Guernica’s Odyssey to Spain: 45th anniversary

 

 

 

Lorraine Bacchus

 

 

 

1 Guernica by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), 1937. Oil on canvas, 349 x 776 cm. Reina Sofia Museum, Spain.
Photo: Lorraine Bacchus

 

 

Visitors to MOMA on Wednesday 8 September 1981 were unaware they would be the last to see Picasso’s Guernica on the walls of the Museum’s third-floor gallery. The next day a crew of handlers would begin a clandestine removal of what had become one of the most symbolic and famous paintings in the world (Pl 1). After more than four decades at the Museum, Guernica was leaving New York for Madrid. The last exile, as it came to be known, was going home. It was to be the first time the painting had been in Spain and it would never leave again. Most of MOMA’s staff only learned of its departure in an internal memo from the Director, Richard E Oldenburg: ‘We can take comfort [and] pride in parting with it with good grace, with all possible concern for Picasso’s wishes and with due recognition of the special significance which Guernica has for the people of Spain.’^[1]

The phrase ‘with good grace’ is perhaps a nod to how MOMA was reluctant to part with the painting, concerned that the democratic constitutional monarchy established in Spain after dictator Franco’s death did not meet Picasso’s stipulation for a Republic. Objections from some of the artist’s heirs and legal problems also delayed the handover. For Spanish officials, the push to resolve all these obstacles was urgent, as they were keen for the painting and its accompanying preparatory drawings to have a public unveiling in time for the centenary of Picasso’s birth on 25 October 1981. In the end it was the threat of a lawsuit and a slip of paper that helped turn things around: a receipt was found for 150,000 Francs that proved their ownership. This was the amount paid to Picasso by the exiled Spanish Government for a mural they had commissioned for Spain’s pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Fair – the mural that became Guernica.

A subject for the work was not stipulated but, since Picasso was Spain’s most famous living artist, they must have hoped he would produce something powerful that would boost support for the Republican cause in the country’s Civil War. It would have been impossible for them to have envisaged how globally influential their mural would become, and it seems extraordinary now to think that their response to Guernica was tepid. But they were happy at least that the canvas had been wrested from Picasso’s studio on rue des Grands Augustins in Paris just in time for the World Fair opening (Pl 2).

 

 

2 Picasso working on Guernica in the rue des Grands Augustins studio.
© Dora Maar, VEGAP, Madrid, 2026. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

 

 

The autonomous Basque government in exile was also unimpressed with the mural.^[2] Standing in front of the painting at the end of the fair, ‘Picasso offers it to them, saying, this is yours. If you want the painting, it’s yours. And they say, No thank you.’^[3] And so Picasso takes it back, an action that, according to Fernandez Quintanilla, one of the Spanish Diplomats who dealt with MOMA through the handover, probably saved the painting from being lost for ever: ‘Picasso picked up the painting from the exhibition because no-one else picked it up. If Picasso hadn’t picked it up, it would have ended up in the hands of the Franco government, which probably would have stored it in some basement, or burned it. Certainly it would never have become as celebrated as it is today.’^[4]

Accounts differ as to how Picasso, living in Paris, came to hear about the fascist aerial obliteration of the Basque town of Guernica in April 1937 – one of the first indiscriminate air raids against a civilian population – but news of the atrocity gave him what he had been struggling to find, namely a subject for the commissioned mural. Once he had this, it took Picasso only weeks to complete the huge, one-piece canvas measuring 3.4 x 7.76 m, an achievement that art historian Gijs van Hensbergen describes as nothing short of miraculous: ‘I mean any artist would be very happy to have filled the canvas let alone make a canvas which actually did what it was asked to do, which is scream out to the world and highlight what Republican Spain was suffering. That’s what it was supposed to do and that’s what it did magnificently and with immense power.’^[5]

Rosario Peiro, Head of Collections at the Reina Sofia Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid, where Guernica can now be seen, emphasises the continuing relevance of the painting: ‘There’s more and more interest, above all with the geo-political situation we’re currently living through, this painting is yet again becoming a protagonist.’^[6] Standing with her in front of Guernica, she makes it clear, however, that for the Museum it will always be more than an icon: ‘All the adjacent rooms are geared towards explaining the painting, not only the context but also the gestation and the composition of the painting… Our intention is that this painting continues to be a painting, not only a symbol. It can’t be one thing without the other.’^[7]

The photographs taken by Dora Maar (1907–1997) (Pl 3) are crucial to the Museum’s showing of the many stages of Guernica, the metamorphosis, as Picasso preferred to call it. Rarely, if ever, has a painting’s progression been documented in such detail.

