Guernica Wants to House Picasso Masterpiece

MADRID (Agence France-Presse)—Officials in Guernica have renewed calls for Picasso's masterpiece representing the destruction of the Basque town in northern Spain by German warplanes 70 years ago to be put on display there.

"We shall continue to demand it, it belongs to the dead, to the survivors," the mayor of Guernica, Miguel Angel Aranaz, told the AFP ahead of a ceremony on Thursday to mark the 70th anniversary of the bombing that leveled the town.

Named after the Basque town, the huge black and white painting is considered by many as modern art's most powerful anti-war symbol. It has been on display since 1992 in Madrid at the Reina Sofia Art Centre.

Musuem directors categorically refuse to allow the oil painting to travel anywhere because of its advanced state of deterioration, a decision backed by Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

The mural, which is 11 feet tall, was exhibited in more than 50 different places around the world between 1937 and 1957, including Brazil, Germany and the United States.

The frequent moves during this time damaged the painting and it is now very fragile, the head of the museum's conservation department, Jorge Garcia, told the AFP last year.

"It is unthinkable to wrap it up again, anyone who desires this is crazy," he said at the time.

Assigned to paint a mural for Spain's pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris, Picasso decided to represent the bombing of Guernica by German planes backing the right-wing forces of General Francisco Franco during Spain's 1936-39 Civil War.

The attack on April 26, 1937 leveled three-quarters of the historic town, killing hundreds of the roughly 6,000 people which called it home at the time.

"In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death," Picasso was quoted as saying as he worked on the mural.

After Franco won the civil war and established a dictatorship, Picasso arranged for the Museum of Modern Art in New York keep the painting for as long as he was in power.

During the Vietnam War, the room housing Guernica became the site of occasional anti-war vigils.

Franco died in 1975—two years after Picasso—and in 1981 the painting arrived in newly democratic Spain where it was housed first in an annex of Madrid's Prado museum before being moved to the Reina Sofia, which is named after Spain's current queen.

The regional Basque government, led by nationalists, first asked Madrid in April last year to allow the painting to be exhibited "temporarily" at Bilbao's Guggenheim museum for the 70th anniversary of the Guernica bombing.

For many Basques Guernica is an important symbol of their national identity as the town is considered the centre of their cultural traditions.

Many across Spain however have come to see the painting as a symbol of the civil war that killed half a million people on both sides.

Keeping the painting in Madrid, one of Europe's most visited cities, would ensure more people get a chance to see the work, opponents of moving it argue.