 July 2017 to 23 August 2017.

Arnheim, Rudolf. (1973). The Genesis of a Painting: Picasso's Guernica. London: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-25007-9

Barton, Simon. (2004). A History of Spain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Becht-Jördens, Gereon: Picassos Guernica als kunsttheoretisches Programm. In: Becht-Jördens, Gereon and Wehmeier, (In German) Peter M.: Picasso und die christliche Ikonographie. Mutterbeziehung und künstlerische Position. Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 2003, S. 209-237 ISBN 3-496-01272-2

Becraft, Melvin E. Picasso's Guernica - Images within Images 3rd Edition PDF download

Beevor, Antony. (2006) The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 978-0-297-84832-5

Blunt, Anthony. (1969) Picasso's Guernica. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-500135-4

Campbell, Peter (2009). "At the New Whitechapel" London Review of Books 31(8), 30 April 2009.

Cohen, David. (2003) Hidden Treasures: What's So Controversial About Picasso's Guernica?, Slate, 6 February 2003. Accessed 16 July 2006.

Fluegel, Jane. (1980) "Chronology" in Rubin (1980) Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective.

Francesconi, Elizabeth. (2006) "A Look Inside Picasso's War Images", discourse: An Online Journal by the students of Southern Methodist University, Spring 2006.

Granell, Eugenio Fernándes, Picasso's Guernica: the end of a Spanish era (Ann Arbor, Mich. : UMI Research Press, 1981) ISBN 0-8357-1206-0, ISBN 978-0-8357-1206-4

Greenberg, Clement (1993). The Collected Essays and Criticism; Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226306240

Harris, Mark and Becraft, Melvin E. Picasso's Secret Guernica

Hensbergen, Gijs van. (2009) "Piecing together Guernica". BBC News Magazine: 7 April 2009. Accessed: 14 August 2009.

Hoberman, J. "Pop and Circumstance". , 13 December 2004, 22-26.

Kennedy, Maev. (2009) "Picasso tapestry of Guernica heads to UK", London: The Guardian, 26 January 2009. Accessed: 14 August 2009.

Martin, Russell. (2002) Picasso's War: The Destruction of Guernica and the Masterpiece that Changed the World (2002). On-line excerpts link.

PBS On-line supplement to "Treasures of the World" series, "Guernica: Testimony to War" with Guernica timeline.

Pisik, Betsy. (2003) "The Picasso Cover-Up". The Washington Times, 3 February 2003. Re-published at CommonDreams.org. Accessed: 14 August 2009

Preston, Paul. (2007) "George Steer and Guernica". History Today 57 (2007): 12-19.

Ray, Beverly. (2006) "Analyzing Political Art to Get at Historical Fact: Guernica and the Spanish Civil War". The Social Studies 97 (2006): 168-171.

Richardson, John (2016) "A Different Guernica". The New York Review of Books, 12 May 2016, 63 (8): 4-6.

Rubin, William, ed. (1980) Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. ISBN 0-87070-519-9

Tóibín, Colm. (2006) "The art of war", London: The Guardian, 29 April 2006. Accessed: 14 August 2009.

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Guernica (Spanish: ; Basque: ) is a large 1937 oil painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. It is one of his best-known works, regarded by many art critics as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history. It is exhibited in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.

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died:

April 8, 1973, Mougins, France (aged 91)

...(Show more)

Early years

Pablo Picasso was the son of José Ruiz Blasco, a professor of drawing, and Maria Picasso López. His unusual adeptness for drawing began to manifest itself early, around the age of 10, when he became his father's pupil in A Coruña, where the family moved in 1891. From that point his ability to experiment with what he learned and to develop new expressive means quickly allowed him to surpass his father's abilities. In A Coruña his father shifted his own ambitions to those of his son, providing him with models and support for his first exhibition there at age 13.

The family moved to Barcelona in the autumn of 1895, and Pablo entered the local art academy (La Llotja), where his father had assumed his last post as professor of drawing. The family hoped that their son would achieve success as an academic painter, and in 1897 his eventual fame in Spain seemed assured; in that year his painting Science and Charity, for which his father modeled for the doctor, was awarded an honourable mention in Madrid at the Fine Arts Exhibition.

The Spanish capital was the obvious next stop for the young artist intent on gaining recognition and fulfilling family expectations. Pablo Ruiz duly set off for Madrid in the autumn of 1897 and entered the Royal Academy of San Fernando. But finding the teaching there stupid, he increasingly spent his time recording life around him, in the cafés, on the streets, in the brothels, and in the Prado, where he discovered Spanish painting. He wrote: "The Museum of paintings is beautiful. Velázquez first class; from El Greco some magnificent heads, Murillo does not convince me in every one of his pictures." Works by those and other artists would capture Picasso's imagination at different times during his long career. Goya, for instance, was an artist whose works Picasso copied in the Prado in 1898 (a portrait of the bullfighter Pepe Illo and the drawing for one of the Caprichos, Bien tirada está, which shows a Celestina [procuress] checking a young maja's stockings). Those same characters reappear in his late work-Pepe Illo in a series of engravings (1957) and Celestina as a kind of voyeuristic self-portrait, especially in the series of etchings and engravings known as Suite 347 (1968).

Picasso fell ill in the spring of 1898 and spent most of the remaining year convalescing in the Catalan village of Horta de Ebro in the company of his Barcelona friend Manuel Pallarès. When Picasso returned to Barcelona in early 1899, he was a changed man: he had put on weight; he had learned to live on his own in the open countryside; he spoke Catalan; and, most important, he had made the decision to break with his art-school training and to reject his family's plans for his future. He even began to show a decided preference for his mother's surname, and more often than not he signed his works P.R. Picasso; by late 1901 he had dropped the Ruiz altogether.

In Barcelona Picasso moved among a circle of Catalan artists and writers whose eyes were turned toward Paris. Those were his friends at the café Els Quatre Gats ("The Four Cats," styled after the Chat Noir ["Black Cat"] in Paris), where Picasso had his first Barcelona exhibition in February 1900, and they were the subjects of more than 50 portraits (in mixed media) in the show. In addition, there was a dark, moody "modernista" painting, Last Moments (later painted over), showing the visit of a priest to the bedside of a dying woman, a work that was accepted for the Spanish section of the Exposition Universelle in Paris in that year. Eager to see his own work in place and to experience Paris firsthand, Picasso set off in the company of his studio mate Carles Casagemas ( Portrait of Carles Casagemas [1899]) to conquer, if not Paris, at least a corner of Montmartre.

Discovery of Paris

One of Picasso's principal artistic discoveries on that trip (October-December) was colour-not the drab colours of the Spanish palette, the black of the shawls of Spanish women, or the ochres and browns of the Spanish landscape but brilliant colour-the colour of Vincent van Gogh, of new fashion, of a city celebrating a world's fair. Using charcoal, pastels, watercolours, and oils, Picasso recorded life in the French capital ( Lovers in the Street [1900]). In Moulin de la Galette (1900) he paid tribute to French artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the Swiss Théophile Alexandre Steinlen as well as his Catalan compatriot Ramon Casas.

After just two months Picasso returned to Spain with Casagemas, who had become despondent about a failed love affair. Having tried unsuccessfully to amuse his friend in Málaga, Picasso took off for Madrid, where he worked as an art editor for a new journal, Arte Joven. Casagemas returned to Paris, attempted to shoot the woman he loved, and then turned the gun on himself and died. The impact on Picasso was deep: it was not just that he had lost his loyal friend and perhaps felt a sense of guilt for having abandoned him; more important, he had gained the emotional experience and the material that would stimulate the powerful expressiveness of the works of the so-called Blue Period. Picasso made two death portraits of Casagemas several months later in 1901 as well as two funeral scenes ( Mourners and Evocation), and in 1903 Casagemas appeared as the artist in the enigmatic painting La Vie.

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Pablo Picasso | Biography, Cubism, Famous Paintings, Guernica, & Facts

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Pablo Picasso, Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the most-influential artists of the 20th century and the creator (with Georges Braque) of Cubism. Among his best-known works are Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1909) and Guernica (1937).

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Why is this painting so shocking? - Iseult Gillespie

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Bringing our city to your living room

Art may have the ability to cheer us up, to entertain us, but it also has the power to effect real change in the world.

Pablo Picasso once even went so far as to declare, "Painting is not made to decorate apartments; it is an offensive and defensive instrument of war against the enemy."

Some artworks throughout history have revolutionised the way we think about politics, social issues and even art itself.

From cave paintings to soup cans, princesses to soviet leaders, these are the paintings that have had an undeniable, impact on the art world and beyond.

Lascaux caves, 17,000 Before Present

The oldest painting made quite the global kerfuffle - but not until 17,000 years after it was painted. In 1940, a group of young men came across a cave in the French countryside, inside of which they discovered some one of the world's most extraordinary examples of prehistoric art. Whilst not the oldest example of human painting, the caves are one of the earliest examples of sophisticated painting, demonstrating a key moment in the human drive to make art.

Studies of the foetus in the womb, c.1510, Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo counts more than a few household names among his artworks - but this might not be one of them. This study of a foetus curled up in a womb, however, arguably made more impact on the world than the Mona Lisa or The Last Supper. In making his anatomical drawings - taken from real life dissections, an illegal practice for non-physicians - Leonardo challenged moral and artistic convention. Leonardo's discoveries and methods went on to change the way that both artists and scientists studied the human body.

Las Meninas, 1656, Diego Velazquez

This is no standard courtly painting. In this portrait of the Princess Margarita and her "meninas". or ladies in waiting, Spanish artist Diego Velazquez raised complex questions of viewpoint and viewer involvement in painting. Is the pictured Velazquez painting us? Are we the king and queen reflected in the mirror on the back wall? Its impact on art history has been profound: these are the kinds of questions raised by cubism 250 years later, and Picasso was so fascinated with Las Meninas, he painted 58 versions of it.

The Death of Marat, 1793, Jacques-Louis David

This painting by French artist Jacques Louis David, could be considered the first truly political artwork. It depicts the aftermath of revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat's murder, who was stabbed in his bathtub. David took a poignant political moment and painted it with near-photographic simplicity; his painting of his dead friend went on to become a pertinent piece of political propaganda, seeing it turned into an engraving which was widely circulated among the public.

Olympia, 1863, Edouard Manet

This radical nude is frequently hailed as a rejection of the patriarchal gaze in art. When Edouard Manet sat down to paint Olympia on her bed, artists had been painting reclining nudes for hundreds of years - but Olympia was going to be different. The pose is directly based on Venus of Urbino by Renaissance painter Titian, a painting famed for its shocking sexuality. But rather than a come hither look in the eyes of the subject, Olympia is confrontational, her stare hard. Her hand is a barrier to her genitals, not a gesture of invitation.

Black Square, 1915, Kazimir Malevich

This painting may just look like a black square - but that's because it is. The work by Kazimir Malevich is considered the first painting to not actually be of anything. Malevich wanted to completely reject the idea that art should depict reality, or even try to. This painting and Malevich's ideas went on to inspire countless artists in the twentieth century, and was the basis on which abstract and conceptual art movements were widely built - not necessarily changing the world, but changing art forever.

Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962, Andy Warhol

In contrast, this work by Andy Warhol definitely is of something - but it's not exactly something you would expect. Andy Warhol took a piece of design that the American people saw every day, and turned it into gallery-worthy art. In doing so, he questioned ideas of value attached to art - is this Campbell's soup tin really less worthy of attention than a Leonardo? To emphasise his point, Warhol first displayed the works lined up on shelves in a gallery space, mimicking how they would be stacked in a grocery store.

Guernica, 1937, Pablo Picasso

No artwork has become as important a symbol of anti-war movements as this heartbreaking painting by Pablo Picasso. The work depicts the overnight bombing of the Spanish city of Guernica in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso had been commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to create an artwork, and was so disgusted by the atrocity that he chose it as his subject. The painting was made into a full size replica tapestry which hangs in the United Nations headquarters in New York.

The Problem We All Live With, 1964, Norman Rockwell

Illustrator Norman Rockwell made his career depicting the normalities of American mid-century life - both the good and the bad. Painted in 1964, the work shows a young black girl named Ruby Bridges walking down the road, on her way to attend an all-white school. She is flanked by security due to the racial hatred this incited - she walks past racial slurs written on the walls. It became an iconic image of the Civil Rights Movement, and Barack Obama had it put on display when he invited Bridges to meet him at The White House in 2011.

Guerilla Girls, 1989, Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?

The Guerilla Girls are an anonymous group of artists with an important message. This art collective meets activism group has spent the last thirty years vocally fighting racism and sexism in the art world. They do this by simply stating the facts - in this case that "less than 5% of the artists in the Modern art section [of the Metropolitan Museum in New York] are women, but 85% of the nudes are female". This poster has become a symbol of furthering female respresentation in art institutions.

