#Bombing of Guernica

[a-modernmajorgeneral]

At the 1937 International Exposition in Paris, two colossal pavilions faced each other down. One was Hitler’s Germany, crowned with a Nazi eagle. The other was Stalin’s Soviet Union, crowned with a statue of a worker and a peasant holding hands. It was a symbolic clash at a moment when right and left were fighting to the death in Spain. But somewhere inside the Soviet pavilion, among all the socialist realism, were drawings of fabulous beasts and flowers filled with a raw folkloric magic. They subverted the age of the dictators with nothing less than a triumph of the human imagination over terror and mass death.

These sublime creations were the work of a Ukrainian artist, Maria Prymachenko, who has once again become a symbol of survival in the midst of a dictator’s war. Prymachenko, who died in 1997, is the best-loved artist of the besieged country, a national symbol whose work has appeared on its postage stamps, and her likeness on its money. Ukrainian astronomer Klim Churyumov even named a planet after her.

When the Museum of Local History in Ivankiv caught fire under Russian bombardment, a Ukrainian man risked his life to rescue 25 works by her. But Prymachenko’s entire life’s work is now under much greater threat. As Kyiv endures heavy attacks, 650 paintings and drawings by the artist held in the National Folk Decorative Art Museum are at risk, along with everything and everyone in the capital.

‘A murderous intruder in Eden’ … another of Prymachenko’s grotesque creatures. Photograph: Prymachenko Foundation

It’s said that, when some of Prymachenko’s paintings were shown in Paris in 1937, her brilliance was hailed by Picasso, who said: “I bow down before the artistic miracle of this brilliant Ukrainian.” It would make artistic sense. For this young peasant, who never had a lesson in her life, was unleashing monsters and collating fables that chimed with the work of Picasso, and his friends the surrealists. While the dictatorships duked it out architecturally at that International Exhibition, Picasso unveiled Guernica at the Spanish pavilion, using the imagery of the bullfight to capture war’s horrors. Prymachenko, too, dredged up primal myths to tackle the terrifying experiences of Ukrainians.

Her pictures from the 1930s are savage slices of farmyard vitality. In one of them, a beautiful peacock-like bird with yellow body and blue wings perches on the back of a brown, crawling creature and regurgitates food into its mouth. Why is the glorious bird feeding this flightless monster? Is it an act of mercy – or a product of grotesque delusion? In another drawing, an equally colourful bird appears to have its own young in its mouth. Carrying it tenderly, you might think, but only if you know nothing of the history of Ukraine.

At first sight, Prymachenko might seem just colourful, decorative and “naive”, a folkloric artist with a strong sense of pattern. Certainly, her later post-1945 works are brighter, more formal and relaxing. But there is a much darker undertow to her earlier creations. For Prymachenko became an artist in the decade when Stalin set out to destroy Ukraine’s peasants. Rural people starved to death in their millions in the famine he consciously inflicted on Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933.

Had she been an ‘intellectual’, she could have ended up in a gulag or worse …Prymachenko.

Initially, food supplies failed because of the sudden, ruthless attempt to “collectivise” agriculture. Peasants were no longer allowed to farm for themselves but were made to join collectives in a draconian policy that was meant to provide food for a new urban proletariat. Ukraine was, and is, a great grain-growing country but the shock of collectivisation threw agriculture into chaos. The Holodomor, as this terror-famine is now called, is widely seen as genocide: Stalin knew what was happening and yet doubled down, denying relief, having peasants arrested or worse if they begged in cities or sought state aid. In a chilling presage of Putin’s own logic and arguments, this cruelty was driven by the ludicrous notion that the hungry were in fact Ukrainian nationalists trying to undermine Soviet rule.

“It seems reasonable,” writes historian Timothy Snyder in his indispensable book Bloodlands, “to propose a figure of approximately 3.3 million deaths by starvation and hunger-related disease in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-1933”. These were not pretty deaths and they took place all around Prymachenko in her village of Bolotnya. Some people were driven to cannibalism before they died. The corpses of the starved in turn became food.

Born in 1908, Prymachenko was in her early 20s when she witnessed this vision of hell on Earth – and survived it to become an artist. But the fear did not end when the famine did. Just as her work was sent to Paris in 1937, Stalin’s Great Terror was raging. It is often pictured as a butchery of urban intellectuals and politicians – but it came to the Ukrainian countryside, too.

