Veiling the Horror

visualresistance.org

"Guernica" by Pablo Picasso at the entrance of the Security Council of the United Nations has been covered with a curtain.

The reason is that this is the place where diplomats make statements to the press and have this work as the background.

The Picasso work features the horrors of war. On January 27, 2003 a large blue curtain was placed to cover the work.

"A diplomat stated that it would not be an appropriate background if the ambassador of the United States at the U.N.

John Negroponte, or Powell, talk about war surrounded with women, children and animals shouting with horror

and showing the suffering of the bombings."

artdaily.com

The Toronto Star

February 9, 2003

by William Walker

The Lessons of Guernica
'Profound symbolism' as U.N. hides Picasso's anti-war masterpiece for Colin Powell's call to arms

UNITED NATIONS—On the second floor of the United Nations building in Manhattan, just outside the Security Council entrance, hangs a seminal piece of 20th-century artwork that offers a graphic and chilling reminder of the horrors of war.

But as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell sat down last week to deliver an historic speech about why America must go to war with Iraq, Pablo Picasso's Guernica was concealed by a large blue drape.

To twist an old axiom, those who ignore the horrors of history — or cover them up — are doomed to repeat them...

"Guernica has become for people around the world visceral, visual evidence of the true nature of war, a perspective very unlike the heroic and optimistic one so often presented by politicians who have never seen war close at hand."

Laurie Brereton, an Australian Labour MP and U.N. delegation member, reflected on the draped-over Picasso after Powell's Wednesday speech.

"There is a profound symbolism in pulling a shroud over this great work of art," she said.

"For throughout the debate on Iraq ... there has been a remarkable degree of obfuscation, evasion and denial, and never more so than when it comes to the grim realities of military action.

"We may well live in the age of the so-called `smart bomb,' but the horror on the ground will be just the same as that visited upon the villagers of Guernica ....

"Innocent Iraqis — men, women and children — will pay a terrible price. And it won't be possible to pull a curtain over that."