"The night watch of the 20th century"

A press release signed by William Sandberg, director of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and published in conjunction with the exhibition Guernica avec 60 études, held in the aforementioned museum and dubbed “the night watch of the 20th century”, in direct reference to Pablo Picasso’s painting and in comparison to the masterpiece by Rembrandt, coinciding with the 350th anniversary of the Dutch artist’s birth. It begins by remembering the aerial bombing of the town Gernika and states that the episode would have been eclipsed by other events at the time and forgotten if it hadn’t been immortalised by Picasso. It goes on to say how the painting came to condemn and warn against the horrors to come, and constitutes Picasso’s masterpiece and a masterpiece par excellence of modern painting.