Is Guernica Too Frail to Move?

Guernica, Picasso, 1937 /MUSEO NACIONAL REINA SOFIA

In recent months a team of curators and conservators at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid has been examining Picasso's great canvas Guernica. Now the museum's chief of restoration, Jorge García Gómez Tejedor, has told the Spanish daily El Pais that the picture has suffered damage from being moved in the past and must not move again. I wonder.

First a little background. Guernica, probably the most famous work of art about wartime suffering, has been for years at the center of a tug of war itself. Madrid has it. The Basques want it. The subject of the painting is of course the 1937 bombing raid on the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. It was an attack enthusiastically carried out by German pilots at the urging of the rebel general Francisco Franco. Not long after, Picasso, who was living in Paris, was approached by a delegation from the beleaguered Spanish Republic, who asked him to produce a major work for the Spanish pavilion at the upcoming Paris world's fair. His response was Guernica. When the fair ended the much publicized painting went on a tour of four Scandinavian cities to raise funds for the Loyalist cause, then on to London and the U.S. for the same purpose. All in vain. Franco prevailed in the Spanish war. Then came World War II and the German occupation of Paris, where Picasso would glumly sit out the war.

Meanwhile his painting would become a sort of war refugee in the U.S., held in trust by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Picasso would always stipulate that it belonged to the Spanish people but shouldn't go to them until they were free of the Franco dictatorship. Picasso died in 1972, Franco three years later. With the generalissimo out of the way, Spain began the transition to democracy that eventually convinced Picasso's heirs that it was time for the painting to go "home".

But where exactly was home? Since not long after it arrived in Spain in 1981, the painting has been on display at the Reina Sofia. But because Guernica was a Basque town, Basque nationalists have been pressing from the start for the work to be transferred to the Basque region. The Bilbao Guggenheim, which didn't exist in 1981, would be the most likely place for it now.  

I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the still ongoing Reina Sofia study of Guernica's physical condition, which has so far turned up 129 "changes" to the canvas, many of them due to being repeatedly rolled up during that world tour 70 years ago. But the conclusion that it can't be moved again, which certainly serves the interests of the Reina Sofia, needs to be seen in the context of the regional struggle between Madrid and the Basques. I'm guessing a move could be handled much more gently this time. It's not like they'd be shipping it in a FedEx tube.