Picasso, already commissioned by the Spanish Republic to create a mural for the 1937 World’s Fair, began work on ‘Guernica’ immediately after the April 26, 1937 bombings. Completed thirty-five days later, it was first shown in July at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris. After touring Europe in 1938, the mural came to the United States and premiered at the Valentine Gallery in New York City on May 5, 1939.

‘Picasso’s Mural’ by Jay Peterson from New Masses. Vol. 31 No. 8. May 16, 1939.

“Guernica” a ferocious indictment of the fascist bombers.

PICASSO fights on for Spain. His mural, Guernica, already famous from the Paris Exposition of 1937, has just been installed at the Valentine Galleries, N.Y.C. There it presents its ferocious indictment of the fascist bombers who systematically wiped out the little Basque village, just two years ago.

The bombs are falling in this picture. In the center a horse neighs wildly as he throws back his head in torture. His legs are breaking. A black bull with white head stands in an upper corner, with a birdlike, crippled creature nearby. Below the bull a mother, bare to the waist, raises her head to the sky, while her lifeless child hangs from her arms. In the foreground a head lies separated from two arms. In one is clutched a flower, the sole bit of vegetation in the canvas. From the right foreground a woman flees in terror. She moves into a strange plane of light. Above that a hand clasps a lamp, as if itself borne on flame. Indeed, a flame seems to leap all through this upper part of the canvas. “The truth will be told,” it seems to say. “Kill, butcher, bomb us, you fascists, but history will remember and you will be repaid.” To the extreme right a figure cut in half flies upward, its arms beseeching pity.

Nor is this all the show. A second room contains sheets from Picasso’s etchings, The Dreams and Lies of General Franco, while the third is filled with countless drawings, all made in preparation for the great mural. The last presents a powerful shattered head in color (the mural, by the way, is in black and white) and a magnificent horse twisting and neighing against a nightmare background.

This show-for the benefit of the Spanish Refugee Relief Fund-is the “must” of the present season. Not only does it take us into the painter’s workshop and permit us to watch the full heat and fury of his efforts, but it thrusts us into the very processes of history. Guernica was razed, but even as the dust was settling, the mind and heart of history, concentrated in the hand of this artist, were already constructing an epic rejoinder which would arouse men to fight back and punish the aggressor. Here are steel, fire, victory for the next encounter.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s to early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway, Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and more journalistic in its tone.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1939/v31n08-may-16-1939-NM.pdf