| Picasso painted 'Guernica' in Paris in two weeks in 1937, just after seeing
the newspaper and newsreel accounts of the destruction of the Basque city.
It is in black and white, like newsreels, and offers an innovative set of
icons of war: women, children, animals, all cyring out under the deadly
barrage of metal descending on them from the air. The painting was first
displayed in the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the International
Exhibition of Arts and Techniques of Modern Life in Paris, just behind the
gigantic pavilions of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. After 1939, the
painting was housed in London, then in New York, and now at the Reina Sofia
Museum in Madrid.
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