Picasso's Guernica hangs in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain's national museum of modern art. It is not at the Prado. The painting reached Spain in 1981, hung in a Prado annex, and moved to the Reina Sofía in 1992.
The mix-up is easy, because the painting did hang in a Prado building at first. It was the Casón del Buen Retiro, an annex about two blocks from the Spanish parliament, and it opened to the public on 25 October 1981.
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And yet the Prado was the museum Picasso once ran. A certificate dated 26 September 1936, signed by Manuel Azaña, confirms his appointment by decree as its director. The Spanish Republic gave him the job.
The same Republic then asked him for a painting for its pavilion at the Paris World's Fair. That painting became Guernica, and the man who had directed the Prado would not let it travel to Madrid on just anyone's terms.
He set conditions instead. One of them was a single sentence in French, that nobody ever agreed how to read.
Why did Picasso refuse to send Guernica to Spain?
Because he would not send it to Franco's Spain. Picasso painted Guernica in Paris, between 1 May and 4 June 1937, for the pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the World's Fair. By 1939 the Republic had lost the civil war and Franco ruled the country, and the canvas went to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Picasso asked the museum to keep it, with its preparatory studies, until the "reestablishment of public liberties" in Spain. In 1958 he renewed the loan indefinitely, until democratic liberties returned. In 1968, when Franco's government asked for the painting, he refused. It would travel to Spain only after democratic rule.
New York was not safe either. On 28 February 1974, Tony Shafrazi sprayed the canvas with red paint and wrote "Kills lies all" on it in protest. The paint came off without permanent damage, though recent studies show traces remain.
Picasso died in 1973 and never saw the painting leave New York. Franco died in 1975, and Spain held its first democratic elections in 1977. The painting stayed where it was. Picasso's heirs and his lawyer now had to decide whether his conditions had been met.
What You'll Discover
Whose painting he said it was.
How it finally arrived in 1981.
Why no one could photograph it.
Where the other Guernica hangs.