Guernica
A monochromatic tableau of terror and suffering in grey, black, and white — the only colors of newsprint — depicts a shattered bull, a screaming horse, a dying soldier, a mother holding her dead child, and dismembered bodies, all compressed into a claustrophobic shallow picture plane. The forms are simultaneously Cubist and expressionistic, with mouths open in screams and eyes distorted into asymmetric masks of anguish. A single bare electric bulb, shaped like an eye, hangs at the top of the composition.
Guernica is the definitive anti-war painting in art history and one of the most politically engaged works ever created by a major artist. Originally designed as a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World's Fair, it traveled the world as a fundraiser for the Spanish Republic and eventually became an icon of the anti-nuclear movement, with a reproduction hung outside the UN Security Council Chamber in New York where it remains today.
Picasso painted Guernica in response to the April 1937 Nazi bombing of the Basque civilian town of Guernica, commissioned by the Spanish Republican government for the Paris Exposition. Franco's subsequent victory in the Civil War left Picasso in exile in Paris; he refused to allow the painting to return to Spain until democracy was restored. It was held at MoMA in New York from 1939 until Franco's death in 1975.