This is a lecture about Gernica, about a history painting, an anachronism really, that refuses to die.

I start on the left with a photo of the then US ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte,

mugging for the camera in early 2001, with behind him the now notorious tapestry version of Gernica

hung in the ante room to the Security Council.

Negroponte was fresh in 2001 from service as ambassador to Honduras, that is, as commander-in-chief

of the Contra War against the Sandinistas next door.

And it seems there was no perceived dissonance at this point between Picasso's picture of terrorized

civilians and the fresh faces of those arranging their death. Things, as you know, were to

change. Gernica came down from the wall. On the right is a participant snapshot of a demonstration in London in 2004.

It is one of hundreds, maybe thousands of reappearances of the painting over the past six years.

I'm going to show you two more.

Extraordinary one at the top, taken in 2008 in Calcutta, just at the start of a demonstration

against state violence in Nandiram and down below Madrid.

I'm not going to talk directly about the role of Picasso's painting since the US-Uk invasion of the Middle East,

but in a sense everything I go on to say is shadowed by it.

For how did it happen, this is my lecture's basic question,

that a painting of the Spanish Civil War came to emblematize state violence

in the way these photographs suggest. What was it about Gernica that went on and goes on

providing a usable, seemingly even a necessary form for total war? Already in 1937, the size and materials and ambition of a history painting

like Gernica were anachronistic. The idea that the whole shape and temper of a new historical moment

could or ought to be epitomized, monumentalized in oil on campus, was increasingly

hard to believe in.

...