My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love , 1990, Dmitri Vrubel

In 1979, a famous photo of Soviet Union leader Leonid Brezhnev and German Democratic Republic leader Erich Honecker was taken. The two were depicted in a socialist fraternal kiss - a kiss which is made on the mouth if two leaders consider themselves particularly close. Artist Dmitri Vrubel chose to paint this image onto the Berlin Wall, accompanied by the controversial epithet. As the most famous part of the East Side Gallery, where murals are displayed on the remaining parts of the Berlin Wall, the painting is a symbol of how art can be an expression of people power - a power that can change the direction of politics.

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Art may have the ability to cheer us up, to entertain us, but it also has the power to effect real change in the world. Pablo Picasso once even went so far as to declare, "Painting is not made to decorate apartments; it is an offensive and defensive instrument of war against the enemy."

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This fantastical triptych is generally considered a distant forerunner to Surrealism. In truth, it's the expression of a late medieval artist who believed that God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell were real. Of the three scenes depicted, the left panel shows Christ presenting Eve to Adam, while the right one features the depredations of Hell; less clear is whether the center panel depicts Heaven. In Bosch's perfervid vision of Hell, an enormous set of ears wielding a phallic knife attacks the damned, while a bird-beaked bug king with a chamber pot for a crown sits on its throne, devouring the doomed before promptly defecating them out again. This riot of symbolism has been largely impervious to interpretation, which may account for its widespread appeal.

Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/ Centralasian

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The most famous paintings in art history of all time-ranked

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Explore our picks of the most famous paintings of all time from artists such as Jan Van Eyck, Seurat and Edward Hopper

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Art history has delivered us some amazing paintings and sculptures, so limiting the list to twenty pieces is no small feat. Certain works will always rise to the top. In this list of the twenty most famous pieces of Western art, see how many you recognize. Do you agree with the list? Which work would be your twenty-first?

Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci

The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo

The Creation of Adam is the central element in Michelangelo's large Sistine Chapel fresco. It is one of the most replicated biblical paintings in history, now blazoned on anything, from placemats to umbrellas. Here God breathes life into Adam, and the creation of man is central to the biblical creative narrative. God floats in a cloud of drapery and other human figures. He is portrayed as an older man, draped in a simple tunic, muscular yet real. The outstretched hands connect God to man and humanity. Michelangelo's painting of Adam, created in the image of God, must be one of the most famous nudes in art history. Eve, created from Adam's rib in the biblical narrative, is believed to be the figure tucked under God's left arm. Given that Michelangelo was first and foremost a sculptor, his strongest skills in painting are the musculature and twisted forms in the reclining nudes. A major cleaning project of the work completed in the late 1980s revealed Michelangelo's original bright color palette.

The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli

Botticelli's famous painting, The Birth of Venus, was commissioned by the influential Florentine Medici dynasty. Painting with tempera on canvas, rather than the more conventional wood panels used (like the Mona Lisa), showed a break away from traditional materials that were becoming popular at the time. The work is revered as a great treasure of the Renaissance, depicting a nude at the center of the painting referencing the ancient world. The Renaissance saw the "rebirthing" of the world of antiquity, not only in art, but also in architecture, philosophy, and poetry. Works by writers like Homer were regenerated and provide the background story for this picture. Venus is located at the center of the piece, riding upon a shell to the shore, after her birth from sea foam. She is blown from her right towards land by Zephyrus and the nymph Chloris, who guide her to shore. Pomona, the goddess of Spring, waits on shore for Venus' arrival. Take note of her contrapposto stance, the detail in her hair and her unusually large neck.

Guernica by Pablo Picasso

Guernica, a political protest piece in Picasso's distinct cubist style, was a central attraction at the Paris World Fair in 1937. This large-scale monochromatic palette of gray, white and black was Picasso's response to the recent bombing of the Northern Spanish town, Guernica. The attack by Hitler's armed forces, sanctioned by Franco's government against his people, was the first aerial saturation of a civilian population. It served as a "training mission" for Hitler and reduced the village to rubble, wounding or killing a third of the population. The painting is not easy to decipher, but the figures' pain and grief are distinct. The far left figure is of a woman who is screaming and holding a lifeless child in her arms. A bull remains unharmed and calm while a horse in the center of the work is terrified and distressed. Dead and wounded figures, mutilated bodies and distorted faces writhe in agony. Guernica traveled the globe to raise awareness of the war, contributing to its worldwide fame. MOMA held it for 19 years in New York until civil liberties and democratic processes were restored in Spain.

Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer

Girl with a Pearl Earring, or the " Mona Lisa of the North," is painted by the 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. A deceptively simple portrait, Girl with a Pearl Earring is enigmatic. No name is given and all the audience sees is a girl who has a pearl earring and is staring back. Speculation around the girl's identity ranges from being Vermeer's mistress to being one of his 15 children. The girl's hair is tied back in a blue band contrasting with the gold of her dress and is offset by the dark background, giving the painting its luminosity. Her mouth is open as though she is about to ask a question, but what is she thinking? The painting is a tronie rather than a portrait, depicting the subject's head dressed in its Eastern turban. This headdress, together with the exceptionally large pearl, conjures up the exotic. The painting crossed the globe during the restoration of the Mauritshuis, gaining near-movie star status. The Girl with the Pearl Earring experienced further fame with the release of the films Girl with a Pearl Earring and St Trinians.

Campbell's Soup Cans by Andy Warhol

Campbell's Soup Cans is just one in a series of paintings Andy Warhol made so incredibly famous through his use of the company's branding. Painted by hand, with the use of stencils, closer inspection reveals that these cans are not identical in appearance or spacing. Each can represents one of the 32 flavors that Campbell's had on offer in 1962. As a pop artist, Warhol became interested in the machine-like processes involved in mass production of such things as the Campbell's soup can itself. In the climate in which Warhol was producing these works, the American public was becoming more and more reliant on mass-production. For Warhol, this would lead to society's ultimately becoming more depersonalized and homogenous. Warhol saw the connection to the mechanical and the awareness of advertising, design, branding and mass production that the middle class was engaged in.

The Thinker by Auguste Rodin

Number 1 (1950) Lavender Mist by Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock's painting style was both confronting and controversial for the 1950's American public. Breaking away from the traditions of the pictorial past, Lavender Mist embodies Pollock's chosen style, which he had worked on since 1947. Pollock explored the characteristics of the paint itself and the surface it was applied to. Full of energy, the characteristic "dripping" technique was applied to a large scale canvas on the floor while Pollock walked around it. He applied paint straight from the industrial paint can, throwing, flinging and pouring paint across the surface with his sticks, brushes and turkey basters. In the heat of the action, he would fling other things in too, including sand and the occasional cigarette butt. In the tradition of ancient cave painters, Pollock signed the work in the upper left-hand corner with his handprints. Best seen up close, his action painting is rich in color and texture, which is lost in a photograph in a book or on a website. This action painting was a subset of the broader movement known as abstract expressionism.

Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh's magnum opus, Starry Night, is another exceptionally famous work that has constantly been replicated on bags, mugs, umbrellas and all manner of objects, a testament to its fame and popularity. It depicts the scene he saw from his room during his stay at a sanatorium. Van Gogh, not being the most robust of characters mentally, tried to chop off his ear, and eventually took his own life. Starry Night uses a strong color palette, with great energy created by the swirls of his brush. These characteristics have influenced generations of artists, making Van Gogh one of the most well-known and influential painters in Western art. Having completed thousands of works, Starry Night along with Café Terrace at Night and Sunflowers are amongst the most well-recognized paintings in the world, even an entire episode of Doctor Who was dedicated to the artist and his inner demons. Despite his skills, Van Gogh managed to sell only one of his works during his lifetime; ironic, given how they are now so revered that a single painting will command a USD 100 million price tag at auction.

American Gothic by Grant Wood

Named from the style of the building in the background of this painting, American Gothic has long been a cultural icon of a nation. Painted in 1930s America, Wood's painting represents America, Middle America, and small-town America all at the same time. Along with Thomas Hart Benton and some other artists, Wood's style was linked to the Regionalist painting genre. Pictured here are a farmer and his daughter (although the actual models were Wood's dentist and his daughter). Part of the fascination people have for the work is the contradictory readings people attribute to it. Some feel that Wood was mocking the Midwest, while others think it accurately represented the Midwesterner that he saw and painted. Either way, the work suggests hardworking individuals who toil the land, a conservative America that contrasted with the growing industrial culture of the time, and a symbol of the American heartland.

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper

Water Lily Pond by Claude Monet

Monet's Water Lily Pond belongs to a series of paintings that Monet created at his property in Giverny. They capture the impressions light left reflected upon the water dappled through the tree branches and leaves. This particular work incorporates Monet's famous Japanese bridge and the weeping willows that have become instantly recognizable to millions around the world. The suite of Water Lilies is on permanent display at the Museé de l'Orangerie in Paris. It was produced later in the artist's life. Water lilies were a constant subject for the artist. A continued decline in Monet's eyesight due to cataracts eventually affected how he saw the pond. The awesomeness of the original works' harmony and intensity of colors eventually became darker, bluer and more blurred and abstract in their execution. Despite this, Monet's contribution to art came from his ability to capture fleeting moments of time in the permanence of his canvas, making him a truly remarkable impressionist.

The Scream by Edvard Munch

Second, only to the Mona Lisa, The Scream is the most iconic human figure in the history of Western art. This now famous expressionist painting by Edvard Munch is part of the artist's autobiographical series the Frieze of Life. The Scream depicts a character who has recently walked along the bridge that extends from the left of the painting to the foreground. Curvy energetic forms rush around in the background in reds, blues, and yellows. Munch said the scene came from a moment of overwhelming anxiety and melancholy he experienced while out for a stroll with friends one evening. Stolen twice in dramatic heists from the Oslo Munch Museum, the painting has had its share of notoriety. The Scream also broke the record for the most expensive painting sold at auction in 2012 when it sold for just shy of USD 120 million. The Scream has also been parodied in other artists' work, adding to its notoriety. Andy Warhol was commissioned to produce silk prints from a lithograph of the painting. Munch made the lithograph himself, allowing him to sell black and white copies at will. In Wes Craven's Scream franchise, the killer wore a mask referencing on The Scream 's haunting face.

Venus de Milo by Alexandros of Antioch

The Venus de Milo, thought to represent the Greek goddess Aphrodite, is the oldest inclusion on this list. One of the most famous sculptures in the world today, the Venus de Milo originated in Ancient Greece. She was discovered on the island of Melos (Milo in modern Greek) and is now housed in the Louvre in Paris, with millions of people visiting her every year. Carved sometime around 100 BCE by the sculptor Alexandros of Antioch, Venus is a partially clothed woman who is missing her arms. Much discussion has surrounded what she was originally doing, or holding, with them. The form of this sculpture lives up to the image of Aphrodite the Greek Goddess of Beauty, Venus being her Roman namesake. Certain schools of thought, however, believe she is Amphitrite, the Goddess of the Sea, while others have claimed she is a prostitute. Whatever her origin, there is no question she is one of the most iconic statues in the world.

David by Michelangelo Buonarroti

David is the second of Michelangelo's works, with a spot in the top 20 most famous art pieces. This time, Michelangelo shows his mastery over the sculpting of human forms from marble. His success in sculpture would ultimately influence his painting of the Sistine Chapel, especially the rendering of muscular forms in his majestic fresco. Nearly three times the size of the average person, David is no mean feat, especially given the initial intention to place the sculpture above the roof line of the Florence Cathedral. Michelangelo's skill in chiseling can be seen in David's beautiful form, its muscles, and David's expression. It serves as a stellar example of High Renaissance art and the use of the contrapposto pose. The slingshot that David used to kill Goliath in the Old Testament story can be seen slung over David's left shoulder. He holds on to the stone he uses to kill the giant in his right hand. More recently, visitor numbers have been restricted to reduce vibrations, given the small fractures found in David 's ankle.

The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí

Looking for a world-famous, tiny painting that packs a huge punch? Enter the self-proclaimed genius Salvador Dalí and his famous droopy clocks in crazy dreamlike landscapes. Of all his work, The Persistence of Memory is arguably his most famous, executed with Dalí's usual detailed precision. The initial reaction is often, "What am I looking at?" The painting immediately turns our sense of normality on its head with its malleable clocks and the strange arrangement of objects within this dreamy landscape. The Persistence of Memory challenges many viewers on first glance, and yet its sense of fun draws you in a seductive attack on what is real. An autobiographical aspect, the sea and hills are reminiscent of the artist's Catalonian home landscape. At the center is the deformed character, with its large nose and its eye with its equally large eyelash that extends to the contours of the nose. Dalí's famous clocks were supposedly born out of the artist's response to looking at melted cheese. And then, of course, there are those links to Freud, the unconscious and the dreamscape, where irrational thoughts in our minds play out.

The Kiss by Gustav Klimt

The School of Athens by Raphael

Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette by Edward Renoir

This painting is arguably Renoir's most famous work, depicting a lively and energetic atmosphere in a Parisian dance garden, the Moulin de la Galette. As an Impressionist, Renoir sets about capturing the moment through his brush strokes and use of color. His palate is vivid with a mix of blues, oranges, pinks and reds, helping to create the sense of movement the viewer experiences in the painting. Dapples of light are cast through the leaves upon those visiting the garden, further enhancing this sense of movement. Central to the painting is the subject of fun and pleasure experienced on the outskirts of Paris. Through loose, almost sketch-like brushwork, Renoir added a feeling of movement. There is also a sense that everyone knows each other, for example, the familiarity of the two central women, one flirting with the man before her while the other leans in over her shoulder.

