$450,000 of Picasso Etchings Stolen from Art Gallery

This is Guernica on the Solidarity Wall, in Belfast, March 2008.
"Guernica is a painting by Pablo Picasso, depicting the Nazi German bombing of Guernica, Spain, by twenty-eight bombers, on April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The attack killed between 250 and 1,600 people, and many more were injured."
[...]
Interpretations of Guernica vary widely and contradict one another. This extends, for example, to the mural's two dominant elements -- the bull and the horse. Art historian Patricia Failing said, "The bull and the horse are important characters in Spanish culture. Picasso himself certainly used these characters to play many different roles over time. This has made the task of interpreting the specific meaning of the bull and the horse very tough. Their relationship is a kind of ballet that was conceived in a variety of ways throughout Picasso's career."

When pressed to explain them in Guernica, Picasso said, "...this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse... If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are."

In "The Dream and Lie of Franco," a series of narrative sketches also created for the World's Fair, Franco is depicted as a monster that first devours his own horse and later does battle with an angry bull. Work on these illustrations began before the bombing of Guernica, and four additional panels were added, three of these relate directly to the Guernica mural.

Picasso said as he worked on the mural:
“ The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. How could anybody think for a moment that I could be in agreement with reaction and death? ... In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.”
Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_%28painting%29

The solidarity wall features murals mainly dedicated to peoples/revolutionaries inspired by or with connections to Irish Republicanism (the Blanketmen, Palestinians, ETA, Frederick Douglass and so on).

The solidarity wall is situated in the historic Falls Road. In the 1960s, residents of the Falls Road and other Catholic areas of Northern Ireland began to campaign for civil rights. This included an end to religious discrimination in housing and jobs. Many civil rights marches were attacked by Loyalists, often aided by the almost-entirely Protestant police force. Several streets around Catholic Falls Road were burnt out by Loyalists.

In response to the Northern Ireland riots of August 1969, the British government introduced British troops onto the Falls Road. The troops were initially welcomed by the residents of the Falls Road as a source of protection. The community of the Falls had come under assault by Protestant gangs. However, this attitude on the part of residents quickly turned to anger as they were drawn into conflict with the British Army. In 1970, the road was the scene of what became known as the Falls Curfew. In response to a gun and grenade attack by the Provisional IRA, 3000 British army troops sealed off the streets around the road, home to about 10,000 people. They flooded the area with soldiers in an attempt to recover IRA weapons. After an all day gun battle (predominantly with the Official IRA), ninety rifles were recovered and four Catholic civilians were killed by the soldiers. This event is widely regarded as the end of the British army's "honeymoon" period with the Irish nationalist community in Northern Ireland. For the following thirty years the British Army and maintained a substantial presence on the Falls Road, with a base on top of the Divis Tower. This was removed in August 2005 as part of the British government's Normalisation programme following the IRA's statement that it was ending its armed activities. In the intervening period, the Falls Road area saw some of the worst violence of the Troubles. Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falls_Road_(Belfast)

G.B BZH has contributed a photo to this story.

These are photos of Picasso paintings currently on exhibit in The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

Ryan Brunsvold has contributed a photo to this story.

Pablo Picasso's painting Pablo Girl with a Mandolin (1910). On display at Museum of Modern Art in New York.

habkb has contributed a photo to this story.