The Screaming Horse
There is a horse at the center of the canvas, and it is dying. Its neck twists upward at an impossible angle, mouth torn open in a scream we cannot hear but somehow feel vibrating in our chest. The tongue is a dagger. The eyes roll with a terror so complete that it becomes almost geometric, almost abstract, as if the very shape of fear could be reduced to its purest form.
This is the first thing most people see when they stand before 『Guernica』, Pablo Picasso’s massive canvas that stretches nearly twenty-six feet across. The painting arrived in the world in 1937, created in a fury of weeks after German bombers, supporting Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces, dropped their payloads on a small Basque market town. It was a Monday afternoon. The weekly market was full. By the time the planes left, the town was rubble and flame.
But here is what strikes me about that horse, about the whole fractured nightmare Picasso assembled from newspaper photographs and his own tormented imagination: there is no color. Everything unfolds in shades of black, white, and gray, as if the world itself had been drained of something essential. Some say this evokes newsprint, the grainy photographs that carried the horror across the world. Others see in it something simpler. When violence reaches a certain pitch, perhaps color becomes irrelevant. What remains is only light and its absence, form and its destruction.
To the left of the horse, a woman holds a dead child, her head thrown back in a grief so total it has transformed her face into something not quite human. Below, a dismembered soldier clutches a broken sword, a flower growing impossibly from his shattered grip. Above, a bare lightbulb burns like a cold eye, and a figure leans through a window holding a lamp, as if trying to illuminate a darkness too vast for any single flame.
We do not need to know the history to feel what this painting carries. We do not need to read about April 26, 1937, or the three hours of bombing, or the estimated deaths that historians still debate. The painting tells us everything in the language of broken bodies and screaming mouths. It speaks to something we recognize, something we wish we didn’t.
Layers of Glass and Grief
Photo by I remember the first time I saw a photograph of violence in a newspaper, truly saw it. I was perhaps ten years old. The image was of a city I could not name, in a conflict I did not understand. But I understood the woman in the photograph. I understood her face. She was kneeling in rubble, hands raised to the sky, mouth open in that same silent scream.
We live now in a world saturated with such images. They scroll past us on our phones between advertisements and jokes, between pictures of meals and pictures of friends. We have developed, perhaps necessarily, a kind of callus against them. The alternative feels unbearable. To feel the full weight of every tragedy we witness would be to collapse under a grief too enormous to carry.
And yet.
Picasso understood something about the function of art that we might be forgetting. He did not paint Guernica as documentation. Photographs already existed. Film footage was being gathered. The world knew what had happened. What Picasso offered instead was something transformed, something made strange enough that we could not look away, could not simply process and dismiss.
The bodies in Guernica are not realistic. They are angular, fragmented, reassembled according to a logic that defies anatomy. Eyes appear in the wrong places. Limbs emerge from unexpected angles. The space itself seems to fold and compress, interior and exterior merging into a single plane of chaos. This is not how bombing looks, not exactly. But it might be how bombing feels. It might be what remains after the mind has tried and failed to organize the unorganizable.
The painting does not ask us to understand; it asks us to be unable to look away.There is a politics here, of course. Picasso was explicit about his intentions. He wanted to condemn fascism, to expose the cruelty of modern warfare waged against civilians, to create something that could not be ignored or easily dismissed. For decades, a tapestry copy hung at the United Nations, directly outside the Security Council chamber, a silent witness to the deliberations within.
But art that only serves politics becomes propaganda, and Guernica has outlived its immediate historical moment because it offers something more. It speaks to the experience of suffering itself, to the way violence unmakes the world. A mother holding her dead child does not belong to any single conflict. She appears in every war, in every earthquake, in every moment when the random cruelty of existence breaks through the thin membrane of ordinary life.
This is what the painting holds beneath its surface: not just the condemnation of a specific atrocity, but a recognition that atrocity is somehow woven into the fabric of what we are. The broken sword at the bottom of the canvas might symbolize the futility of resistance, or it might suggest that some part of us has always known how to wound and be wounded. The flower that grows from the dead soldier’s hand offers no easy redemption. It simply persists, a small green thing amid the gray.
What We Carry Forward
Photo by We have all stood in the presence of something that overwhelmed us. Not necessarily a painting, not necessarily art at all. Perhaps it was a hospital room where someone we loved was dying. Perhaps it was a funeral where the weight of absence pressed down on everything. Perhaps it was something smaller, more private: a moment when we realized that someone had been suffering and we had not noticed, had not wanted to notice.
These moments leave marks on us. They change how we see, even if we cannot articulate the change. We walk back into our ordinary lives, we return to our routines and distractions, but something has shifted. We know now that the membrane is thin, that the chaos Picasso painted is always there, just beneath the surface of the everyday.
This knowledge could make us cynical. It could make us retreat further into the comfort of our carefully constructed worlds, building higher walls against the images we do not want to see. But it could also do something else. It could make us tender. It could remind us that the people around us, even the ones who seem most composed, are carrying their own invisible weights.
Guernica has hung in Madrid’s Reina Sofía museum since 1992, returned to Spain after decades of exile. Picasso had refused to allow the painting to enter Spain while Franco remained in power. The dictator died in 1975, but the painting waited until democracy had truly taken hold. It came home, finally, to a country trying to reckon with its own fractured past.
I think about this homecoming sometimes. I think about what it means to carry something painful through years of exile, waiting for conditions that might allow healing. The painting did not change during those decades. What changed was the context into which it could be received, the willingness of a society to look at what it showed without turning away.
The Question That Remains
Photo by There is a figure in Guernica that I keep returning to, the one holding the lamp, leaning through what might be a window from some other space. Art historians have debated what this figure represents. Is it truth, trying to illuminate the darkness? Is it witness, the function of the artist observing and recording? Is it hope, or is it merely the last flicker of light before everything goes dark?
I don’t think Picasso knew the answer. I don’t think he meant for us to settle on one interpretation and move on. The power of the figure lies precisely in its ambiguity, in the way it asks a question rather than making a statement.
We are living through times when the images of suffering multiply faster than we can process them. Wars continue. Bombs still fall on market days. Mothers still kneel in rubble with their dead children. And we still scroll past, most of the time, because we do not know what else to do.
But maybe the question is not whether we can fix everything we see. Maybe the question is simpler and harder at the same time. What does it mean to refuse to look away? What happens to us, and to the world, when we allow ourselves to be changed by what we witness?
The woman with the lamp leans forward, holding her small flame against an enormous darkness. She does not seem to believe that her light will be enough. But she holds it out anyway.
What else is there to do?
