Where should Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” be allowed to hang?

At the heart of the Reina Sofía national museum in Madrid is the huge canvas of Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica”, with its anguished faces and contorted bodies: an icon of 20th-century art. If Basque nationalism has its way, from October it will spend nine months at Bilbao’s Guggenheim museum, to mark the 90th anniversaries of the regional government and the aerial bombing of Guernica itself by Nazi Germany during the Spanish civil war, killing 200 to 300 civilians. The Reina Sofía’s response, backed by Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist government, is that the oil painting is too fragile to travel.

That hasn’t persuaded the Basques, who want an inquiry. “We want to know the optimal conditions for this painting to come home,” said the deputy head of the regional government. Since Mr Sánchez depends on Basque nationalist parliamentary votes, they have some leverage.

In fact, Guernica’s “home” is Madrid. It was commissioned in January 1937 for an international exhibition in Paris by the Spanish Republic’s beleaguered government battling General Francisco Franco’s nationalist forces. The painting is a universal denunciation of fascism and war. It came back to Spain in 1981, only after democracy had returned, as Picasso had stipulated. In 1992, it was installed in the Reina Sofía and has never moved since.

The Basque demand has been backed by Catalonia’s Socialist regional government. That smacks of hypocrisy. The National Museum of Catalan Art in Barcelona has been slow to comply with an order from the Supreme Court to return 12th-century frescoes to a monastery at Sijena, a village just across the border in Aragón. The judge in charge of the case recently gave the museum 13 months to return the frescoes.

Some see the Sijena dispute as coloured by the Catalan separatists’ failed bid for independence in 2017. But the bigger question behind these rows is whether a country of radical decentralisation can hang on to national art collections. Perhaps in Spain art, like politics, is doomed to be local. ■