Spanish politicians clash over request to move Picasso’s Guernica | Spain
A row has broken out between the governments of Madrid and the Basque region in Spain over a request to temporarily house Guernica, arguably Picasso’s most famous work, in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao to mark the 90th anniversary of the bombing of the Basque town.
The work has been on display at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid since 1992, and repeated requests to move it to the Basque Country have been rejected.
The latest demand saw Isabel Díaz Ayuso, Madrid’s outspoken, conservative president, and Aitor Esteban, leader of the Basque nationalist party, trading insults, each accusing the other of being “provincial”.
“There is no point in going back to the way things were,” Ayuso said. “Then we should send all Picasso’s works to Malaga,” he said, referring to the city of his birth.
“It represents a provincial mentality where culture is universal,” said Reina Sofia, insisting that moving Guernica carries the risk of damaging the work.
Esteban retorted that if anyone was from the country, it was Ayuso who said that the idea of national identity was “drinking beer on the terrace of the bar”; This was a reference to the Madrid president’s insistence on keeping bars open during the pandemic.
Basque President Imanol Pradales asked: “Does the Spanish government have the courage to move Guernica? They exhumed Franco and they cannot afford to move a painting from Madrid to Euskadi.” [the Basque region]? “The ball is in their court,” he said.
The Basque government wants the painting to hang at the Guggenheim from October 1 to June 30 to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica.
Picasso’s black and white masterpiece depicts the violence of the attack carried out by the Italian air force on April 26, 1937, during the Spanish civil war. Italy was an ally of the Spanish general Francisco Franco, and the attack was the first attempt at aerial bombardment of civilians in what would soon become a routine war.
Estimates of the number killed at Guernica vary widely, from 126 to 1,654; but in any case, Picasso’s work became an international symbol of the horrors of war.
He painted it shortly after the event and it was exhibited at the Paris International Exhibition in 1937. It subsequently toured Europe and the United States and hung in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York for many years because of Picasso’s opposition to his return to Spain during the Franco dictatorship.
In 2000, Reina Sofia rejected MoMA’s request to borrow Guernica, saying “the great icon of our museum must remain separate from the policy of lending works to other museums, without exception.”
