From El Greco's compressed cosmos in late-sixteenth-century Toledo to Antoni Tàpies's matter paintings in late-twentieth-century Barcelona, ten Spanish painters built the visual vocabulary the rest of Europe and the Americas borrowed from. The decisions each one made, and the line between them.

Guernica is the most famous anti-war painting of the twentieth century — but it is also a specific argument, built piece by piece out of a visual grammar Goya invented in 1814. The bull, the horse, the lit lamp, the screaming mother, the broken sword. What each part of Guernica says, and the line of paintings that taught Picasso how to say it.