The Reina Sofía museum in Madrid is planning an exhibition in 2017 for the 80th anniversary of Picasso’s great mural Guernica. The show will present new aspects of the famous work, which was painted in 1937 in response to the aerial bombing of the town of the same name in the Basque country by German and Italian forces allied to the Nationalists led by General Franco.
The show will examine the making of the black-and-white mural, which is 11ft tall and 26ft wide, as well as its critical reception at the Paris Exposition in 1937 and display at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1939. That same year, Picasso transferred Guernica to the care of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. It toured the US throughout the 1940s and then headed for Brazil, travelling there from 1953 to 1956.
The exhibition will explore the painting’s role in Spain’s post-war reconstruction and as an international image of peace as well as its influence on contemporary artists, a museum spokesman says. “The team at Reina Sofía have done a tremendous job of constantly renewing the context of Guernica, in hopes of helping prevent the painting settling down into a comfortably ‘past’ art history,” says T.J. Clark, a Picasso expert and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.
Guernica returned to MoMA in 1957 and remained there for 24 years. It was handed over to Spain in September 1981 and went on display at the Prado museum after democracy was restored to the country. In 1992, it was transferred to the Reina Sofía museum.