 

 

3 Report on the evolution of Guernica. © Dora Maar, VEGAP, Madrid, 2026.
© Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

 

 

When she met Picasso, Maar was already established as one of the pre-eminent photographers in the circle of French Surrealists: her work was radical, political, and innovative in its own right. As an anti-fascist activist, Maar urged Picasso to seize upon the outrage of Guernica: ‘Four days after the bombing’, she said, ‘Picasso picks up his pencil and never puts it down again, convinced that artists cannot and must not remain indifferent to a conflict in which “the highest values of humanity are at stake”.’^[8]

After more than four decades of custodianship, MOMA’s staff must have almost forgotten the painting did not belong to them but, from the grave, Picasso’s wish was being imposed: that the painting be shown in Spain when democracy was restored. And on that September day of unsettled weather in New York, the time had finally come. The long wait for a dictator to die had ended six years earlier in 1975, but Spain’s transition to democracy had been complex and fraught.

Even as the top-secret arrangements were being made to move Guernica to Spain, confidence in the country’s fledgling democracy was dramatically challenged in an attempted coup, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero on 23 February 1981. But when the King emeritus Juan Carlos (presently in self-imposed exile in the UAE, following financial and personal scandals)^[9] spoke out against the insurrectionists, the coup was seen to have failed and the process of Guernica’s long-delayed journey to Spain stuttered back on course.

The painting had become stranded in MOMA because of the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Picasso had agreed it should remain in New York for safekeeping but made it clear that Spain, his native country, would be the ultimate and permanent recipient of the work. Guernica’s journey to MOMA had been part of an international propaganda and fund-raising tour in which it was exhibited dozens of times in eleven countries in Europe and the Americas in aid of the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War.

July 2026 marks the 90th anniversary of General Francisco Franco’s military uprising – the event that triggered the War and, only a year into his insurgence, the bombing of Guernica. The continued, very public, showing of the painting around the world had been the proverbial thorn in the side of Franco’s 36-year dictatorship. In Spain itself it was forbidden even to own a small reproduction of Guernica. But the painting’s absence from Spain only increased its power: it came to symbolise in absentia the hopes of many for a restored democracy.

Before crossing the Atlantic, one of its earlier destinations, in late 1938/39, was the Whitechapel Gallery in the heart of London’s East End during its first and only visit to Britain. This was a key moment for the Gallery’s role in exhibiting political art and its connection to working-class activism. The showing of Guernica was much more than an exhibition: it was a rallying call against fascism and in support of the Republican cause in Spain, with talks, films and news broadcasts about the Civil War being screened every day. This showing of the painting was thanks to Roland Penrose, the British Surrealist artist and close friend of Picasso, together with the Stepney Trade Union Council, and Clement Attlee, who was then the Labour Party leader. Attlee’s speech, as he stood in front of Guernica, was an impassioned warning against the rise of the far right: ‘If once fascism gets a hold, the people who will suffer most will be the young. Fascism tries to make the younger generation in its own image, to make every boy into the image of Hitler or Mussolini’ (Pl 4).^[10]

 

 

4 Clement Attlee at Guernica exhibition opening, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1939.
© Whitechapel Gallery Archive, Whitechapel Gallery.

 

 

The Whitechapel was, and is, free to all, but for the Guernica exhibition a voluntary admission charge was proposed – a pair of workman’s boots in good condition to be be sent to the country’s largely civilian Republican army. Hundreds of pairs were donated and lined up like ex votos at the base of the painting. Sadly, no photograph exists of this gesture of solidarity by Londoners but there is a contemporary artwork that commemorates it. The artist Mychael Barratt has made a wood and linocut version of the painting – with boots. When it was shown at Eames Fine Art in London, people were invited to replicate the historic donation of boots and many did so, and these were later given to a local charity (Pl 5).

