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 describes how George Steer’s newspaper reports shook Picasso into action and how surrealist photographer and activist Dora Maar secured the studio on the Rue des Grands-Augustins, documented all 36 days of work, and gave him objective feedback through her black-and-white photographs. The hosts walk through the painting’s claustrophobic room, dagger tongues, hidden skull, matte house paint, and refusal of color, then follow its messy reception, its wartime tour that included a Ford showroom in Manchester, its four-decade exile at MoMA, the 1974 spray-paint attack, and its tense 1981 homecoming to Madrid behind bulletproof glass.

• Why Picasso’s initial apathy toward the commission gave way to a 25-foot canvas painted in 36 days
• Dora Maar’s role as collaborator, not muse, from securing the studio to painting the horse’s hair
• How Cubist fracturing and the absence of flags, uniforms, and planes made the painting universal
• Why Marxist supporters of the Republic hated Guernica and tried to have it replaced with heroic realism
• The legal fight over its return to Spain and the ongoing Basque claim that it belongs near the town itself