Ernest Urtasun as soon as once more rejects the PNV’s request to maneuver ‘Guernica’ to Bilbao: “My obligation is to preserve this heritage” | Culture | EUROtoday

Ernest Urtasun has as soon as once more reminded the PNV that the Guernica by Pablo Picasso is not going to journey to Bilbao as Lehendakari Imanol Pradales requested on March 27 to President Pedro Sánchez in a gathering at Moncloa. The Minister of Culture has been blunt with Senator Igotz López within the Government management session within 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 another 90 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 short lived and distinctive switch. We insist on the creation of a working group of technicians from the Reina Sofía, the Guggenheim and worldwide specialists to evaluate whether or not it’s potential. I consider that the technical advances would make it potential and the expertise of the Guggenheim is confirmed. All that’s wanted is political will for this evaluation.”

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 only any portray, it is without doubt one of the most fragile and sophisticated to move,” 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 motive for being can be misplaced.” López has clung to this point to finish his request: “If its survival will depend on the exhibition of the Guernica They have an issue. The Reina Sofía may assert itself past the Guernica. We ask for top of imaginative and prescient and sensitivity. Not attempting can 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 haven’t requested for a report on the standing of the portray.” 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 can be the optimum circumstances for this portray to come back house.”

The Basque Government has defended during this time 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, 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 can be a gesture of historic reminiscence and symbolic reparation in direction of the Basque folks,” 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 “the political courage” to take the painting to the Basque Country.

A new political actor has joined the controversy this Tuesday. The spokesperson for the Catalan Government, Sílvia Paneque, has endorsed the PNV request: “Not only does it make cultural sense, but it is a democratic duty.” Following the statements of the Madrid president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, this Monday calling the request “catetada”, Paneque said that the representatives of the autonomous communities would do well to respond with “respect and education” to the demands of other territories. 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.”

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.

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 the latest report made public by the Reina Sofía, the same conclusion is reached, in other words: “The work is at present maintained in steady circumstances due to rigorous management of the environmental circumstances. However, in view of a potential switch, its format, nature of the weather that compose it and state of conservation, along with the quite a few damages suffered over time, make it particularly delicate to all sorts of vibrations which might be inevitable in transporting artistic endeavors. These vibrations may generate new cracks, lifting and losses of the pictorial layer, in addition to tears within the help, so its switch is strongly discouraged,” concludes the Conservation-Restoration Department of the Reina Sofía Museum.