Picasso's Guernica

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 November 2017

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the context and impact of Pablo Picasso's iconic work, created soon after the bombing on 26th April 1937 that obliterated much of the Basque town of Guernica, and its people. The attack was carried out by warplanes of the German Condor Legion, joined by the Italian air force, on behalf of Franco's Nationalists. At first the Nationalists denied responsibility, blaming their opponents for creating the destruction themselves for propaganda purposes, but the accounts of journalists such as George Steer, and the prominence of Picasso's work, kept the events of that day under close scrutiny. Picasso's painting has gone on to become a symbol warning against the devastation of war.

With

Mary Vincent Professor of Modern European History at the University of Sheffield

Gijs van Hensbergen Historian of Spanish Art and Fellow of the LSE Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies

and

Dacia Viejo Rose Lecturer in Heritage in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge Fellow of Selwyn College

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:02.0	Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time.
0:05.0	There's a reading list to go with it on our website and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC in our time.
0:12.0	I hope you enjoy the programs.
0:14.0	Hello in 1937 Pablo Picasso revealed his painting
0:18.0	Gernica at the Paris International's exhibition in the Pavilion of
0:22.3	Republican Spain.
0:24.0	The work took its name from the Basque town which just a few months earlier
0:28.0	had been carpet bombed and burnt to rubble by Nazi Germany Plains, supporting Franco's nationalists in the Spanish Civil War.
0:35.0	The outcry over that massacre was so great that the nationalists denied responsibility
0:40.0	saying the Basque did it themselves,
0:42.0	but eyewitness reports and Picasso's painting
0:44.2	ensured this infamous act of terror would be remembered
0:47.2	and around the world Picasso's Gernica
0:49.5	has since become one of the most iconic protests
0:51.7	against the horrors of war.
0:53.5	Women to discuss Bicassas Gernica are Mary Vincent,
0:56.9	professor of modern European history at the University of Sheffield.
1:00.4	Geis Van Hensburgen, historian of Spanish art and fellow at the LSC Kenyada Blanch Center for Contemporary Spanish Studies,
1:07.0	and daseer Pieto Rose, lecturer in heritage in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge.
1:14.0	Mary Vincent's, what divided Spain at that time and brought it into war?
1:19.0	The immediate cause of the Spanish Civil War is a military coup which takes place on the 17th and 18th of July 1936, so nearly a year before the bombing of Gurnika.
	...

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