Pablo Picasso: When a Murdered City Entered the Painting

Guernica wakes on market day as a town and goes to sleep as a wound, after aircraft that see marks on a map in place of homes drop their bombs on its streets. In Paris, Picasso stands before an empty canvas commissioned for the Spanish Pavilion until the newspapers arrive, dust from the town falls across his studio floor, and the canvas becomes a surviving wall that tells him to place there those who found no grave. That night he is called before the Court of Ruins, where a Ruined House sits as judge and shattered windows stand as witnesses, and the figures of the painting come forward: a mother who asks not to be painted beautifully, a horse that wants the terror of every creature in its body, a bull that insists on keeping its meaning open, a woman with a lamp, and an electric light like a cold eye that sees everything and saves no one. Dora Maar photographs the stages as the painting builds itself over its own erased forms; it hangs in the pavilion amid an exposition celebrating progress, then stays in exile in New York because Picasso refused to let it return to Spain while dictatorship endured, and comes home only after his death. At the end of the trial the House asks what he did, since he could give back neither its roof nor its people, and he answers that he built them a wall no bomb could demolish.