Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). Guernica (1937). Oil on canvas, 350 cm x 782 cm

ABOUT THE COVER " I t isn't up to the painter to define the symbols, " said Pablo Picasso when asked to explain his celebrated mural, Guernica. " ….The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them. " Picasso himself did not know what the work would turn out to be when he was commissioned to paint the center-piece for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 World's Fair in Paris: " A painting is not thought out in advance. While it is being done, it changes as one's thoughts change. And when it's finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it " (1,2). The official theme of the World's Fair was modern technology, but the inspiration for Picasso's mural came from world events—specifically the Nazi bombing and virtual obliteration of Guernica, an ancient Basque town in northern Spain. The bombardment of this nonmilitary target took little more than 3 hours, during which airplanes, plunging low from above the center of town, machine-gunned the townspeople who had taken refuge in the fields (3). News reports and horrific photographs of the massacre quickly reached Paris and provided the story line for perhaps the best-known painting of the 20th century. Started 6 days after the bombing and completed in 5 weeks, the monumental mural captured the agony brought on by brutality and violence. A native of Andalusia, Spain, who lived most of his life in France, Picasso was the most innovative artist of his era and perhaps any era. His complex genius is usually tracked in a series of overlapping periods beginning in 1901. A master of classical art, he painted the poor, whose ordinary activities he imbued with melancholy and lyricism (blue period, rose period). Around 1905, influenced by Cézanne and African sculpture, he experimented with fragmented and distorted images and became one of the founders of modern abstraction (literally " the drawing away from or separating "). Destroying in order to create, Picasso dismantled traditional forms and sought the inner geometry of objects and the human figure. His Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) marked the beginning of analytic cubism, the harsh intellectual style (also of Braque and Gris) in which decomposition of objects into geometric lines and contours is carried to an extreme (5). Figures and their surroundings are broken into " angular wedges or facets, " …