Final journey of the 'last exile'

One day in early September 1981, two state workers flew undercover to New York to handle the secret transfer of Picasso's Guernica to Spain. They were Álvaro Martínez Novillo, deputy director general of the national arts department, and José María Cabrera, director of the Restoration Institute, who took his wife along.

One afternoon, after stepping out of the MoMA, where the famous anti-war painting was then being kept, the three Spaniards went to a department store and ran into the Spanish filmmaker Luis García Berlanga. When he saw the uncomfortable look of surprise on Martínez Novillo's face, the director of Welcome Mister Marshall! figured that his friend, who was clearly in New York without his wife, might be having an affair. Nobody told him the real purpose of the trip.

Later that evening, all four of them went out to dinner and Berlanga joked with the waiter: "Treat these people well, they're here to take away the Guernica." The three other people at the table stared at him in stupor. Could he possibly have guessed? "Not even my grandchildren will live to see that day," retorted the waiter. Yet just days later, on September 10, at 7.45am, the painting arrived in Madrid in the hold of an Iberia jumbo jet called Lope de Vega.

"We'd spent the entire night packing the painting," says Martínez Novillo, thinking back on those days. "We had a sandwich for dinner and the next day we went out the back door on 54th Street. All the traffic lights in Manhattan had broken down and there was complete chaos."

They returned with the precious artwork on a regular flight. None of the other passengers suspected a thing. It was the captain who announced upon landing that the arch-famous painting - named after the Basque town that was bombed by German and Italian warplanes in 1937 - was finally in Spain.

"Berlanga wanted to kill me when he found out," Martínez Novillo recalls with amusement. "He told me he could have rented a 16mm camera to record the packing and the trip. It was a pity, but we had orders not to say a word about it to anyone."

These and other memories were part of a recent discussion organized by the Reina Sofía Museum, the painting's current home. Another speaker, Genoveva Tusell, a professor of art history, noted that there was a comical side to a secret mission whose code name was Operación cuadro grande (Operation big painting).

Tusell, who was five years old in 1981, remembers how for months she thought that the Guernica had been painted by her own father, Javier Tusell, a well-known historian and then Martínez Novillo's boss, who led the negotiations to get the artwork delivered to Spain (where it had never been before, since it traveled straight from Paris to New York for safekeeping, with Picasso himself stipulating that it should be handed over to Spain only when the country became a democracy).

"He [Tusell] was in charge of harvesting the fruit of American goodwill," says José Lladó, then Spain's ambassador in Washington. Yet the move was not entirely disinterested, he adds. The patron of the arts David Rockefeller and the chairman of the MoMA board of trustees, William S. Paley, who was also the founder of the CBS television station, were in talks with Juan Tomás de Salas, head of a major Spanish media group, with a view to the possible creation of private networks in Spain.

"They were businessmen on the lookout for new places where it might be worth investing," says the former diplomat, who would go on to become the first chairman of the board of trustees of the Reina Sofía Museum, the final resting place for the Guernica after it was transferred there in 1992 from an annex of the Prado Museum.

Yet getting Guernica to the Prado was not easy. The first contacts had begun as early as 1968, but besides Picasso's own reticence, there was a well-founded fear regarding the safety of the painting in Spain, after some of Picasso's work had been sprayed with acid by a group of religious fanatics called Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey during an exhibition in Madrid. In 1977, Congress passed a resolution in favor of the repatriation of the remains of former King Alfonso XIII, the remains of the statesman Manuel Azaña, and the Guernica. Diplomats got to work trying to convince the heirs of the painter, who died in 1973, to allow the mural back in Spain.

Then, the failed coup of February 23, 1981 cast a new shadow over Spain's image abroad. "The French press was talking about a garrisoned democracy," recalls the historian Josefina Cuesta. Soon after Guernica came home, Iberia published an ad in which it described the mural as "a symbol of peace." The historian Santos Juliá still remembers the effect that the painting's final overseas journey had on the Spanish psyche. The headlines talked about "the last of the exiles" and "the end of the Transition."