“A work of art must make a man react… It must agitate him and shake him up.”

–Pablo Picasso

Guernica is one of the most famous paintings in the world. The mural is a portrait of horrors and pain of war. Picasso painted it in 1937 after the fascist German forces ruined the town, after which the painting is named, at the height of Spanish civil war. The Gernika town in the Basque country was devastated by the aerial bombardment inspired Picasso to register his protest in the most powerful way available to him.

Looking closely at the painting, one gets a shock to observe that women are main characters of this art piece. The soldier on the ground is a symbol of a new dream for Spain that lies broken on the floor. Guernica is the strongest artistic expression that shows the drama and suffering of a people. While the world pledged in the form of United Nations, after defeating fascist forces, to save the future generations from the scourge of war, today we see many Gernikas around us. Yemen, Syria, Libya, Palestine and Kashmir are modern day Gernikas waiting for their own Picassos who can transfer their pain on canvas with strokes of a brush.