The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci

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20 of the World's Most Famous Art Pieces

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Art history has delivered us with some amazing paintings and sculptures and limiting it to twenty pieces is no small feat. Certain works will always rise to the top. In this list of the 20 most famous pieces of western art see how many you recognize.

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A brief history of religion in art - TED-Ed

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Why art has the power to change the world

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Davos 2016: The arts and culture represent one of the few areas in our society where people can come together to share an experience even if they see the world in radically different ways, argues Olafur Eliasson.

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art, i.e. The Met Museum

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Art from the past holds clues to life in the past. By looking at a work of art's symbolism, colors, and materials, we can learn about the culture that produced it.

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What is art and how does it effect society?

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What is art and how does it effect society?

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Why art is important | Katerina Gregos | TEDxGhent

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How Does Art Affect Culture and Society? - Masterpiece Mixers

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From Reference.com Art influences society by changing opinions, instilling values and translating experiences across space and time. Research has shown art affects the fundamental sense of self. Painting, sculpture, music, literature and the other arts are often considered to be the repository of a…

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Mind map and brainstorm online with Bubbl.us! Create colorful mind maps to print or share with others. Millions of people are using Bubbl.us worldwide to generate ideas, map out processes and create presentations.

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Campbell's Soup Cans (sometimes referred to as 32 Campbell's Soup Cans) is a work of art produced between November 1961 and June 1962. by American artist Andy Warhol. It consists of thirty-two canvases, each measuring 20 inches (51 cm) in height × 16 inches (41 cm) in width and each consisting of a painting of a Campbell's Soup can-one of each of the canned soup varieties the company offered at the time. The works were Warhol's hand-painted depictions of printed imagery deriving from commercial products and popular culture and belong to the pop art movement.

Warhol was a commercial illustrator before embarking on painting. Campbell's Soup Cans was shown on July 9, 1962, in Warhol's first one-man gallery exhibition in the Ferus Gallery of Los Angeles, California curated by Irving Blum. The exhibition marked the West Coast debut of pop art. Blum owned and possessed the painting series until he loaned it to the National Gallery of Art for several years in 1987 and then sold it to the Museum of Modern Art in 1996. The subject matter initially caused offense, in part for its affront to the technique and philosophy of the earlier art movement of abstract expressionism. Warhol's motives as an artist were questioned. Warhol's association with the subject led to his name becoming synonymous with the Campbell's Soup Can paintings.

Warhol produced a wide variety of art works depicting Campbell's Soup cans during three distinct phases of his career, and he produced other works using a variety of images from the world of commerce and mass media. Today, the Campbell's Soup cans theme is generally used in reference to the original set of 32 canvases, but it also refers to other Warhol productions: approximately 20 similar Campbell's Soup painting variations also made in the early 1960s, 20 3 feet (91 cm) in height × 2 feet (61 cm) in width multi-colored canvases from 1965, related Campbell's Soup drawings, sketches and stencils over the years, two different 250-count 10-element sets of screen prints produced in 1968 and 1969 and other inverted/reversed Campbell's Soup can painting variations in the 1970s. Because of the eventual popularity of the entire series of similarly themed works, Warhol's reputation grew to the point where he was not only the most-renowned American pop art artist, but also the highest-priced living American artist.

There is some confusion because sometimes later screen prints are referred to as if they are The Campbell's Soup can set, and sometimes the original set of painting canvases is referred to as if it is a set of screenprints. In addition, there is ongoing production and sale of unauthorized screen prints using Warhols official intellectual property as a result of a fallout with former employees. The popular story is that his social colleagues motivated the original series with a suggestion that brought him closer to his roots. There are also several professional colleagues who are suggested to have influenced this artistic pursuit.

Warhol arrived in New York City in 1949, directly from the School of Fine Arts at Carnegie Institute of Technology. He quickly achieved success as a commercial illustrator, and his first published drawing appeared in the Summer 1949 issue of Glamour Magazine. In 1952, he had his first art gallery show at the Bodley Gallery with a display of Truman Capote-inspired works. By 1955, he was tracing photographs borrowed from the New York Public Library's photo collection with the hired assistance of Nathan Gluck, and reproducing them with a process he had developed earlier as a collegian at Carnegie Tech. His process, which foreshadowed his later work, involved pressing wet ink illustrations against adjoining paper. During the 1950s, he had regular showings of his drawings, and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art ( Recent Drawings, 1956).

In 1960, Warhol began producing his first canvases, which he based on comic strip subjects. Although Warhol had produced silkscreens of comic strips and of other pop art subjects, he supposedly relegated himself to soup cans as a subject at the time to avoid competing with the more finished style of comics by Roy Lichtenstein. He once said "I've got to do something that really will have a lot of impacts that will be different enough from Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist, that will be very personal, that won't look like I'm doing exactly what they're doing."

In 1961, Warhol was waivering between the action painting of abstract expressionisms with its use of drips and brushstrokes and the more direct style of pop art. Most of his early soup can work veered toward the latter. He experimented with hand-painting and spray painting through a stencil cutout as well as rubber stamping images. He began stamping with engraved art gum erasers onto canvas and paper using acrylic paint in January 1962.

Some sources mistakenly claim the original set of 32 Campbell's Soup cans was a set of silkscreen works. There is so much confusion on what the Campbell's Soup cans are that when the Art Gallery of Ontario acquired a Campbell's Soup I set it was described as "the entire, iconic series" by The Globe and Mail. The Museum of Modern Art, which owns the 32 Campbell's Soup cans, as well as complete sets of Campbell's Soup I and Campbell's Soup Cans II, describes the former as a set of paintings ("Acrylic with metallic enamel paint on canvas, 32 panels") and the latter two as sets of screenprints ("Porfolio of ten screenprints"). The original 32 soup cans were produced by tracing projections of soup cans onto canvas followed by hand brushstrokes. The process relied on stamps and stencils, which were Warhol's intermediate step from painterly techniques to silkscreening. They are regarded as one "of the works on which his fame as an artist rests", as well as a necessity of "any true retrospective exhibition of his work.

Warhol was able to get exposure for his comic strip (and newspaper ad) paintings as a backdrop for his Bonwit Teller window design in April 1961. Leo Castelli visited Warhol's gallery in 1961 and said that the work he saw there was too similar to Lichtenstein's, although Warhol's and Lichtenstein's comic artwork differed in subject and techniques (e.g., Warhol's comic-strip figures were humorous pop-culture caricatures such as Popeye, while Lichtenstein's were generally of stereotypical hero and heroines, inspired by comic strips devoted to adventure and romance). Castelli chose not to represent both artists at that time. (He would, in November 1964, be exhibiting Warhol, his Flower Paintings, and then again Warhol in 1966.) In February 1962, Lichtenstein displayed at a sold-out exhibition of cartoon pictures at Castelli's eponymous Leo Castelli Gallery, ending the possibility of Warhol exhibiting his own cartoon paintings. Lichtenstein's 1962 show was quickly followed by Wayne Thiebaud's April 17, 1962, one-man show at the Allan Stone Gallery featuring all-American foods, which agitated Warhol as he felt it jeopardized his own food-related soup can works. Warhol was considering returning to the Bodley gallery, but Bodley's director did not like his pop artworks. In 1961, Warhol was offered a three-man show by Allan Stone at the latter's 18 East 82nd Street Gallery with Rosenquist and Robert Indiana, but all three were insulted by this proposition.

Cans of condensed Campbell's Soup

By March 1962, art critic David Bourdon had seen some of Warhol's soup cans illustrated in a newsletter and passed by to visit his social space/studio. Irving Blum was the first dealer to show Warhol's soup can paintings. Blum happened to be visiting Warhol at his 1342 Lexington Avenue apartment/art studio in December 1961 and then May 1962, at a time when Warhol was being featured in a May 11, 1962 magazine article "The Slice-of-Cake School" (that included an April 1962 photo of him eating Campbell's Soup straight out of an upside down can while standing next to a human-sized canvas of a Campbell's Soup Can painting), along with Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, and Thiebaud. Warhol, who was interviewed on April 24, was the only artist whose photograph actually appeared in the article, which is indicative of his knack for manipulating the mass media. He was also a bit of a surprise choice over Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Tom Wesselmann and George Segal, who had already presented pop art shows that had been reviewed. Blum saw dozens of Campbell's Soup can variations, including a grid of One-Hundred Soup Cans that day. By the time of Blums May 1962 visit Warhol was working on his 16th individual realistic soup can portrait of the 32 can series and the May Time article noted that he was "currently occupied with a series of 'portraits' of Camplell's soup cans in living colour" with Warhol quoted as saying "I just paint things I always thought were beautiful, things you use every day and never think about...I'm working on soup...I just do it because I like it." Three of the Campbell's Soup Can paintings were layed out on Warhol's parquet floor. Blum, who knew some of Warhol's larger Campbell's Soup can works were already being marketed by New York City art dealers, was shocked that Warhol had no gallery arrangement and offered him a July show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. This would be Warhol's first one-man show of his pop art. Warhol was assured by Blum that the newly founded Artforum magazine, which had an office above the gallery, would cover the show. Not only was the show Warhol's first solo gallery exhibit, but it was considered to be the West Coast premiere of pop art. Blum also used the lure of Hollywood celebrity to entice Warhol to exhibit out west despite his interest in the New York fine arts scene. His fans Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward (Hopper's wife at the time) held a welcoming party for the event to help Warhol meet West Coast artists and celebrities. A letter from Blum to Warhol dated June 9, 1962, set the exhibition opening for July 9.

Warhol sent Blum thirty-two 20-by-16-inch (510 mm × 410 mm) canvases of Campbell's Soup can portraits, each representing a particular variety of the Campbell's Soup flavors available at the time. A postcard dated June 26, 1962 sent by Irving Blum states " 32 ptgs arrived safely and look beautiful. strongly advise maintaining a low price level during initial exposure here". The thirty-two canvases are very similar: each is a realistic depiction of the iconic, mostly red and white Campbell's Soup can silkscreened onto a white background. If they could become lasting, they would recall the time in 1962 when Campbell's had exactly 32 varieties "So it kink of marks a time", according to Warhol.

The canvases have minor variation in the lettering of the variety names. Most of the letterings are painted in red letters. Four varieties have black lettering: Clam Chowder has parenthetical black lettering below the variety name that said (Manhattan Style), which means that the soup is tomato- and broth-based instead of the cream-based New England style; Beef has parenthetical black lettering below the variety name that says (With Vegetables and Barley); Scotch Broth has parenthetical black lettering below the variety name that said (A Hearty Soup); and Minestrone had black parenthetical lettering saying (Italian-Style Vegetable Soup). There are two varieties with red lettered parenthetical labels: Beef Broth (Bouillon) and Consommé (Beef).[citation needed ] The font sizes only vary slightly in the variety names.[citation needed ]

However, there are a few notable stylistic font differences. Old-fashioned Tomato Rice is the only variety with lower case script. This lower case script appears to be from a slightly different font than the other variety name letters.[citation needed ] There are other stylistic differences. Old-fashioned Tomato Rice has the word Soup depicted lower on the can, in place of a portion of ornamental starlike symbols at the bottom that the other 31 varieties have.[citation needed ] Also, Cheddar Cheese has two banner-like addenda. In the middle-left, a small golden banner says "New!", and a middle center golden banner says "Great As A Sauce Too!".[citation needed ]

The exhibition opened on July 9, 1962, with Warhol absent and without a formal opening. However, the opening coincided with La Cienega Boulevard's "Monday Art Walk", which was a popular event. The thirty-two single soup can canvases were placed in a single line, much like products on shelves, each displayed on narrow individual ledges. The contemporary impact was uneventful, but the historical impact is considered today to have been a watershed. The gallery audience was unsure what to make of the exhibit. A John Coplans Artforum article, which was in part spurred on by the responding display of dozens of soup cans by a nearby gallery with a display advertising them at three for 60 cents ($5.8 in 2022), encouraged people to take a stand on Warhol. Another detractor, the nearby Primus Stuart Gallery, stacked a pyramid of real Campbell's Soup cans in the window below a sign that read "Do Not Be Misled. Get the Original. Our Low Price 2-0.33¢." ($3.19 in 2022). The Los Angeles Times published a cartoon, with two characters mocking the artistic impression that the paintings gave. Few actually saw the paintings at the Los Angeles exhibit or at Warhol's studio, but word spread in the form of controversy and scandal due to the work's seeming attempt to replicate the appearance of manufactured objects. Extended debate on the merits and ethics of focusing one's efforts on such a mundane commercial inanimate model kept Warhol's work in art world conversations. The pundits could not believe an artist would reduce the art form to the equivalent of a trip to the local grocery store. Talk did not translate into monetary success for Warhol. Dennis Hopper was the first of only a half dozen to pay $100 ($967.44 in 2022) for a canvas. Blum decided to try to keep the thirty-two canvases as an intact set and bought back the few sales. This pleased Warhol who had conceived of them as a set, and he agreed to sell the set for ten monthly $100 installments to Blum. Those payments were twice what Blum was paying in rent at the time. Only 2 paintings had been taken home and 4 had been put on reserve. Warhol had passed the milestone of his first serious art show. Gopnik describes the result as not "...bad for radical new pictures in an unknown and weirdly repetitive style by an artist with zero name recognition and no local ties." An alternate story from Blum's business partner Joseph Helman is that Blum had committed to giving Warhol a commission of $3000 ($29023.1 in 2022) based on a $200 ($1934.87 in 2022) price and the $1000 was the result of a heated renegotiation.

The Ferus show closed on August 4, 1962, the day before Marilyn Monroe's death. Warhol went on to purchase a Monroe publicity still from the film , which he later cropped and used to create one of his most well-known works: his painting of Marilyn. Although Warhol continued painting other pop art, including Martinson's coffee cans, Coca-Cola bottles, S&H Green Stamps, and Campbell's Soup cans, he soon became known to many as the artist who painted celebrities. He returned to Blum's gallery to exhibit Elvis and Liz in October 1963.

Blum bought back a total of 5 works before paying for the complete set. He retained possession of the work for over 25 years, generally keeping them in the original special slotted crate except for the occasional home display in his own dining room.

Although the original exhibition of the set presented them all at the same height on various walls, the Museum of Modern Art generally presented them in a grid on a single wall (see main image above), except for the 2015 Warhol exhibition that it hosted. Since Blum was not able to hang the paintings in a straight line with the proper spacing and perspective, he installed shelves to make the exhibition spacing and placement easier. Since Warhol gave no indication of a definitive ordering of the collection, the sequence chosen by MoMA (in the picture at the upper right of this article) in the display from their permanent collection reflects the chronological order in which the varieties were introduced by the Campbell Soup Company, beginning with Tomato in the upper left, which debuted in 1897. By April 2011, the curators at the MoMA had reordered the varieties, moving Clam Chowder to the upper left and Tomato to the bottom of the four rows. Blum had installed them in a 4-row grid when displayed in his own dining room prior to his availing them for public display.

In August, Warhol's pop art had its first museum presentation in a survey show at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. This show resulted in Warhol's first fine art review in The New York Times. Regarding some of Warhol's Campbell's Soup can paintings the review stated "These are no mere unruly incidents but big steps towards art that is socially to the point."

Although an early review announced that Warhol was to have a gallery arrangement with Martha Jackson in New York (along with Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Oldenburg and Dine), Jackson sent word that she was canceling a promised December exhibition, noting "The introduction of your paintings has already had very bad repercussions for us." News of her cancellation came before the exhibition ended. Even though she cancelled his exhibition, her assistant John Weber sold ten Warhol paintings that she took on consignment.

In August, when Sidney Janis invited Warhol to present in the Sidney Janis Gallery's late October exhibition entitled "The New Realists: An Exhibition of Factual Painting & Sculpture", it was still unclear to Janis if Warhol's preferred referent was Andy or Andrew. Warhol exhibited a canvas with 200 soup cans ( 200 Soup Cans) and another that presented a human-sized Beef Noodle Soup ( Big Campbell's Soup Can) as well as 19¢ and Do It Yourself (Flowers) alongside works by Oldenburg, Lichtenstein and others. The New Yorker said the exhibition "hit the New York art world with the force of an earthquake. Within a week tremors had spread to art centers throughout the country." A Kansas City newspaper ran the headline "Which Way Is Modern Art Going? Hold Your Breath and Watch the Soup Cans".

After Jackson, cast Warhol aside, Emile de Antonio brought Warhol and his ex-girlfriend, Eleanor Ward together. After a bit of encouragement and drinking Ward said that if Warhol would paint her a two-dollar bill she would give him a show. Warhol's first New York solo Pop exhibit opened at Ward's Stable Gallery November 6, 1962. The exhibit included Marilyn Diptych, but no soup cans were on display even though they were on guest badges. Warhol's invitations to the exhibit included a quote from a college art student's perception of Warhol's message from his soup can paintings: "I love soup, and I love it when other people love soup too, because then we can all love it together and love each other at the same time." Warhol earned important praise for this exhibition, including Michael Fried who had been harsh on him 12 years earlier.

Campbell's Soup Company

Promotional Warhol-inspired 1967 Campbell's Souper dress

Campbell's Soup was started in 1869 by Joseph A. Campbell, a fruit merchant from Bridgeton, New Jersey, and Abraham Anderson, an icebox manufacturer from South Jersey. Although Anderson left the company in 1876, his son, Campbell Speelman, remained at Campbell's as a creative director and designed the original Campbell's Soup cans. In 1894, Arthur Dorrance became the company president. In 1897, John T. Dorrance, a nephew of company president Dorrance, began working for the company. Dorrance, a chemist, developed a commercially viable method for condensing soup in 1897, leading to the famous label's origin in 1898. In the 21st century, the label continued to retain elements of the 1898 design, such as the oddly tilted letter "O" in the word Soup, and the gold medal that was added in 1900. The original label was inspired by the Cornell Big Red football team uniforms. When Campbell's Soup Cans was presented in 1962, the Campbell's soup can label had not changed in the previous 50 years.

Although it would be widely announced in a May 1962 issue of Time magazine, as late as March 1962 Warhol saught secrecy for his Campbell's Soup project stating his hope "that the Campbell Soup Co. knows nothing about these paintings; the whole point would be lost with any kind of commercial tie-in." During the first week of the July 1962 Ferus Gallery exhibition, Campbell's Soup CEO William Murphy sent a team of legal representatives to evaluate the "use and violation of trademarks". Initially, Campbell Soup Company considered legal action, but decided to evaluate the public reaction to the art first. Within months of the original 1962 exhibition, Campbell's Soup Cans printed attire was in vogue in Manhattan high society. Later that year, the company decided to give Warhol a $2000 ($19349 in 2022) commission for a Campbell's tomato soup can painting as a gift for Oliver G. Willits, its retiring chairman of the company's board of directors. In 1964, Campbells sent Warhol free cans as a sign of respect. In January 1967, the company took legal action against Warhol for using a soup can label without consent for an Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston show announcement. Also in 1967, Campbell Soup Company sent a letter to Random House, who was on the verge of publishing a Warhol book, regarding Campbell's legal perspective on his art noting that Warhol's work would not be considered in conflict with their corporate intellectual property as long as he did not paint the logo on actual soup cans. The letter also included a formal denial that Campbell's had ever had any influence on Warhol's artistic subjects. That same year, the company produced the promotional Souper Dress that could be purchased for $1 ($8.78 in 2022) and 2 soup can labels (pictured right). In 1985, the company also commissioned Warhol to paint its dry soup mixes, which were new at the time. In 1993, the company bought a Warhol tomato soup can painting to hang in its corporate boardroom at its headquarters and by 2012 the company had licensing agreement with the Warhol estate to use Warhol's renditions on a variety of merchandise. That year, the company celebrated the 50th anniversary of the series by partnering with Target Corporation to release four different Warhol-inspired limited-edition designs of condensed tomato soup cans (pictured left) in its United States stores.

Although Campbell Soup never pursued litigation against Warhol for his art, United States Supreme Court justices have stated that it is likely Warhol would have prevailed. E.g., in a majority opinion, Stephen Breyer noted in a computer code case that "An 'artistic painting' might, for example, fall within the scope of fair use even though it precisely replicates a copyrighted 'advertising logo to make a comment about consumerism'". Regarding another Campbells Soup Company case, Neil Gorsuch stated "Campbell's Soup seems to me an easy case because the purpose of the use for Andy Warhol was not to sell tomato soup in the supermarket...It was to induce a reaction from a viewer in a museum or in other settings."

Warhol in 1973

Campbell's Soup Cans is considered Warhol's signature work. He made paintings from soup can photographs of every perspective and state by his one-time love interest Edward Wallowitch for about a year. During this time, he mixed his media (oil- and water-based paints) and cut stencils to help pursue realism. Photographs from Wallowitch served as the subjects of tracing and copying that resulted in many of his 1961 and 1962 Campbell's Soup cans and dollar bill paintings and drawings. In total, Warhol painted about 50 Campbell's Soup canvases from November 1961 to 1962. The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné (edited by Georg Frei and Neil Printz) lists the 32 canvas main set, 3 large grid-style paintings (1 of 200 cans and 2 of 100 cans), and about a dozen and a half still lifes. Although Warhol had been trained to paint still life fruit bowls on a table in art school, his longing desire was to paint his favorite variety of Campbell's Soup (Tomato) from the pantry of his childhood home. Warhol is quoted as saying "Many an afternoon at lunchtime Mom would open a can of Campbell's for me, because that's all we could afford, I love it to this day."

Several anecdotal stories supposedly explain why Warhol chose Campbell's Soup cans as the focal point of his pop art. One reason is that he needed a new subject after he abandoned comic strips, a move taken in part due to his respect for the refined work of Roy Lichtenstein. According to Ted Carey-one of Warhol's commercial art assistants in the late 1950s-it was Muriel Latow who suggested the idea for both the soup cans and Warhol's early U.S. dollar paintings. Latow and Carey were visiting Warhol to console him in his predicament of being upstaged on comics. Warhol begged them for ideas and even paid Latow for availing her thoughts. Another account of Latow's influence on Warhol holds that she asked him what he loved most, and because he replied "money" she suggested that he paint U.S. dollar bills. Latow was then an aspiring interior decorator, and owner of the Latow Art Gallery in the East 60s in Manhattan. She also told Warhol that he should paint "Something you see every day and something that everybody would recognize. Something like a can of Campbell's Soup." Carey said that Warhol responded by exclaiming: "Oh that sounds fabulous." A $50 ($489.64 in 2022) check dated November 23, 1961 in the archive of the Andy Warhol Museum confirms the story that she charged him for giving him ideas.

By one account, according to Carey, Warhol went to a supermarket the following day and bought a case of "all the soups", which Carey said he saw when he stopped by Warhol's apartment the next day. When the art critic G. R. Swenson asked Warhol in 1963 why he painted soup cans, the artist replied, "I used to drink it, I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years." Another account holds that Warhol instructed his mother to buy a can of each of the 32 varieties of Campbell's Soup from the local A&P. He began with a series of drawings and then made color slides of each to be projected onto a screen. He tinkered with dimensions and how best to combine the varieties. However, rather than combine them, as was common with supermarket food imagery of the time, he decided to create individual portraits with as much realism as he could against a white background.

The soup is said to have reminded Warhol of his mother, Julia, who served it to him regularly while raising him during the Great Depression as a Czech immigrant in a Pennsylvania coal mine town. At times, the family could not even afford to splurge on Campbell's Soup and ate soup made from ketchup. It is regarded as doubtful that the Warhols had Campbell's Soup often, since it was marketed as an upscale item and his mother was a soupmaker who cooked from scratch. It wasn't until the late 1950s that canned soup was targeted toward the working class.

In an interview for London's in 1985, David Yarritu asked Warhol about flowers that Warhol's mother made from tin cans. In his response, Warhol mentioned them as one of the reasons behind his first tin can paintings:

David Yarritu: I heard that your mother used to make these little tin flowers and sell them to help support you in the early days.

Andy Warhol: Oh God, yes, it's true, the tin flowers were made out of those fruit cans, that's the reason why I did my first tin-can paintings ... You take a tin-can, the bigger the tin-can the better, like the family size ones that peach halves come in, and I think you cut them with scissors. It's very easy and you just make flowers out of them. My mother always had lots of cans around, including the soup cans.

Several stories mention that Warhol's choice of soup cans reflected his own avid devotion to Campbell's soup as a consumer. Robert Indiana once said: "I knew Andy very well. The reason he painted soup cans is that he liked soup." He was thought to have focused on them because they composed a daily dietary staple. Others observed that Warhol merely painted things he held close at heart. He enjoyed eating Campbell's soup, had a taste for Coca-Cola, loved money, and admired movie stars. Thus, they all became subjects of his work. Yet another account says that his daily lunches in his studio consisted of Campbell's Soup and Coca-Cola, and thus, his inspiration came from seeing the empty cans and bottles accumulate on his desk.

Warhol did not choose the cans because of business relationships with the Campbell Soup Company. Even though the company at the time sold four out of every five cans of prepared soup in the United States, Warhol preferred that the company not be involved "because the whole point would be lost with any kind of commercial tie-in." However, by 1965, the company knew him well enough that he was able to coax actual can labels from them to use as invitations for an exhibit. They even commissioned a canvas.

Willem de Kooning, who was among the artworld's elite by the 1960s, was among the artists who used the word soup metaphorically in reference to abstract expressionism saying "Everything is already in art, Like a big bowl of soup. Everything is in there already,...," while other New York artists used the word slangily as a way to discuss their art. In 1961, Warhol painted a single "Campbell's Soup Can" and gave it to his brother Paul to celebrate the birth of his son Marty on a 20-by-15-inch (51 cm × 38 cm) canvas. Each of Paul's kids was able to exhibit the painting at school. Eventually, the family decided to auction off the work on November 13, 2002 at Christie's in New York. This work is regarded as one of the inspirations for the prominent set.

