Picasso’s famous anti-war painting depicting the bombing of a Basque town is Guernica.
Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 after the Basque town of the same name was bombed on 26 April during the Spanish Civil War. German aircraft from the Condor Legion and Italian planes supporting Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces took part in the attack. Reports of the destruction helped turn the event into an international symbol of the dangers of aerial warfare against civilians.
The enormous black, white, and gray oil painting was created for the Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition. Its fractured forms, screaming figures, wounded horse, bull, dead child, and fallen soldier communicate suffering without showing the bombing as a literal scene.
Guernica is often confused with The Weeping Woman, another 1937 Picasso work connected thematically to wartime grief. The painting is now displayed at Madrid’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.