Expressionism, sculpture, video: the art world is so vast and varied it can be difficult to know where to start, even with its biggest names. Our writers suggest the one piece that can help you understand masters old and new
On 26 April 1937 the Basque town of Guernica was bombed by Hitler’s Luftwaffe and the Italian Legionary Air Force. Picasso, a Spanish artist settled in Paris, paid homage to the killed with this cubist history painting. Moments of revelation punch through the jagged mayhem to hit your heart. The baby cradled in a screaming mother’s arms hangs its head upside down, eyes blankly open, mouth obliviously gaping: it is dead, you realise as if for the first time. Picasso asks in each line of this figure what a child’s death means. He poses similarly agonising questions across the canvas: what does it feel like to be the woman in the burning house, arms outstretched to a God who is not showing any mercy today? And how does the universe permit the pain of that screaming horse, its newspaper body pierced and eviscerated? So long as this painting exists the bombing of Guernica will never end but will always be this infinite moment of wrong. Jonathan Jones
See it at: Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid
