Seventy-five years ago Nazi warplanes -- aligned with Franco's Nationalists -- bombed and destroyed the Basque town of Guernica. In response, the Spanish Republican government asked Pablo Picasso to commemorate the tragedy via a mural to be exhibited at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris. The large painting, the most memorable of the century, 11 feet and 6 inches by 28 feet and 8 inches, depicted the violence of the German bombardment. The attack was all the more terrifying because it demonstrated the existential significance of aerial barrage: all civilian populations would now potentially have to live in a state of emergency.
