Eric the Blue

According to pablopicasso.org, the artist was living in occupied Paris during World War II when some Nazi soldiers invited themselves into his apartment. Seeing Guernica (above) displayed on a wall, one of them asked, “Did you do that?”

“No, you did,” Picasso is said to have replied.

I read that today. It must’ve been a big apartment because the painting is 25.5 feet long (and 11.5 feet high). I hope the anecdote is true. It’s true that the Nazis did it. From the Wikipedia article:

Guernica is a large 1937 oil painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. It is one of his best-known works, regarded by many art critics as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history. . . . Prominently featured in the composition are a gored horse, a bull, screaming women, a dead baby, a dismembered soldier, and flames. Picasso painted Guernica at his home in Paris in response to the 26 April 1937 bombing of Guernica, a town in the Basque Country in northern Spain, by Nazi Germany’s Condor Legion and the fascist government of Italy.

In other art news, the Minnesota State Fair opened today. This city slicker has been bored by all the agricultural stuff ever since spending interminable tracts of time, maybe a half hour or more, with my grandpa on Machinery Hill. But if I go this year I’m going to check out the crop art, as I understand there are a lot of works addressing news made in Minnesota since the last State Fair. Here, for example, is the entry of Jennifer Nelson, from Fridley, Minnesota:

I like to imagine a fair-goer wandering through the crop art displays right after having picked up some buttons at the GOP booth. “Did you do this?” they might ask someone standing by Ms Nelson’s composition.