What Makes Guernica So Shocking? An Animated Video Explores the Impact of Picasso’s Monumental Anti-War Mural

The Basque town of Guernica after its devastation by German bombs in 1937.
"What emotion did you feel the first time you saw Picasso's Guernica? Perhaps curiosity or fascination, and maybe even surprise, given how different the painting looks from everything else in a museum or an art-history textbook. There was almost certainly a dash of confusion as well, but you probably didn't feel the kind of shock you would have if you had learned what many of its early viewers did. Just what gave Guernica its early impact is the central question of the animated TED-Ed video above, written by humanities scholar Iseult Gillespie. 'How can we make sense of this overwhelming image,' asks its narrator, 'and what exactly makes it a masterpiece of anti-war art?' ..."
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Picasso, Guernica, 1937

2011 July: Spanish Civil War - 75 Year, 18 July, 2011 August: Down and Out in Paris and London, 2012 March: 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother), 2012 June: "The Spanish Earth", Written and Narrated by Ernest Hemingway, 2013 January: The Real George Orwell, 2015 August: Songs of the Spanish Civil War, 2016 September: George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia (1938), 2017 January: Guernica (2016)