It is only during the last 10 years or so that scholars have been using reception-theory methodology in the study of art history. The majority of the research conducted in Japan using this approach has focused on how the country has received overseas art works, artists, and art movements. However, this presentation, rather than focus on the Japanese perspective, takes instead a single art work — Picasso's 1937 painting entitled Guernica — and examines the changes in meaning and function that it has undergone in its move through numerous social and cultural contexts.
      Since it was first displayed in the 1937 Paris World Exposition, Guernica — which may well be the best-known art work of the 20th century — has gone through a rather circuitous set of vicissitudes before arriving at its current home in Madrid's El Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. The central image in the painting no longer refers only to the bombing of Guernica, said to have provided the impetus for Picasso's creation of the work. The image has been dragged onto the historical stage time and again as a symbol of 20th century massacres, and has been used as a witness in various political crises. While it is impossible to discuss all of these events in the brief amount of time available, my research indicates that the history of this painting can be divided into five important stages.

1)	The movement of the painting from Paris to New York during the latter half of the 1930s.
2)	The painting's world tour in the 1950s.
3)	The Vietnam War-era antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
4)	The return of the painting to Spain in the 1980s.
5)	The global propagation of the painting through reproduction media, particularly the antiwar, antinuclear movement in Japan.

      This presentation focuses on the painting's return to the historical stage in each of these five periods, and analyzes its role (or, rather, the role it was forced to play) in each of the scenarios. Consideration is given to the new accouterments that adorned it in each of its appearances, in the form of such multi-faceted resources as scholarly papers, mass-media journalism, and interviews with witnesses. I scrutinize the process by which this painting, through its entire history, has been made into a universal symbol of the global antiwar, pro-peace movement. Along the way, much of the detailed history of the Guernica bombing has been lost, in inverse proportion to the rise of the painting's role as universal symbol.
      The painting has reappeared on the world stage at different times in a variety of symbolic guises. Subsequent changes in its reception are not solely the result of discourse — separate from the work itself and arbitrarily imposed thereon — but of the intimate interaction between the work's structure and the dialogue concerning it. Guernica's theatrical composition and the allegorical nature of its iconography will be discussed as an important element in that interaction. Rather than separate the internal analysis of the painting from its reception, I will examine how both elements are interrelated.