What is important here is what the Basques think about it, in the end, they are the ones depicted in the canvas that has come to represent the anti-war sentiments of large portions of the international community.
And this is what a member of a family that experienced the bombing thinks about it, the article was published at The Age's Art section.
Welcome back to Picasso's war zone
June 28, 2006Will Guernica return to Guernica? Never say never, writes Larry Schwartz.Until he rang his Basque home town in northern Spain this month Jose Antonio (John) Ugalde had no idea of his people's plans to renew their claim to Pablo Picasso's most famous painting.
His sister-in-law alerted him that with the approach of the 70th anniversary of Guernica's destruction by German bombers serving the nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War, the townspeople would seek its relocation from Madrid's Reina Sofia modern art museum.
"Madrid has nothing to do with the Basque country," says the retired fitter and turner, secretary of Melbourne's Gure Txuko (Our Corner) community club for the city's tiny Basque community.
Ugalde, who migrated to Australia in 1956, says there is a strong belief in the Basque region, bordering on the Bay of Biscay, that Picasso's Guernica should be housed in the town it depicts. "The people of Guernica deserve to see and teach their children what they (did)," says Ugalde, who remembers playing Robin Hood in the rubble with sticks for swords. "It was an indefensible town."
He looks forward to the Picasso: Love & War exhibition, which opens at the National Gallery of Victoria this week and features photographs taken by Picasso's then lover Dora Maar in their studio in Paris as the artist created his monumental painting described by NGV senior curator Ted Gott as his "rage against the inhuman slaughter".
Picasso: Love & War coincides with a double exhibition at Madrid's Prado and Reina Sofia museums celebrating the 25th anniversary of the "patriation" of Guernica which was kept in New York at Picasso's insistence until the end of the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.
"There is … no gainsaying the unquenchable authority of Guernica as an icon, especially in Spain," Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The New Yorker this month. "Its arrival there, in 1981, heralded a national liberalisation, whose fragility was made apparent by the painting's initial display, in a building near the Prado, flanked by vigilant soldiers of the Guardia Civil, inside a cage of bulletproof glass."
Schjeldahl noted that the first question at a press conference for the Madrid show was when it would be coming to the Basque region. "Never," the Reina Sofia director had replied.
Guernica is a cultural capital for the Basque people. It was home to about 7000 people at the start of the civil war. Many more people were in town on a market day during the three-hour aerial attack by the German Condor Legion that struck on April 26, 1937. As people fled the bombing they were machine-gunned by fighter planes. An estimated 1685 people were killed and 900 injured in the three-hour raid.
Picasso had been commissioned to paint a mural for the Paris World Fair. He began his painting within a week of the bombing. The 3.5 metre by 7.8 metre canvas that features imagery including a gored horse, fallen soldier, screaming mothers and dead babies has come to be regarded as a protest against the brutality of war.
John Ugalde, 68, says it is all the more valued by the Basque people because Franco's men had sought to blame them for the destruction of their town. "Guernica never had any military bases and the front wasn't there," Ugalde says. "They did it because Guernica was a symbol of the Basque people."
He lives in a terrace house in suburban Melbourne with his Italian-born wife, Lidia, his dog, Gorri (Basque for "ginger") and cat Autztuntxu ("little ash"). The Ugaldes' daughter, Amaia, 25 — a traditional Basque name that means "peace" — accompanied them when he last revisited surviving brothers and sisters in Guernica in 1990.
In the entrance hall of his home is a carved wooden shield painted red, green and gold with the word, "Euskalerria", meaning Basque country. Across the hall is a print of a central Australian landscape by indigenous painter Albert Namatjira. "We are the Aborigines of Europe," he says.
Ugalde understands that the Basques have been in Europe at least 60,000 years and that they are direct descendants of the prehistoric race whose remains were first found at Cro-Magnon, a cave in Dordogne, France.
Ugalde is the youngest of six children. He was born 15 months after the bombing. His father was away fighting for the resistance at the time; his mother tending the family farm on the outskirts of town.
His brothers and sisters would for years recall the horror of that day. "That was a common conversation in our family," he says.
Picasso: Love & War 1935-1945 is on at the NGV from Friday to October 8.
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