So it would take a very complacent eye not to see the disturbing side of Prymachenko’s early art. The bird in its parent’s mouth, the peacock feeding a brute. Maybe there is also survivor guilt, and a feeling of alienation from a destroyed habitat, in such images of strange misbegotten creatures lost in a nature they can’t work and don’t comprehend. One of her fantastic beasts appears blind, its toothy mouth open in a sad lamentation, as it stumbles through a garden on four numbed clodhopping feet. A serpent and a many-headed hydra also appear among the flowers, like deceptively beautiful, yet murderous intruders in Eden. In another of these mid-1930s works, a glorious bird rears back in fear as a smaller one perches on its breast, beak open.

There’s nothing decorative or reassuring about the images that got this brave artist noticed. Far from innocently reviving traditional folk art, her lonely or murderous monsters exist in a nature poisoned by violence. Yet she got away with it – and was even officially promoted right in the middle of Stalin’s Terror, when millions were being killed on the merest suspicion of independent thought. Perhaps this was because even paranoid Stalinists didn’t think a peasant woman posed a threat.

Her spirit survives … a rally for peace in San Francisco, recreating a work by Prymachenko called A Dove Has Spread Her Wings and Asks for Peace. Photograph: John G Mabanglo/EPA

Prymachenko remembered that, as a child, she was one day tending animals when she “began to draw real and imaginary flowers with a stick on the sand”. It’s an image that recurs in folk art – this was also how the great medieval painter Giotto started. But it was Prymachenko’s embroidery, a skill passed on by her mother, that first got her noticed and invited to participate in an art workshop in Kyiv. Such origins would inevitably have meant being patronisingly classed by the Soviet system as a peasant artist. An “intellectual” who produced such work could have ended up in the gulag or worse.

Yet, to see the sheer miracle of her achievement, you must also set Prymachenko in her time as well as her place. The Soviet Union in the 1930s was relentlessly crushing imagination as Stalin imposed absolute conformity. The Ukrainian writer Mikhail Bulgakov couldn’t get his surreal fantasies published, even though, in a tyrannical whim, Stalin read them himself and spared the writer’s life. But the apparent rustic naivety of Prymackenko’s work let her create mysterious, insidiously macabre art that had more in common with surrealism than socialist realism.

Then, incredibly, life in Ukraine got worse. Prymachenko had found images to answer famine but she fell silent in the second world war, when Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union made Ukraine one of the first places Jews were murdered en masse. In September 1941, 33,771 Kyiv Jews were shot and their bodies tossed into a ravine outside their city. Prymachenko was working on a collective farm and had no colours to paint.

In the 1960s, she was the subject of a liberating revival, her folk designs helping to seed a new Ukrainian consciousness. There’s an almost hippy quality to her 60s art. You can see how it appealed to a younger audience, keen to reconnect with their Ukrainian identity.

The country has other artists to be proud of, not least Kazimir Malevich, a titan of the avant garde famous for Black Square, the first time a painting wasn’t a painting of something. Yet you can see why Prymachenko is so loved. Her art, with its rustic roots, expresses the hope and pride of a nation. But the past she evokes is no innocent age of happy rural harmony. What she would make of Putin’s terror one can only guess and fear.

[quotesfrommyreading]

Spain underwent a civil war from 1936 to 1939, setting the stage for World War II. A band of military leaders headed by Franco rose up against the democratically elected Spanish government in 1936. Three violent years later, these fascist-leaning insurgents won the war, and Franco was installed as dictator.

Spain’s allegiance with the Nazis began with the Spanish Civil War. Hitler sent Condor Legion planes to bomb the northern city of Guernica—an event memorialized in a famous painting by Pablo Picasso—in 1937. Hitler also helped arm the military uprising against the democratic government throughout the civil war. Just a few years later, during World War II, Franco would return the favor by sending raw materials used to produce weapons of war to Hitler.

In the spring of 1939, half a million refugees streamed over the border from Spain to France to escape the violence, including hundreds of thousands of veterans who had fought for Spain’s elected government in the civil war.

Forced into refugee camps with little access to food and clean water along the beaches in southern France, they were given a choice: return to Spain, where they would be met with Franco’s violent revenge, or fight the Nazis.

Thousands enlisted as soldiers or manual laborers for the French Army. Others joined the French Resistance.

When France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Franco disowned the Spanish refugees he considered traitors. Germany deported 10,000 to 15,000 Spaniards to Nazi concentration camps. The Nazis killed about 60 percent of these Spanish refugees.

  —  Spain's Oft-Forgotten Nazi Ties

[ammg-old2]

Walking down a tree-lined street in the Poble Sec neighborhood of Barcelona, one might easily miss a small bronze square set into the sidewalk. Stamped into the metal in the regional language of Catalan are the words: “Here lived Francesc Boix Campo, born 1920, exiled 1939, deported 1941, Mauthausen, liberated.”

