Whitechapel Gallery celebrates its reopening with Guernica

The Whitechapel Gallery in east London celebrated its reopening after two year of work and £13.5m last night. The undisputed star of the new space - extended by knocking through into the adjacent Whitechapel public library - was a life-size mural of Pablo Picasso's famous painting Guernica which usually hangs in the United Nations' headquarters in New York.

The painting holds a special relevance to the London gallery, as Picasso's original version, which commemorated a massacre in 1937 in the eponymous town during the Spanish Civil War by Franco's Nationalists and the German air force, had been exhibited in the gallery in 1939 to raise funds for the Republican forces in the three-year conflict.

Sealing the year-long loan of the mural was the brainchild of Polish artist Goshka Macuga (above), who was joined by the members of the capital's artistic elite, including classical composer Michael Nyman and burlesque dancer Immodesty Blaize.
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