Picasso and Columbus: What Do They Have In Common?

Pablo Picasso and Christopher Columbus -- two household names in all four corners of the world.

One is a twentieth-century Spanish artist whose painting, La Guernica, stands as a universal condemnation of war atrocities. The other an Italian explorer, credited for discovering the New World in 1492.

Discussing these two men here seems to do justice to neither one of them. What would Picasso, widely admired for his artistic talents, have anything to do with Columbus, a controversial figure lauded or despised for his actions?

Despite their differences, these two European men share something in common: Their hubris, that is, their conviction that what they did represented humanity, and their neglect of people that do not belong to the same race.

Prominently featured in Picasso's painting La Guernica is the killing of innocent women and children in wars. Despair, suffering, and death fill the gray, black, and white canvas, which shows a screaming woman in front of a house on fire, another one holding a dead child, and a dismembered soldier lying under a squealing horse. 


La Guernica is Picasso's political statement against the two-hour Nazi Germany's bombardment of a small Basque town, Guernica and the deaths of more than 2,500 civilians during the Spanish civil war. Commissioned by the Spanish Republicans (Franco's adversaries), the work was exhibited at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris, went on a world tour, and returned to Spain in 1981 after 42 years of loan to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

During the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 1970s, the painting gained more fame as antiwar activists put it on posters to denounce U.S. colonial war and the 1968 massacre at My Lai, where 500 villagers, including women and infants, were slaughtered by the U.S. army. Cementing its iconic antiwar status, the United Nations headquarters in New York displayed a tapestry depicting Picasso's La Guernica from 1986 to 2021.

Granted, La Guernica is a powerful symbol of the tragedies of war. The killing of innocent civilians in Guernica was barbarous. Incensed at the nonsensical massacre of Spaniards in his lifetime, Picasso created a masterpiece mural.

The problem is that Picasso's La Guernica is about crimes committed against his countrymen, rather than crimes committed by his country against the Indigenous peoples in the New World.

Here enters Christopher Columbus, a hero in western civilization, the "great" explorer who spearheaded the European invasions of the New World.

The Columbus Monument, Barcelona, Spain

After setting foot on the Hispaniola island (nowadays known as Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Columbus carried a large-scale genocide against the Arawak Indians. Financed by the Spanish monarchy, he ravaged the island, enslaving the Indians, sending 500 of them to Spain in 1495, and forcing the rest to work in gold mines. 

Appointed governor and viceroy of the Indies, Columbus slaughtered the natives. To deter further rebellion, he had their dismembered bodies paraded through the streets. According to the record, three million natives perished from war, slavery, and mines.

The insatiable appetite for gold led Columbus and his men on a rampage, murdering, raping, enslaving, and pillaging wherever they went. In a few years, through violence and slavery, Columbus annihilated the natives of the Caribbean islands.

Columbus's heinous crimes against humanity were amplified by other Spaniards at an even larger scale. Hernan Cortes decimated the Aztecs of Mexico. Francisco Pizarro obliterated the Incas of Peru.

Firmly anchored in a Eurocentric view of the world, both Picasso and Columbus never gave a thought to what Spain did to the Indigenous peoples of the New World.

After learning the destruction of Guernica, Picasso might have thought, "How the hell could Nazi Germany kill my own people so brazenly?" 

After seeing gold worn by the natives, Columbus's might have thought, "Bringing back all the gold to Spain will make Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand happy!"

How can we compare a two-hour bombardment of Guernica and a toll of 2,500 with the genocide of millions of American natives and the destruction of entire civilizations at a continental scale?

To show the violence perpetrated by white men against the Indigenous peoples of the New World, we need to replace La Guernica with a mural painting called La Hispaniola.

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Read these other articles:

Enough with Moral Imperialism

Democracy and Human Chattel

The Democracy Trap: Ballot Box vs. Industrialization


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