According to Blake Gopnik, there is scholarly opinion that Warhol's repetition of nearly identical Campbell's Soup Cans could be linked to Yves Klein's identical blue monochrome paintings. He notes that Klein had invited Warhol to his early 1962 wedding to Rotraut Klein-Moquay, and Warhol's work had incorporated International Klein Blue.

In May 1961, Warhol purchased 6 Frank Stella miniature versions of his Benjamin Moore painting series. In this series, Stella represented the entire Benjamin Moore product line with a painting for each color. Tony Scherman and David Dalton feel this could have partly served as an inspiration for the complete set of Campbell's Soup cans.

Warhol had a positive view of ordinary culture and felt the abstract expressionists had taken great pains to ignore the splendor of modernity. The Campbell's Soup Can series, along with his other series, provided him with a chance to express his positive view of modern culture. However, his deadpan manner endeavored to be devoid of emotional and social commentary. The work was intended to be without personality or individual expression. Warhol's view is encapsulated in the Time magazine description of the 'Slice of Cake School,' that "... a group of painters have come to the common conclusion that the most banal and even vulgar trappings of modern civilization can, when transposed to canvas, become Art."

His pop art work differed from serial works by artists such as Monet, who used series to represent discriminating perception and show that a painter could recreate shifts in time, light, season, and weather with hand and eye. Warhol is now understood to represent the modern era of commercialization and indiscriminate "sameness." When Warhol eventually showed variation it was not "realistic." His later variations in color were almost a mockery of discriminating perception. His adoption of the pseudo-industrial silkscreen process spoke against the use of a series to demonstrate subtlety. Warhol sought to reject invention and nuance by creating the appearance that his work had been printed, and he systematically recreated imperfections. His series work helped him escape Lichtenstein's lengthening shadow. Although his soup cans were not as shocking and vulgar as some of his other early pop art, they still offended the art world's sensibilities that had developed so as to partake in the intimate emotions of artistic expression.

Contrasting against Caravaggio's sensual baskets of fruit, Chardin's plush peaches, or Cézanne's vibrant arrangements of apples, the mundane Campbell's Soup Cans gave the art world a chill. Furthermore, the idea of isolating eminently recognizable pop culture items was ridiculous enough to the art world that both the merits and ethics of the work were perfectly reasonable debate topics for those who had not even seen the piece. Warhol's pop art can be seen as a relation to Minimal art in the sense that it attempts to portray objects in their most simple, immediately recognizable form. Pop art eliminates overtones and undertones that would otherwise be associated with representations.

Warhol clearly changed the concept of art appreciation. Instead of harmonious three-dimensional arrangements of objects, he chose mechanical derivatives of commercial illustration with an emphasis on the packaging. His variations of multiple soup cans, for example, made the process of repetition an appreciated technique: "If you take a Campbell's Soup can and repeat it fifty times, you are not interested in the retinal image. According to Marcel Duchamp, what interests you is the concept that wants to put fifty Campbell's Soup cans on a canvas." The regimented multiple can depictions almost become an abstraction whose details are less important than the panorama. In a sense, the representation was more important than that which was represented. Warhol's interest in machinelike creation during his early pop art days was misunderstood by those in the art world, whose value system was threatened by mechanization.

In Europe, audiences had a very different take on his work. Many perceived it as a subversive and Marxist satire on American capitalism. If not subversive, it was at least considered a Marxist critique of pop culture. Given Warhol's apolitical outlook in general this is not likely the intended message. According to writer David Bourdon, his pop art may have been nothing more than an attempt to attract attention to his work. Gopnik describes Warhol's presentation as objective and unblinking with no promotional intent.

Campbell's Soup I and Campbell's Soup Cans II

In late 1961, he began to learn the process of silkscreening from Floriano Vecchi, who had run the Tiber Press since 1953. Though the process generally begins with a stencil drawing, it often evolves from a blown-up photograph which is then transferred with glue onto silk. In either case, one needs to produce a glue-based version of a positive two-dimensional image (positive means the open spaces that are left are where the paint will appear). Usually, the ink is rolled across the medium so that it passes through the silk and not the glue. After the 1961 Christmas season ended, Vecchi advised him how to refine his pigments and to better squeegee techniques over the course of multiple visits. In 1962, his silk screen printmaking techniques by was also influenced by graphic art business owner Max Arthur Cohn in Manhattan. It took Warhol until August 1962 to refine his technique of applying the paint with a rubber squeegee through the porous screen. Campbell's Soup cans were among Warhol's first silkscreen productions; the first were U.S. dollar bills. The pieces were made from stencils; one for each color. Warhol did not begin to convert photographs to silkscreens until after the original series of Campbell's Soup cans had been produced. Within 3 months, he was mass producing silkscreens on various subjects, including Campbell's Soup cans. In 1967, Warhol created Factory Additions, a company for publishing and printmaking. According to Christopher Andreae of The Christian Science Monitor, Warhol produced two different 10-screenprint sets of Campbell's Soup cans in volumes of 250, one in 1968 and one in 1969.

Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato), 1962. Stencils such as this are the basis for silkscreening.

On April 7, 2016, seven Campbell's Soup Cans prints were stolen from the Springfield Art Museum. The FBI announced a $25,000 reward for information about the stolen art pieces from the " Campbell's Soup I" set. They were a part of 1 of 250 sets of 10 screen prints that Warhol had ordered in 1968, that had been donated to the museum in 1985 (by The Greenberg Gallery in St. Louis) and that were on display for the first time since 2006. Each of the screenprints had an estimated value of $30,000 ($36581 in 2022), according to Artnet author Blake Gopnik. An National Public Radio source estimates that they generally sold for up to $45,000 ($54871 in 2022), but the tomato soup version could sell for $100,000 ($121936 in 2022). They were insured as a set and the insurance company paid $750,000 ($914517 in 2022) once the museum turned over the remaining three screenprints.

When the Art Gallery of Ontario acquired a full Campbell's Soup I set in 2017 it became the first set in a public collection in Canada. On November 8, 2022, climate change protesters glued themselves to and vandalised another version of the "Campbell's Soup I" set that was on display at the National Gallery of Australia. An edition of the second set, Campbell's Soup Cans II is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. The Museum of Modern Art also has one of these sets. Hot Dog Bean soup from this set sold for $258,046 ($324180 in 2022) in Vienna in 2013.

1965 multi-colored versions from the Milwaukee Art Museum collection

In 1965, Warhol revisited the Campbell's Soup cans theme while arbitrarily replacing the original red and white colors with a wider variety of hues. He produced a set of 20 3 by 2 feet (91 cm × 61 cm) canvases using either four or five colors in addition to black and in some instances white. This set is regarded as a significant enough set to tour as its own art exhibition. Ken Johnson from The New York Times noted that in contrast to Warhol's usual "mechanical repetition" each painting was remarkable for its uniqueness. 19 of the 20 were still in exhistance when 12 of them were presented in an exhibition in 2011. At some point prior to 2004, the Museum of Modern Art had one of these.

In 1970, Warhol entered into a collaboration in which he facilitated exact duplication of some of his 1960s works by providing the photo negatives, precise color codes, screens and film matrixes for European screenprint production. Warhol signed and numbered one edition of 250 before subsequent unauthorized unsigned versions were produced. The unauthorized works were the result of a falling out between Warhol and some of his New York City studio employees who went to Brussels where they produced work stamped with "Sunday B Morning" and "Add Your Own Signature Here". Some of the unauthorized productions bore the markings "This is not by me, Andy Warhol". Art galleries and dealers market Sunday B Morning reprint versions of several screenprint works including those from the Campbell's Soup can sets.

Warhol followed the success of his original series with several related works incorporating the same theme of Campbell's Soup cans subjects. By 1982 Warhol had painted over 100 renderings of Campbell's Soup Cans. These subsequent works along with the original are collectively referred to as the Campbell's Soup cans series and often simply as the Campbell's Soup cans. The subsequent Campbell's Soup can works were very diverse. The heights ranged from 20 inches (510 mm) to 6 feet (1.8 m). Occasionally, he chose to depict cans with torn labels, peeling labels, crushed bodies, or opened lids (see image right).

When Warhol exhibited at The American Supermarket exhibition group show (with Lichtenstein, Wesselmann and Mary Inman) at the Bianchini Gallery in 1964, he presented both Campbell's Soup Cans screen prints and autographed cans of Campbell's Soup, which he referred to as his "Duchamp number". Warhol signed several cases of soup cans for the exhibition. When Warhol was barraged by fans for soup can signatures, he or his assistants would put Warhol's signature on cans.

200 Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962 (Acrylic on canvas, 72 by 100 inches (182.9 cm × 254.0 cm)), in the private collection of John and Kimiko Powers is the largest single canvas of the Campbell's Soup can paintings. It is composed of ten rows and twenty columns of numerous flavors of soups. Experts point to it as one of the most significant works of pop art both as a pop representation and as conjunction with immediate predecessors such as Jasper Johns and the successors movements of Minimal and Conceptual art. It was created as Warhol was developing skills to replace painting and drawing with his hands, and he produced the repetitive series with stamps and stencils. Its medium was synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas according to one source. The move to stamps and stencils reduced the flaws and the subsequent move to silkscreen resulted in a mechanization whose only variation was due to the process, i. e., "leftover ink caking on the bottom of the screens, irregular seepage through the screens, or screens placed imprecisely and inconsistently on the canvas." The earliest soup can painting seems to be Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato Rice), a 1961 ink, tempera, crayon, and oil canvas.

In many of the works, including the original series, Warhol drastically simplified the gold medallion that appears on Campbell's Soup cans by replacing the paired allegorical figures with a flat yellow disk. In most variations, the only hint of three-dimensionality came from the shading on the tin lid. Otherwise the image was flat. The works with torn labels are perceived as metaphors of life in the sense that even packaged food must meet its end. They are often described as expressionistic.

By 1970, Warhol established the record auction price for a painting by a living American artist with a $60,000 ($452134 in 2022) sale of Big Campbell's Soup Can with Torn Label (Vegetable Beef) (1962) in a sale at Parke-Bernet, the preeminent American auction house of the day (later acquired by Sotheby's). The seller was a young Peter Brant, according to art dealer James Mayor. By some accounts this was an arranged sale rather than an auction. This record was broken a few months later by his rival for the artworld's attention and approval, Lichtenstein, who sold a depiction of a giant brush stroke, Big Painting No. 6 (1965) for $75,000 ($565167 in 2022).

Small Torn Campbell's Soup Can (Pepper Pot), 1962. In May 2006 the painting sold for $11.8 million.[168]

In May 2006, Warhol's Small Torn Campbell Soup Can (Pepper Pot) (1962) sold for $11,776,000 ($17.09 million in 2022) and set the current auction world record for a painting from the Campbell Soup Can series. The painting was purchased for the collection of Eli Broad, a man who once set the record for the largest credit card transaction when he purchased Lichtenstein's "I ... I'm Sorry" for $2.5 million with an American Express card. The is in the collection at The Broad. The $11.8 million Warhol sale was part of the Christie's Sales of Impressionist, Modern, Post-War and Contemporary Art for the Spring Season of 2006. Total sales on the night it was auctioned were $143,187,200 ($207.86 million in 2022), which was the second highest auction night in history at the time.

The broad variety of work produced using a semi-mechanized process with many collaborators, Warhol's popularity, the value of his works, and the diversity of works across various media and genre have created a need for the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board to certify the authenticity of works by Warhol.

Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art had one of its Campbell's Soup Cans paintings stolen. It was estimated to have been worth €35,000 (€37636 in 2021). The theft occurred in March 2015, but it was not made public until August 2015. A Campbell's Soup Cans lithograph worth tens of thousands of dollars was stolen in March 2021 in Manhattan from art curator Gil Traub. Although the thief was identified on security video, the artwork was not recovered.

Irving Blum made the original thirty-two canvases available to the public through an arrangement with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC by placing them on permanent loan February 20, 1987, which was two days before Warhol's death. While at the National Gallery of Art, they were installed in a 4-row, 8-column grid. The works were on loan to the National Gallery of Art before the Museum of Modern Art acquired them for approximately $15 million on October 9, 1996 ($27.99 million in 2022). The Museum of Modern Art attributes the source of funds or credits for this painting to a wide variety of sources: "Partial gift of Irving Blum Additional funding provided by Nelson A. Rockefeller Bequest, gift of Mr. and Mrs. William A. M. Burden, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund, gift of Nina and Gordon Bunshaft, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, Philip Johnson Fund, Frances R. Keech Bequest, gift of Mrs. Bliss Parkinson, and Florence B. Wesley Bequest (all by exchange).

