Guernica

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One of the reasons I enjoy being part of a group on Goodreads is that I actually read books that I otherwise wouldn't have chosen to read. I chose this book to cover my July Travel Read to Spain. As I did the Audible version it took me much longer to complete as I typically listen while driving or working in the garden. Also, I found it a bit slow to get into and that it tended to mump around frequently from character to character which made it hard to follow at times. This was one of those reads that don’t strike a chord in me. I’m giving the novel 3.5 stars. There’s nothing wrong with the writing. On the whole, the storytelling is skillfully executed, with sympathetic characters and descriptive setting, evoking sense of place and time. The description of the war scenes and aftermath in the last third of the book is particularly piquant.

GUERNICA | Kirkus Reviews GUERNICA | Kirkus Reviews

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. Then, one afternoon in late April, Picasso was sitting at his usual table at the Flore when the Spanish poet Juan Larrea jumped out of a taxi and accosted him. That winter, Larrea had helped persuade Picasso to create a large mural for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris World’s Fair that summer. But months had gone by, and Picasso had done no more than a few sketches. Now—according to Larrea’s friend, the Basque painter José Maria Ucelay, who later described the encounter—Larrea had an idea: A historic Basque town had just been completely destroyed by Hitler’s planes. What if he made the mural about that? The Spanish and Basque governments hated the mural. President José Antonio Aguirre snubbed Picasso’s offer to give the work to the Basque people; Ucelay, the Basque painter, called it “one of the poorest things ever produced in the world,” adding that Picasso was just “shitting on Gernika.” Several Spanish officials suggested taking it down and replacing it with a different work altogether. Buñuel, a notorious radical in his own right, found it so unpleasant that he said he “would be delighted to blow up the painting.” In many respects he was an innocent. When the war broke out he decided to go to Granada because he thought he would be safest at home, but actually when he got there it became apparent that he wasn’t safe. He took refuge in the home of a friend, Luis Rosales, who was also a poet, albeit a Falangist. Federico assumed that if he stayed with him he would be safe. But one day, when Rosales was out, civil guards came to get him. He had been denounced by Ramón Ruiz Alonso, a right-wing politician. With the OK of José Valdés, the local commander of the civil guard, a real fascist and also a rather twisted individual who had been badly wounded in the stomach, was in extreme agony and eaten up with hatred, Lorca was shot and, until Gibson’s book, nobody really knew why.

Les Abattoirs

But in 1937, Steer was hardly being celebrated. The Spanish right would claim that his Guernica story was wildly inaccurate. It would harp on the fact that he was not a full-time staff member at the Times while covering that story. Preston comments that Southworth put these arguments to rest in his painstaking study La destrucción de Guernica: Steer was, in fact, eased out of the Times, even before editor Geoffrey Dawson, a Franco supporter, saw to it that he would never write for the Times again. Guernica ( Spanish: [ɡeɾˈnika]; Basque: [ɡernika]) is a large 1937 oil painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. [1] [2] It is one of his best-known works, regarded by many art critics as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history. [3] It is exhibited in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. [4] It was eventually discovered that Hermann Göring — Germany’s minister of aviation and war — saw Spain as an excellent training ground for the Luftwaffe, used to mastermind the blitzkrieg against Poland that followed three years later.

Guernica (Picasso) - Wikipedia Guernica (Picasso) - Wikipedia

Picasso painted Guernica at his home in Paris in response to the 26 April 1937 bombing of Guernica, a town in the Basque Country in northern Spain that was bombed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy at the request of the Spanish Nationalists. Upon completion, Guernica was exhibited at the Spanish display at the 1937 Paris International Exposition and then at other venues around the world. The touring exhibition was used to raise funds for Spanish war relief. [5] The painting soon became famous and widely acclaimed, helping to bring worldwide attention to the Spanish Civil War that took place from 1936 to 1939. Martin, Russell. (2002) Picasso's War: The Destruction of Guernica and the Masterpiece that Changed the World (2002). On-line excerpts link. Thanks to the exceptional loan of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía of numerous sketches and post-scriptums of Guernica, the genesis of the artwork is presented from the bullfights to Minotauromachies in the 1930’s until the bursting of the Spanish civil war in Picasso’s life and art. The display reminds us of the artwork’s context, emphasizing on the choc caused by the bombing of Gernika, the Basque village, on April 26th 1937. An important partnership with the National Archives of France offers the possibility of presenting a group of posters that comes from the fund of the International Brigades. Guernica is to painting what Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is to music: a cultural icon that speaks to mankind not only against war but also of hope and peace. It is a reference when speaking about genocide from El Salvador to Bosnia."The 1937 firebombing of the Basque town of Guernica is the central event of this ambitious first novel from Seattle-based journalist Boling. a b "136959 Guernica Remakings 2019". Southbank Centre. Archived from the original on 14 August 2020 . Retrieved 26 August 2020. In the case of the military rebels, a programme of terror and extermination was central to their planning and preparations,” writes Paul Preston, the highest-profile historian writing on Spain in English today. “Because of the numerical superiority of the urban and rural working classes, they believed that the immediate imposition of a reign of terror was crucial.” In his 2012 classic, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain, Preston describes the core motive for the military rebellion. “The intention was to ensure that establishment interests would never again be challenged as they had been from 1931 to 1936 by the democratic reforms of the Second Republic.” See also: Bombing of Guernica; Spanish Civil War; and Spanish Civil War, 1937 Bombing of 26 April 1937 [ edit ] Guernica in ruins, 1937 The general line” among British correspondents in Spain, writes Preston in his 2008 book, We Saw Spain Die, “was that Republican Spain was in the hands of Moscow and that the crimes of anarchists were committed at the behest of Soviet agents.” Orwell was clearly not among those who believed that the anarchists were controlled by Soviets. But as he indicated in Homage to Catalonia, he thought the Communists were committing a disaster by targeting, and at times killing, anti-Stalinist leftists — as he famously described in his account of the fighting at Barcelona’s Telephone Exchange. Preston writes critically of Orwell’s book: