On this day in 1981 Picasso’s Guernica, his anti-war mural, was returned to Spain after forty years of hanging in New York’s Museum of Modern Art.  Picasso had requested the painting not be returned to Spain until Spain restored democratic liberties in the country.

The subject of the mural was the brutal bombing of the town of Guernica in 1937, by the Nazi Luftwaffe, who were allies of Fransisco Franco’s right-wing Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso was commissioned to paint the mural showing the horrors of war to be exhibited in the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition in 1939.

 

Today is also Grandparent’s Day.

We didn’t have a Grandparent’s Day when I was a kid.  According to the internet, Grandparent’s Day was made official in 1978 as the first Sunday after Labor Day by then President Jimmy Carter.

I think relationships with my grandparents when I was young were a bit more formal than today. In fact, in my family, when we referred to them we always used their last name as in Grandma Rosch or Grandpa Christiansen.

All of my four grandparents lived in Oceanport, the town I grew up in.

I have written about my father’s parents, my Norwegian grandparents Sophie and Carl before.

My grandparents on my mother’s side (Rosch) lived right across the street.  Technically their address was Main Street but the back lots of their property were on Willow Court, the street I grew up on, and right across from my house.  My grandfather William H. Rosch however died in August of 1960 at the age of 75 when I was just four years old.

But I have nice memories growing up to adulthood with my three grandparents.

 

Kim and I are grandparents too now.

We have three grandsons, Cameron, Christian, and Ethan.  I have written about them many times as well. But maybe not so much about Ethan.

 

Ethan is six.

He is very headstrong and determined but gets a little frustrated at times.

Recently at school, he and his classmates were assigned the task of drawing a self-portrait.

Ethan also happens to be very good at drawing, a talent that seems to run in my family, my grandfather Carl was an oil painter, my father worked with pastels, and my siblings are talented artistically as well.

However, Ethan apparently didn’t approve of being assigned the task of drawing a self-portrait.

As a result, he took on the brutality and the horror of being asked to do such a thing in a very Picassoesque way.

So, as all the other kids in the class drew their images as you might expect them to, Ethan created his Guernica, expressing his raw feelings on the matter.

And as his proud grandfather, I thought it was brilliant.

Happy Grandparents Day!