How a small photo of a bomb site took its place alongside Picasso’s Guernica

Robert Capa's image taken during Spanish civil war continues to enjoy potent afterlife in Reina Sofia museum

On the second floor of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, not far from Picasso's huge and ever-livid Guernica, hangs a much smaller but equally eloquent testament to the civilian cost of the Spanish civil war.

Robert Capa's photograph of No 10 Peironcely Street in the working-class Madrid barrio of Vallecas in the early winter of 1936, measures just 29.4cm by 40.2cm. Three children sit on the pavement in front of a shrapnel-gnawed house, smiling amid the rubble left by the German bombers Hitler sent to support Gen Franco's coup.