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The Lessons of Guernica: 'Profound Symbolism' as U.N. Hides Picasso's Anti-War Masterpiece
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The Lessons of Guernica
'Profound symbolism' as U.N. hides Picasso's anti-war masterpiece for Colin Powell's call to arms
Bush's `game over' remark makes it definite: U.S. will attack
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by William Walker
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UNITED NATIONS—On the second floor of the United Nations building in Manhattan, just outside the Security Council entrance, hangs a seminal piece of 20th-century artwork that offers a graphic and chilling reminder of the horrors of war.
A copy of Picasso's Guernica serves as a mute rebuttal to a pair of pro-war demonstrators calling for U.S. action against Saddam Hussein outside United Nations' headquarters in New York on Wednesday. (Photo/Graham Morrison)
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But as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell sat down last week to deliver an historic speech about why America must go to war with Iraq, Pablo Picasso's Guernica was concealed by a large blue drape. To twist an old axiom, those who ignore the horrors of history — or cover them up — are doomed to repeat them."The game is over," President George W. Bush declared, just 24 hours after Powell's presentation failed to sway doubtful U.N. Security Council members. "Saddam Hussein will be stopped."From the night of his State of the Union speech on Jan. 28, Bush and his administration have been turning the screws tighter and tighter, applying intense pressure on the U.N. to issue a second resolution authorizing war against Iraq and also leaning heavily on friendly nations like Canada to agree to join the military effort without U.N. backing.But it wasn't until last week that it finally became clear to the world: Bush will go to war.The president said as much, standing grimly in a White House briefing room alongside Powell, the one-time administration dove whose political stock has soared in Republican party circles for championing Bush's march to war.To those who closely observe Bush, it comes as no surprise to be on the eve of war. Some even wonder how he held off this long."Recent visitors to the Oval Office are struck by the president's single-mindedness on this subject," says Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution think-tank and deputy secretary of state in the Bill Clinton administration. "No matter what they come to discuss ... Bush brings the conversation quickly to Iraq and the urgency, as he sometimes puts it privately, of `getting this thing done.'" Increasingly, Bush the 43rd president resembles Bush the 41st president, a man viewed as consumed by (oil-related) foreign policy while his country's economy foundered. Bush's father was defeated after winning the 1991 Persian Gulf War largely because Americans felt he ignored the country's economic woes.With his countless warnings over recent months that "time is running out" for Saddam, and fear-mongering references to weapons of mass destruction and Iraq's ties to the Sept. 11 terror attacks on America, the younger Bush seems to many to be similarly obsessed with Iraq.The president has reached "the point at which he feels he has heard enough of the arguments against what his instincts tell him he should do," Talbott says. "He understands that it is the consequence of a decision, not the rationale for it, that determines how it will be judged. He wants to end the debate with action and dispel the doubts with success."
That Iraq has bedeviled U.N. weapons inspectors, as Powell asserted at the U.N., should come as no surprise.
Saddam has toyed with Washington for more than a decade, at turns openly defiant and taunting, then suddenly graciously co-operative.An example of the latter came after Saddam's congress voted unanimously last fall to ban the return of any U.N. weapons inspectors to the country. Then, by "presidential decree," Saddam signed the order allowing inspectors to return.According to Powell, Saddam has since hidden his biological and chemical weapons, placed the U.N. inspectors under surveillance, accused them of being American spies and denied them access to Iraqi weapons scientists.
Polls taken after Wednesday's U.N. speech show Powell's performance has moved more Americans to favor war with Iraq. Yet a determined minority is extremely opposed and offers the nuggets of a potential anti-war movement the likes of which haven't been seen since Vietnam.
Yesterday, Bush used his national radio address to hammer home the message on Iraq. Today, he is dispatching both Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to the Sunday TV political shows.This week, Bush will be arm-twisting world leaders by telephone and in person to join his campaign for "regime change" in Iraq — leading to Friday's climax, when chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix makes his final report to the U.N. Security Council.With more than 125,000 American troops within striking distance of Iraq — including the famed 101st Airborne Division "Screaming Eagles" elite strike force — most Washington observers say the war will begin within 20 days of Blix's report.
