A painting is not thought out and settled in advance. While it is being done, it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it’s finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it. — Pablo Picasso

In a famous story about Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s wrenching 1937 anti-war mural, a gestapo officer barges into the painter’s Paris studio and asks, “did you do that?”, to which Picasso acerbically replies, “you did.” The title refers to the 1937 bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War, carried out by Spanish Nationalists and the Luftwaffe. Whether or not the anecdote about Picasso and the Nazi ever happened is unimportant; it encapsulates the artist’s disgust and outrage over the atrocities of war and the takeover of his country by Franco’s Nationalists, unyielding sentiments found not only in the painting but also its path through the world.

“Guernica had this really unique relationship with Picasso and his life,” says art historian Patricia Failing. “In a way it was his alter ego.” This is a bold claim considering that during most of his career, “Picasso generally avoids politics,” notes PBS, “and disdains overtly political art.” After the mural’s exhibition at the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, however, the painting was sent on tours of Europe and North America “to raise consciousness about the threat of fascism.”

In 1939, after the fall of Madrid, the artist declared, “The painting will be turned over to the government of the Spanish Republic the day the Republic is restored in Spain!”  Then, almost 30 years later,

In a surprisingly ironic turn, Franco launched a campaign in 1968 for repatriation of the painting, assuring Picasso that the Spanish Government had no objection to the controversial subject matter. One can only imagine how incredulous Picasso must have been. Through his lawyers, Picasso turned the offer down flat, making it clear that Guernica would be turned over only when democracy and public liberties were restored to Spain.

Picasso died in 1973 and never saw his country free from fascism. Franco died two years later. The painting was not exhibited in Spain until 1981 — not a “return,” but a restoration, perhaps, of an international icon that had endured 44 years of exile, had become a potent anti-war symbol during the Vietnam War, and had survived a vandal attack the year after the artist’s death.

In the Great Art Explained video above, James Payne “looks at some of the more acknowledged interpretations along with techniques, composition and artistic inspiration,” as the video’s description notes. “We all know that Art is not truth,” Picasso said, consistently discouraging tidy interpretations of Guernica as a straightforward protest painting. “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” What do we realize when we stand before the mural — all 11 by 25 feet of it? It depends upon our state of mind, the artist might say, as he engulfs viewers in an allegorical nightmare standing in for a very real horror.

Related Content: 

The Gestapo Points to Guernica and Asks Picasso, “Did You Do This?;” Picasso Replies “No, You Did!”

Guernica: Alain Resnais’ Haunting Film on Picasso’s Painting & the Crimes of the Spanish Civil War

The Mystery of Picasso: Landmark Film of a Legendary Artist at Work, by Henri-Georges Clouzot

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

To our way of thinking, the question is not whether Marcel Duchamp conceived of Fountain, history’s most famous urinal, as art or prank.

Nor is it the ongoing controversy as to whether the piece should be attributed to Duchamp or his friend, avant-garde poet and artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

The question is why more civilians don’t head for the men’s room armed with black paint pens (or alternatively, die-cut stickers) to enhance every urinal they encounter with the signature of the non-existent “R. Mutt.”

The art world bias that was being tested in 1917, when the signed urinal was unsuccessfully submitted to an unjuried exhibition at the Society of Independent Artists, has not vanished entirely, but as curator Sarah Urist Green explains in the above episode of The Art Assignment, the past hundred years has witnessed a lot of conceptual art afforded space in even the most staid institutions.

Fountain was a premeditated piece, but sometimes, these artworks, or pranks, if you prefer — Green favors letting each viewer reach their own conclusions — are more spontaneous in nature.

She references the case of two teenaged boys who, underwhelmed by a Mike Kelley stuffed animal installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, positioned a pair of eyeglasses in such a way that other visitors assumed they, too, were part of an exhibit.

One of the boys told The New York Times that “when art is more abstract, it is more difficult to interpret,” causing him to lose interest.

“We had a good laugh about it,” the other added.

And that, for us, gets to the heart of Fountain’s enduring power.

Plenty of art world stunts, whether their intention was to shock, critique, or screw with the gatekeepers have been lost to the ages.

Fountain, at heart, is a particularly memorable kind of funny…

Funny in the same way poet Russell Edson’s “With Sincerest Regrets” is funny:

WITH SINCEREST REGRETS

for Charles Simic

Like a white snail the toilet slides into the living room, demanding to be loved. It is impossible, and we tender our sincerest regrets.In the book of the heart there is no mention made of plumbing.

And though we have spent our intimacy many times with you, you belong to a rather unfortunate reference, which we would rather not embrace…

The toilet slides out of the living room like a white snail, flushing with grief…

More recent art world controversies — Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” and Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ — arose from the juxtaposition of serious religious subject matter with bodily fluids.

By contrast, Fountain took the piss out of a secular high church — the established art world.

