On a flight I took recently from Paris to Osaka, the screen displaying our plane’s route reflected the state of the world in 2024: the aircraft zigzagged from France to Austria, over Romania, Turkey, Georgia and Turkmenistan, crossing China via the Gobi Desert then rounding North Korea before making a 90° turn toward our destination. Our flight carefully avoided the hot war zones (Ukraine, the Middle East, Iran) and a heavily sanctioned Russia that is now thoroughly alienated from the West. We were flying over a world in shambles.
Day after day, with its images of shelled schools, wrecked hospitals, women screaming in despair, mass protests and tent encampments at universities, 2024 was a year of super-charged gloom. Having spent much of the past decade researching my book “Picasso the Foreigner,” I was reminded by this turmoil and devastation of the artist’s monumental masterpiece, “Guernica.”
In the spring of 1937, the first spring of the Spanish Civil War, Pablo Picasso found a universal language to denounce an extreme episode in modernity’s escalation of horror: the destruction, in fewer than four hours, of a Basque country town enjoying a sunny market day. Solemnly calling on centuries’ worth of sources, and summoning all the references his prodigious literary, pictorial and religious erudition could muster, Picasso set to work creating a huge, tragic tableau. Even today, when refugees in transit camps are asked about a major work of art, “Guernica” springs to mind.