Guernica was a Basque town bombed by the Germans during the Spanish Civil War in April 1937. Picasso had already been commissioned to paint a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the World's Fair, and he completed his massive, black, white, and grey anti-war mural by early June 1937. Picasso's Cubist approach to portraying the figures adds to the sense of destruction and chaos. Guernica was in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York until 1981, when it was returned to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Spain.