Holocaust memorials like this one—which honors a Spanish survivor of a Nazi concentration camp—are part of a project that started in Germany but has expanded over the past few years across Europe and the United States.

These unassuming memorials hide a mighty purpose: making the victims of a traumatic past a visible and permanent part of the modern landscape.

In October, Spain’s current progressive government approved a new law—called the Democratic Memory Law—that recognizes Spaniards who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis.

Among other measures, the law will create a census and a national DNA bank to help identify the thousands of Spaniards who were killed during World War II.

I am a scholar of Spain’s role in World War II and the Holocaust. The way the country has faced this disturbing past has evolved considerably in recent decades. Spain has publicly avoided the history of Spaniards killed in Nazi camps, who were victims of Adolf Hitler, but also of Francisco Franco, Spain’s dictator from 1939 to 1975.

This new law marks a shift, recognizing that the Spanish government has a role to play in reviving the memory of all of the victims of Spain’s dark years.

[josebalarratxe]

“Ni ez naiz Mikel Laboa” komikiaren bigarren booktrailerra.

Second booktrailer of the comicbook “Ni ez naiz Mikel Laboa“ (I´m not Mikel Laboa).

[alex-dontknow]

The painting held by the protesters is "Guernica" by Pablo Picasso. It was painted in response to an event during the Spanish Civil War in 1937 where the small Basque town was bombed extensively by Nazi German and Italian forces. 1,645 people were killed and a further 889 were injured. The town was defenseless and held no military gain or strategic value to either opposing forces.

A thousand died defenceless at the hands of an unnecessary military raid. This is a war crime condemned by thousands across the globe.

Tens of thousands more are dying today in Palestine due to Israeli "defences", yet the Western world refuses to condemn them for the same war crime, and dozens more at a much more severe rate.

Guernica communicates the same message today as an anti-war painting, however it is not a conflict if one side has the weapons and the other has their prayers.

Israel is not and never will be the victim.

Israel is an Apartheid Terrorist state.

A four day ceasefire will never be enough if Palestinians are given freedom only to be carpet bombed and buried again. They are grouping the masses to wipe them out more efficiently.

It does not stop at a ceasefire. Palestine must be liberated.

[booasaur]

In 1937, the Basque city of Gernika came under severe bombing by the Nazi Luftwaffe and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria.

Picasso was so affected he painted the piece Guernica:

Today (December 8, 2023), Gernika created their own haunting demonstration in solidarity with Palestine:

(If you unmute, beware, there is the very loud sound of an actual air raid siren.)

It's a human mosaic and includes the mother with dead child from Guernica.

[kropotkindersurprise]

December 8, 2023 - Hundreds of people gathered in Guernica, Basque Country, to form a human flag in solidarity with the Palestinian people, as air raid sirens filled the air. The town of Guernica became symbol and a rallying cry against war crimes and the slaughter of civillians after German and Italian planes bombed the town for Franco's fascists in 1937, during the Spanish civil war, killing hundreds of innocent civillians. [video]

[pinkflowerperson]

In the town of Guernica, Spain, protestors formed a human mosaic representing the Palestinian flag in solidarity with Gaza. The Spanish town was aerially bombed during the Spanish Civil War by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The town echoes its sirens once again, 86 years after the attacks.

[hastalavistabyebye]

Canon mandalorian art and the Murals of Sundari

There's a very interesting thing about canon mandalorian art. Outside of Sabine's graffitis and armor paint, the only canon mando figurative art (that I have found) are the statue of Tarre Vizla -which go perfectly in star wars' long tradition of dead historical figures' statues, especially for Jedi- and the three murals of Mandalore. I said figurative because there is also the Memorial Shrine on Sundari that was bombed by death watch during the clone wars that is definitely not figurative. But that's another subject.

Of those two exemples of mandalorian sculptures that we know of, we have an old, historical, imposing rendition of a past Mand'alor (and in both medium and subject, what I personally headcanon as the favored type of art by Mandalorians) and a series of murals depicting one of the victories of the Mandalorians over the Jedi, during one of their war. And that mural is the only major art we see in Sundari, the New Mandalorians' Capital.

And that's what I'm going to talk about.