Warhol's production of Campbell's Soup can works underwent three distinct phases. The first took place in 1962, during which he created realistic images, and produced numerous pencil drawings of the subject. In 1965, his second phase involved multicolor soup cans. In the late 1970s, he again returned to the soup cans while inverting and reversing the images. The best-remembered Warhol Campbell's Soup can works are from the first phase. Warhol is further regarded for his iconic serial celebrity silkscreens of such people as Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor, produced during his 1962-1964 silkscreening phase. His most commonly repeated painting subjects are Taylor, Monroe, Presley, Jackie Kennedy and similar celebrities.

1. Dean, Martin (March 13, 2018). "The Story of Andy Warhol's 'Campbell's Soup Cans'". Sotheby's.

2. Martha Esposito Shea; Mike Mathis (2002). Campbell Soup Company. Arcadia Publishing. ISBN 0-7385-1058-0.

3. ^ Campbell Soup Can design, Campbell Soup Company. Newton, N.J.: Historic Conservation & Interpretation, Inc. 1999. OCLC 24632139.

4. ^ Cox, J. (2008). Sold on Radio: Advertisers in the Golden Age of Broadcasting. McFarland, Incorporated, Publishers. p. 106. ISBN 978-0-7864-5176-0.

5. ^ Robert Heide; John Gilman (2006). New Jersey: Daytripping, Backroads, Eateries, Funky Adventures. St. Martin's Griffin. p. 129. ISBN 0-312-34156-3. The Campbell's Soup Company was begun when Joseph Campbell, a fruit merchant, and Abram Anderson, an icebox manufacturer, ... Arthur Dorance and Joseph Campbell then formed a new company called the Joseph Campbell Preserve Company. ...

6. Harrison and Wood, p. 732. Republished from Swenson, G. R., "What is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters (Part I)," ^ ARTnews, New York, November 7, 1963, reprinted in John Russell and Suzi Gabik (eds.), Pop Art Redefined, London, 1969, pp. 116-119.

7. ^ Spencer, Laura (June 3, 2016). "Thieves Who Stole Warhol Prints From Springfield Art Museum Were Likely 'Amateurs'". KCUR, NPR.

8. ^ "Climate activists target Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans at National Gallery of Australia". The Guardian. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Australian Associated Press. November 8, 2022.

9. ^ "Andy Warhol's Iconic Campbell's Soup Can Painting Sells for $11.7 Million". Fox News. Associated Press. May 10, 2006. Archived from the original on November 14, 2007.

10. AFP. (May 11, 2006). ^ Auction sets record for Warhol's soup series. ABC News (Australia). Retrieved March 22, 2020.

Angell, Callie (2006). Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raissonné. New York: Abrams Books in Association With The Whitney Museum of American Art. ISBN 0-8109-5539-3.

Marcade, Bernard; De Vree, Freddy (1989). Andy Warhol. Galerie Isy Brachot.

Sylvester, David (1997). About Modern Art: Critical Essays 1948-1997. Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 0-8050-4441-8. (Citing "Factory to Warhouse", May 22, 1994, Independent on Sunday Review as primary source)

Vaughan, William, ed. (2000). The Encyclopedia of Artists. Vol. 5. Oxford University Press, Inc.

Warin, Jean, ed. (2002) [1996]. The Dictionary of Art. Vol. 32. Macmillan Publishers Limited.

Warhol, Andy & Hackett, Pat (1980). Popism: The Warhol Sixties. Harcourt Books. ISBN 0-15-672960-1.

Watson, Steven (2003). Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties. Pantheon Books.

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Campbell's Soup Cans (sometimes referred to as 32 Campbell's Soup Cans ) is a work of art produced between November 1961 and June 1962. by American artist Andy Warhol.

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Much of the painting's emotional power comes from its overwhelming size, approximately eleven feet tall and twenty five feet wide. Guernica is not a painting you observe with spatial detachment; it feels like it wraps around you, immerses you in its larger-than-life figures and action. And although the size and multiple figures reference the long tradition of European history paintings, this painting is different because it challenges rather than accepts the notion of war as heroic. So why did Picasso paint it?

In 1936, Picasso (who was Spanish) was asked by the newly elected Spanish Republican government to paint an artwork for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair. The official theme of the Exposition was a celebration of modern technology. Yet Picasso painted an overtly political painting, a subject in which he had shown little interest up to that time. What had happened to inspire it?

Later, in the 1940s, when Paris was occupied by the Germans, a Nazi officer visited Picasso's studio. "Did you do that?" he is said to have asked Picasso while standing in front of a photograph of the painting. "No," Picasso replied, "you did."

This painting is not easy to decipher. Everywhere there seems to be death and dying. As our eyes adjust to the frenetic action, figures begin to emerge. On the far left is a woman, head back, screaming in pain and grief, holding the lifeless body of her dead child. This is one of the most devastating and unforgettable images in the painting. To her right is the head and partial body of a large white bull, the only unharmed and calm figure amidst the chaos. Beneath her, a dead or wounded man with a severed arm and mutilated hand clutches a broken sword. Only his head and arms are visible; the rest of his body is obscured by the overlapping and scattered parts of other figures. In the center stands a terrified horse, mouth open screaming in pain, its side pierced by a spear. On the right are three more women. One rushes in, looking up at the stark light bulb at the top of the scene. Another leans out of the window of a burning house, her long extended arm holding a lamp, while the third woman appears trapped in the burning building, screaming in fear and horror. All their faces are distorted in agony. Eyes are dislocated, mouths are open, tongues are shaped like daggers.

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Why is this art? Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans (video) | Khan Academy

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Steven Zucker and Sal Khan discuss Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans

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The growth of suburbia (article) | Khan Academy

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Learn about Levittown and housing benefits for veterans.

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What Happened in 1962 inc. Pop Culture, Prices Significant Events, Key Technology and Inventions

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1962 Prices including Wages, Houses and Gas, Toys, Fashions and Furniture, Events include Cuban Missile Crisis, Marilyn Monroe found dead, First Wal-Mart discount store opens, ...

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The bombing of Guernica (26 April 1937) was an aerial bombing of the Basque town of Guernica ( Gernika in Basque) during the Spanish Civil War. It was carried out, at the behest of Francisco Franco's rebel Nationalist faction, by its allies, the Nazi German Luftwaffe's Condor Legion and the Fascist Italian Aviazione Legionaria, under the code name 'Operation Rügen'. The operation opened the way to Franco's capture of Bilbao and his victory in northern Spain.

The attack gained controversy because it involved the bombing of civilians by a military air force. Seen as a war crime by some historians, and argued as a legitimate attack by others, it was one of the first aerial bombings to capture global attention. The number of victims is still disputed; the Basque government reported 1,654 people killed at the time, while local historians identified 126 victims (later revised by the authors of the study to 153). A British source used by the Air War College claims 400 civilians died. Soviet archives claim 800 deaths on 1 May 1937, but this number may not include victims who later died of their injuries in hospitals or whose bodies were discovered buried in the rubble.

The bombing is the subject of the anti-war painting by Pablo Picasso, which was commissioned by the Spanish Republic. It was also depicted in a woodcut by the German artist Heinz Kiwitz, who was later killed fighting in the International Brigades, and by Rene Magritte in the painting Le Drapeau Noir. The bombing shocked and inspired many other artists, including a sculpture by René Iché, one of the first electroacoustic music pieces by Patrick Ascione, musical compositions by Octavio Vazquez ( Gernika Piano Trio) and René-Louis Baron, and poems by Paul Eluard ( Victory of Guernica), and Uys Krige ( Nag van die Fascistiese Bomwerpers) (English translation from the Afrikaans: Night of the Fascist Bombers). There is also a short film from 1950 by Alain Resnais titled .

Guernica (Gernika in Basque; officially Gernika-Lumo), in the Basque province of Biscay, and 30 kilometres east of Bilbao, has long been a centre of great significance to the Basque people. Its Gernikako Arbola ("the tree of Gernika" in Basque) is an oak tree that symbolizes traditional freedoms for the Biscayan people and, by extension, for the Basque people as a whole. Not only was Guernica considered the identity of Basque, but it was also considered the spiritual capital of Basque people. Guernica has always been celebrated as the home of Basque liberties. Guernica was also the location of the Spanish weapons manufacturer Astra-Unceta y Cía, which had been a supplier of firearms to the Spanish military and police forces since 1912. At the time of the bombing, the population of Guernica was 7,000 people, and the battlefront was 30 kilometres away.

Advances by Nationalist troops led by Generalísimo Francisco Franco had eaten into the territory controlled by the Republican Government. The Basque Government, an autonomous regional administrative body formed by Basque nationalists, sought to defend Biscay and parts of Guipuzcoa with its own light Basque Army. At the time of the raid, Guernica represented a focal strategic point for the Republican forces. It stood between the Nationalists and capture of Bilbao. Bilbao was seen as key to bringing the war to a conclusion in the north of Spain. Guernica also was the path of retreat for the Republicans from the northeast of Biscay.

Prior to the Condor Legion raid, the town had not been directly involved in the fighting, although Republican forces were in the area; 23 battalions of Basque army troops were at the front east of Guernica. The town also housed two Basque army battalions, although it had no static air defenses, and it was thought that no air cover could be expected due to recent losses of the Republican Air Force.

Monday 26 April was market day; there were more than 10,000 people in the former Basque capital. Generally speaking, a market day would have attracted people from the surrounding areas to Guernica to conduct business. Market days consisted of local farmers bringing in their crops to sell to the village people. They would bring the crops of the week's labour to the main square, which is where the market was held.

There is a historical debate over whether a market was being held that particular Monday as, prior to the bombing, the Basque government had ordered a general halt to markets to prevent congestion of roads, and restricted large meetings. It is accepted by most historians that Monday "...would have been a market day".

Luftwaffe doctrine, 1933-1942

James Corum states that a prevalent view about the Luftwaffe and its Blitzkrieg operations was that it had a doctrine of terror bombing, in which civilians were deliberately targeted in order to break the will or aid the collapse of an enemy. After the bombing of Guernica in 1937, Wieluń and Warsaw in 1939, and Rotterdam in 1940, it was commonly assumed that terror bombing was a part of Luftwaffe doctrine. During the interwar period the Luftwaffe leadership officially rejected the concept of terror bombing, and confined the air arms use to battlefield support of interdiction operations.

The vital industries and transportation centres that would be targeted for shutdown were valid military targets. It could be claimed civilians were not to be targeted directly, but the breakdown of production would affect their morale and will to fight. German legal scholars of the 1930s carefully worked out guidelines for what type of bombing was permissible under international law. While direct attacks against civilians were ruled out as "terror bombing", the concept of attacking vital war industries-and probable heavy civilian casualties and breakdown of civilian morale-was ruled as acceptable.

General Walther Wever compiled a doctrine known as The Conduct of the Aerial War in 1935. In this document, which the Luftwaffe adopted, the Luftwaffe rejected Giulio Douhet's theory of terror bombing. Terror bombing was deemed to be "counter-productive", increasing rather than destroying the enemy's will to resist. Such bombing campaigns were regarded as diversion from the Luftwaffe's main operations, destruction of the enemy armed forces.

The Condor Legion was entirely under the command of the Nationalist forces. The order to perform the raid was transmitted to the commanding officer of the Condor Legion, Oberstleutnant Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen, from the Spanish Nationalist Command.

While questions are often raised over the intent of the raid, the diaries of the planner and commander of the mission made public in the 1970s indicate that an attack on Guernica represented part of a wider Nationalist advance in the area and was also designed to support Franco's forces already in place.

Richthofen, understanding the strategic importance of the town in the advance on Bilbao and restricting Republican retreat, ordered an attack against the roads and bridge in the Renteria suburb. Destruction of the bridge was considered the primary objective since the raid was to operate in conjunction with Nationalist troop movements against Republicans around Marquina. Secondary objectives were restriction of Republican traffic/equipment movements and the prevention of bridge repair via the creation of rubble around the bridge.

On 22 March 1937 Franco started to put his plan into action, starting with his air chief, General Kindelan. The German army would first take the Guadalajara front. Italians then would be restructured at Palencia. From there two new divisions were formed. General Emilio Mola would start the campaign against the north (Asturias, Santander and Biscay). All Nationalist equipment was sent to the north front to support Mola. The main reason to attack first from the north was the suspicion that a decisive victory could be won there quickly. Mola wanted to make this fight quick; he let the Basque people know that if they wanted to surrender he would spare their lives and homes. On 31 March Mola's threat was put into action and the fighting began in Durango.

Condor Legion persuaded Franco to send troops to go north and to be led by General Emilio Mola. 31 March 1937, Mola attacked Biscay province, including the bombing of Durango by the Condor Legion. Republicans put up a tough fight against the German troops, but eventually were forced back. Many refugees fled to Guernica for safety, about a thousand people turned to Guernica. On 25 April, Mola sent a warning to Franco saying that he was planning a heavy strike against Guernica.

