Emotion at the UN after the Rockefeller family took over a Guernica tapestry

After the UN announced Thursday the withdrawal of this loan, decided by its owner Nelson Rockefeller Junior, UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric quickly tweeted his bitterness, like many diplomats assigned to the Nations united.

“It’s really sad. This wall without the tapestry is meaningless. This tapestry hanging elsewhere will lose a lot of its value,” said Dujarric. “What a pity! This tapestry has been the backdrop for part of my professional life”, also added on Twitter a British diplomat, Mungo Woodifield.

The presence of the tapestry, which regularly passed presidents, ministers and other ambassadors to the Security Council, was intended to make them aware of the tragedy of war.

For the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, the announcement of the recovery of the tapestry came as a surprise. “It was not planned,” said his spokesman on Friday, indicating that he did not have any explanation from the Rockefeller family for this sudden decision.

With letters, phone calls, “the secretary general and others have tried enormously to keep the tapestry here but we have not succeeded” in changing the owner’s mind, added in a statement Stéphane Dujarric, when of its daily press briefing.

“It’s like a loss to look at this empty wall,” he insisted. “This tapestry was not only a moving reminder of the horrors of war, but because of its positioning, it also testified to so many stories that had been unfolding since 1985 on the outskirts of the Security Council,” he said. added.

Commissioned in 1955 by Nelson Rockefeller, the tapestry taken from the work of Pablo Picasso and which represents the bombing of the city of Guernica on April 26, 1937 by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, was woven by the French workshop Jacqueline de La Baume-Dürrbach.

No comments, including whether a sale of the tapestry is planned, could be obtained from the Rockefeller Family Office, the Rockefeller Archives Center, and the Rockefeller Foundation.