Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937, oil on canvas, 349.3 × 776.6 cm, Collection Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid

Picasso’s masterpiece, a veritable pictorial bomb dropped in June 1937 in response to the real bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe on the Basque town of Guernica, is his last work to bring together woman, bull and horse.

In it, he summons the bestiary of the bullring and the three women in his life at the time: on the left, a pietà with a baby in her arms, imploring the tutelary bull, modelled on Marie-Thérèse and her daughter Maya; on the right, we see his new muse Dora Maar – with her spiky hair and starry eyes. As for the horse, Françoise Gilot offers an interpretation: “When Picasso wanted to depreciate Olga, he always compared her to the horse, and that’s what he told me himself. In Guernica, the more or less massacred horse in the center of the painting is, in a way, an unpleasant image of Olga; […] the bull looks benevolent, whereas the horse is in the triangle of destruction, is in the process of dying, is an animal of death¹”.

The painting’s political, ideological and historical charge is thus doubled by an autobiographical intention at a time when Picasso is torn between Olga, whose separation he has just obtained despite threats, Marie-Thérèse, mother of their daughter Maya, and his new conquest Dora Maar, committed to the Republican cause.

¹ In A. Maïllis, Picasso, la femme et le toro, Georges Naef, Genève, 2021, p. 122