To meet these objectives, two Heinkel He 111s, one Dornier Do 17, eighteen Ju 52 Behelfsbomber, and three Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 of the ( Corpo Truppe Volontarie) were assigned for the mission. These were armed with 250 kg (550 lb) medium high-explosive bombs, 50 kg (110 lb) light explosive bombs and 1 kg (2.2 lb) incendiaries The ordnance load for the 24 bombers was 22 tonnes (22 long tons; 24 short tons) in total. A follow up to the bombing raid was also planned for the next day involving Messerschmitt Bf 109 raids in the area. The order was noted on 26 April by Richthofen as:

Starting at once: A/88 and J/88 for free fighter bomber mission on the streets near Marquina-Guernica-Guerriciaz. K/88 (after Returning from Guerriciaz), VB/88 and Italians for the streets and the bridge (including suburb) east of Guernica. There we have to close the traffic, if we finally want a decision against personnel and materiel of the enemy. Vigon agrees to move his troops for blocking all streets south of Guernica. If this succeeds, we will have trapped the enemy around Marquina.

The first wave arrived over Guernica around 16:30. A Dornier Do 17, coming from the south, dropped approximately twelve 50 kg (110 lb) bombs.

The three Italian SM.79s had taken off from Soria at 15:30 with orders to "bomb the road and bridge to the east of Guernica, in order to block the enemy retreat" during the second wave. Their orders explicitly stated not to bomb the town itself. During a single 60-second pass over the town, from north to south, the SM.79s dropped thirty-six 50 kg (110 lb) light explosive bombs. César Vidal says that at this point, the damage to the town was "relatively limited... confined to a few buildings", including the church of San Juan and headquarters of the Izquierda Republicana ("Republican Left") political party.

The next three waves of the first attack then occurred, ending around 18:00. The third wave consisted of a Heinkel He 111 escorted by five Regia Aeronautica Fiat CR.32 fighters led by Capitano Corrado Ricci. The fourth and fifth waves were carried out by German twin-engined planes. Vidal notes:

If the aerial attacks had stopped at that moment, for a town that until then had maintained its distance from the convulsions of war, it would have been a totally disproportionate and insufferable punishment. However, the biggest operation was yet to come.

Earlier, around noon that day, the Junkers Ju 52s of the Condor Legion had carried out a mission around Gerrikaraiz. Following this they landed to re-arm and then took off to complete the raid on Guernica. The attack would run from north to south, coming from the Bay of Biscay and up the course of the Urdaibai estuary.

The 1st and 2nd Squadrons of the Condor Legion took off at about 16:30, with the 3rd Squadron taking off from Burgos a few minutes later. They were escorted from Vitoria-Gazteiz by a squadron of Fiat fighters and Messerschmitt Bf 109Bs of Günther Lützow's 2. (2nd Squadron) of Jagdgruppe 88 (J/88), for a total of twenty-nine planes. Lützow himself did not participate in the attack, he was on home leave from 8-29 April 1937.

From 18:30 to 18:45, each of the three bomber squadrons attacked in a formation of three Ju 52s abreast-an attack front of about 150 m (490 ft). At the same time, and continuing for around 15 minutes after the bombing wave, the Bf 109Bs and Heinkel He 51 biplanes[citation needed ] strafed the roads leading out of town, adding to civilian casualties.

The bombing shattered the city's defenders' will to resist, allowing the rebel Nationalists to overrun it. This indirectly supported Douhet's theory, which predicted this result. The rebels faced little resistance and took complete control of the town by 29 April. The attacks destroyed the majority of Guernica. Three-quarters of the city's buildings were reported completely destroyed, and most others sustained damage. Among infrastructure spared were the arms factories Unceta and Company and Talleres de Guernica along with the Assembly House Casa de Juntas and the Gernikako Arbola. Since the Luftwaffe was then operating on Wever's theory of bombing as a military action, the mission was considered a failure as a result. However, the rubble and chaos that the raid created severely restricted the movement of Republican forces.

Since his appointment on the northern front, the Soviet aviation advisor Arjénoukhine had insistently called for air reinforcements, motivating his demands by high losses inflicted by nationalist aviation over Republican troops as well as civilian population. On 8, 9 May I-15 and 6 R-Zet were sent by air from central Spain through Toulouse, in France. Planes were immediately immobilized by non-intervention committee, and later sent back unarmed to central Spain.

An early study by Gernikazarra Historia Taldea estimated the number of victims to be 126, later revised to 153, and is still considered by the organisation to be provisional. Those incomplete data roughly correspond to the mortuary records of the town that survived, and do not include the 592 deaths registered in Bilbao's hospital. Raúl Arias Ramos in his book La Legión Cóndor en la Guerra Civil states that there were 250 dead. The study by Joan Villarroya and J.M. Sole i Sabate in their book España en Llamas. La Guerra Civil desde el Aire states that there were 300 dead. These studies, cited by historians such as Stanley Payne and Antony Beevor as well as media such as the BBC and , provide the currently recognized death toll in those numbers.

After Nationalist forces led by General Emilio Mola's forces took the town three days later, the Nationalist side claimed that no effort to establish an accurate number had been made by the opposite side. The Basque government, in the confused aftermath of the raids, reported 1,654 dead and 889 wounded. It roughly agrees with the testimony of British journalist George Steer, correspondent of The Times, which estimated that 800 to 3,000 of 5,000 people perished in Guernica. These figures were adopted over the years by some commentators. These figures are represented in a majority of the literature from that period and up to the 1970s.

The Nationalist junta gave a patently false description of the events (claiming that the destruction had been caused by Republicans burning the town as they fled) and seems to have made no effort to establish an accurate number. At an extreme low, the Francoist newspaper claimed, on 30 January 1970, that there had only been twelve deaths.

Issues with the originally released figures were raised following an appraisal of large scale bombing raids during the Second World War. A comparison of the Guernica figures with the figures of dead resulting from air attacks on major European cities during the Second World War exposed an anomaly. James Corum uses the figure of forty tons of bombs dropped on Guernica, and calculates that if the figure of 1654 dead is accepted as accurate then the raid caused 41 fatalities per ton of bombs. By way of comparison the Dresden air raid during February 1945 which saw 3,431 tons of bombs dropped on the city caused fewer deaths per ton of bombs: 7.2-10.2 fatalities per ton of bombs dropped. Corum, who ascribes the discrepancy between the high death toll reported at Guernica and in other cases such as Rotterdam to propaganda, goes on to say that for Guernica:

...a realistic estimate on the high side of bombing effectiveness (7-12 fatalities per ton of bombs) would yield a figure of perhaps 300-400 fatalities in Guernica. This is certainly a bloody enough event, but reporting that a small town was bombed with a few hundred killed would not have had the same effect as reporting that a city was bombed with almost 1,700 dead".

The numbers regarding the level of material destruction of the city still vary depending on the author and on what type of damages are being taken into account. Salas Larrazábal Estimated that the bombs destroyed 14% of the local buildings. Cástor Uriarte (1970) estimated a total of 74% of the buildings were destroyed, mainly due to the fire that could not be extinguished until the next day.

The first English-language media reports of the destruction in Guernica appeared two days later. George Steer, a reporter for , who was covering the Spanish Civil War from inside the country, authored the first full account of events. Steer's reporting set the tone for much of the subsequent reportage. Steer pointed out the clear German complicity in the action. The evidence of three small bomb cases stamped with the German Imperial Eagle made clear that the official German position of neutrality in the Civil War and the signing of a Non-Intervention Pact was a sham. Steer's report was syndicated to The New York Times and then worldwide, generating widespread shock, outrage, and fear. There was coverage in other national and international editions also:

The Times ran the story every day for over a week after the attack.

The New York Post ran a cartoon showing Adolf Hitler brandishing a bloody sword labelled "air raids" as he towered over heaps of civilian dead littering "the Holy City of Guernica".

The US Congressional Record referred to poison gas having been dropped on Guernica. This did not actually occur.

During debates in the British Parliament Guernica was also inaccurately described as an "open city" which contained no military targets.

Noel Monks, an Australian correspondent in Spain for the London Daily Express, was the first reporter to arrive on the scene after the bombing. He received the following cable from his office, "Berlin denies Guernica bombing. Franco says he had no planes up yesterday owing fog. Queipo de Llano says Reds dynamited Guernica during retreat."

Overall, the impression generated was one which fed the widely held public fear of air attack which had been building throughout the 1930s, a fear which accurately anticipated that in the next war the aerial forces of warring nations would be able to wipe whole cities off the map.

Stanley Payne observes that the presence of Steer was the reason for Guernica becoming a major media event; the town of Durango had been bombed a few days before and suffered higher casualties yet received comparatively little attention. Steer was first on the scene and was eager to dramatise the effect of bombing on cities in order to encourage war preparedness. Steer inflated the number of casualties by 1000%.

After the attack, José Antonio Aguirre published the following press note:

"German airforces, following orders of the Spanish Fascists, have bombed Guernica, setting the historical villa, that so much veneration has among the Basques, on fire. They (the Spanish Fascists) wanted to hurt us in the most vulnerable spot of our(the Basques) patriotic sentiment, proving once again what Euzkadi(Basque provinces) may expect from those who won't hesitate in destroying the sanctuary that commemorates centuries of our freedom and democracy (...). Before God and before History, which will judge us all, I assure you that the German planes bombed the population of Guernica, with unprecedented viciousness, for three hours, reducing the historical villa to ashes. They haunted women and children with machine gun fire, killing large numbers of them (..)". The Republican statement counted 1645 deaths and 889 wounded.

This account is not flatly false like the National/Rebel account. The attribution of responsibility is correct, the cause of the bombing is probably wrong but reasonable at the time, and machinegun fire was indeed used to create fires in the village. However, it contains lies and is intentionally misleading in various points. It suggests that the bombing was sustained through three hours, while three hours is the time between the first and last round among the three made on Guernica. The numbers of dead and injured have been now proven to be completely false and impossible for the size of the locality (see other parts of the article for actual numbers). The intentional, individual chase of civilians by German planes has not been disproven (nor proven) but has some problematic points in it. Some prestigious foreign journalists like Hemingway, Orwell and Saint-Exupéry reported it, but none of them actually saw it and have other proven inaccuracies in their accounts of the war. No material proofs of it had been found, and the streets of the village are far too narrow for the chase to take place. It is possible that the chase of civilians happened outside of the urban area as the population was fleeing from the bombs, but a generalized chase and murder of the witnesses seems like a pointless waste of resources, or even a counter producing action, if the goal of the German airforces was, as it is now believed, to extend demoralization and fear in the neighbouring villages.

Media reporting and denial by Franco's military board

On 27 April, the day after the bombing, the rebel general Gonzalo Queipo de Llano broadcast a statement through Union Radio Seville accusing the local population and "the reds" of having deliberately burned and dynamited Guernica as part of a scorched earth policy. Among the facts that he provides to prove his version are the "absolute absence of German airforces" in the National/Rebel airforces and the bad weather.

On 29 April, in view of the outrage caused by the bombing in European public opinion, Franco's propaganda service issued an international official statement with the same version of the facts. This theory found favor in conservative British journals, including The Times which even put in doubt the testimony from its own correspondent, George Steer. While Republican forces had been involved in pursuing a scorched earth strategy in the past, (notably in Irun, which was dynamited), Steer's reporting was supported by the reporting of other journalists who witnessed the same levels of destruction. Furthermore, there were objective proofs available at the time of the falsehood of Queipo Llano's version: The bad weather he mentions only unleashed hours after the attack had been perpetrated, and the weaponry of the city and the bridge to get to it were among the few buildings which had not been destroyed.

The Germans denied any involvement, as well. Von Richthofen claimed that the Germans had a target that was a bridge over the Mundaca River, which was on the edge of town. It was chosen for the fact that it would cut off the fleeing Republican troops. However, even though the Germans had the best airmen and the best planes in Spain, none of their bombs hit the presumed target.

Some Nationalist reporters suggested that the town had been bombed from the air, but by Republican airplanes. The bombs were said to have been made in the Basque country and the explosions happened because of dynamite stored in the sewers. Another theory by Nationalists was that there were a "few bomb fragments found" in Guernica, but the damage was mainly caused by Basque incendiaries. Franco's regime minimized the bombing for decades. In 1970, newspaper claimed that there had only been twelve deaths during the bombing raid.

The scorched earth version was maintained as the official version all through Franco's regime.

The Nationalists were embarrassed by the bombing and refused to admit the truth. Rather than acknowledging it as a routine military operation, they tried to dodge the issue, deny the attack took place and instead blamed the Republicans for setting fire to the town. Thus their efforts at covering up the event ended up causing them more harm than good. Even Hitler was furious and demanded Franco absolve the Condor Legion of any responsibility, though ironically it may have helped him politically, as the attack increased foreign fears about the power of the Luftwaffe, which encouraged appeasement towards Germany. As a consequence of the attack, Franco issued an order to the Condor Legion that strategic bombing could not occur without permission from himself or the commanding general of the air force (tactical bombing was left in the hands of battlefield commanders).

The attack has entered the lexicon of war as an example of terror bombing. It is also remembered by the surviving inhabitants and Basque people as such. Due to the lingering divisions from the conflict, the event remains a source of emotion and public recrimination.

A commonly held viewpoint is that the involvement of the Luftwaffe in the Civil War occurred because of shared anti-communism and to form a proving ground for troops employed later during World War II. This view is supported by the comments of then Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring at the Nuremberg Trials:

I urged him (Adolf Hitler) to give support [to Franco] under all circumstances, firstly, in order to prevent the further spread of communism in that theater and, secondly, to test my young Luftwaffe at this opportunity in this or that technical respect.

