Picasso was trying for greatness and he achieved it in this painting. It commands the space in the Reina Sophia and it pulls you right in. I've never seen it before in the flesh - always just missing it when it traveled. But what a charge! It's no wonder the ABEX guys were sweating over Picasso - the play between flat space, classical volume and the disregard for precedent are all right here. The screaming horse, the knife-like beams of electric light and the fractured geometry turn Modernism into a grand visual experience. I thought - we don't have a Guernica today - even as the empire unleashes its military ferocity on smaller countries. We don't have a visual language or visual history for it. Greenberg was all about pleasure, Pop all about image and minimalism all about material - our political art is heavy on political light on art. Guernica still resonates because it isn't just about the time or the place - but about grander human issues. Could Pollock's drip have made something as hard as this - or could deKoo's goop push buttons like this? Postmodernism's navel gazers sure couldn't get close - not with their painty-photo-repros or billboard aesthetics. For me I think Stella's Von Kleist paintings feel a bit of this - speed and violence, but overall examinations of brushstrokes or swirls of color can't even get in the same room. As you get through the Museo you run across the POMOs - there's a boxy Scully, a stripey Bleckner(boy was I stunned,) a Katz portrait of his wife, Schnabel's hero Tapies and a bunch of Euro Art Professionals that make paintings. Nothing compares.