Many Afterlives. Pablo Picasso's Guernica in the Imaginary of the Atomic War, ca. 1943

An important aspect of the biography of Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937) is the fact that the potential public that would, in time, see the work, and specifically the US public, learned of its existence through its printed image. Considering Guernica as a displaced work, deposited by Picasso at the MoMA in the winter of 1939, the aim of this essay is to analyse the use and value of the image of the work in the imaginaries of atomic war that emerged in the first half of the 1940s in the United States of America. Presented as a case study, it sets out to analyse the photomontages by Mies van der Rohe and Ray Eames, both published in 1943. The exercise of constructing meanings using photomontage reveals a process of iconographic migration in which Guernica is used as an image of war, but it also gives rise to a phenomenon of slippery dissociation between work and image in order to construct a new signifier.