MADRID: Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky made a one-day visit Tuesday to Spain and seized the opportunity to view Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica.”
It was a move laden with symbolism.
Among the last century’s most famous paintings, “Guernica” depicts the horrors of war — specifically the bombardment of civilian targets. The enormous, black-grey-and-white painting features screaming women, flailing horses and a gored bull. Picasso used them to represent the bombing by Nazi and fascist Italian war planes of the town named Guernica in 1937, during Spain’s Civil War.
The painting’s distorted, cubist figures have since become a symbol of suffering, violence and resistance. At the United Nations, a tapestry of it hangs at the entry to the Security Council’s chamber, where Russia is one of five nations with a permanent seat.
Zelensky referenced the painting before. In April 2022, while remotely addressing Spain’s parliament just months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he said:
