Ernest Urtasun has once again reminded the PNV that. The Minister of Culture has been blunt with Senator Igotz López in the Government control session in the Senate. “I understand the sensitivity behind this request. We are talking about a work linked to the memory of Gernika and the pain it symbolizes. My obligation is to guarantee access to culture and also guarantee heritage. In matters like this we must listen to the technicians who have preserved the work for 30 years. The reports are clear and advise against moving the piece due to the risks it entails. Celebrating the 90th anniversary of Gernika must be guaranteeing that this work can serve 90 more years. My obligation is preserve this heritage.”
López has insisted on the position of the Basque Government, which for two weeks has been demanding a working group of experts to guarantee the transfer. “We ask for a temporary and exceptional transfer. We insist on the creation of a working group of technicians from the Reina Sofía, the Guggenheim and international experts to assess whether it is possible. I believe that the technical advances would make it possible and the experience of the Guggenheim is proven. All that is needed is political will for this analysis.”
The Minister of Culture has resorted on several occasions to the report prepared by the Madrid museum to justify his blunt response. “He Guernica It is not just any painting, it is one of the most fragile and complex to transport,” said Urtasun. The nationalists have also referred to the document, but to the part in which the institution’s curators argue, as the Basque senator has read, that “the piece is capital for the museum and our reason for being would be lost.” López has clung to this point to finish his request: “If its survival depends on the exhibition of the Guernica They have a problem. The Reina Sofía could assert itself beyond the Guernica. We ask for height of vision and sensitivity. Not trying would be undoubtable.”
Hours before the face-to-face meeting, the Vice President and Basque Minister of Culture, Ibone Bengoetxea, had already reiterated her Government’s position: “We have not asked for a report on the status of the painting.” The PNV, its spokesperson said, is not interested in the opinion of the curators of the piece either, what the Basque nationalists have been requesting since March 24, when they also met with Urtasun at the Ministry of Culture to request the transfer of the canvas, is to know “what would be the optimal conditions for this painting to come home.”
The Basque Government has defended for almost two weeks that they were waiting for what they call “a formal response” from Pedro Sánchez’s executive. “Governments respond to each other and we are waiting for a response,” Bengoetxea concluded Tuesday morning. With Urtasun’s response at the parliamentary headquarters, the PNV once again receives the same refusal from the minister to the request made by the Lehendakari, Imanol Pradales, in a meeting with the President of the Government for the transfer of the painting that has been housed in the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid since 1992.
The objective of the PNV is for the painting to travel to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, where they want it to be exhibited between October 1, 2026 and June 30, 2027, on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the constitution of the first Basque Government and the bombing of Gernika, which occurred on April 26, 1937. “It would be a gesture of historical memory and symbolic reparation towards the Basque people,” the lehendakari to the president. Last weekend, the Basque ruler took advantage of Aberri Eguna (Basque homeland day) to ask Sánchez if he was going to have
A new political actor has joined the controversy this Tuesday. The spokesperson for the Catalan Government, Sílvia Paneque, has endorsed the PNV’s request: “It makes cultural sense and is a democratic duty.” Paneque has said that the representatives of the autonomous communities would do well to respond with “respect and education” to the demands of other territories. The councilor has stated that we must also take into account the “technical” criteria used by the Reina Sofía Museum, which categorically rejects the trip in a report. But the Generalitat has avoided making any comparison with Sijena’s paintings, in the MNAC, and which the justice system has ordered to be transferred to Aragon.
Urtasun has also responded to Ayuso during his speech in the Senate: “Allow me to say something clearly, in the face of those who describe this request as ignored, this ministry wants to show respect and empathy.”
Museum refusal
The Reina Sofía has never agreed to the possibility of moving the painting, not even in cases as exceptional as the request made in 2000 by the MoMA in New York. “The great icon of our museum must remain without exceptions outside the institution’s loan policy,” states the four-page report from the Reina Sofía on the “history of requests” received.
The linen and jute fabric canvas (original dimensions of 349.4 by 776.6 centimeters) was analyzed in 1997 after “suffering more than 30 roamings” and as many windings and it was then considered that “the optimal conditions for its conservation had to necessarily be stable, with strict control of climatic fluctuations, avoiding all types of vibrations.” , in other words, to the same conclusion: “The work is currently maintained in stable conditions thanks to a rigorous control of the environmental conditions. However, in the face of a possible transfer, its format, nature of the elements that compose it and state of conservation, together with the numerous damages suffered over time, make it especially sensitive to all types of vibrations that are inevitable in transporting works of art. These vibrations could generate new cracks, lifting and loss of the pictorial layer, as well as tears in the support, so its transfer is strongly discouraged,” concludes the Conservation-Restoration Department of the Reina Sofía Museum.
