Editor’s Note: This article is part of a collaboration between the Harvard Art Law Organization and the Harvard International Law Journal.
Daniel Ricardo Quiroga-Villamarín*
In the collective imagination of international lawyers and scholars of international affairs alike, perhaps the most vivid image we have of Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” might be of its absence. While a tapestry reproduction of this famous artwork has adorned the entrance to the Chamber of the United Nations Security Council since September 13 1985, it was briefly “covered up” in February 2003. The reason was that Colin L. Powell, then Secretary of State of the U.S., delivered an infamous speech before the United Nations Security Council on Iraq’s failure to disarm —leading, eventually, to the so-called Second Gulf War later the same year. Instead, a blue curtain with the emblem of the United Nations was conspicuously hung. And, from a specific angle, TV cameras were able to capture a dismembered “horse’s hindquarters […] just above the face of the speaker.” While there is no public record of the decision-making behind this aesthetical choice, journalists have long speculated that it “would be too harrowing, too politically pointed if Colin Powell were to be shown defending war in front of this great denunciation of war” (see also here). Be that as it may, this minor incident bears witness to the entanglements of art, war, and law in our unending quest to create a just international order.
This quest, of course, began long before the establishment of the United Nations in 1945 —and even perhaps of its immediate predecessor institution, the League of Nations (thereafter, the League), in the wake of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919-20. With this in mind, in this short intervention, I trace the connections between the Spanish Civil War of 1936 (the conflict which originally inspired Picasso’s work) and the League, all the way to the current challenges our liberal rules-based international order (with the United Nations as its cornerstone) is facing, using the many lives of the “Guernica” as a running thread. For the horrors that once inspired Picasso’s century continue to haunt our times —in fact, they seem to be returning with a vengeance on the world stage.
The entrance to the Chamber of the League’s Council (which, in many ways, worked as the inspiration of our contemporary Security Council) also has a connection with the Spanish polity. As I’ve explained with more detail elsewhere, all its interior décor had been donated by the Second Spanish Republic in the mid-1930s. This included the Latin-inscribed heavy bronze doors that guarded the entrance to the League. But the centerpiece of the Spanish donation had been the mural “The Lesson of Salamanca,” painted by the Spanish —or Catalan, depending on who you ask!— artist José María Sert y Badia between 1934 and 1936. This image was affixed to the Chamber’s abode, and it towered over the delegates who sat in its semicircular table. To accompany it, Sert also created a series of smaller murals for the walls entitled “Hope and Justice,” “Social Progress and the Law,” “The Vanquished and the Victors,” and “Peace Revived and Peace Dead.” The result was what in German is known as a Gesamtkunstwerk: a “total work of art”: an overarching aesthetical structure that gave the Council’s Chamber a coherent identity. It was Sert’s, and Spain’s, homage to world peace. And yet, by the time it was actually installed in the League’s Palais des Nations (“Palace of Nations”) building in Geneva, Switzerland, it had become a symbol of war —and, eventually, of the League’s own demise.
In July 1936, a military uprising brought the crisis-ridden Second Republic to the brink of catastrophe —taking, along with it, the “Great Experiment” that was the early League of Nations. To the embarrassment of League Officials, after a period of indecision, Sert decided to pledge his allegiance to the Nationalist camp in the civil war. This meant that, by the time the Council met for the first time in its new Chamber on 2 October 1936, the painter of their most hallowed hall had open Fascist sympathies. It was in this very Chamber where the Republican Government made its case, unsuccessfully, for international assistance. That same month, the Italian Fascists invaded Ethiopia, a fellow member of the League and nominally equal state. By 1937, winds of war were once sweeping the European continent —eventually leading to the collapse of the international order centered on the League and the eruption of what we now call World War II. The League’s embarrassment over having Fascist artwork in the middle of a great war against it was shared also by the Rockefeller family. The lobby of their “flagship 30 Rockefeller” Plaza building also harbored Sert’s massive mural “American Progress.” The fact that this occurred only after they had sacked the original artist, the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, because he had included a prominent image of Lenin in his mural “Man at the Crossroads” is almost a joke that tells itself.
