Resumen de Looking at Picasso’s Guernica after the Barcelona May Days of 1937: the transgressive “Left” and the end of history
For people in Picasso’s circle, Guernica was not about the bombing of Gernika. The artist’s work on the piece overlapped with the “civil war within the civil war” between Communists and anarchists on the streets of Barcelona on 2–8 May 1937 and the dismantlement of the non-Stalinist Marxist party called POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista). Analyzing neglected archival and published sources, this article argues that these events left an imprint on the early reception of Guernica. The first section reconstructs the cross-border flow of information about the Catalan revolution of 1936 and its repression in Picasso’s milieu. The second section argues that critics who interacted with Picasso perceived Guernica as a piece that captured not only the transgressive “left-handed” force that was being expunged from the political realm, but also the hope that the Republic’s choice of war over revolution would somehow bring this force back. For these early critics, Guernica staged a collective sacrificial ritual facilitating the transition into a new epoch that they related to the end of history.
