Picasso’s Guernica

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the context and impact of Pablo Picasso’s iconic work, created soon after the bombing on 26th April 1937 that obliterated much of the Basque town of Guernica, and its people. The attack was carried out by warplanes of the German Condor Legion, joined by the Italian air force, on behalf of Franco’s Nationalists. At first the Nationalists denied responsibility, blaming their opponents for creating the destruction themselves for propaganda purposes, but the accounts of journalists such as George Steer, and the prominence of Picasso’s work, kept the events of that day under close scrutiny. Picasso’s painting has gone on to become a symbol warning against the devastation of war.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Mary Vincent 4 episodes
  Professor of Modern European History at the University of Sheffield
• Gijs van Hensbergen No other episodes
  Historian of Spanish Art and Fellow of the LSE Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies
• Dacia Viejo Rose No other episodes
  Lecturer in Heritage in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge Fellow of Selwyn College

Reading list

• Picasso's Guernica: History, Transformations, Meanings
  Hershel B. Chipp (University of California Press, 1992)
• Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon
  Gijs van Hensbergen (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005)
• Life with Picasso
  Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake (Virago, 1990)
• The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction
  Helen Graham (Oxford University Press, 2005)
• Guernica and Total War
  Ian Patterson (Profile Books, 2007)
• Picasso: His Life and Work
  Roland Penrose (University of California Press, 1992)
• We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War
  Paul Preston (Constable, 2009)
• The Destruction of Guernica
  Paul Preston (Harper Collins, 2010)
• Telegram from Guernica: The Extraordinary Life of George Steer, War Correspondent
  Nicholas Rankin (Faber and Faber, 2013)
• War and Cultural Heritage: Biographies of Place
  Marie Louise S. Sorensen and Dacia Viejo-Rose (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
• Guernica! Guernica!: A Study of Journalism, Diplomacy, Propaganda and History
  Herbert Southworth (University of California Press, 1992)
• The Tree of Gernika: A Field Study of Modern War
  George Steer (Faber and Faber, 2011)
• Guernica: The Crucible of World War II
  Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts (Scarborough House, 1991)
• Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Heritage and Memory after Civil War
  Dacia Viejo-Rose (SAP/Canada Blanch, 2014)

Related episodes

• The Spanish Civil War
  
  3 Apr, 2003 940 History of Europe
• Bruegel’s The Fight Between Carnival and Lent
  
  15 Jan, 2015 750 Painting
• Hitler in History
  
  5 Oct, 2000 940 History of Europe
• The Avant Garde’s Decline and Fall in the 20th Century
  
  25 Feb, 1999 700 Arts
• The Thirty Years War
  
  6 Dec, 2018 940 History of Europe
• The Siege of Paris 1870-71
  
  16 Jan, 2020 940 History of Europe
• The Economic Consequences of the Peace
  
  28 Sep, 2023 330 Economics
• Dadaism
  
  19 Mar, 2026 700 Arts
• Walter Benjamin
  
  10 Feb, 2022 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People
  
  20 Oct, 2011 700 Arts

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: b09bxkdm

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09bxkdm

Auto-category: 700.92 (Arts and recreation > Fine arts and decorative arts > Artists, architects, and related occupations > Artists)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, in 1937 Pablo Picasso revealed his painting Guernica at the Paris International's exhibition in the Pavilion of Republic in Spain.