This paper takes the Pablo Picasso retrospective, which included Guernica, at the second São Paulo Bienal of 1953–54 as a lens to examine how artists and critics in Cold War Brazil crafted aesthetic politics and diverged from earlier local and international debates of abstraction and realism. The attributions of meaning to Picasso’s work at the Bienal by actors from a spectrum of Communist and anti-Communist alignments evaded easy partisan and aesthetic delineations to reveal varied attempts to reconcile Marxism and formalism and a collective wrestling with the place of the local in modernism.