Art
Guernica
Picasso’s Guernica takes on new meaning as Gaza continues to be starved and bombed to dust, with tens of thousands of women, children, physicians, journalists, and aid workers burned alive, dead, or maimed, all under the averted eyes of the Western powers.
Writing about the Germans’ bombing of Guernica for the New York Times on Wednesday, April 8, 1937, writer G. L. Steer observed:
It is impossible to state the total number of victims…In a street leading down the hill from the Casa de juntas, the writer saw a place where fifty persons, almost all women and children, were said to have been trapped under a mass of burning wreckage.
Among the horrors that Picasso’s Guernica depicts can now be said to include the destroyed conscience of those who are supposed to be the custodians of a rule-of-law and human-rights-based world order.