May 11th, 1937, fifteen days after the Fascist bombing of Guernica, a Basque village during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso stretched a canvas for the mural that would be "Guernica". Eleven-and-a-half feet tall by almost twenty-six feet wide entirerly in black, white and shades of gray.

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"Guernica was the last great history-painting. It was also the last modern painting of major importance that took its subject from politics with the intention of changing the way large numbers of people thought and felt about power".
Robert Hughes, "The Shock of the New, Art and the Century of Change"

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