Guernica (Tapestry)

Pablo Picasso, 1937

Okay, so picture this. You're walking down a hallway at the United Nations. Carpet. Fluorescent lights. Diplomats going back and forth with folders under their arms, everybody in a hurry. And on the wall, twenty-two feet across, somebody is screaming. It's Guernica. Well, sort of. Not the painting. A tapestry. Nelson Rockefeller commissioned it in the fifties. So now the most famous anti-war image in the world is made out of wool. Soft. Quiet. The kind of thing that absorbs sound. Picasso supervised that personally. They hang it right outside the room where the Security Council argues about war for a living. Airspace. Targets. Ceasefires. Sanctions. Whatever the crisis is that day. Which is... pretty good placement. The real Guernica came out of 1937. German and Italian planes bomb a Basque town for hours. Picasso gets the news and starts painting. Horse screaming. Mother with a dead child. That bare bulb staring down at everybody. Just panic, basically. Then 2003 comes around. The United States is making its case for invading Iraq. Colin Powell is about to give his big presentation at the UN. And, okay, here's where it gets interesting. There's a big blue curtain hanging over Guernica. Completely covered. Official explanation? Better background for television. That was the story. But diplomats were already pointing out the obvious problem. It's a little awkward to stand there talking about bombing a country with women and children screaming behind your head. Everybody saw it. The case for war out front. Guernica behind a curtain. They didn't have to argue with the painting. They just pulled a sheet over its face.

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