I hopped on the bus yesterday to see this at the Whitechapel Gallery. It is the tapestry version of Picasso’s Guernica, made by weaver Jacqueline de la Baume Dürrbach in 1955.
I’ve never seen the 1937 original painting, which Picasso made in response to the devastating arial bombardment on the town of Guernica – by German planes in support of Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War. It is in Madrid, these days, and I’ve never been.
The tapestry usually hangs out at the UN, where it is apparently supposed to remind the rulers of the world about the horrors of war and the importance of avoiding it. You will have noticed how well that’s worked.
The Whitechapel exhibition makes some pointed comments about this, in relation to the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan in particular. Other artworks in the same hall include a bust of former US secretary of state Colin Powell. It’s nice to see the tapestry in the same room as the old warmonger. When Powell went to the UN in February 2003 to urge support for bombing the living daylights out of Iraq, Guernica was carefully covered up. The Whitechapel has arranged the blue curtains behind the tapestry this time.
I spent a long time just looking at the tapestry though. It is huge, and it is in shades of brown rather than Picasso’s monochrome. For some stupid reason I’d always thought that the brown reproductions I’d seen were sepia tinted…
The thing is, I’ve never seen a version of Guernica that’s bigger than about A4 size, although it’s always been one of my favourite works of art. It’s so powerful even in a little reproduction. But up close to the tapestry, it’s amazing. And things that often barely show up in repro, like the doors and interior scenery are really obvious – you feel almost as if you’re in the nightmare room that the war crashed into.
I stood there and thought about the last time Guernica was here. The actual painting came to the Whitechapel Gallery in 1939, while the Spanish Civil War was still on. 
That showing was expressly political – not just because it was a display of a political artwork, but because it was organised by Stepney trades union council as a political event to mobilise support for the republican side. Here’s a pic of Clem Atlee, better known for leading the post-war Labour government, among the speakers. The exhibition was aimed at workers and trade unionists, rather than miscellaneous art-lovers.
The suggested “price of entry” was a pair of boots, in decent condition. For donation to the republican soldiers. That wouldn’t have been the cheapest night out in the impoverished East End, either – that’s a substantial donation. Apparently the boots were left on the floor, beneath the painting, and there were lots.
That is not a pacifist gesture.
I think Guernica is often used simply as an anti-war image. And it is a searing expression of rage and anguish at the horror of arial bombing – a war tactic that requires an airforce and kills masses of civilians. Them against us, if you like. You need the resources of a state to do it – in Franco’s case, he borrowed the planes off the Nazis.
But the rage in Guernica is not simply anti-war – the painting was used to support those fighting back. The ones without the airforce, the defenders of the republic. And in Spain that wasn’t just a military thing: the workers rose in revolution. I was reminded that it is time to read George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia again.
Here is Orwell, just arrived to find the workers of Barcelona have taken over. “Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized,” he writes.
Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist.Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.
Now the Spanish Civil War was a war between right and left, between classes. The US/UK wars on Iraq and Afghanistan are the imperialist kind of war. The pre-invasion regimes there did not raise the flag of revolution, to inspire workers everywhere. As we know, Saddam Hussein was a very nasty dictator, the Taliban were a grim bunch – and both were former Western allies, which is not a recommendation either.
But people in those countries do have a right to fight back, against the US/UK occupiers and their local puppets. So do those in blockaded, half-strangled Gaza, or repeatedly invaded Lebanon. Just as the fighters of Vietnam did, when they drove the US out. And that resistance to empire and occupation means something to millions of people worldwide. Although somehow I can’t see an appeal coming for kit to be left at the Whitechapel Gallery as contributions for the Afghan resistance…
I thought about all the donated boots as I walked home. The world turns, the wars go on, the crisis deepens and I am caught between laughter as more bits fall off capitalism, and horror at where we could be heading. Unemployment is rocketing, there is a nasty strain of “Britishness” bigotry in the air… It feels like all the gloom of the 30s is upon us.
There is rebellion in the air too. Things have been kicking off on the streets of Thailand, Egypt has been on the boil for months now, Greece looked ready to explode in December. France has seen general strikes.
How mighty is the might of empire, I wonder? Which way does all the upheaval and instability go? Surely somewhere, sometime there must be a breakthrough, a new beacon of revolution. We don’t half need it.
I’d give a pair of boots for that.
It does feel a lot like the 1930s. The anti-immigration feeling is particularly disturbing.
But then there are some good Depression-era revivals going on, like make do and mend, waste not want not, and other pro-planetary practices… I do wonder if Britain is ever going to demand change, what with us being more inclined to tut and put the kettle on. Lately it feels like change will be thrust upon us by circumstances, so where that will go is anyone’s guess.
Sorry, this comment is a bit of an ambling mess. Unlike this splendid new blog, which is an aesthetic joy!
I think there will be a time when in some way a large number of people go, we’re not going to tut and put the kettle on any more. But how? That is the bit that is hardest to guess.
I mean those “British jobs for British workers” strikes at Lindsey oil refinery and other construction sites scared the daylights out of me in one way, because they were directed against migrant workers from overseas. And that is a horribly dangerous way to go. Like a DIY divide and rule, and a stepping up of racism…
But the flip side is, if they hadn’t had the hideous Britishness thing, they were an example of extremely militant, powerful action, which busted straight through the anti-union laws and – if it had been better directed politically – could have been an example of how to take on the recession induced jobs squeeze. It certainly wasn’t apathetic.
I dunno. It seems to me most people are fed up to the point of switch-off with parliamentary politics and politicians. The official union structures are offering nothing. At least the French unions have called strikes over the recession and job losses… so I think people make the tea because it looks like there’s not much alternative. But I think it might also mean that when all the bitterness explodes – because I don’t think people are all calm and happy – it could happen completly outside all the ways that we have traditionally expected…
See, I will out-ramble you!
Good point. The oil refinery rage was not apathetic in the least. And – I have to phrase this carefully, so as not to sound like a UKIP loon – I can see why unfettered EC immigration would upset that group of employees, as the net effect is only measurable to them as a general suppression of wages. It’s not about the fantastic new Italian deli that’s opened up their area. And of course that’s the only reason we have free movement of labour in Europe, to ensure the bottom rungs are oversubscribed and people fight each other for their pittance. Those who make the rules care nothing for egalitarianism or any ideology whatsoever beyond profit. Obviously. Er… OK, I’ve forgotten my point.
It really is impossible to imagine what will happen when critical mass is reached and enough ordinary people think “Hang on… this is all toss, isn’t it? What are we doing propping up this insane status quo?” If indeed they do. The only vague cross-class parallels I can think of are the poll tax riots, or the last huge anti-war march. Neither of which were exactly Madame Guillotine-esque in terms of long lasting effect.
Nope, still the ramble czar. Blah blibble blee.
Well, you have phrased it carefully: “is measurable to them only…”
But I think the rising tide of government anti-immigrant rhetoric – not just Brown’s notorious British jobs comment – over the last few years, not to mention the cacophany in the press, has a lot to do with how migrant workers and immigrants generally are perceived these days. When the sodding Labour party gets into it, all that shit gets a new air of respectability. Those bastards have a lot to answer for.
For contrast, there were demonstrations involving more than 100,000 people in Ireland in 2005, sparked by a dispute on Irish Ferries over the EU’s “Bolkestein directive” – bit like the Posted Workers Directive that the Lindsey contract firms are so keen on, but focusing on services…
Anyway, those demos were huge – certainly not just deli-loving fancy pants types. They also involved lots of migrant workers, mainly from Eastern Europe. And they used slogans like this
That’s not to mention the fact that many of the strikers at Lindsey, or people they had worked with, must have been on sites in Germany or wherever, Auf Wiedersehen Pet style…
What I’m saying is very similar groups of workers can see things differently at different times – which way people jump depends on what is going on and the political climate at the time.
God on a bike, I am a clumsy phraser. Can I add that I believe there should be free movement of people globally without any borders or restrictions? Am scared I appear to have channelled Robert Kilroy-Silk for a moment there.
Yes, totally agree political context heavily influences mood in these situations. My deli remark was meant to be a dig at the equally offensive stereotypical middle class position on immigration, – “wonderful Polish deli owner, dear little man, and their sausages are to die for” – but that wasn’t really the point intended.
Thing is, the way I see it is that the government care nothing for ideology. It’s all about money and power. So free immigration = a good way for their corporate pals to keep wages at an absolute minimum. From the point of view of people doing the jobs, or losing them, this is rubbish. The cognitive dissonance required to blame the exploitative system itself is sometimes too great, so the foreign workers themselves – pawns in the same game – are blamed. Divide and rule is easy when people are exhausted and ground down by the thankless slog and worried they can’t feed their kids. I’m not convinced racism/xenophobia is the primary impulse, more desperation and “Stop nicking my stuff, I NEED IT”. It’s the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid of needs, fundamental life and death stuff. Any cornered animal will fight the nearest rival. (NB I am emphatically not suggesting British workers are animals. ARGHHHH SOCK IN GOB NOW QUEENIE)
Q – don’t worry. I really did think you had phrased it carefully to make a distinction between how Lindsey workers might perceive things or what the bosses’ motivations for allowing free movement within the EC might be and your own position. I know you’re not one for border fences and barbed wire.
It is interesting that there is a bit of a split among the employers and politicians on immigration, with some stirring up anti-immigrant racism to divert anger about jobs towards scapegoats, while others are all for open borders, but – as you point out – only because they want a nice pool of labour to exploit at the lowest possible rates.