Kren's Taj Mahal: The Guggenheim's Global Love Museum

That old Bilbao moon / There where we used to go / That old Bilbao moon / Casting its golden glow / That old Bilbao moon / Love never laid me low / That old Bilbao moon / How does it haunt me so. I don't know if / It would bring you / Joy or grief / But it was fantastic / It was fantastic / It was fantastic / Beyond belief.

—Bertold Brecht, "Bilbao Song"

The unlikely encounter between the American visitor and his hosts was taking place in Guernica—the Basque town of ancient laws, Hitler's Luftwaffe squadrons, and Picasso's painting. The illustrious visitor's destination was Bilbao and it was already late afternoon, but the hosts were still keeping him away from his desired object.

They were in the pastoral Bizkaian countryside, sitting around a long table at the center of an old baserria "farmstead" turned into an exquisite restaurant. For Basques good food, wine, and an exuberant commensality are quintessential to any negotiation. Right across the narrow valley from the restaurant was the cave of Santimamine where archeologist Barandiaran had discovered rupestral paintings and other Paleolithic vestiges that invoke the very essence of Basque prehistory.

Three miles away was the town of Guernica. Rousseau had written: "Guernica has the happiest people in the world, regulating their affairs by a body of peasants under an oak, and always conducting themselves wisely" (qtd. in Zulaika, "Tropics" 93). Happy also was Hitler as he welcomed back the pilots who had bombarded it: "Your fight in Spain was a lesson to our opponents." "Guernica was an experimental horror," added Churchill (Zulaika, "Tropics" 93). The hosts wanted to immerse the American visitor in this very land, in the thickness of its mysterious aura of Basque prehistory and legendary antiquity, in the drama of its tragic centrality in twentieth century's history of horror and art.

The visitor's name was Thomas Krens, the director of New York's Guggenheim Museum. It was in Guernica that the possibility of the Bilbao-Guggenheim, the textbook case of the cultural politics of transnational museums, became real. It is worth revisiting this story in order to learn about the genesis of how the global museum was patented. Only a detailed narrative of the twisted trip that began in a helicopter ride that April 8 can bring us close to the real story.

A Helicopter Ride

Forget for a moment Hitler's warplanes and Picasso's painting. It was a helicopter of the Basque police that had landed smoothly in Guernica's soccer field, carrying aboard the distinguished visitor and his local hosts. The aerial visitor was coming from New York and had arrived via Madrid in Bilbao's Sondika airport. As implausible as it seemed, they were going to plot a new epoch-making chapter in the international history or art and politics. The Basques had studied the man in advance and left nothing to chance. The main instruction was clear: treat him as if he were a head of state. So first there was a visit with the lehendakari or President of the Basque Autonomous Government in Gasteiz, the Basque administrative capital thirty miles from Bilbao. But there was a second no less important provision: he had to travel there by helicopter. The airport is close to downtown Bilbao, but a direct car ride could prove fatal for the visitor's first impressions of the city. The grim view of the city's closed industries in ruins could make him jittery; and it was not uncommon that the road be blocked by traffic, public works, or perhaps a labor protest, any of which might place the entire visit in jeopardy. Airlifting him over the beautiful Mundaka estuary and the green hills of the interior countryside was a far safer proposition. And there was an added symbolic factor of which the hosts were very conscious: this aerial overview of the panorama reinforced by the helicopter's sound track would give the visitor a sense of almost imperial power.

The Basques hammered upon one message: "Bilbao is a strong, fundamentally healthy city." Although it was undergoing...