Guernica

Of all the great paintings in the world, Picasso's Guernica has had a more direct impact on our consciousness than perhaps any other. In this absorbing and revealing book Gijs van Hensbergen tells the story of his masterpiece, from its origin in the destruction of the Basque town of Gernika in the Spanish Civil War, through its time as a weapon in the propaganda battle against Fascism, and its later role both as the nucleus of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and as the detonator for the Big Bang of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s to its long-contested but eventually triumphant return to Spain in 1981.