Russell Martin: 'Picasso's War' (2002)

Russell Martin, Picasso's War: The Destruction of Guernica, and the Masterpiece That Changed the World. New York: Dutton, 2002.

The way it's organized:
Prologue
The Spanish Dead
Remembering the Bullring
Images Spilling from Fingers
Save Spain!
A Wearable Pair of Boots
Exiles
The Last Refugee
Guernica in Gernika
Epilogue

Highly absorbing book, providing background, context, a detailed account of artistic creation, setting, display, impact, rescue, and ongoing installation.

We see why Picasso was moved to perform his artistic duties on behalf of the Spanish Republic, then under attack by Nazi and fascist-backed brutes from 1936 until 1939. Martin shows how Picasso's response to the German-Italian air assault against Guernica on April 26, 1937 led to the creation of his Guernica masterpiece.  

A vivid account of the bombing, how word of it spread (and was also denied by the usual suspects), and how Picasso's work was displayed at the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris Expo, the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life) that ran later in 1937. At this utterly surreal expo, giant German Nazi architecture ranged against Soviet symbols, even as German and Italian military forces and equipment faced off against Soviet equipment and advisers in the ongoing Spanish Civil War. 

Most of Europe would be engulfed in the Second World War before the decade of the 1930s was out, but only after Spain was left to burn to the ground.     

Picasso's War includes still-current debates over modern Spanish life, identity and policy. The aspirations of people in the Basque region and Catalonia are notably included. 

Since 1992, Madrid has been hosting Guernica in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; but not without a fight and the creation of a proposed alternate venue at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Basque country. 

I've seen the original Guernica at the Reina Sofía in Madrid and the huge tapestry copy at United Nations headquarters in New York City.  Now I'd like to visit Balboa and, of course, sacred Guernica (Gernika), both in Euskadi, Basque country. 

Here is the author's tribute to his teacher-friend and mentor Angel Vilalta: "Angel continually demonstrated that the best kinds of men were inquisitive and energetic, courageous yet compassionate, attuned to the breadth of the world's worries and pleasures but also equally focused on family and friends." (page 187). 

Today's Rune: Growth. 

Richard Rhodes: 'Hell and Good Company' (2015)

Richard Rhodes, Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World It Made (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).  

This is another well-written book about the endlessly absorbing Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Rhodes interweaves personal accounts (of nurses, doctors, artists, officers) with technical observations (types of equipment, processes, construction of air raid shelters) in a winning combination, because he also manages to keep the book fairly short.

"War is chaotic. People come and go. I decided to pin my narrative not to the people but to the chronology of the war itself, starting at the beginning and marching through to the end." (page xvii).

Lots of people make their way in and out of and then back into the narrative as the war moves along. Many have poignant arcs, such as that of Patience Darton and Robert Aaquist: "Love made a space for them, but love doesn't conquer all." (page 221).

There are tales of Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, John Dos Passos, André Malraux, Joan Miró, and much about medical efforts and hospitals. Nearly one in five doctors in the anti-fascist International Brigades were women (page 187).

Rhodes favors the side of the Republic defending against the fascist and Nazi-backed Nationalists, and he shows greatest sympathy where it seems most appropriate. The Spanish people are given their due, but this is mostly a collective story told from the outside in, mostly through the words of international participants or semi-omnisciently.

I like the specificity of detail that Rhodes delves into from time to time. I've learned new things about the war. Not only about the heroism of the various medical corps, but more about the Germans sent by Hitler, too: "The Condor Legion deployed to Spain by ship . . . consisted initially of thirty-seven officers, 3,786 men, and ninety-two factory-new aircraft, including three squadrons of Junkers-52 bombers, three squadrons of Heinkel 51 biplane fighters, two squadrons of Heinkel 45 and Heinkel 70 reconnaissance bombers, and a seaplane squadron . . . Hitler also sent tank companies, antitank platoons, signals units, and submarines to bolster Franco's forces. Mussolini contributed not only planes, tanks, and submarines but also tens of thousands of infantry." (page 29).

One of the legacies of the Spanish Civil War is in the use of air power to bomb civilian targets en masse, with ruthless repetition -- a terrible legacy, indeed, especially when one side gains air supremacy against a virtually helpless enemy stuck on or under the ground. 

Today's Rune: Movement.  

Shock Delivered

Alvah Bessie's Men in Battle (1939) delivers a riveting non-fictional account of the Spanish Civil War from a soldier's or "worm's eye" (as he terms it) point of view. It goes perfectly well with Pablo Picasso's epic 1937 masterwork, Guernica. Here's one small sample:

'They brought the Fascist pilot in, and he was a Spanish youngster in a beautiful Italian flying suit, with a bullet wound in his arm and a broken face. The Spanish company commander in the sector where he landed had smashed him in the jaw in a fit of rage (and we all agreed that while this may have been humanly understandable, it was politically incorrect). . .'   ~~ From the 1977 Pinnacle Books version, page 273.