Those three murals have obviously been inspired by Picasso's Guernica. I'm absolutely not a Picasso specialist nor do I wish to be (he was an asshole first category, thank you very much but ew). But. What I do know is that Guernica was commanded to Picasso to illustrate the city Guernica's bombing and denounce fascism, and later on was a symbol of the horror of the war (especially the world war 2 which started two years after the realisation of this imposing painting). The blatant difference with Guernica in those murals is that the violence isn't denounced at all. It's highlighted. The Mandalorians Crusaders have halos, they're bigger, standing, orderly, majestic. Opposed to that are the Jedi, distorted, chaotic, small, at the feet of the Mandalorians. This is obvious propaganda in favor of the victors of the battle. (Of the battle only because it's the Jedi who won that war.)

Using Guernica was an interesting and easy way to show "A War" even if the soul of it is completely reversed (which is really interesting too) but yeah, that's a smart and quick way to send a mood to the person watching those episodes of clone war, without needing to focus on the art. You see the style, you understand roughly what's the meaning of it. End of the parenthesis.

What is interesting is that this is the only figurative art I've found for the New Mandalorians. More than that, that last mural was right under the speaking balcony, above the royal platform of Sundari's palace. Satine Kryze talked about her ideals just over the graphic depiction of Jedi being decapitated. This, added to the cultural genocide the New Mandalorians were making, paint one hell of a picture.

For that last part on the New Mandalorians, @/fox-trot made an amazing explanation of it, in some of their tags once but I can't find the post again :( roughly, they were highlighting how, notably in Legends, the Mandalorians used to be a vastly diverse people, different colors of skin, different species.... But with the arrival of the New Mandalorians, not only we can't see any art but those ones, not only do they want to erase entire parts of their traditions and culture (armor doesn't mean war, you could change the warrior and blood culture without taking the armor out, cue Jedi and their weapons lightsaber), but they also are all human, white and rich. Boba and Jango Fett aren't seen as Mandalorians at all. The Wren are Death Watch so traitors and terrorists. The New Mandalorians are good and safe and refuse any way of protection, are more passive than neutral in that regard, and are a white, human elite.

That elite have hid/erased/we-can't-even-know-because-it-can-only-be-seen-in-it's-obvious-absence all of their traditional art but those murals, depicting the massacre that was one of their victorious battles in a war they ultimately lost. This is one hell of a propaganda and rewriting of History.

You can read it in many ways, two I can think of are :

-the New Mandalorians Government want to send the message "See how bloody and terrible and not-good mandalorian culture is. We need to be pacifists to not-be-like-that"

-but what it can look like is the symbolic reality of what they're doing : a cultural genocide painted in glorious light.

Anyway you want to look at it, with such a critical light of the new mandalorians or not, that those murals are the only art display in Sundari's palace still send one hell of a message.

[abla-soso]

Chilling display in Guernica.

In 1937, the Nazis bombed this village on behalf of Franco’s Spanish Nationalists, who saw it as a center for the resistance against fascism.

86 years later, descendants of that horror express solidarity with Palestinians.

[momo33me]

It was premature to report that the US used a Trojan Horse humanitarian aid truck from the floating pier to carry US troops to Nuseirat refugee camp for a joint US-Israel hostage rescue operation. It has not been unproven & is still being analyzed in photo & video images but it has not been indisputably proven. What we know for sure is that US & UK intelligence cells have been in Israel throughout the genocide to assist Israeli intelligence. That was reported in the NY Times which supports the genocide. Those US & UK intelligence cells were involved in engineering the massacre at Nuseirat refugee camp.

We also know beyond dispute that the US allowed Israel to use the floating pier for military purposes, for launching the Trojan Horse aid truck which carried Israeli soldiers & possibly US special forces to the camp. But once again, we do not have indisputable evidence that US special forces were directly involved. There are photos of non-Israeli soldiers in the operation but it isn't certain they are wearing US uniforms.

The ghoulish Matthew Miller, Genocide Joe's spokesperson, officially sanctioned the massacre by evoking the 'Hamas uses civilians & children as human shields' trope. Palestinian eyewitnesses report body parts & dead children strewn all over & bodies pulled out of the bombing rubble in pieces. At least 274 Palestinians were killed & 698 wounded in Israel's brutal attack. Commentators have compared the slaughterhouse in Nuseirat to Guernica or the My Lai massacre. Zionists are triumphal over the massacre which, in the ways of karma, will be part of the Zionist entity's undoing.

What we know for certain is that the US & UK assisted Israel in the genocidal operation, including but not only intelligence operations & the use of the floating pier, but the involvement of US special forces is still unclear.

