Before becoming one of the defining images of the twentieth century, Guernica was an unstable process made of sketches, photographs, revisions and visual fragments linked to the Spanish Civil War. Les métamorphoses de Guernica, at the Musée Picasso, attempts to bring the painting back into that original moment through a VR experience that reconstructs the mental and physical environment in which the work emerged. Rather than functioning as a conventional exhibition, the project uses virtual reality to immerse visitors inside Pablo Picasso’s Paris studio in 1937, during the creation of the large mural commissioned for the Spanish Pavilion at the Exposition Internationale. The digital environment is built from historical photographs, archival documents and three-dimensional reconstructions that allow viewers to follow the different stages in the painting’s transformation. A central part of the experience focuses on the photographs taken by Dora Maar, who documented the evolution of Guernica almost daily. Through these images, the project reveals how figures, compositions and details continuously changed throughout the process: distorted horses, fragmented bodies, screaming mothers and lamps appear and disappear within a painting still in flux. The VR experience also emphasises the relationship between Guernica and the circulation of media images during the 1930s. Newspapers, war photographs and headlines reporting the bombing of the Basque town on 26 April 1937 move through the immersive environment, suggesting how Picasso absorbed the visual violence of contemporary conflict into the construction of the work itself. Visitors do not simply observe the finished painting, but enter into its process of metamorphosis. The walls of the studio are crossed by newspaper clippings, words, photographs and graphic fragments that transform the space into a kind of mental landscape suspended between historical memory and digital imagination. In recent years many museums have used virtual reality to create spectacular experiences around major masterpieces. The Musée Picasso project appears instead to focus primarily on the processual dimension of the work, using technology not to monumentalise Guernica but to reveal its instability, layering and continual transformation. Rather than reconstructing a single painting, Les métamorphoses de Guernica attempts to make visible the moment in which a political image takes shape amid the chaos of war, media circulation and the visual memory of 1930s Europe.