One historian claimed the Germans bombed Guernica in a deliberate attempt to destroy the entire town.

According to James Corum, while the popular view of the attack was a terror bombing aimed at the town, in reality the intended target was the bridge and roads. The issue was that pinpoint bombing was not possible at the time of the attack. Most of the bombers used by the Luftwaffe in Spain did not possess adequate targeting gear and thus the Condor Legion's preferred solution was to carpet the area with bombs to ensure the targets would be hit. Corum also argues against the view that there was a psychological element to the attack, stating that Richtofen seemed unaware of the significance of Guernica to the Basques and his diary indicates he only cared that the attack had been able to shut down logistics in the town. The Nationalists also didn't destroy the Basque parliament building or the Holy Oak, both of which had great cultural significance to the Basque and would have been excellent targets if the raid was meant to be a psychological warfare attack. Corum also argues that the attack on the town did not differ in style from the types of attacks the Allies conducted during WW2 and the Condor Legion regarded the attack as a routine tactical operation.

Alongside the potential for gains in combat experience it is also thought that various strategic initiatives were first tried as part of Luftwaffe involvement in the conflict. Theories on strategic bombing were first developed by the Luftwaffe with the first exhibition of " carpet bombing" in the September 1937 Asturias campaign. Comparisons between the raid on Guernica and the fate of other cities during the conflict are also telling. As the fighting progressed into March 1938 Italian pilots flying as Aviazione Legionaria under Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle were involved in thirteen raids against Barcelona involving fire and gas[citation needed ] bombs.

The use of "carpet bombing" was becoming standard practice by Condor Legion personnel. To illustrate this point, military historian James S. Corum cites an excerpt from a 1938 Condor Legion report on this use of this tactic:

We have had notable results in hitting the targets near the front, especially in bombing villages which hold enemy reserves and headquarters. We have had great success because these targets are easy to find and can be thoroughly destroyed by carpet bombing.

On the Spanish side, threats made prior to the raid by General Emilio Mola to "end the war in the North of Spain quickly" and threats apparently made against Republicans in Bilbao afterward implied a blunting of strategy and that air raids were effective and set to become an increasingly favorite instrument in the Nationalist war effort.

Vidal outlines some other commonly voiced theories on the raid:

The lack of reconnaissance missions before the bombing suggests to him that the Legion intended the destruction of the town rather than a specific target. Reconnaissance missions had been ordered as a prerequisite before raids around built-up areas on 6 January 1937. The intent of the order was to minimize civilian deaths and it had been issued by Mola, then Supreme Commander of the Air Force Salamanca.

Since the raid appears to have ignored Mola's earlier plans for reconnaissance prior to the raid, Vidal concludes that Richthofen must have received direct orders from Mola or Franco.

According to Nicholas Rankin (Telegram from Guernica, Faber and Faber, London 2003, page 121):

It was von Richthofen himself who selected the mix of blast, splinter and fire bombs for this particular operation, agreed at a military conference in Burgos the night before. Von Richthofen wrote in his diary: "As it was a complete success of our 250 kg (explosive) and ECB1 (incendiary) bombs".

In Vidal's view, such a mission would have typically used 10-kilogram bombs, and no incendiaries. Vidal also argues that the 22-ton load-out used in the raid represented a relatively large quantity for an attack on the stated primary objective. By way of comparison, Vidal indicates sources which give total tonnage of bombs dropped on the front during the first day of the offensive as sixty-six.

Vidal argues that the Italians had been trying to obtain a separate peace agreement with the Basque nationalists and were not inclined to jeopardize those efforts by deliberately inflicting civilian casualties.

The bombing gained immediate international media attention because of the intentional targeting of civilians by aerial bombers, a strategy widely recognized as "deviant", causing "international horror".

Steer's reports on the horrors of Guernica were greatly appreciated by the Basque people. Steer had made their plight known. The Basque authorities later honored his memory by naming a street in Bilbao George Steer Kalea, and commissioning a bronze bust with the dedication: "George Steer, journalist, who told the world the story about Guernica."

Despite Francoist efforts to play down the reports, they proliferated and led to widespread international outrage at the time.

Picasso's painting

Guernica quickly became a world-renowned symbol of civilian suffering resulting from conflict and inspired Pablo Picasso to adapt one of his existing commissions into . The Spanish Republican Government had commissioned a work from him for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exposition. Though he accepted the invitation to display a piece, he remained uninspired until he heard of the bombing of Guernica. Before the bombing of Guernica took place, Picasso never cared much for anything to do with politics. Once Picasso heard the news he changed his commissioned work for Spain into a reflection on the massacre.

Picasso began the painting on 11 May 1937, working on a piece of unbleached muslin (349 cm x 776 cm). Since the work was so large, Picasso had to use a ladder and a long-handled brush to reach the furthest corners of the canvas. He spent over two months creating Guernica. He used only black and white paint to invoke the truth-telling authority of documentary photography. "The protest is found in what has happened to the bodies, the hands, the soles of the feet, the horse's tongue, the mother's breasts, the eyes in the head-the imaginative equivalent of what happened to them in the flesh. We are made to feel their pain with our own eyes."

The display of Picasso's work at (Republican) Spain's Pavilion during the 1937 World's Fair reflected the effect on public consciousness. The painting, later adopted as a symbol of Basque nationalism during the Spanish transition to democracy, was displayed near Mercury Fountain, an overtly political work by Alexander Calder that incorporated mercury from the mines of Almadén. Today it resides in Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. A tapestry copy of Picasso's Guernica is displayed on the wall of the United Nations building in New York City, at the entrance to the Security Council room. It was placed there as a reminder of the horrors of war.

Immediately after the bombing French sculpture René Iché created , one of his most violent and personal sculptures. He was shocked and horrified by the enormous civilian massacre and worked endlessly on the plaster statue. Iché used his daughter to model a child's body. He refused to display his work because of the violence. Just after his death an exhibition was held to commemorate the artist. This piece was displayed for a short time, then returned to his family.

Recrimination for the activities of the Condor Legion and shame at the involvement of German citizens in the bombing of Guernica surfaced following German reunification in the 1990s. In 1997, the 60th anniversary of Operation Rügen, then German President Roman Herzog wrote to survivors apologizing on behalf of the German people and state for Germany's role in the Civil War in general. Herzog said he wished to extend "a hand of friendship and reconciliation" on behalf of all German citizens. This sentiment was later ratified by members of the German Parliament who went on to legislate in 1998 for the removal of all former Legion members' names from associated German military bases.

On the 70th anniversary of the bombing, the president of the Basque Parliament met with politicians, Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, and deputies from Hiroshima, Volgograd, Pforzheim, Dresden, Warsaw, and Oswiecim, as well as several survivors from Guernica itself. During the meeting they showed images and film clips of the bombing, took time to remember the 250 dead, and read the Guernica Manifesto for Peace, pleading that Guernica become a "World Capital for Peace".

The 2016 film Guernica leads up to and culminates in the bombing of Guernica, set against the background of personalities involved in press coverage of the war.

Bombings of Jaén and Córdoba

On 1 April 1937, at 17:20 PM, the Spanish city of Jaén, one of the few areas in Andalucia under Republican control at that point of the Civil War, was bombed by 6 German bombers. The bombers made a single raid over the city, in which an estimated 150 people were killed. The order for the Jaén bombing was written and signed by General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, and is preserved in the Spanish National Archives.

On 1 April 1937, at noon, the Andalucian city of Córdoba, under rebel control at the time, had been heavily bombarded by seven bombers under the command of the Republican Government. The civil population was warned about the bombing. The main target of the attack was the General Military Hospital in the city. It is estimated that 40 people were killed by the attack, about half of them in the hospital. The same day at 20:00, the Republican government signed an order to execute "as many National Prisoners as people died in the Jaén bombing".[citation needed ] The order was carried through.

The bombing of Durango is considered the clearest precedent for Guernica. It was perpetrated on 31 March 1937, by the Italian Air Forces in a three-raid pattern, almost identical to that carried out in Guernica. It killed an estimated 250 people and destroyed most of the city.

Alfredo Kindelán considers that both Guernica and Durango were "practice drills" in the development of more effective bombing strategies to use in bombings of Madrid. The city suffered a similar attack prior to the bombing of Guernica, and further attacks afterwards. Madrid presented a fierce resistance against the National troops that surpassed all of Franco's expectations and forced him to completely modify his attack strategy. A series of air bombings to demoralize the population were ordered both before and after Guernica. It has also been suggested that the war chronicle Picasso read to inspire himself to paint Guernica was actually a chronicle written by Louis Delaprée about the bombing of Madrid on December 1936.[citation needed ]

On 13 February 2003, during the commemoration of the 58th anniversary of the Bombing of Dresden, inhabitants of Dresden, Germany, including survivors of the firestorm of 1945, joined together with witnesses of the bombing of Guernica to issue an appeal to the people of the world:

As our television sets show bombers preparing for war against Iraq, we survivors of Guernica and Dresden recall our own helplessness and horror when we were flung into the inferno of bombing-we saw people killed. Suffocated. Crushed. Incinerated. Mothers trying to protect their children with only their bodies. Old people with no strength left to flee from the flames. These pictures are still alive in our memory, and our accounts capture indelibly what we went through.

For decades we-and survivors from many other nations-have been scarred by the horror, loss and injuries we experienced in the wars of the 20th century. Today we see that the beginnings of the 21st century are also marked by suffering and destruction. On behalf of all the victims of war throughout the world we express our sympathy and solidarity with all those affected by the terror of 11 September in the US and the war in Afghanistan.

But is that very suffering now also to be inflicted upon the people of Iraq? Must thousands more die in a rain of bombs, must cities and villages be destroyed and cultural treasures obliterated?

On 26 April 2007, Dr. Tadatoshi Akiba, Mayor of Hiroshima and President of Mayors for Peace compared the experience of Guernica to Hiroshima:

Human beings have often sought to give concrete form to our powerful collective longing for peace. After World War I, that longing led to the League of Nations and numerous rules and taboos designed to govern warfare itself. Of these, the most important was the proscription against attacking and killing civilian non-combatants even in times of war. However, the second half of the twentieth century has seen most of those taboos broken. Guernica was the point of departure, and Hiroshima is the ultimate symbol. We must find ways to communicate to future generations the history of horror that began with Guernica....
In this sense, the leadership of those here in Guernica who seek peace and have worked hard to bring about this memorial ceremony is profoundly meaningful. The solidarity we feel today derives from our shared experience of the horror of war, and this solidarity can truly lead us toward a world beyond war.

Braatz, Kurt (2005). Gott oder ein Flugzeug - Leben und Sterben des Jagdfliegers Günther Lützow [God or an Airplane - Life and Death of Fighter Pilot Günther Lützow] (in German). Moosburg, Germany: NeunundzwanzigSechs Verlag. ISBN 978-3-9807935-6-8.

Corum, James S. - Wolfram Von Richthofen: Master of the German Air War (University Press of Kansas, 2008)

Corum, James. The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, 1918-1940. Kansas University Press. 1997. ISBN 978-0-7006-0836-2

Coverdale, John F. - Italian Intervention in the Spanish Civil War. Princeton University Press, 1975

Maier, Klaus A. - Guernica 26 April 1937: Die Deutsche Intervention in Spanien und der "Fall Guernica." Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1975

Patterson, Ian - Guernica and Total War (London: Profile; USA, Harvard University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1-86197-764-9)

Moa, Pío - Los Mitos de la Guerra Civil, La Esfera de los Libros, 2003.

Ramírez, Juan Antonio - Guernica: la historia y el mito, Electa, Madrid, 1999

Arias Ramos, Raúl; El Apoyo Militar Alemán a Franco:La Legión Cóndor En La Guerra Civil, La Esfera de los Libros, 2003

Rankin, Nicholas - Telegram From Guernica: The Extraordinary Life of George Steer, War Correspondent (Faber & Faber, London, ISBN 0-571-20563-1)

Southworth, Herbert Rutledge - Guernica! Guernica!, a study of journalism, diplomacy, propaganda, and history, Berkley, 1977

Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, Guernica: The Crucible of World War II, Stein and Day, 1975, ISBN 0-8128-1839-3.

César Vidal Manzanares, Chapter 9 of La Destrucción de Guernica, translated into English by Peter Miller. A detailed account of the attack and an account of its likely motivations. The sections of the article on the timing of the attacks and the particular planes and armaments used draw heavily on this source.

Boling, Dave. Guernica: A Novel (Bloomsbury, US, 2008 ISBN 978-0-330-46066-8)

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The bombing of Guernica (26 April 1937) was an aerial bombing of the Basque town of Guernica ( Gernika in Basque) during the Spanish Civil War. It was carried out, at the behest of Francisco Franco's rebel Nationalist faction, by its allies, the Nazi German Luftwaffe's Condor Legion and the Fascist Italian Aviazione Legionaria, under the code name 'Operation Rügen'.