[amin13864]

بلدة غرنيكا في بلاد الباسك في شمال إسبانيا، قُصفت جوياً خلال الحرب الأهلية الإسبانية عام 1937، وكان لهذا القصف الوقع الكبير بين الناس في جميع انحاء العالم، عندما رسم الفنان الإسباني بيكاسو لوحته الشهيرة "غرنيكا" وبها وصلت رسالة وصف بشاعة القصف. في هذا الفيديو أهالي البلدة أرادوا التضامن مع أهلنا في غزة وأعربوا عنه بتشكيل علم فلسطين بأجسادهم في وسط البلدة. رائع!

The town of Guernica in the Basque Country in northern Spain was bombed from the air during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. This bombing had a great impact on people all over the world, when the Spanish artist Picasso painted his famous painting “Guernica” and it conveyed a message describing the ugliness of the bombing. In this video, the townspeople wanted to show solidarity with our people in Gaza and expressed it by forming a Palestinian flag with their bodies in the center of the town. amazing!

[victusinveritas]

1937 - Frederick Seidel

It’s always about to rain except When it’s already raining, like now. They go from the pub to the cinema through the rain, To the newsreel and the Disney cartoon, With tickets that are half-price

One day a week in the afternoon. It was the Basque city of Guernica last week, Weeping under airplanes dropping bombs. Walt Disney is not Picasso, But his art is gloriously sunny,

But Mickey Mouse has already said The poems of Lorca will never be funny. Disney, the century’s genius, makes amends. Only he can make butterflies And hurricanes make friends.

D. H. Lawrence is a kamikaze Burning up the sky On his way to bite England explosively and die. He has bad English teeth

That are sharp as a shark And a burning brain That sings like a lark. Silkworms eat mulberry leaves to feed Rainer Maria Rilke the silk he needs

To address the angelic orders. Even the enormous angels Dismount from the sublime, dismount From Pegasus, the horse with wings, And instead of wine, sip brine.

The nostrils of the T. S. Eliot crocodile Lurk just above the surface of the river Nile. His periscope is two nostrils that watch like eyes. His snout stays submerged In water bitter as bile.

Kisses of passion grunt like electroshock And cause convulsions and rigor mortis And sexually join together Two hard-shelled hunchbacks, Each shaped like a tortoise.

They’re Eliot, they’re Lawrence, Each honking on and on, on his moral high horse. If Lawrence caught her, Lawrence would slaughter Emily Dickinson, Eliot’s daughter. Some will get sick and some will die But that is not the reason why A small plane Tows an advertisement For a nearby bar and restaurant

Through the sky Above the beach at Gibson Lane. It is the opposite of insane. Everybody knows Pete the pilot. It’s his plane,

Which he crashes without harm now and again. Black marvelous waves, white August, Is the summer song of Gibson Beach. There’s a skywriting plane crossing the sun With a marriage proposal from someone for someone.

[josebalarratxe]

Gernikaren bonbardaketa, “Ni ez naiz Mikel Laboa” komikiko irudia.

Bombing of Guernica, image of the comicbook “Ni ez naiz Mikel Laboa“ (I´m not Mikel Laboa).

[the-goya-jerker]

A request by @sunny-xander-ooc

This is Guernica by Pablo Picasso.

This painting has it all. A gored horse. A screaming woman with a dead baby. Dismembered soldiers. A bull. Some guy being nosy through the window.

This is Picasso's response to the bombing of Guernica, Spain by Nazi Germany. It was a government commission to raise awareness at the World's Fair for the war.

I feel like this is one of those ones that's difficult to review. This is very much a depiction of the real world suffering caused by war during 1937. I have complicated feelings on the potential eroticism of war! Like, World War I homoerotic poetry does exist, I think we're far enough removed from it oftentimes to have poignant and erotic art made about it. But also World War II is a very different story when it comes to how removed we are from it...

I do feel some pretty intense discomfort thinking about a piece about a bombing in an erotic light as well.

On top of that, I don't like Picasso's style very much. I think it's, in part, the same issue I have with some of Dali's works. It's saturated the public conscience too much. Except for Picasso it isn't a piece but a whole style.

I'm also just not jiving with how that style combines with the somber tone created by the monochrome palette.

0/10, just for personal discomfort with the subject matter, as well as the style.

Instead of my usual poll though, I want to know your thoughts on this subject matter!

[gotankgo]

Guernica (1937) oil on canvas

• Pablo Picasso

«Guernica, a large black-and-white oil painting executed by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso in 1937 following the German bombing of Guernica, a city in Spain’s Basque region. The complex painting received mixed reviews when it was shown in the Spanish Republic Pavilion at the world’s fair in Paris, but it became an icon as it traveled the world in ensuing years, raising controversies on its meaning and its rightful home.»