Why is Guernica mentioned in the glass menagerie?

Question

Picasso, like Tenessee Williams, created art that was autobiographical. Study the work that Picasso introduced during the 1930s, the same period of time in which The GLASS MENAGERIE takes place. How was the painting “Guernica” part of Picasso’s life? Why did Williams mention it in THE GLASS MENAGERIE?

Answer 1

Scenes One & Two
Summary: Scene One
Tom Wingfield steps onstage dressed as a merchant sailor and speaks directly to the audience. According to the stage directions, Tom “takes whatever license with dramatic convention is convenient to his purposes.” He explains the social and historical background of the play: the time is the late 1930s, when the American working classes are still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression. The civil war in Spain has just led to a massacre of civilians at Guernica.

The reference to Guernica was just used to convey what was going on in the world at that time and to explain the mood of the people.

Answer 2

William's alludes to the tragic event in Guernica where Nazi planes aided by Fascist forces used this small Basque town for bombing practise as a way of reminding his audience of the uneasy peace in America . This was one way of establishing a tense atmosphere in the play. Americans of the thirties lived in relative peace, but for the 1944-5 audience of the play's first production in the late 1930s, would have been seen as the calm before the storm of World War II. The allusion to the carnage at Guernica famously depicted in Picasso's painting served as a reminder to everyone that a long war lay ahead in which the United States were included.
There is also a connection between the uneasy peace of the time, and the uneasy peace in the Wingfield household where the hero Tom is desperate to escape home and go out into the world.
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/menagerie/section1.html

Answer 3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(painting)

Picasso said as he worked on the mural:
“ The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. How could anybody think for a moment that I could be in agreement with reaction and death? ... In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death. ”