A request by the Basque Country to host Pablo Picasso’s wartime masterpiece Guernica has caused a political spat with Madrid and raised questions about the significance of the painting and the events that inspired it.
Picasso painted the work in 1937, just months after Germany’s Condor Legion and Italy’s air force had firebombed the northern Basque town of Gernika in support of Francisco Franco’s rebels during the Spanish civil war.
Depicting the horrors of war in stark black-and-white, the painting was shown at the Paris International Exhibition that year and is widely regarded as one of the Spanish artist’s greatest works. Since 1981 it has been exhibited in the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid.
On Sunday, the president of the Basque Country, Imanol Pradales, appealed to Madrid to allow Guernica to be moved to his region between October this year and June next year, stating that the coming months represent “a period of great symbolism and political relevance” for Basques. This year marks the 90th anniversary of the first Basque government and April 2027 marks the 90th anniversary of the bombing of Gernika.
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“Will the Spanish government have the political bravery to bring Guernica to the Basque Country?” Pradales, of the moderate Basque Nationalist Party, asked supporters at an event to mark the Basque national day.
“It would be a good way of making progress in terms of reparation for the Basque people [and] democratic memory,” he added.
The Basque regional government has made similar requests before and Pradales personally asked the Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, to approve the transfer of the painting several weeks ago.
However, the central government has responded by citing a report by the Reina Sofía Museum that warns that moving Guernica could damage it. Ernest Urtasun, the Spanish minister of culture, said “the reports are clear, they overwhelmingly advise against [moving the painting].”
Spain has 17 regional governments, with varying degrees of autonomy. The president of the Madrid region, the conservative populist Isabel Díaz Ayuso, accused her Basque counterpart of provincialism, describing his proposal as “blind, absurd, oikish”.
“The heritage of Spaniards belongs to all Spaniards,” she said. “You can’t divide it up into 17 [regions].”
The Basque proposal would see Guernica hang in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which receives more than one million visitors each year. The Reina Sofía has turned down several other similar requests for the loan of the painting, including from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which had looked after it during Spain’s four-decades dictatorship.
Díaz Ayuso’s comments drew an acid response from Arnaldo Otegi, leader of the Basque left-wing nationalist coalition EH Bildu.
“Isabel, the contribution of your lot in Gernika was the Condor Legion,” he said, adding that the painting “belongs to the Basque Country”.
The controversy has raised broader questions about the painting – and the bombing of the town of Gernika itself. Critics of the Basque government’s demand say that Guernica represents the suffering of all peoples during wartime, not just the Basques. The right-wing political commentator Antonio Casado said the 1937 attack had been part of an offensive against republican Spain and that the Basque government was distorting history.
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“Why go now and ask the central government ... for the temporary transfer of Guernica as an act of ‘reparation’ for a supposed attack on the Basque people, as if they were the only ones affected by fascism and as if the Spanish state were the aggressor which now must apologise?” he said.
In November, the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, visited Gernika and acknowledged his country’s “historical responsibility” for its involvement in the bombing of the town.
