My taste is in agreement with yours, but I'm not sure Guernica fits the other examples you gave.
In person it's overwhelming, because it's huge - much too big to hold in your head at once - and every corner of it has something happening in it. Something horrible, or a horrified / horrorific reaction to something horrible. The abstractions and symbolism also create this kind of dreamlike, inarticulable sense of "we'll never get to the bottom of this" - with this being the painting itself, and by extension the experience it depicts.
My guess is that an inhabitant of a future utopian civilization, which had eliminated violence for generations, would have no frame of reference, and no (or an inadequate) emotional response. I don't, however, think it would take any specific knowledge ("in 1937 the Germans..." blah blah blah) to recognize and respond to the painting as depicting experiences and responses common to violence and destruction and war anywhere and any time those happen.
In person it's overwhelming, because it's huge - much too big to hold in your head at once - and every corner of it has something happening in it. Something horrible, or a horrified / horrorific reaction to something horrible. The abstractions and symbolism also create this kind of dreamlike, inarticulable sense of "we'll never get to the bottom of this" - with this being the painting itself, and by extension the experience it depicts.
My guess is that an inhabitant of a future utopian civilization, which had eliminated violence for generations, would have no frame of reference, and no (or an inadequate) emotional response. I don't, however, think it would take any specific knowledge ("in 1937 the Germans..." blah blah blah) to recognize and respond to the painting as depicting experiences and responses common to violence and destruction and war anywhere and any time those happen.