In February 2003, as U.S. officials including Colin Powell made the case for war in Iraq at the United Nations, a plain blue curtain hung behind the podium. It was covering a tapestry reproduction of Pablo Picasso's Guernica, officially because its chaotic lines looked bad on television. This deep dive uses that moment to open the biography of a painting that still unsettles the powerful, then travels back to Paris in January 1937, when the embattled Spanish Republic commissioned a mural for the Paris International Exposition and Picasso, uninspired and apolitical, spent months sketching his own studio instead.

Everything changed on April 26, 1937, when Nazi Germany's Condor Legion bombed the Basque market town of Guernica for over three hours and machine-gunned fleeing civilians, ignoring the only military target nearby. The episode descri ...