The Paris Review

Revisited: Guernica

Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Nathan Englander revisits Picasso’s Guernica.

Picasso, HEAD OF A HORSE, SKETCH FOR GUERNICA, 1937

When I was eleven years old, my mother took me into the city from our suburban Long Island enclave. It was 1981, and we were on our way to MoMA. We were going to say goodbye to , Picasso’s giant antiwar mural from 1937. At the end of the Spanish Civil War, Picasso lent the painting to MoMA, stipulating that it not be sent to Spain until

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Paris Review

The Paris Review2 min read
Contributors
ANGELA BALL’s most recent book of poetry is Talking Pillow. MICHAEL BERRY is a writer and translator. He is the director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. AIMEE CHOR is a poet and translator. SARAH CHARLE
The Paris Review1 min read
Life Poem 1
A leaf falls here/there, now/thenbehind the rain, a curtain of rain,the trees in their own time.I see now that time falls in layers. There were deer there once, in the clearing,three deer, large as memory objects.They stood in a circleas if they knew
The Paris Review1 min read
Farah Al Qasimi
Farah Al Qasimi’s first photographs were of the dreary New Haven winter: reflections in water, a dead cat, an angry dog. She was an undergraduate at the Yale School of Art, where in 2017 she also received her M.F.A. Since then, Al Qasimi has turned h

Related Books & Audiobooks