Culture clash ... Picasso's Guernica, which Basque politicians would like to see displayed in the region that inspired it. Photograph: Denis Doyle/AP
Picasso's Guernica, that massive monochromatic canvas hanging in Madrid's Reina Sofia museum, is one of the most powerful denunciations of war ever painted, writes Giles Tremlett. Wailing mothers, shrieking people, bellowing animals and severed limbs powerfully dramatise the horrors of war.
Guernica may denounce war, but Spaniards appear determined not to allow one of their most famous paintings any peace.
Everybody in Spain, it sometimes seems, wants to get their hands on it. The latest claim comes from the Basque country.
Guernica, the town whose destruction by German carpet bombers working for the rightist rebels during the Spanish civil war inspired Picasso, is a Basque town.
Last week the members of a senate culture committee said the painting ought to be sent there - or, at least, to the nearby Basque city of Bilbao - to be put on display.
It is just the latest in a series of petitions - which have also come from his early home in the Catalan city of Barcelona - for Guernica to be sent travelling.
"If we send valuable pictures to other countries for temporary exhibitions, why can't Guernica travel to Bilbao?" asked José Ramón Urrutia, a Basque nationalist senator, before the vote was pushed through.
The answer to that lies in the size of Guernica. At 3.49 by 7.76 metres, it is hardly a regular painting.
Also, the experts say, its previous travels have weakened it. Guernica was first displayed in Paris. It then travelled to Britain, where it was shown at London's Burlington and Whitechapel galleries.
It even made an appearance at a Manchester car dealers - which the painting's recent biographer, Gijs van Hensbergen, places on the corner of Victoria St and Cateaton St - as it was used to try to drum up support for the beleaguered Spanish republic.
From there it returned to Paris before being shipped across the Atlantic to New York, where it stayed for some decades in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Picasso had stipulated that the painting could not be displayed in Spain until the country was again a democratic republic. So it took some six years of negotiation after Franco's death in 1975 for the country's constitutional monarchy to be considered sufficiently close to the master's wishes for MoMA to relinquish custody.
It travelled, for the first time ever, to Madrid in 1981, where it has been relocated on several occasions.
The culture ministry now says it has "technical reports" saying that the picture should never be moved again.
Basques, like Catalans, Parisians, Americans and Manchester car dealers, will just have to travel to Madrid to see Guernica.
