Speaking at the unveiling of the Bayeux Tapestry, Prime Minister Andy Burnham found himself talking not about medieval embroidery but about a very different kind of war painting, telling reporters he would relish the chance to see Picasso’s Guernica displayed somewhere in the UK. “I would love to see Guernica come to London,” he said. “I love it as a piece of social history. It’s an incredibly powerful work of art.”
He did not stop there. Asked whether such a loan was remotely realistic, Burnham suggested he might have a bit more pull than the average admirer. “I do know the people at the Reina Sofía, so who knows? I might try and pull a string or two out there,” he said, referring to the Madrid museum that has housed the painting since 1992. He also mentioned, almost as an aside, that he would love to see an L.S. Lowry painting shown in the capital as well, a smaller ambition but one that fits comfortably alongside the larger one.
Whether Burnham’s connections at the Reina Sofía amount to anything more than friendly acquaintance remains to be seen, and getting Guernica out of Spain, even briefly, would be no small undertaking. The painting has not travelled internationally in decades, and its history explains why any request to move it is treated with extreme caution by the institutions responsible for its care.
Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 in direct response to one of the twentieth century’s earliest and most notorious instances of terror bombing carried out against civilians. On April 26 of that year, Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe, acting alongside fascist Italian aircraft, bombed the Basque town of Guernica at the explicit request of General Francisco Franco. The assault lasted more than three hours, levelling much of the town with high explosive and incendiary bombs, while fighter planes machine-gunned residents as they fled. It was a genocidal attack on a civilian population, and reports of its brutality spread quickly through the international press.
The Spanish Republican government had already commissioned Picasso to produce a large mural for the Spanish pavilion at that year’s Paris World’s Fair. Reading the newspaper accounts and seeing photographs of the destruction, he redirected the commission entirely, producing instead an enormous black-and-white canvas built around images of agony and disorder. The screaming woman, the gored horse, the bull looming over the wreckage, none of these figures depict the bombing literally. They function instead as a kind of visual shorthand for suffering and the collapse of innocence, which is part of why the painting has retained its force for nearly ninety years without losing any of its immediacy.
Guernica did not return to Spain for decades. Picasso, who lived the rest of his life in exile from his homeland, refused categorically to let the painting be shown there while Franco remained in power. His objection was not abstract. Franco had orchestrated the military coup that triggered the Spanish Civil War in the first place, and it was Franco who had personally requested the German and Italian bombing raids that levelled Guernica and killed its residents. For Picasso, allowing the painting to hang anywhere within Franco’s Spain would have meant handing the regime a kind of moral cover it had no right to claim.
That refusal was tested directly in 1968, when Franco’s government made an actual attempt to acquire the painting, apparently hoping its presence in Spain would signal a degree of political modernisation to the outside world. Picasso turned the offer down flatly. He understood exactly what the regime intended, using the painting to soften or obscure its own history rather than confront it honestly.
To make his wishes legally binding, Picasso placed Guernica in the care of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, issuing instructions that the painting belonged to the Spanish people in principle but could not physically enter the country until, in his words, public liberties and democratic institutions had been fully restored. Franco ruled until he died in 1975, two years after Picasso died in 1973, meaning neither man lived to see the painting return home. Only after Spain completed its transition to democracy did Guernica finally arrive on Spanish soil, on September 10, 1981, an event significant enough that the newspaper El País ran the simple headline “The War Has Ended.”
It is unlikely that any of Burnham’s contacts at the Reina Sofía can realistically shift the museum’s position. Almost certainly it would need to weigh in very carefully. For now, Burnham’s remarks are aspirational rather than negotiable. The prime minister and former Culture Minister has expressed a genuine admiration for the painting, one that has spent most of its existence heightening the abomination of war. Let’s make this a reality.
Top Photo: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.