With General Franco’s approval, Nazi and Italian Fascist forces brutally attacked the small town of Guernica, in the north of Spain. Ancient Guernica was an important political and cultural center of the Basque region, the area most resistant to Franco’s Fascism. The men of Guernica were off fighting in the Spanish Civil War. The remaining citizens were unarmed civilians.
The attack of Guernica came on a Monday afternoon. It was market day. Many people gathered in the center of town to shop for the week. From about 4:30 in the afternoon until 7:30 in the evening, German and Italian planes dropped twenty-two tons of bombs on a village measuring only 3 square miles. Military forces then swooped down to machine gun the fleeing population. Fires burned for three days. Roads and bridges to escape the inferno had been destroyed. Contemporary records estimate 1,650 people were killed. Most of them were women, children, the sick, and the elderly.
The purpose of the bombing of Guernica was to terrorize and intimidate the Basque population. For Nazi forces, it also served as a practice exercise in the technique of saturation bombing. The result was international outcry—and an artistic attack by the greatest living artist. Eyewitness accounts and photographs of the violence appeared in newspapers within days of the attack. Picasso was enraged by the slaughter of innocents and he immediately began work on his composition. Fueled with conviction and urgency, Picasso’s abstract masterpiece with a message took little more than a month to complete. At the time, Picasso wrote, “…painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”
【毕加索:愤怒揭露战争真相】相关文章:
★ Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning)(一)
最新
2016-10-18
2016-10-11
2016-10-11
2016-10-08
2016-09-30
2016-09-30