Among all the masterpieces of modern art, Picasso's Guernica has profoundly marked the cultural identity of the 20th century...

Gijs van Hensbergen, starting from the destruction of the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War, describes the story of the creation of the work, its transformation into a powerful symbol of the struggle against fascism, its role as a core component in the creation of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and its spark for the Abstract Expressionism movement in the late 1940s, as well as the years of the work's exile until its troubled yet ultimately triumphant return to Spain in 1981.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]