The canvas replica of Picasso’s painting, symbolizing war’s horrors, had been a photogenic fixture at the United Nations for decades before its owner, the Rockefeller family, removed it last year.
When a 25-foot tapestry replica of Pablo Picasso’s antiwar painting “Guernica” was removed from the United Nations by its owner a year ago after more than three decades there, diplomats mourned the abrupt exit of an artwork that poignantly reflected the organization’s core purpose. “It’s horrible, that it is gone,” Secretary General António Guterres said at the time. Nelson A. Rockefeller Jr., a philanthropist and scion of the family that commissioned and owned the tapestry, offered no public explanation. Now, it turns out, the disappearance was temporary. The tapestry is to be rehung Saturday at its longtime home outside the Security Council chambers, according to a new arrangement announced by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. They said in a statement that under a long-term loan to the United Nations, Mr. Rockefeller is the steward of the tapestry and that the National Trust would “handle coordinating its display at other venues in the United States and across the globe.” Mr. Rockefeller said he had erred a year ago in not explaining the removal of the tapestry, which had been done to clean and preserve it — always with the goal, he said, of displaying the tapestry in public again, not just at the United Nations but elsewhere.
