“We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession. In its ultimate extension, the truth about which we have been insane will lead us to look beyond the truth to something in which the imagination will be the dominant complement.” With these words, Wallace Stevens affirmed his conviction that imagination is essential to interpretations of reality. But does the same hold for historical realities; where the search for truth is often evasive, never complete, and even, as Stevens suggested, sanity-weakening? What does it mean to reinterpret history on a motionless, silent, two-dimensional canvas, where an event is compressed as an instantaneous flash that belongs not to the documentary, but to the imagination? It is uncertain whether this question was considered by Pablo Picasso when he created Guernica—his searing response to the Francoist bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937. Yet the interdependence of imagination and reality is essential to what he produced. By attending to this interplay in Guernica, it is possible to glean knowledge about the artwork’s corresponding historical reality, demonstrating how the imaginative treatment of an intensely violent past may be considered useful to historical interpretation.