Zelensky Visits Spain, Views Picasso’s “Guernica” in Symbolic Gesture

 Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky made a one-day visit to Spain on Tuesday, seizing the opportunity to view Pablo Picasso’s iconic painting “Guernica.” The move carried deep symbolism. Painted in 1937, Guernica depicts the horrors of war and the bombardment of civilian targets during Spain’s Civil War. Its distorted cubist figures screaming women, flailing horses, and a gored bull have become enduring symbols of suffering, violence, and resistance.

A tapestry of the painting hangs at the entrance to the United Nations Security Council chamber, where Russia holds a permanent seat, underscoring its relevance in today’s geopolitical climate.

Zelensky has referenced Guernica before. In April 2022, addressing Spain’s parliament remotely just months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he said: “Imagine that people now in Europe live for weeks in basements to save lives. From shelling, from air bombs. Daily! April 2022 and the reality in Ukraine is as if it’s April 1937. When the whole world learned the name of one of your cities Guernica.”

The painting has drawn other notable visitors, including Barack Obama in 2018 and novelist Salman Rushdie, who viewed it after surviving a stabbing attack that left him blind in one eye.

Historian Giles Tremlett described Guernica as “possibly the world’s first anti-war painting,” adding: “It represents something that has had continuity since then … and today is highly visible in Ukraine, so it seems highly apt.”