A row has erupted in Spain over what to do with Pablo Picasso’s 1937 Cubist masterpiece ‘Guernica’. Since 1992, this gigantic black-and-white painting – which depicts the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica in April 1937 by planes from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany – has hung in Madrid’s Reina Sofía Museum. The Basque government has now requested that it be transferred to Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum from October this year to June 2027, to mark the 90th anniversary of Guernica’s destruction.

It’s often said in Spain that you need only scratch the surface to uncover Civil War-era grievances: the Guernica dispute shows how true this is

It’s often said in Spain that you need only scratch the surface to uncover Civil War-era grievances: the Guernica dispute shows how true this is

The resulting dispute has quickly turned political. Basque president Imanol Pradales claims that the presence of Guernica in Bilbao for nine months ‘would be a gesture of historical memory and symbolic reparation towards the Basque people’ – a reference to the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, in which Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces were supported by Hitler and Mussolini.

Pradales, whose PNV party provides crucial parliamentary support to Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s minority coalition, has warned that not granting his Guernica request........

© The Spectator