Biography | Pablo Picasso — The Attic on Rue des Grands-Augustins Where Guernica Was Painted

A plaque on the gates of 7 rue des Grands-Augustins states the fact in one sentence. Pablo Picasso lived in this building from 1936 to 1955. It was in this studio that he painted Guernica in 1937. The house is the old Hôtel de Savoie, a 17th-century mansion in the 6th arrondissement. Dora Maar found him the attic rooms in the winter of 1936. Honoré de Balzac had already set The Unknown Masterpiece in a studio in this street, a coincidence Picasso liked. On 26 April 1937 the German Condor Legion bombed the Basque town of Gernika. Picasso had accepted a commission from the Spanish Republic for the Paris International Exhibition. He made the first sketch for the mural on 1 May. He finished the canvas on 4 June. The painting measures 349.3 by 776.6 centimetres. The stretchers were so large the canvas had to be tilted under the rafters. Dora Maar photographed the states of the work in this room as the composition changed over those weeks. On 4 June the painting left for the Spanish Pavilion at the Trocadéro, designed by Josep Lluís Sert and Luis Lacasa. The pavilion opened on 12 July 1937 and was demolished when the fair closed. Nothing of that building stands. This street address does. Picasso kept the studio through the Occupation. He used it less after the war, once he was living in the south. The interior is not a public museum. The pin is the doorway and the plaque. The painting now hangs at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. The work was made here, in a dim attic that had to take a wall-sized canvas on the slant. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons