Pablo Picasso

Widely regarded as the twentieth century’s most respected and influential painter, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) painted Guernica, an eleven-foot-tall, twenty-six-foot-wide mural, in 1937. It was his response to the bombing of the Basque capital in the Spanish civil war. The bombing had been carried out by Nazis at the behest of Francisco Franco, who went on to rule Spain as dictator from 1939 to 1975. Thousands of people in Guernica were killed or wounded, and the town was destroyed. The painting is housed in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.