Every September, Spain celebrates one of the most symbolic moments of its transition to democracy. This year will mark 45 years since an Iberia commercial flight from New York landed in Madrid with its pilot announcing to the surprised passengers that they had just travelled with one of the country’s most famous exiles: Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. After more than four decades on display at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the painting could finally return home after the end of the Franco dictatorship, in accordance with the wishes of the Spanish painter.

Picasso’s most famous painting, which depicted the horrors inflicted on civilians during the bombing of the Basque town of Gernika in the Spanish civil war, was intended to be a cry for peace. “If world peace prevails, the war I painted will be a thing of the past,” Picasso told Josep Lluís Sert, his friend and the architect of the Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the 1937 Paris international exhibition.

In a period when the Middle East and Europe are once again being torn apart by war, Guernica is as relevant as ever and has become a global emblem of the horrors of aerial bombardment. But in Spain, Picasso’s masterpiece has become another excuse for a petty political fight.

Basque Country president Imanol Pradales, who comes from the conservative Basque Nationalist party (PNV), has requested that Guernica be transferred for a few months from Madrid’s Reina Sofía museum, which has been its only home since 1992. To see it hanging in Bilbao for the first time, Pradales said,........

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