Picasso's Guernica at Reina Sofía: New Exhibition Challenges Political Reading

The Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid has opened 'Pietà and Terror in Picasso: The Path to Guernica', a major exhibition running until September 4, 2017, curated by Timothy James Clark and Anne M. Wagner. The show brings together around 180 works by Pablo Picasso from over thirty institutions and private collections worldwide, including loans from MoMA, the Met, the Guggenheim New York, the Tate London, and the Musée Picasso Paris. The curators propose a new interpretation that downplays the political implications of the Spanish Civil War and instead focuses on the aesthetic and personal circumstances leading to Guernica. They argue that from 1924–25, with works like 'The Three Dancers' (1925), Picasso's art became increasingly anguished, reflecting horrors of World War I, the rise of fascism, and the Spanish Civil War. The exhibition traces this transformation through ten rooms, culminating in Guernica itself, which remains structurally fragile and in need of cleaning. An appendix covers the painting's travels before its return to Spain in 1981, though it omits the 1953 Milan exhibition and the 1981 arrival at the Casón del Buen Retiro.