From Publishers Weekly
Picasso watched closely from his adopted Paris as the Spanish Civil War unfolded, and when German bombers leveled the Basque village of Guernica, the previously apolitical Picasso felt stirred to action. Created at a frenzied pace, his painting Guernica was both homage to his Catalonian homeland and a scathing indictment of bloodshed. While Martin (Beethoven's Hair) meticulously describes the painting's creation and context, much of the book focuses on the controversies that haunted the canvas for decades. When Guernica was first introduced at the Spanish pavilion of the 1937 International Exposition of Art and Technology Applied to Modern Life in Paris, it was ignored by many, criticized by others for ugliness-and even for not being political enough. Later acknowledged as a classic, it was housed in New York's Museum of Modern Art, safe from the war overseas. By the '60s, voices grew stronger asking for its return to Spain, the country that had originally commissioned its creation. With Franco still in power, an aging Picasso asked that the painting go to Spain only when the country was once again free from oppression. Within this larger narrative, Martin weaves a memoir of his own trek to visit Guernica, which finally arrived in Spain in the 1980s. The culmination of this thread, when Martin coincidentally views the painting on September 11, 2001, brings the narrative into the contemporary world and highlights Guernica's brutal relevance today.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Picasso's "Guernica" was painted in reaction to the barbarous Nazi bombing of the Basque village in Spain in 1937. Martin (Beethoven's Hair) extensively researched the circumstances surrounding the creation of this painting and the attention it has continued to command. On 9/11 he was in Madrid viewing "Guernica"; here he has collaged his response to the attacks in New York City with his feelings about the painting. In the face of such terrible loss, it may be reasonable to parallel the two horrific events; however, Martin mixes fact and opinion with his personal reminiscences. Picasso's politics were ambiguous at best; while he joined the Communist Party to please his friends after World War II, he became disillusioned with Stalin in the 1950s. Picasso said, when asked, in typical fashion, that painting was his party. "Guernica's" historical significance as possibly "the last great history painting" gets lost here, begging the question is it politics, art, or tragedy that is Martin's focus? He discusses visuals yet provides no illustrations, such as the photographs Dora Maar took of Picasso working on "Guernica" or the preparatory drawings. This effort will not satisfy the thoughtful reader, and it skimps on production. For a contrasting perspective on Picasso and "Guernica," try James Lord's Picasso and Dora. You can pass on this one. Ellen Bates, New YorkCopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
Russell Martin marries the artist and setting into a fascinating story of the Spanish Civil War. Moved by the German bombing of the Basque town of Guernica, Spanish painter Pablo Picasso paints a mural, described as "complex and profoundly disturbing images of horror," depicting the destruction. Oliver Wyman's words are clear and enthusiastic, but his "foreigner's accents" in English are droll, and he can't pronounce the abundant Spanish. Still, the painting's journeys, the artist's lovers, and the tyrannical dictator Franco make a challenging script for a performance that both entertains and instructs. Now housed in Madrid, Picasso's most famous canvas has become a symbol of peace. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Picasso hadn't yet agreed to create a mural for Spain's pavilion in Paris' 1937 international exposition, but once news of the Nazi bombing and utter destruction of the historic Basque town of Guernica reached the expatriate Spanish artist, visions of a painting in protest of that horrific massacre of innocents quickly coalesced. The result was the immense masterpiece Guernica, which, as Martin so resoundingly chronicles, became "the world's most recognized symbol of war's brutality." Martin, the author most recently of Beethoven's Hair (2000), relates in engrossing detail the entire, never before fully documented story of the genesis, reception, and fate of Guernica, freshly considering overlooked aspects of Spain's civil war and Franco's collusion with Hitler, the ongoing struggle for Basque autonomy, and Picasso's refusal to allow Guernica to travel to Franco's Spain. Initially castigated for being too vague in its condemnation of the fascist attack, the painting's timeless and universal power soon made itself known as war erupted around the globe. Martin's poignant portrayal of Picasso and gripping history of a painting that galvanized a world assaulted by new extremes of systematic violence illuminate the complex and always provocative nexus of art, politics, and social conscience. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2002
An engrossing story of a landmark work of art and the struggle "to fashion meaning out of unimaginable evil."

Publishers Weekly, August 26, 2002
Martin meticulously describes the painting's creation and context [and] focuses on the controversies that haunted the canvas for decades.

Booklist, November 1, 2002
Martin's gripping history of a painting . . . illuminates the complex and always provocative nexus of art, politics, and social conscience.

Deseret News, Salt Lake City, November 10, 2002
Russell Martin has created his own masterpiece of literature in Picasso's War. . . . It is a most unusual and gripping work.

