"¡No tome fotos!” the security
woman snapped at me. She was too late though; I already took my shot. The photo
is mostly a black and white blur, but it’s more than that to me. It’s a
reminder that I was there—in Spain, at the Museo Reina Sofia, standing in front
of the painting I had been drawn to since I was a little boy: “Guernica.”
The
museum is laid out like a suspense film. Each room leading up to “Guernica” is
dedicated to Picasso’s sketches of a specific character in the painting. The
Falling Woman Room. The Wounded Horse Room. The Weeping Woman with Child Room. The
deeper I went, the more enveloped I became in the twisted and tortured scenes
of the Spanish Civil War. Finally, there it was: 11.5-by-25.6 feet. It was
staring at me. I felt hollow looking back at it. Small and helpless and hollow.
I had seen the image a hundred times before, but never had it made such an
impact. All the smaller vignettes were now suddenly together in one
overwhelmingly large brutal story. It was cacophony visualized. It was a big,
ugly, gasping-for-breath piece of art, and as I stood before it, I thought to
myself, “This is why art exists.”
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