'[The pilot] was a native of Majorca and had been a pilot before the war. When the Fascists took Majorca, they had asked him to fly for them, and since there is nothing a pilot would rather do than fly, he had accepted. He had raided Barcelona many times. Like most pilots everywhere, he had no political convictions whatsoever, and it is relatively easy to drop high explosives on people you cannot see . . .' (Ibid.).

Guernica -- an impressively large painting (eleven feet high and between twenty-five and twenty-six feet long) -- was moved from New York City to Madrid in 1981 (Casón del Buen Retiro), then on to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 1992. A tapestry version created by Madame J. de la Baume Dürrbach is temporarily on display at the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas, USA (until March 8, 2015) -- I saw this version in the 1980s at United Nations headquarters. In the parlance of our day: WOW.

Today's Rune: Fertility.

Ground Zero Nevermore Six, 1913-2013

"We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world."

"The second is freedom of every person to worship God [or gods or no God] in his [or her] own way — everywhere in the world."

"The third is freedom from want — which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants - everywhere in the world."

"The fourth is freedom from fear — which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world."

"Basic things . . . must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.

Many subjects connected with our social economy call for immediate improvement. As examples: We should bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance."

"We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care."

"We should plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it."

From: U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) to the U.S. Congress, January 6, 1941. 

How's the U.S., and the world, holding up to this vision, delineated 72 years ago? 

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.  

Plays, Dialogue, Image, Action: Guernica and The Firebugs

Some more rediscovered texts to once more ramble through. These remind me of Joan Stapleton Boyd, 7th and 8th grade English teacher. Thought-provoking and sometimes evil, she's the one who made her classes do scenes from Romeo and Juliet. Yes, indeed: I was once Tybalt:

What, art thou drawn among these heartless hinds?
Turn thee, Benvolio, look upon thy death.

Ms. Boyd had us do some heavy lifting when it came to reading and thinking. Another play we studied, for instance, was The Firebugs / Herr Biedermann und die Brandstifter by Max Frisch. That was cool, in the arena of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which we also covered. In other words, the kinds of texts that make one take special note during a nightmare like the recent West Fertilizer Company explosion in West, Texas -- especially now that one Bryce Reed, a weird, very delighted-to-be-interviewed EMT volunteer, has been charged with possessing and then trying to hide the materials for assembling an explosive device. Makes you wonder.

Another play along the lines of The Firebugs is Guernica by Arrabal. This one reminds me of Syria, sure, not to mention a score of other "conflicts" occurring at the very time of this posting (there will be others). Arrabal seems to suggest that you can't really hide anywhere -- chance will change things and choices will be made, by you or for you, somewhere along the way. Might as well try to make some decisions for yourself, while remaining engaged with the world via some kind of philosophy (religious or non-religious) of freedom and responsibility. Existentialism redux.

Dig it, man. I still do -- because, and may we collectively not forget, they're still right on.

Today's Rune: Fertility.   

 

Sing the Blues on Every Decoration Day

Many layers of meaning attach themselves to Memorial Day and its worldwide equivalents. Soldiers, military veterans, wars -- of course. Mortality and contemplation. The meaning of life and the worth of a life. Loss. Remembrance.

In the past century, the technology of war has become increasingly sophisticated, greatly expanding in possibility through air power, advanced communications, high exposive armaments, submarines, tanks, laser-guided munitions, remotely piloted attack drones, poison gas, atomic weapons, mass electronic propaganda and mediated filtering. And, when nations coalesce together to fight "Total War" or "assymetrical war," everything is brought to bear against perceived enemies, including children, animals, woman and men together, not to mention their combined social spaces. 

Given mass killing realities like the 9/11/2001 attacks, the Holocaust, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Nanking, the Armenian Genocide, indiscriminate firebombings of great cities, the Great War, and the U.S.-Vietnam War -- just to recall a handful of grisly atrocities perpetrated by human societies or tribes or groups in the past century -- it may be wise to expand the official scope and acknowldgement of Decoration Day, of Memorial Day, to include all societies touched by war and massacre, to think beyond the uniformed.

But hell, what do I know?  In the spirit of John Lee Hooker, "I sing the blues every Decoration Day." 

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.   

Omar Mukhtar: Lion of the Desert

If you like history, war movies, action movies, and maybe something a little different, you might want to check out Moustapha Akkad's Omar Mukhtar: Lion of the Desert (1980/1981). First, overall it's excellent. Second, it's set in Libya during Italy's fascist period, with Mussolini aiming to expand his "New Roman Empire" in Africa, focusing on the struggle between Libyan guerillas vs. Italian occupation and shot with meticulous detail. Third, none other than Colonel Muammar Muhammad al-Gaddafi / Qaddafi invested heavily in the film. Fourth, director Moustapha Akkad, who also produced the Halloween series of films, was, along with his daughter, assassinated by an al-Qaeda bomb in Jordan in 2005. Fifth, Lion of the Desert was not shown on Italian TV until 2009 -- nearly thirty years after its theatrical release. 