Book Description
From the bestselling author of Beethoven's Hair comes a stirring narrative account of the bombing of the town that inspired one of the world's most celebrated and controversial works of art, the painting Guernica's profound impact on the politics and culture of the twentieth century, and the artist whose immense passion and artistic vision are unequaled in modern history. On April 26, 1937, in the late afternoon of a busy market day in the Basque town of Gernika in northern Spain, the German Luftwaffe began the relentless bombing and machine-gunning of businesses, homes and villagers to test a new type of warfare waged from the air at the request of General Francisco Franco and his rebel forces. Three-and-a-half hours later, the village lay in ruins, its population decimated. This act of terror and unspeakable cruelty the first intentional, large-scale attack against a nonmilitary target in modern warfare outraged the world, and compelled a Spanish painter to respond with artistic fury. Pablo Picasso, an expatriate living in Paris, reacted immediately to the devastation in his homeland by beginning work on the canvas that would become his testament against the horrors of war. Guernica has become widely considered the greatest artwork of the twentieth century in the sixty-five years since its creation, and has been claimed as a powerful symbolic image first by the embattled government of Republican Spain and then, over time, by the international communist party, American artists opposing the war in Vietnam, international peace organizations, Basque separatists, survivors of the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and people everywhere. Weaving themes of conflict and redemption, doom and transcendence, and featuring some of the century's most memorable and infamous figures, including Adolf Hitler, Eleanor Roosevelt, George Orwell, Jackson Pollock, Lillian Hellman, and Picasso himself, Martin follows this renowned masterwork from its fevered creation through its journey across decades, from many countries of Europe to America and finally and triumphantly to Spain. Picasso's War is a book that vividly demonstrates how vital art is to human lives and how sometimes it even transfigures tragedy, a story that delivers an unforgettable portrait of an artistic genius whose visionary rendering of the terrible wounds of war still resonates profoundly today.

From the Author
The story of Guernica is one in which Picasso's masterpiece readily proves that art matters enormously in our individual and collective lives. Far more than decoration, great art of every kind painting, sculpture, literature, music, dance examines, reflects on, and makes sense of events that we otherwise struggle to understand. Art gives us a common language and common perspective with which to grieve and to celebrate, to express outrage and to offer hope. Guernica has become so important worldwide because it has so perfectly suited its times. It is monumental without being classically "monumental," depicting as it does a vital political event from the microcosmic perspective of its victims rather than from the macrocosm of historical "meaning." Guernica became great, in the view of critic Hilton Kramer, because "a great painter placed his talents at the service of a great political cause, and thus for one splendid moment of history, at least the treacherous gap separating the hermetic concerns of modernist art from the larger and more compelling interests of society was triumphantly bridged." It is that process of bridging the linking of human tragedy to the alchemy of art that is the soul of this story. It is a story that affirms that it is art that best enables us to ennoble our lives, and that only art can meaningfully fuse both doom and beauty.

About the Author
Russell Martin is the author of Beethoven's Hair (2000), a U.S. bestseller and winner of the Colorado Book Award, which has been published in fifteen editions around the world and will soon be the subject of an international television documentary. His highly acclaimed 1994 book, Out of Silence, was named by the Bloomsbury Review as one of fifteen best books of its first fifteen years of publication. A Story That Stands Like A Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West (1989), won the Caroline Bancroft History Prize. He also is the author of the novel Beautiful Islands (1988); The Color Orange: A Super Bowl Season with the Denver Broncos (1987); Matters Gray and White: A Neurologist, His Patients & the Mysteries of the Brain (1986); Entering Space (co-authored with Joseph P. Allen, 1984), and Cowboy: The Enduring Myth of the Wild West (1983). He has edited two anthologies of contemporary western writing, Writers of the Purple Sage (1984) and New Writers of the Purple Sage (1992). He is a graduate of The Colorado College in Colorado Springs, where he has returned to teach for eighteen years. He also has taught courses at conferences including Writers@Work and the Desert Writers workshop. He spent a postgraduate year on a Thomas Watson Foundation fellowship in Great Britain and Guatemala and worked as a newspaper reporter in Telluride, Colorado for a number of years before becoming a freelance writer. In 1995, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by his alma mater. He lives in Denver and Salt Lake City.