 

 

5 Guernica at the Whitechapel by Mychael Barratt, 2023. Woodcut and linocut on paper. Signed and titled in pencil.
Numbered from the edition of 30 Image size: 1980 x 100 cm .Paper size: 209 x 110 cm. Photo: Eames Fine Art, London

 

 

Guernica made another appearance at the Whitechapel, albeit in tapestry form – the very tapestry that usually hangs in the United Nations, the very one at the centre of international outrage after it was covered up in 2003 to allow Colin Powell to make his fateful speech for the US-led invasion of Iraq. It was this infamous event that formed the centre point of an installation in 2009 by the London-based Polish artist Goshka Macuga. She mimicked the blue drapery that was used to obscure it at the UN but pointedly set the tapestry in front of it, highlighting and symbolically reversing the UN’s controversial decision (Pl 6).

 

 

6 The Nature of the Beast by Goshka Macuga (b 1967), installation view, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2009.
Photograph. © Whitechapel Gallery Archive, Whitechapel Gallery.

 

 

The historical and political events surrounding the genesis of Guernica still continue to reverberate. In November last year the German President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, became his country’s first Head of State to pay an official visit to the town of Guernica. There he took part in a remembrance ceremony marking what he described as the ‘terrible crimes’ of 1937: ‘It is very important to me, and I am consciously addressing this sentence to my compatriots in Germany, that we do not forget what happened back then. This crime was committed by Germans. Guernica serves as a warning – a call to stand up for peace, freedom and the preservation of human rights. We want to live up to that, now and in the future.’ Earlier, he had visited the Reina Sofia Museum to see Picasso’s Guernica, a formal acknowledgement of its symbolism and which, he said, ‘has lost none of its urgency’ (Pl 7).^[11]

 

 

7 German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and German First Lady Elke Buedenbender look at Guernica in Reina Sofía Museum during their State visit in Madrid, Spain, 26 November 2025. Photo: Rodrigo Jimenez/EPA/Shutterstock

 

 

The Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones speaks of the potency of the painting and of art: ‘The power of Guernica – to make us see the crimes of our own time more clearly – is a tribute to the moral efficacy of art. There is a reason everyone recognises Guernica as an image of the barbarity of bombing. The Second World War saw far more murderous air attacks, yet Guernica is the most universally remembered example of the pity of air raids – because Picasso painted it.’^[12]

The removal of Guernica from New York to Madrid was carried out with the secrecy of a military operation but one with an unexpectedly comical title: ‘Operación Cuadro Grande’ (‘Operation Big Painting’). A contingent of officials from Spain’s Culture Ministry had flown out a few days before MOMA’s de-installing of the canvas in order to oversee the delicate task of dismounting, rolling and packing of it and to formally accept possession and responsibility for the work. Spain’s state airline, Iberia, also had to be in on the operation, given that it was one of their scheduled commercial flights that was to transport the painting. On arrival in Madrid’s Barajas airport at 07.45 on 10 September 1981, it was the pilot who revealed to astonished passengers that Guernica was finally in Spain (Pl 8).

 

 

8 Guernica arrives in Madrid on 10 September 1981 on a scheduled flight from New York. Photo: Iberia Airlines

 

 

The announcement probably also served to reassure them about the reason for the presence on the tarmac of armed Civil Guards in their patent-leather tricorn hats – given that Tejero’s failed coup had only happened a few months before.

Newspapers the next day were emblazoned on their front pages with headlines of Guernica’s homecoming and of its one-way ticket. Its destination was 10 miles away at the Casón del Buen Retiro, an annexe of the Prado. One of those waiting to receive it was Carmen Garrido Pérez, Head of the Museum’s Technical Office. She describes how anxious she was: ‘It was all done with great secrecy. One day they called me and told me we had to take all the equipment in a van to the Casón. I had to work uncomfortably in a small room where that huge roll was being kept … behind me in a corner there was a Civil Guard with his machine gun. I remembered my days of running ahead of the police in May of ’68 and I thought to myself, what if that machine gun gets out of hand?’^[13]

 

 