I have only minor issues with Lion of the Desert: early on there's a little bit of hokiness, some melodramtic music and a crazy affinity for zoom shots, sort of like a 70s TV movie. But once it kicks into gear, this film becomes mesmerizingly more effective. It's as if the director and crew settled down and really got to work after some initial adjusting. The cast is strong, especially Anthony Quinn as Omar Mukhtar, the guerilla leader, and Oliver Reed as Rodolfo Graziani, the relentless, brutal and merciless Italian commander. Having earlier played Napoleon, Rod Steiger also does a pretty good impression of Mussolini. Let's not forget Irene Papas.

The conflict itself seems as old as humankind itself, though in the modern style, the Italians are fully mechanized and the guerillas move around on foot and horseback with light weaponry and explosives. One of the most impressively dramatic -- and horrific -- scenes is the 1931 Italian blitzkrieg assault on Kufra, starting with aerial bombardment (a prototype of Guernica, Spain, 1937), next ground artillery, then small Whippet-like tanks and machine-gun mounted armored cars followed by infantry. Other horrors include the creation of concentration camps surrounded by barbed wire and flanked with guard towers, public hangings, poison gas, and a massive barbed wire "Hadrian's Wall" running north-south in Eastern Libya, cutting the rebels off from Egypt. It's nasty stuff, like so much of war is, made more nightmarish through use of modern weapons churned out by the 20th century's Satanic mills. Finally, there is also human decency in the film, epitomized by individuals on both sides of the conflict, an important touch.

Today's Rune: Defense.   

Guernica to the Nth Degree: Dresden, 65 Years Ago

Notice how the older one becomes, the more connected one feels to history? I don't believe anyone who says they're not interested in history -- that is, everything that's come before the ever-shifting present moment -- unless he or she lives only in a disembodied spirit. The present always has a deepening context, and that context is history.

I remember seeing the city of Dresden in East Germany with my own eyes in 1981 during the Cold War, the remaining ruins from the 1945 firebombings and the rebuilt parts, as well. The living people and the ruins of a church. If the 1937 bombing of Guernica was a harbinger (already transpiring in the Asia-Pacific War), Dresden provided more testimony to human cruelty and madness.

But beyond Picasso's Guernica of 1937, why not check out Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969)? Or Errol Morris' mesmerizing documenary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003), scored by Philip Glass? Or from yet another viewpoint, via the perspective of an Inuit guy who finds himself over Dresden 65 years ago: Vincent Ward's Map of the Human Heart (1993)? What I love about all of these artistic achievements is how they draw so many things together with such clarity.



This trailer for Map of the Human Heart makes the movie seem like Disney meets Hallmark, but the film is anything but. The Dresden scenes are indelibly wrought.

Today's Rune: Gateway.  The older I become, the closer I feel to the big events of the past. How about you?

Tehran Guernica?

The pen may be mightier than the sword, but only after heads have been chopped off.

Art is powerless to stop war, ameliorate violence. In fact, cartoons can incite violence. Picasso's Guernica bears witness to aerial bombing. Art can tell a story, entertain, keep us human, keep us sane. Art can move, art can observe, art can pay attention, art can shake things up. Art can make us pause, inspire reflection. Art cannot stop things like an invasion of Poland or Iran.

Today's Rune: Defense.

Wings Over the World

H.G. Wells' Things to Come (1936; Wells' screenplay based on his 1933 novel, The Shape of Things to Come; directed by William Cameron Menzies; produced by Alexander Korda, London Films) proceeds through a terrifying combination of WWII and WWIII to the year 2036. Civilization is reduced to barbarism, then rises again -- thanks to a "rational dictatorship" of scientists -- in Basra, Iraq: Wings Over the World!


Seen from the perspective of 2008, the film is alternately cheesy, eerie, and chilling. The gigantic sets are impressive, the weapons of mass destruction dropped from the air (poison gas a la WWI, or nerve gas) as creepy now as it probably was when first watched.

Wells' worldview boils to the surface of each new plot development. Only rational scientists (presumably all white Anglophiles) can keep humankind from degenerating into atavism. (Of course, scientists created the destructive technology as well, but that's different!) The real Basra in the 1930s housed a British air base securing the area for petroleum exports; Basra in 2008 has British overwatch (again). After taking into account ideological bent and historical context, it's still quite an interesting take on the shape of things.


Poster for Spanish version: La Vida Futura. Released a year before the Nazi air attack on Guernica, Spain, and four years before the London Blitz. Imperial Japanese troops were already rampaging through Manchuria. And let's not forget the Great Depression (how could, we these days?)