FROM OUR EDITORS

A military action and the artistic response that it engendered are the topics of this absorbing narrative. In late April 1937, Guernica, a remote Basque town in northern Spain, was pounded by Hitler's Luftwaffe in support of Francisco Franco's fascist insurgents. In the carnage that ensued, more than 1,600 civilians are killed or wounded. When the news reached Paris, world-famous painter Pablo Picasso decided to express his outrage and sorrow on canvas. The result is arguably the most famous painting of the 20th century.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"On April 26, 1937, in the late afternoon of a busy market day in the Basque town of Guernica in northern Spain, the German Luftwaffe began the relentless bombing and machine-gunning of businesses, homes, and villagers at the request of General Francisco Franco and his rebel forces. Three and a half hours later, the village lay in ruins, its population decimated." "This act of terror and unspeakable cruelty - the first deliberate, large-scale attack against a nonmilitary target in modern warfare - outraged the world, and one man in particular. Pablo Picasso, a Spanish expatriate living in Paris, responded immediately to the devastation in his homeland by creating the canvas that would become widely considered the greatest artwork of the twentieth century - Guernica." Weaving themes of conflict and redemption, of the horrors of war and the power of art to transfigure tragedy, Russell Martin follows this renowned masterwork from its fevered inception through its journey across decades and continents - from Europe to America and, finally and triumphantly, to democratic Spain. Full of historical sweep and deeply moving human drama, Picasso's War features some of the century's most memorable and infamous figures, including Adolf Hitler, Eleanor Roosevelt, George Orwell, and Jackson Pollock, and delivers an unforgettable portrait of an artistic genius and the visionary painting that still resonates profoundly today.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Picasso watched closely from his adopted Paris as the Spanish Civil War unfolded, and when German bombers leveled the Basque village of Guernica, the previously apolitical Picasso felt stirred to action. Created at a frenzied pace, his painting Guernica was both homage to his Catalonian homeland and a scathing indictment of bloodshed. While Martin (Beethoven's Hair) meticulously describes the painting's creation and context, much of the book focuses on the controversies that haunted the canvas for decades. When Guernica was first introduced at the Spanish pavilion of the 1937 International Exposition of Art and Technology Applied to Modern Life in Paris, it was ignored by many, criticized by others for ugliness-and even for not being political enough. Later acknowledged as a classic, it was housed in New York's Museum of Modern Art, safe from the war overseas. By the '60s, voices grew stronger asking for its return to Spain, the country that had originally commissioned its creation. With Franco still in power, an aging Picasso asked that the painting go to Spain only when the country was once again free from oppression. Within this larger narrative, Martin weaves a memoir of his own trek to visit Guernica, which finally arrived in Spain in the 1980s. The culmination of this thread, when Martin coincidentally views the painting on September 11, 2001, brings the narrative into the contemporary world and highlights Guernica's brutal relevance today. (Oct. 28) Forecast: Martin's Out of Silence: An Autistic Boy's Journey into Language and Communication (1994) was widely reviewed and acclaimed, and Beethoven's Hair (2000) was a Washington Post Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times bestseller. Look for strong national reviews, many of which will use the book as a springboard to discuss more recent political art (and the lack thereof). Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Picasso's "Guernica" was painted in reaction to the barbarous Nazi bombing of the Basque village in Spain in 1937. Martin (Beethoven's Hair) extensively researched the circumstances surrounding the creation of this painting and the attention it has continued to command. On 9/11 he was in Madrid viewing "Guernica"; here he has collaged his response to the attacks in New York City with his feelings about the painting. In the face of such terrible loss, it may be reasonable to parallel the two horrific events; however, Martin mixes fact and opinion with his personal reminiscences. Picasso's politics were ambiguous at best; while he joined the Communist Party to please his friends after World War II, he became disillusioned with Stalin in the 1950s. Picasso said, when asked, in typical fashion, that painting was his party. "Guernica's" historical significance as possibly "the last great history painting" gets lost here, begging the question is it politics, art, or tragedy that is Martin's focus? He discusses visuals yet provides no illustrations, such as the photographs Dora Maar took of Picasso working on "Guernica" or the preparatory drawings. This effort will not satisfy the thoughtful reader, and it skimps on production. For a contrasting perspective on Picasso and "Guernica," try James Lord's Picasso and Dora. You can pass on this one. Ellen Bates, New York Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Imaginative cultural historian Martin (Beethoven￯﾿ﾽs Hair, 2000, etc.) crafts a well-integrated and fascinating account of Picasso￯﾿ﾽs famous painting and the horrible events that inspired it.

The author￯﾿ﾽs signature approach to seemingly offbeat subjects is careful research filtered through a novelistic sensibility to grasp the inherent story, which he unfolds in the engaging, almost offhand manner of a fictional amateur sleuth. Martin is, first and foremost, a consummate storyteller who deftly weaves such multiple disciplines as politics, history, art, science, and even current events into a narrative forming a coherent whole. A case in point is his handling here of the motivation behind Picasso￯﾿ﾽs change of heart regarding his previous, adamantly apolitical stance on the Spanish Civil War, then only a few months old. Commissioned by a Republican delegation to devise a prominent work for the courtyard of the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World￯﾿ﾽs Fair in Paris, Picasso, who disdained "poster" (i.e., political) art, originally contemplated a mural whose subject would be the artist in his studio. But the brutal attack on the civilian population of the Basque town Gernika, intended by Franco and his Nazi allies to inspire terror and capitulation, had an energizing effect on the artist. Within two weeks of Gernika￯﾿ﾽs bombardment and strafing by Goering￯﾿ﾽs Luftwaffe, Picasso was hard at work on the monumental canvas that was to become the most political artwork of the 20th century. Martin goes beyond the obvious, however, in providing additional, less well-known motives for Picasso￯﾿ﾽs sudden engagement. Having agreed to become the titular director of the Museo del Prado in September of the previousyear, the artist was outraged by Franco￯﾿ﾽs barbaric disregard for the safety of the nation￯﾿ﾽs treasures and quietly agreed to their removal to safety in Valencia.