April 26th will mark the 70th anniversary of the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica; German and Italian planes in support of the fascist forces of General Francisco Franco razed the town and killed 120 of the estimated half million people who would lose their lives during the Spanish Civil War. Pablo Picasso’s mural, Guernica, has become the quintessential symbol of the horror of war. My first encounter with the painting came as a freshman in college as I sat timidly in my advisor’s office. While Carroll Feagins, who was also chairman of the philosophy department at Guilford College, and I discussed my future as a philosophy major my eyes were drawn to what appeared to me to be a stark yet fascinating pastel dominating the wall above his desk. I was a kid of blue collar working class immigrants with little or no acquaintance with art, especially art of this kind, which may have explained my equivocation between puzzlement and intrigue. I won’t offer an analysis of Picasso’s masterpiece, indeed he deferred when asked to explain the meaning of the symbols pointed out in the work in this way: “…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.” I will confess that I never managed to shake my initial fascination with the painting and while my much smaller replica of the original maintains its vigil at home, for many years it kept watch over me in my office.
Perhaps, I’ll send President Bush a reproduction of Guernica as a Christmas present. If that iconic painting could do as scripture proclaimed, He who has eyes, let him see, then whatever the price of the original, it could never exceed the value of a single life lost in the war in Iraq or in any war; but, if it could save a solitary soul from the hungry maw of war, no ransom would be too dear.