9 Guernica encased in bullet-proof glass at the Casón del Buen Retiro. Photo: Museo Nacional del Prado

 

 

After technical analysis and inspection, the painting was publicly displayed in isolation behind bulletproof glass (Pl 9). At the opening ceremony, the Minister of Culture, Iñigo Cavero, made an emotive declaration: ‘This is the last exile returning to Spain today.’ Also there for the historic moment was 86-year-old Dolores Ibárruri, better known to the world as ‘La Pasionaria’. Her battle-cry of ‘No Pasarán’ (‘They shall not pass’) in broadcasts from a besieged Madrid became the motto of the Republican forces. Standing in front of Guernica, she gravely pronounced: ‘The Civil War is over.’^[14] Almost a million people visited Guernica in its first year in Spain. Forty-five years later, Guernica, is still the most visited painting in the Reina Sofia, somewhat belying John Berger’s assertion that ‘the days of art pilgrimage are over’.^[15]

The painting was relocated to the Reina Sofía Museum in 1992, a move that Peiro, the Head of Collections, says was correct and important: ‘In the Prado it was part of the tradition of Spain’s art, while here in the Reina Sofia, the world in which Picasso worked, it is part of the modern and contemporary international art scene.’^[16] Gertrude Stein is said to have complained to Picasso that his portrait of her didn’t resemble her. ‘She will,’ he reputedly replied. And something similar has taken place with Guernica – that at the time Picasso painted it, over those frenzied few weeks in 1937, it was criticised for not portraying anything specific of what had happened when the town was bombed. But now, nearly 90 years later, its fragmented representation has come to symbolise the horror of every war, making it a timeless, universal allegory (Pl 10).

 

 

10 Guernica mural, Marinaleda, Andalusia, Spain. Translation: ‘A curse on all wars and on those who wage them.’
Photo: Lorraine Bacchus

 

 

The tragedy is, of course, that Guernica does still resonate with peace campaigners around the world, as art historian TJ Clark, concludes: ‘Guernica lives on because the state of war and so-called peace to which it gives form lives on. Not never again, alas, but again and again and again. War from the air, states using their technical power to crush all attempts to resist their versions of allowable life, remains our surrounding reality.’^[17]

 

 

 

1. MOMA Archive, Press Release, 10 September 1981. ↑
2. There have since been many requests for the painting to be moved to the Basque region. The Spanish Ministry of Culture has recently refused another, this time to move it temporarily to the Guggenheim, Bilbao, for the 90th anniversary in 2027 of the bombing of Guernica. The Ministry cited the fragile condition of the painting for its refusal: El Pais, 7 April 2026. ↑
3. Dacia Viejo Rose, Lecturer in Heritage in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Selwyn College, BBC Radio 4, ‘In Our Time’, 2 November 2017. ↑
4. ‘For Spain, Guernica Stirs Memory and Awe’, James M Markham, New York Times, 2 November 1981. ↑
5. BBC Radio 4, ‘In Our Time’, 2 November 2017. ↑
6. In person interview with Lorraine Bacchus at the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, 11 December 2025. ↑
7. Ibid. ↑
8. ‘The Metamorphoses of Guernica’, Picasso Museum Paris, 8 April–6 September 2026. ↑
9. There have been recent renewed calls from right-wing politicians for the 88-year-old Juan Carlos to be allowed to return to Spain to ‘spend the last stage of his life with dignity in his own country’: BBC News, 27 February 2026. ↑
10. East London Advertiser, 7 January 1939, Whitechapel Gallery Archive. ↑
11. El Pais, 7 November 2025 ↑
12. ‘As Aleppo burns in this age of lies, Picasso’s Guernica still screams the truth about war,’ The Guardian, 12 October 2016. ↑
13. Website Archive, Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain. ↑
14. ‘Rethinking Guernica’, Reina Sofia Museum https://guernica.museoreinasofia.es/en ↑
15. ‘Ways of Seeing’, BBC series 1972 and book of same name. ↑
16. Ibid, n5. ↑
17. TJ Clark from his lecture ‘Why Guernica will not die’ at the Conference Guernica: Survival of a Myth, Picasso Museum, Spain, 18 November 2021. ↑