Guernica

Pablo Picasso worked at a feverish pace to finish this enormous canvas in only a few weeks, driven by rage over a real tragedy. In April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, German and Italian warplanes flattened the Basque town of Guernica and killed hundreds of ordinary people. Living in Paris when the news reached him, Picasso channeled his fury into a mural more than 11 feet tall and 25 feet wide. He chose no color at all, just black, white, and gray, which gives the whole scene the grim feeling of a newspaper photo, harsh and impossible to ignore.

Scattered across the canvas are figures caught in agony: a horse crying out, a strangely still bull, a mother cradling her lifeless child, and a soldier lying broken with a snapped sword in his hand. Picasso's Cubist approach pulls these bodies apart and reassembles them, twisting limbs and faces to capture raw panic and grief. Above it all sits a single lightbulb shaped almost like an eye, and people still argue about what it means. A few read it as the blinding flash of a bomb, while others think it stands for the world watching and finally seeing the truth.

A well-known tale follows the painting around. As the story goes, a Nazi officer looking at a photograph of it asked Picasso, "Did you do this?" and the artist shot back, "No, you did." Nobody knows if the exchange truly happened, but it sums up the anger baked into every inch of the work. The mural now lives in Madrid, where it continues to move anyone who longs for peace.