Would connecting the image to something that happened in the 11th century and which most people have never heard of diminish its impact?

I think it must have. And as this thread has shown, understanding how Guernica came to be enhances its impact for some people. So the original context is not unimportant for anti-war art: sufficient but perhaps not necessary.

It’s not quite pro-war but Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will seems pertinent here — the classic question of whether it can be considered as great art despite its cheerleading for fascism. But if you knew nothing at all about Hitler then the problem wouldn’t arise … you could simply appreciate the visuals and the natty uniforms. But in this case, we (whoever “we” is) can’t let the film detach from its context, we resist doing that. So if it is to be appreciated as great art, then it seems we must do so while remaining very aware of the intent behind it.

It’s good point that anti-war art easily makes the transition from specific to general. The hypothetical right-wing critic of Guernica might say “you can’t even tell what it’s supposed to be”. In a way that’s true. Several people have made convincing comments here about the emotional impact of the painting: you can tell that something terrible has happened. But what? There isn’t much internal evidence in the painting to tell us that it represents the bombing of Guernica in 1937. That all comes from context: you have to know that it’s called Guernica and know what famously happened at Guernica. If you showed the painting to someone who knew nothing about it, and told them it was called “Auschwitz”, would it have the same impact? Or an even greater impact? But what if it was called “The Harrying of the North”? Would connecting the image to something that happened in the 11th century and which most people have never heard of diminish its impact?

(btw it’s a good thing you linked to BODITT to explain who Jessie Pope was. The Wikipedia page on her is so spectacularly bad it’s quite funny!)

Part of the asymmetry might be that specific anti-war messages are easy to interpret as generic anti-war messages — they detach from their original context — whereas pro-war messages remain attached to their original context. Imagine if Picasso had painted some rousing pro-Franco, let’s-kill-the-commies thing instead. There aren’t that many people these days who believe that war is inherently a good thing (or are there?), it depends on the reasons why it was fought. Once those reasons are forgotten (or rejected), recede into the past, the artwork would lose its power to move the spectator. Whereas anything with an anti-war message is assimilated to all wars, past, present and future, whether actually relevant or not.

Or it could just be that art criticism is not my thing and I have no idea what I’m talking about :) After all, lots of people still seem to like Jessie Pope, dire poetry and all …

You can’t accuse Picasso of hysteria - indeed the fact that he wasn’t there makes the work less passionate. Because no-one who hasn’t run through the flames of a burning city can completely comprehend what it is like. And then I don’t believe you can reproduce it.

It is all beyond human communication, and maybe beyond comprehension for the people who were actually there.

Even my parents, who spent bits of the Blitz huddled in their family Anderson shelters, make no attempt to describe it. I don’t think they can. I don’t think they even retained it.

Particularly in a fast moving medium like television, knowing what the audience shares is very important. And is wrong again and again. i’m gone every time some breathless narration announces the beginning o fWW2 as if it is a surprise to the viewer.

Something else - Guernica is big. If you took your photos above and expanded them at very high resolution to life size, they would be completely crushing to the viewer.

And if you could add an image of that child alive with its mother, people would weep. Even though it is black and white.

Hence we are moved by one photo of a dead child, but not another.

Sounds obvious, but in documentary it is an important issue. Not enough to record; it is necessary to record artfully.

One of my ‘favourite’ bombing images is this.

Tension and intention.

Point taken though, I can understand that much of its power as a work of art derives from Picasso’s passion and anguish, and that it has become entangled in history itself. But then again … that’s partly why I’m wary of it. He was just one man, and his painting is the reaction of just one man. As an historian I should be wary of relying upon just one source, and yet Guernica has come to stand for Guernica and much else. Who needs to understand what actually happened at Guernica, or what people felt after Guernica, when we’ve got Guernica to look at?

Having said all that, Guernica was exhibited in London just as the Munich crisis was ending, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for how British artlovers reacted to it at the time …

So all opinions above are, of course, utterly valid. But, having seen the sketches in the Reina Sofia, I’d agree with Ronan. It really is a matter of emotional response rather than semiotic analysis. I suppose it appeals to an ‘act of faith’ or leap of imagination rather than a ‘reading’. Maybe that’s the key difference between painting and photography, IMHO - not that the latter is not also ‘art’.

But I think iconography is the key. When you absorb the extent to which ‘Guernica’ symbolizes the opinions, experiences and collective agonies (and I don’t use that term lightly) of a substantial sector of the Spanish population (even to this day), then it ceases to be ‘merely’ a painting. I was completely swept away by that culture for many years, so the painting has many additional layers of adopted resonance for me.

Maybe whether ‘we’ get it or not is not the issue at all. What matters is why ‘they’ get it. We could debate who ‘they’ are, of course. But I suppose that’s the point at which an artefact becomes a memorial/commemoration/emotional rallying point. Personally, when responding to ‘Guernica’ I’m now responding to a monument, not a painting. I don’t think, with any amount of effort, I could now strip it back to being ‘just’ a painting.

But hey - you military-ish myth-and-memory types know far more about those matters than me. And, of course, that’s the point of art - it is transformative, has no fixed meaning and we can debate it forever. Which is nice.