And it did so with a factory-fresh urinal, no more gross than a porcelain dinner plate.

No wonder people couldn’t stop talking about it!

We still are.

Green recounts how performance artists Cai Yuan and Jian Jun Xi attempted to “celebrate the spirit of modern art” by urinating on the Tate Modern’s Fountain replica in 2000.

That performance, titled “Two artists piss on Duchamp’s Urinal” was “intended to make people re-evaluate what constituted art itself and how an act could be art.”

Their action might have made a more elegant — and funnier — statement had the Fountain replica not been displayed inside a vitrine.

Still, drawing attention to their inability to hit the target might, as Green suggests, highlight how museum culture “fetishizes and protects the objects” it, or history, deems worthy.

Related Content:

When Brian Eno & Other Artists Peed in Marcel Duchamp’s Famous Urinal

The Iconic Urinal & Work of Art, “Fountain,” Wasn’t Created by Marcel Duchamp But by the Pioneering Dada Artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Watch Marcel Duchamp’s Hypnotic Rotoreliefs: Spinning Discs Creating Optical Illusions on a Turntable (1935)

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.  Follow her @AyunHalliday.

Far be it from me, or anyone, to know the future, but several signs point toward another season or two of staying indoors — and maybe putting travel plans on hold again. If, like me, you find yourself itching to get away, maybe to finally make the journey to see the art you’ve only seen in small-scale reproductions, don’t despair just yet. The art is coming to you, in ultra-high resolution, gigapixel images from Google Cultural Institute.

See extraordinary levels of detail in famous works of art like Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring and Van Gogh’s Starry Night. “So much of the beauty and power of art lives in the details,” writes Google Cultural Institute Engineer Ben St. John.

“You can only fully appreciate the genius of artists like Monet or Van Gogh when you stand so close to a masterpiece that your nose almost touches it.” This kind of intimacy is nearly impossible to achieve in a crowded gallery.

Google’s enormous art photographs are, in some ways, superior to observation with the eye: “Zooming into these images is the closest thing to walking up to the real thing with a magnifying glass.” Even when painted on flat canvases, works of art exist in three dimensions, and there’s still the matter of color reproduction on your screen…. Yet the point remains: there’s no way you’d be able to get as close to Monet or Van Gogh’s work in person unless you were a conservator or maybe a museum guard.

Creating these images has hitherto been an extremely time-consuming affair that required the expert know-how of technicians, a process that has hampered the wide adoption of gigapixel images for the study of art. “In the first five years of the Google Cultural Institute,” Google admits, “we’ve only been able to share about 200 gigapixel images.” The process can now be automated, however, expanding the gallery to 1800+ images and counting, with the invention of a sophisticated machine called the Art Camera:

A robotic system steers the camera automatically from detail to detail, taking hundreds of high resolution close-ups of the painting. To make sure the focus is right on each brush stroke, it’s equipped with a laser and a sonar that—much like a bat—uses high frequency sound to measure the distance of the artwork. Once each detail is captured, our software takes the thousands of close-up shots and, like a jigsaw, stitches the pieces together into one single image.

The technological breakthrough inarguably enhances our experience of art, whether we ever get to see these works in person, and it preserves a cultural legacy for posterity. “Many of the works of our greatest artists are fragile and sensitive to light and humidity,” Google Arts & Culture notes. “With the Art Camera, museums can share these priceless works with the global public while they’re ensuring they’re preserved for future generations.”

They are preserved in multiple views that give the illusion of a three-dimensional experience, including a “street view” option that places viewers inside the gallery and an augmented reality app called Art Projector that “lets you see how artworks look in real size in front of you.” Viewing art this way goes miles beyond my art history education spent staring at the pages of Janson’s History of Art, trying to imagine what it would be like if I could actually see what was happening on the canvas.

Projects like Google Arts & Culture offer an entirely new kind of art education by digitally conserving hundreds of artworks that don’t tend to appear in textbooks, surveys, or museum gift shops. Works, for example, like Joos van Craesbeeck’s Hieronymus Bosch-influenced The Temptation of Saint Anthony, which show how seriously Bosch’s contemporaries and followers took his medieval “diableries”; and Kristian Zahrtmann’s 1894 painting The Mysterious Wedding in Pistoia. “Idolised” in his time, Zahrtmann “managed to rejuvenate Danish painting in the early 20th century” then sank into obscurity. His work is now “the object of renewed interest — at the dawn of another new century.”

While I hope our experience of art does not become primarily virtual, we can be grateful for the opportunity to see — in ways we never could before — the up-close handiwork of artists who can feel so far away from us even in the best of times. Enter the collection here.

Related Content: 

Google Puts Over 57,000 Works of Art on the Web

The Art Institute of Chicago Puts 44,000+ Works of Art Online: View Them in High Resolution

Download 586 Free Art Books from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness