Light is an ambivalent entity in modernism. Tied to technological innovations like gas and electric lighting, it represents the light of urban self-presentation: the light of consumerism as well as the flâneur. The average citizen also becomes enchanted, as articulated by Sonia Delaunay in her painting Disques Electriques, where a lost aura is rediscovered as electric radiance. It is the light of modern science, industry, photography, and film. But the light of modernism casts long and sharp shadows; It is also the light of war, of grenades and bombs. This ambivalent light source forms the basis for BOMBA, a word in Spanish that has a double meaning, signifying both lightbulb and bomb.

In Picasso’s Guernica, the horrors of war are illuminated by flashes produced by the brutal bombardment of the Basque town; at the top of the painting, a lightbulb is set within an eye-like oval shape from which sharp light and dramatic shadows radiate. The artificial light source is framed by a crown of white and black rays in grisaille—a greyscale palette historically referred to as Todmalerei or ”death painting.” The bare lightbulb with its glowing filament appears as a symbol of a flash of explosive destruction, the emergency lighting within a bomb shelter, but also the post-catastrophe light that exposes the atrocities of war in the work of art.

In the exhibition BOMBA, the central element is a mural on the back wall where Guernica once hung as part of the French Exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus, immediately after it had been shown at the Paris World’s Fair in 1937. The mural now consists of a matte grey monochrome surface the size of Guernica (349.3 × 776.6 cm), interrupted by an enlarged figure: the lightbulb that casts a symbolic light over the room where Guernica was shown. In the opposite room, viewers are met with a Bauhaus pendant lamp from the period when Guernica was displayed at Kunstnernes Hus, lowered to eye level. Similar lamps can still be found in the café, but in the exhibition rooms, they have been replaced by wall-washer lighting. The original pendant marks the central axis of the room’s entrance. It is hung from one of the original electric mounting points in the ceiling.

In the Director’s Room facing the park, the painting Originals (Figure 1911) is suspended. It refers to Analytical Cubism, an optical prerequisite for the depiction of the figures in Guernica. In the architecture of Kunstnernes Hus, where functionalism is combined with neoclassicism, the painting enters a dialogue with Per Krohg’s Art Deco-inspired fresco The Artist’s Thorny Path to the Heights at the central axis of the stairwell. Guernica is similarly marked by a duality between modernism and classicism, but unlike Cubism, where fragmentation occurs within an interior, a grid appears to dissolve the distinction between inside and outside in Guernica. The dissolution of the figures in the painting is not the result of a formal experiment here; rather, it conveys an imprint of the horrors of modern warfare. Nonetheless, an ambivalent light is cast over the anti-war icon Guernica, for as Georges Bataille emphasizes in his text Rotten Sun, modernism’s radical artistic transgressions are inextricably linked to brutality and the aesthetics of violence.

Dag Erik Elgin

Pablo Picasso’s Guernica was displayed at the World’s Fair in Paris in 1937 in the Spanish pavilion, even though the artist had painted it while exiled in France due to the Spanish Civil War. At the same World’s Fair, which was dedicated to the art and technology of modern life, the pavilions of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were positioned across from each other, two years before the outbreak of World War II.

The next stop for Guernica was Kunstnernes Hus at the beginning of 1938, this time surrounded by works from other French artist colleagues, Braque, Matisse, and Laurens. The exhibition was organized by artist and art dealer Walther Halvorsen, and although many works were for sale, only three were sold. The French-Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg lent most of the works for the exhibition.

The Norwegian painter Reidar Aulie wrote about Guernica and the exhibition for The Workers’ Newspaper: ”I believe... that anyone standing in front of the painting will receive an immediate and fairly intense impression, a strong feeling that you are standing there as a small eyewitness to a catastrophe (...) It is not a depiction of the massacres in Guernica, either directly or reconstructed by the imagination. (...) Picasso has avenged Guernica as far as a great artist can manage to do so.”

A few years later, on April 9, 1940, Nazi Germany occupied Norway, and in the spring of 1942, Kunstnernes Hus was taken to be used by the occupation forces.

After the exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus, Guernica continued to travel around the world—it was used to raise funds for war victims and as a symbol of freedom and resistance against fascism. For many years, the piece was permanently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Only after Picasso’s death, the painting arrived to Spain, in 1977. It hangs at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid today. The painting has now also become a symbol of modernism.

This exhibition history—and the example of a single work’s journey between contexts—shows how exhibitions are political structures. By breaking down the 1938 exhibition to a signature element—the lamp/bomb—Dag Erik Elgin’s exhibition raises questions about the relationship between art and society, aesthetics and politics, and about the difference between experiencing war and seeing its visual representation. Today, where ongoing wars are filtered through countless screens, the questions about the relationship between horror and its depiction—and what it means to be a witness—are as relevant as they were in 1938. Unlike the 1938 exhibition, which was full of artworks, most images are now gone. Two remain, presented with documentation and archival material: a reflection on the past, for the present. In the galleries, the lamp and its light, missing in one room and blinding in the other, are what remain.

Sarah Lookofsky, curator of the exhibition

The sun, in human terms (in other words, in its association with the notion of noon) is the most elevated idea. It is also the most abstract notion, since it is impossible to look at it fixedly at that time of day. To fully convey the notion of the sun in the mind of someone who necessarily has to emasculate it due to the eyes’ incapacity, it must be said that the sun poetically communicates mathematical serenity and spiritual elevation. If on the other hand one obstinately stares at it, a certain madness is implied, and its meaning shifts; in the light, it is no longer production that appears, but rather waste or combustion, adequately expressed by the horror emanating from the incandescence of an arc lamp. In practice, the scrutinised sun can be identified as a mental ejaculation, foaming at the mouth, and an epileptic seizure. While the previous sun (the one not looked at) is perfectly beautiful, the one that is scrutinised can be considered horribly ugly. In mythology, the scrutinised sun is identified with a man who slays a bull (Mithra), with a vulture eating the liver (Prometheus): the one looking on is the slain bull or the liver that is consumed. The Mithraic cult of the sun led to a very widespread religious practice: people stripped in a kind of pit that was covered with a wooden scaffold, on which a priest slashed the throat of a bull; thus one would suddenly be doused with a shower of hot blood, to the accompaniment of the bull’s thrashing and bellowing—a simple way of reaping the moral benefits of the blinding sun. Of course the bull himself is also an image of the sun, but only with his throat slit. The same goes for the cock, whose horrible solar cry always approximates the screams of a slaughter.

One might add that the sun has also been mythologically expressed by a man slashing his own throat, as well as by an anthropomorphic headless being. All this leads one to say that the ultimate elevation in practice coincides with a sudden fall of unheard-of violence. The myth of Icarus is particularly expressive from this point of view: it clearly splits the sun in two—the one that was shining at the moment of Icarus’s ascent, and the one that melted the wax, causing defection and the screaming fall when Icarus got too close.

This human tendency to distinguish between two suns is of particular importance because the psychological movements described are not movements diverted nor attenuated by secondary elements. But this also indicates that it would be ridiculous a priori to try to find precise equivalents for such movements in an activity as complex as painting. Nevertheless, it can be said that academic painting more or less corresponded to an elevation—without excess—of the spirit. In contemporary painting, on the other hand, the search for a rupture of the highest elevation, and for a blinding intensity, has a part to play in the elaboration or decomposition of forms, though this is strictly speaking only noticeable in the paintings of Picasso.

Georges Bataille
Documents no. 3/1930