Prominently featured in the composition are a gored horse, a bull, screaming women, a dead baby, a dismembered soldier, and flames.

It is widely thought that Surrealist photographer and anti-fascist activist Dora Maar, Picasso's romantic partner at the time, had a significant influence on the style and politicized theme of Guernica.

[9] 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.

[10] 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.

[11] On Monday, 26 April 1937, warplanes of the Nazi Germany Condor Legion, commanded by Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, bombed Guernica for about two hours.

[12][11] 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.

When the main bombardment began the roads were already full of debris and the bridges leading out of town destroyed, and the residents were unable to escape.

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.

"[19] Referring to Picasso's painting, art theorist Rudolf Arnheim writes: The women and children make Guernica the image of innocent, defenseless humanity victimized.

[6] Some argue that Picasso borrowed from Maar's photographic oeuvre by painting Guernica in stark black and white, which was a departure from his usual colorful style.

[1] 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.

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.

"[27] In drawing attention to a number of preliminary studies, the so-called primary project,[28] 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.

[39] 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..."[40] Jean Cocteau also praised the painting and declared it a cross that "[General] Franco would always carry on his shoulder.

[45] However, after its exhibition Rosenberg organised a four-man extravaganza Scandinavian tour of 118 works by Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and Henri Laurens.

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.

[48] 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.

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.

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.

[citation needed] Upon its arrival in Spain in September 1981,[52] it was first displayed behind bomb-and bullet-proof glass screens[53] at the Casón del Buen Retiro in Madrid in time to celebrate the centenary of Picasso's birth, 25 October.

[56] A full-size tapestry copy of Picasso's Guernica, by Jacqueline de la Baume Dürrbach,[59] hangs at the Headquarters of the United Nations in New York City at the entrance to the Security Council room.

[62] 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.

[63] 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.

[5] 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".

[27] 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.

[60] "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.

[27] Art historian and curator W. J. H. B. Sandberg argued in Daedalus in 1960 that Picasso pioneered a "new language" combining expressionistic and cubist techniques in Guernica.

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".

[20] 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".

[71][72] 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.