More on Guernica
Earlier this week a conservator at the Reina Sofia in Madrid announced that Picasso's Guernica had suffered too much damage from previous travels ever to travel again, an announcement that I'm guessing was meant in part to discourage the Basque campaign to have the painting transferred to Bilbao or some other place in the Basque region. Now the director of the museum has chimed in. Manuel Borja-Villel has spoken to the Associated Press (via) and appears to be trying to pre-empt concerns that Guernica is in any kind of danger while still insisting it can never go out the door again.
For one thing, he clarifies that the 129 "changes" to the canvas — creases, stains and so forth — that were detected by the Reina Sofia's recent x-ray examination are the same number that were found by the Museum of Modern Art in New York when it performed the only previous analysis of Guernica's condition in 1957, when the painting was still in MOMA's temporary keeping.
Keep in mind that the AP story is a bit ambiguous when it says that after its debut at the Paris World's Fair in 1937 Guernica went "on the road for nearly 20 years." What it did was tour periodically. After the fair it traveled for a few years on fund raising tours for the Spanish loyalist cause before coming to rest with MOMA. Starting in January 1940 it also made an almost three-year tour around the U.S. Then in a four-year period starting in 1953 it went on several extended journeys, across Europe, to Brazil and around the U.S., when it was seen by millions of people — but not by Picasso, who was away from Paris when it stopped there in the summer of 1955. In fact he never saw the painting again after it was first shipped to New York in 1939. (For a complete account of Guernica's history I recommend Russell Martin's excellent little book Picasso's War.)
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I completely disagree with your thoughts, Richard, and there are some slight inaccuracies. When the Basque government has pronounced in this affair, they have often said that Gernika should be in Gernika, not in Guggenheim. Though I've never been to, Gernika is today a symbol of Basque nationalism and resistance, that represents a tension between modernism and localism very interesting. Think about the abstract sculpture Árbol de Gernika (Guernika tree), which presides Basque parlament today. Though this tension is constant in Basque modernism, from Oteiza and Chillida to Txomin Badiola and Jon Mikel Euba, I believe it is not in Picasso's Gernika, which is a prime example of the universalization of war and conflict under a Republic living his end. Now, there is a disregard of the painting claims if it is understood through the tension of localism so present in Basque art.
Picasso himself stated that the painting had to hang in Prado's Museum, probably because the field of relationships that would be established because he also thought the painting as a history painting tainted with Baroque allegory. However, Reina Sofia is likely the best place to reellaborate those connections and present the painting as a document alive. For instance, the painting was presented as a totem, with no background. One of the first actions of the new director, the aforementioned Manuel Borja Villel, has been to reconstruct the exhibition context and place the painting as the center of modernism political reaction, related with Calder, Renau, Sert and even one documentary written by Buñuel.
I believe that if the painting were in Gernika, many of these connections and elaborations on the painting woulb be totally impossible, and the totem would be back. The idea to see Gernika in an institution that understands culture as an integrated in the consumption and relationships of spectacle, from the building to the collection and exhibitions, like Guggenheim, is totally inadequate to the political simbolism and historic height of the painting.
I sincerely can't believe myself seeing the show Armani or Hollywood Motocycles, and then passing by Gernika. That's a process of banalization very dangerous.
Well, sorry about the long paragraph, and do come and see the new installation.
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