The aesthetical anti-Fascist war effort found an unlikely ally in Sert’s nephew: the Catalan (or Spanish, once again) architect, Josep Lluís Sert I López (see, generally, here). While the younger Sert had long admired the work of his uncle, he had thrown his weight behind the Republican cause. If the Spanish Civil War was a feud between brothers, as all civil wars are, then now the time had come for the two Serts to face their own family quarrel in the battle for the soul of modern Spanish art. They did so in the context of the Paris World Exposition of 1937, which had as its motto “Art and Technology in Modern Life.” Despite the ravages of the civil war, the legitimate government of Spain considered that it was “indispensable” to participate to garner international support in favor of the Republican cause. Their pavilion was designed by the younger Sert (along with Joan Miró and Alexander Calder) and it was crowned by Picasso’s “Guernica.” It was here where the painting first gathered international attention not only as an abstract condemnation of war but as a cri du cœur related to a very concrete ongoing conflagration. The exhibition-goers first saw it perhaps “did not understand that democracy on the whole continent was at stake.” It was not only a condemnation of an ongoing conflict, but a warning of a global war that already loomed on the horizon.
Given that the Fascist uprising had not —yet— won the civil war, they could not claim a place in the Expo’s Pavilions of Nations. But they found a willing sponsor in the Vatican City, a state that allowed its pavilion to act as a proxy for “Nationalist Spain.” The older Sert adorned this hall with a new painting called “the Intercession of Saint Teresa of Jesus in the Spanish Civil War” —as if there were any lingering doubts as to whether his true loyalties lied. While he collaborated with the Republican authorities to evacuate the “cultural treasures of Spain” and protect them from the ravages of the war, he did so because he was more concerned about left-wing iconoclasm than Fascist purges (see further here). His newest paintings deployed the characteristically style (use of massive figures and different shadows of gold) that he once used in the Rockefeller Center in New York City and in the League’s Council in Geneva, but now to wage the Spanish Civil War by other means. By 1939, the Republic was on the verge of military defeat as this conflict escalated into a wider global war. And Picasso’s “Guernica,” like many of Spain’s other human and more-than-human cultural treasures, found itself in exile. In particular, this painting was loaned by the artist by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City until “democratic freedoms” were reestablished in Spain. After the death of the former dictator in 1975, the original “Guernica” finally returned to Madrid in 1981.
This allowed, perhaps, the younger Sert to have the last word in this unfinished argument with his uncle. In 1955, Nelson A. Rockefeller commissioned a tapestry replica of Picasso’s work which he and his family would loan to the United Nations in 1985. Ever since (ignoring minor cover-ups like the one that occurred during Powell’s speech and a period of cleaning and preservation in 2021-2022), this central part of the younger’s Sert homage to the Republic has guarded the entrance to the United Nations Security Council —the most important organ of a new international order created in 1945 in a decisively “American way.” This is only fitting, considering that the younger Sert followed the “Guernica” into exile and had a prolific career in the U.S. —serving as Dean of Harvard Graduate School of Design between 1953-69 and becoming one of the most important figures in modernist architecture and urban planning. In exile, he and many other former Spanish Republican luminaries found a way to carry on with their lives despite all that was lost on the battlefield.
For that reason, it is not surprising that “Guernica” itself went onwards to live many other lives beyond those lost when a coalition of Fascists planes bombed the Basque country in April 1937. It has become a symbol of peace —and an indictment of the horrors of war— with echoes that go far beyond its Spanish (or Basque) origins. Indeed, in the painfully contemporary wars raging in Eastern Europe and Western Asia, the motif of the “Guernica” has been purposefully mobilized by victims to once again garner the world’s attention (see, for instance, here in relation to Ukraine, here with regard to Israel, and here in respect of Gaza). Its gaze still haunts international lawyers and foreign affairs experts when they pour into the United Nations Security Council Chamber to debate and deliberate about international law’s role in times of war and peace. In this intervention, I have tried to hold the painting’s gaze, looking deep in the abyss of its history. For its original meaning, and its many subsequent lives, offers a cautionary lesson about the entanglement of art, law, and war. We can only hope that those within the United Nations today do not forget that —in fact— the events that inspired the “Guernica” proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for the League of Nations. Let us work together so that its contemporary resonances do not prove to be the death knell of our liberal international order.
*Daniel Ricardo Quiroga-Villamarín, Scholar in Residence, Decolonial Futures Research Priority Area — University of Amsterdam.
Contact emails: daniel.quiroga@graduateinstitute.ch & d.r.quirogavillamarin@uva.nl
ORCID: 0000-0003-4294-4379
