Guernica

Guernica or Guernica y Luno (Basque Gernika-Lumo, pronounced like Gayr NEE ka or SAMPA [gernika]) is a small city in the Basque region of Spain that was the meeting place of the Biscayne assembly and a symbol of traditional freedoms of the Basque people.

The city is best known as the scene of an early instance of aerial bombing by the German Luftwaffe (Condor Legion[?]) on April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The Germans were attacking to support the efforts of Francisco Franco to overturn the Spanish Republican[?] government.

It is also home to the Gernika Jai Alai[?], one of the main courts for the jai alai sport.

The painting

"Guernica" is also the name of a famous painting by Pablo Picasso, depicting the bombing of Guernica. Pablo Picasso, asked by the Spanish Republican government to paint a picture to decorate the Spanish Pavilion during the 1937 World's fair in Paris, created a painting depicting the event and called it Guernica.

Picasso's Guernica depicts people, animals, and buildings wrenched by the violence and chaos of the carpet bombing. This large canvas embodies for many the inhumanity, brutality and hopelessness of war, and the cruety of bombing civilians.

After the fair, when the Republican government had fallen, Picasso refused to allow this painting, one of his most famous, to be displayed in Spain until after the end of the Franco regime. It therefore spent many years at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, but was repatriated after Franco's death. It is now in the Queen Sophia Museum in Madrid. The exact location was polemic in Spain, since Picasso's will stated that it should be at the Prado Museum. However as in the late 20th century the Prado moved all of its collections of art after the early 19th century to other nearby buildings in the city for reasons of space, the Sophia, which houses the capital's national collection of 20th century art, seems the appropriate place for it. A special gallery was constructed to at the Sophia to display Picasso's masterpiece to best advantage.

A copy of Picasso's Guernica is displayed on the wall of the United Nations building in New York City, at the entrance to the Security Council[?] room. It was placed there as a reminder of the horrors of war. On January 27, 2003 a large blue curtain was placed to cover this work, so that it would not be visible in the background when Colin Powell and John Negroponte[?] gave press conferences at the United Nations. On the following day, it was revealed 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. They also complained that a horse's hindquarters appeared just above the faces of any speakers.

External links

• Condor Legion and Guernica (http://www.tamu.edu/mocl/picasso/study/history)
• Image of Guernica (http://www.mala.bc.ca/~lanes/english/hemngway/picasso/guernica.htm)