La Vida Futura of the cat walk. What is past is present is future.

Yesterday's Rune: Growth. Today's: Strength.

Savagery, Thy Name Is Human

Another voice of moderation was extinguished today. As to the specific details, more will be revealed but initially, it has the eerie feel of the riveting political film by Costa Gavras from the 1960s, Z.

Benazir Bhutto, former prime minister and prominent opposition leader in the scheduled 2008 Pakistan national election, is dead by violent means. RIP. From the Vatican: "It is difficult to see any glimmer of hope, peace, reconciliation in this country [Pakistan]" (source: Reuters, "World outraged, fearful over Bhutto assassination," 12/27/2007).


Given today's events, now is a reasonable time to mention Iris Chang (1968-2004), The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997) and Nanking, the 2007 documentary film inspired by Chang's work. The events described in both began in 1937, same year as the ferocious aerial bombing of Guernica, Spain, by European fascists, but on a much larger scale (hundreds of thousands vs. hundreds killed or wounded). In Nanking / Nanjing, the Japanese military savaged the Chinese inhabitants from late 1937 to early 1938.

Neutral observers in Nanjing helped create a Safety Zone in an effort to protect and save thousands of civilians from the mayhem. Japanese soldiers aimed to kill all men close to military age, and raped tens of thousands of women. More information can be found at the official documentary film site at http://Nankingthefilm.com

Lou Reed contributed two songs, "Gravity" and "Safety Zone." For more, see also Lou's excellent website at www.loureed.com

Observant and sensitive souls like Philip K. Dick and Iris Chang may respond to such history by saying their bit and self-destructing, or like Voltaire and Costa Gavras, locating those who bear witness, and remembering, while still somehow finding joy in life. The pen may not be mightier than the sword at the time, but it will not let such history be "disappeared" from the annals of the human race.

Today's Rune: Wholeness.

Guernica/Gernika in Memory

Guernica/Gernika represents all violent attacks on primarily civilian targets -- that is why it's so important and lasting as a symbol. It was also a real incident (April 26, 1937) in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), a conflict that helped spark the Second World War. But it was not the first such incident. The German Condor Legion bombed the Basque town of Durango on March 31, April 2 and April 4, 1937, killing some three hundred people -- including at least fourteen nuns and a priest giving communion.

At Guernica, perhaps another two hundred civilians were killed. Most of the townspeople were able to run for their lives after the first bombs fell, though Guernica itself burned. In 2007, some 200 survivors of that attack still live and remember.

After Durango and Guernica, air forces on all sides ramped up the scale and scope of such attacks, so that by 1945, the world experienced hundreds of such mass atrocities ranging from the London Blitz to attacks on Warsaw and Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Civilians killed en masse. It's happening today in Mogadishu and around the world, and it is perpetuated by suicide bombers and Stealth bombers alike.


"Guernica was not bombed by my air force . . . it was destroyed with fire and gasoline by the Basques themselves." Generalissimo Francisco Franco, May 5, 1937.

"Guernica can offer nothing of interest to anyone concerned with its past, nor is ther any value in discussing what happened then with anyone here." Gervasio Guezurago, mayor of Guernica under fascist dictatorship, 1974.

Sources:

Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, Guernica: The Crucible of World War II (1975).

Paul Haven, "70 Years Later, Guernica Holds Secrets" (Associated Press, April 22, 2007).

Guernica/Gernika as Symbol

Picasso images are all over the place. I've seen them in Spain, in France, in England, Scotland, New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit and probably elsewhere. They are distinct and memorable; Picasso's style infuses popular culture as much as Andy Warhol's. Still, I was nearly blown away when I saw the gigantic copy of Picasso's Guernica at the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan in the 1980s. More than all the diplomats and bureaucrats combined, it makes us wonder at our seeming need to exterminate those who oppose us. Even so, I don't think we will stop indulging in war and genocide. Guernica seems to recognize that sentiment, too.

From Gijs van Hensbergen, Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon (US, 2004; British version has the shorter sub-title pictured above):

Guernica had tapped into the ancient and epic rituals of death. But it was also a silent requiem. The contorted, grief-stricken faces of women, with their gaping cup-shaped mouths, seem to wail up to the heavens in despair. But there is no sound. The screaming horse, with its vocal chords cut -- as was the practice before horses were supplied with padding during the corrida -- also remains silent in its pain. Guernica symbolised a requiem for an entire generation. (p. 70)

Death from Above: Guernica

By air, the German Condor Legion attacked the Basque town of Guernica 70 years ago today. Thank God for artists and cultural remembrance. In this case, thank Pablo Picasso. Nobody ever called him an asshole. Meanwhile, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

"A country without memory has no meaning at all." -- Emilio Silva.