About Guernica

The complicated diplomatic negotiations undertaken to bring about the painting's move were also the first important steps in cultural policy to be taken by the country's new government, and they highlighted the role that avant-garde art would play in the official culture of Spain's young democracy. With its arrival, it ceased to be the emblem of dissidence against the dictatorship and became the symbol of the healing of the fracture between the two historical factions in Spain: a sign of the reconciliation upon which the new democratic society would be based.