Pablo Picasso's powerful anti-war tableau "Guernica"
"A diplomat stated that it would not be an appropriate background if the ambassador of the United States at the U.N. John Negroponte, or Powell, talk about war surrounded with women, children and animals shouting with horror and showing the suffering of the bombings."
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When Powell completed his 85-minute presentation to the Security Council, he and its members walked out into the second-floor hallway and past the covered tapestry of Picasso's 1937 masterpiece, Guernica. The tapestry was donated to the United Nations in 1985 by Nelson Rockefeller as a tribute to the international agency's mandate.Picasso was living in Paris during the civil war in his homeland of Spain when Adolf Hitler agreed to help Gen. Francisco Franco's Nationalist regime.Hitler sent his air force to bomb the small Basque village of Guernica in northern Spain.In three hours of relentless bombing, 1,600 of Guernica's civilians were killed, many of them women and children.It was the kind of atrocity the United Nations was created to stop. And it's the kind of atrocity many predict will be repeated in Iraq when Saddam's soldiers hide among civilians in Baghdad and other cities, looking to sacrifice them in hopes of turning world opinion against an American-led military coalition.The official reason Picasso's masterpiece was covered up? It hangs over the exact spot where Security Council members stop and speak before TV cameras. It was decided the violent anti-war images would not be the fitting backdrop for talk of a new war."It is, we think, we hope, only temporary," said Faustino Diaz Fortuny, a Spanish envoy whose government owns the original painting and shows it at a Madrid museum."It's only temporary. We're only doing this until the (TV) cameras leave," said Abdellatif Kabbaj, the chief U.N. media officer.It wasn't the first time the lessons of art have been ignored as the Bush administration pursues its post-Sept. 11 war-on-terrorism agenda.Attorney-General John Ashcroft threw a similar blue drape over the Spirit Of Justice statue last year at justice department headquarters to obscure a naked marble breast while he conducted a TV briefing. At the time, Ashcroft's FBI was arresting and locking up young Muslim men all over America, many on no criminal charges at all.In the disbelief that clouded the minds of many in the days after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, few could have expected such an unfolding of events: a war with Iraq that could spark wider war in the troubled Middle East; the emergence of North Korea as an "axis of evil" country threatening counter-attacks against America over its nuclear program; Bush's "strike first" pre-emptive military doctrine, now being eyed by countries like India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers.Author Russell Martin was standing in a Madrid museum, viewing the original Guernica on the day terrorists struck America. He was researching his new book, Picasso's War.Says Martin now: "In the aftermath of Sept. 11, and in his impatience with the U.N.'s global approach to disarming Saddam Hussein, George Bush leads a U.S. administration that appears to observers in other nations to be belligerent, utterly uninterested in dissenting perspectives and determined to make war at any price." Still, those who support Bush argue that, if world leaders had stepped in and dealt with Hitler after he intervened in Spain's civil war, there might not have been a World War II. They see parallels now in Saddam's 1991 invasion of Kuwait and the need to stop the Iraqi dictator before be regroups and resumes his alleged goal of dominating the Middle East.More an art critic than a political one, Martin describes Guernica as featuring "a screaming horse which has fallen, pierced by a lance; a wailing woman holding a dead child in her arms; another woman, her clothes on fire, attempting to escape from a burning building; the severed head of a soldier."It spoke to the horrors that humans have visited on each other for millennia and, because of this, the painting began to symbolize war remarkably soon after its creation," he says. "Guernica has become for people around the world visceral, visual evidence of the true nature of war, a perspective very unlike the heroic and optimistic one so often presented by politicians who have never seen war close at hand."Laurie Brereton, an Australian Labour MP and U.N. delegation member, reflected on the draped-over Picasso after Powell's Wednesday speech."There is a profound symbolism in pulling a shroud over this great work of art," she said."For throughout the debate on Iraq ... there has been a remarkable degree of obfuscation, evasion and denial, and never more so than when it comes to the grim realities of military action."We may well live in the age of the so-called `smart bomb,' but the horror on the ground will be just the same as that visited upon the villagers of Guernica .... "Innocent Iraqis — men, women and children — will pay a terrible price. And it won't be possible to pull a curtain over that."
Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
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