Guernica is almost eight metres long. It weighs, with its transport structure, more than 500 kilos, and, it has not left Madrid since 1981, when it arrived by plane from New York after four decades of exile.
Since then, every time someone has asked to borrow Picasso's most famous painting, the answer has been the same: no. But this latest request, unusually, has come from the Spanish government.
Authorities in the autonomous Basque region argue that the issue goes beyond the cultural aspect.
The Basque government leader Imanol Pradales wants the work to be exhibited at Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum between October 2026 and June 2027, to coincide with the 90th anniversary of the first Basque Government and the bombing of Guernica.
According to Basque government sources, the move would be "a symbolic and political reparation, not only to the Basque people, but also a message to the world".
The Reina Sofía museum in Madrid, however, does not see it that way and maintains that the painting can't withstand the journey.
What the technical report says
The Conservation-Restoration Department of the Madrid museum published a few days ago a 16-page report in which it "categorically" advises against the transfer. The document describes the current state of the canvas with a level of detail that leaves little room for interpretation: various examples of cracks and micro-cracks,loss of polychromy, pictorial lacunae.
Part of the damage comes from the paint used by Picasso, which has "an added fragility". But most of it, according to the technicians, is a direct consequence of the more than 30 journeys the painting underwent between the 1930s and its arrival in Spain.
On many of these journeys, the work had to be rolled up to fit into the transport containers, a process that left its mark. In 1957, given the poor state of conservation it was already in, resin wax was applied to the reverse and it was reinforced with linen and cotton strips.
The report is clear about what could happen with a new movement: "Vibrations could generate new cracks, lifting and loss of the pictorial layer, as well as tears in the support". It adds that the work "cannot be rolled up" and must remain in a vertical position with stable humidity and temperature conditions.
A debate that goes beyond conservation
The Basque Government does not dispute the state of the painting. What it does dispute is the question.
According to Pradales, the formal request that the Basque Minister of Culture, Ibone Bengoetxea, sent to her Madrid counterpart, Ernest Urtasun was not an enquiry about the state of conservation, but instead a statement about the conditions under which it would be possible to move it: what technology, what guarantees, what cost.
The Reina Sofía's reply, published barely a day after the meeting, did not respond to this.
"It would be a serious matter for a formal request from a government to be answered without a serious and in-depth analysis," said Bengoetxea. The Basque authorities insist they are willing to cover all the costs of the operation and to create a specific technical commission to coordinate it.
The tension also has a political undercurrent that no one is trying to conceal. The negotiation is taking place at a time of transfer of powers between the state and the Basque Country, and Guernica has become a state cause for the Pradales government. Pradales even went so far as to warn Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez that closing the door on this issue would be "a serious political mistake".
A record of refusals without added controversy
What complicates the Basque position is that the Reina Sofía has a consistent track record. In 1997 it refused to include Guernica in the opening of Bilbao's own Guggenheim. In 2000 it said no to the MoMA in New York. In 2006, it rejected a request from Canada's Royal Ontario Museum. It said no to a previous demand from the Basque government in 2007 and also dismissed claims from a Japanese television channel in 2009 and disappointed a Korean museum in 2012.
None of these refusals opened a diplomatic crisis of this magnitude, perhaps because none of them carried the symbolic weight of the 90th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica.
This week, the town's own mayor, José María Gorroño, has gone further than the Basque government: if the painting has to be moved, he says, the natural place is not Bilbao but Guernica.
