How Spain’s failed 1981 coup helped bring Picasso’s Guernica home

Picasso’s Guernica could have remained in New York after Spain’s failed coup attempt in 1981. Instead, the crisis helped persuade the painter’s lawyer and executor, Roland Dumas, that the painting could safely return.

The work’s return followed years of uncertain political negotiations. Picasso, who died in 1973, had made his instructions clear: the painting, a symbol of the horror of the Spanish Civil War, should stay at New York’s Museum of Modern Art until Spain had democracy and firmly restored civil liberties.

An agreement to return the painting was signed in 1980, but Guernica was still at MoMA in early 1981, where the museum had organized a major Picasso retrospective before handing it back. Then came the attempted coup of Feb. 23. Negotiators feared the crisis had ended the prospect of the painting’s return. “They put their hands to their heads: ‘Now we really have lost the painting!’” historian Genoveva Tusell recalled.

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They put their hands to their heads: ‘Now we really have lost the painting!’

The opposite happened. Tusell said Dumas was impressed by the way the coup was put down and by the role of King Juan Carlos. In a 2019 interview preserved in the archives of Spanish public broadcaster RTVE, Dumas said he had told the king he could not approve the transfer while coups were being prepared and one had nearly succeeded. Juan Carlos replied: “Look, I am in power, you will have seen what I did, I reacted and I will always react this way. As long as I live, I will not allow a coup d’état to take place. I would be there to defend freedoms, have no doubt about it.”

Dumas judged that the king was saying sensible things and intended to act on them, Tusell said, and he approved the painting’s transfer. Politicians, diplomats, officials, lawyers and friends all helped secure its return. Among the lesser-known figures involved was then-U.S. Senator Joe Biden, who in 1978 joined Senator George McGovern in backing an official declaration in the U.S. Senate supporting Spain.

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Look, I am in power, you will have seen what I did, I reacted and I will always react this way. As long as I live, I will not allow a coup d’état to take place. I would be there to defend freedoms, have no doubt about it.