Stephen Spender—On Guernica

Russell Martin
Picasso's War
(2003)

Quoting Stephen Spender:

[138] Guernica affects one as an explosion, partly no doubt because it is a picture of an explosion. ... So long as a work of art has this explosive quality of newness, it is impossible to relate it to the past.
[139]
People who say that it is eccentric, or that it falls between two stools, or that it is too horrible, and so on, are only making the gasping noises they might make if they were blown off their feet by a high-explosive bomb.... Guernica is in no sense reportage; it is not a picture of horror which Picasso has seen and been through himself. It is a picture of a horror reported in the newspapers, of which he has read accounts and perhaps seen photographs. This kind of second-hand experience, from the newspapers, the news-reel, the wireless, is one of the dominating realities of our time. The many people who are not in direct contact with the disasters falling on civilization live in a waking nightmare of second-hand experiences which in a way are more terrible than real experience because the person overtaken by disaster has at least a more limited vision than the camera's wide, cold, recording eye, and at least has no opportunity to imagine horrors worse than what he is seeing and experiencing.... The impression made on me by the picture is one that I might equally get from a great masterpiece, or some very vivid experience. That, of course, does not mean that it is a masterpiece. I shall be content to wait some years before knowing that.