NEW YORK, NY.- When a 25-foot tapestry replica of Pablo Picasso’s anti-war painting “Guernica” was removed from the United Nations by its owner a year ago after more than three decades there, diplomats mourned the abrupt exit of an artwork that poignantly reflected the organization’s core purpose.

“It’s horrible, horrible, that it is gone,” Secretary-General António Guterres said at the time.

Nelson A. Rockefeller Jr., a business executive and scion of the family that commissioned and owned the tapestry, offered no public explanation.

Now, it turns out, the disappearance was temporary. The tapestry was rehung Saturday at its longtime home outside the Security Council chambers, under a new arrangement announced by Rockefeller and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

They said in a statement that under a long-term loan to the U.N., Rockefeller is the steward of the tapestry and that it would be gifted to the National Trust, which will “handle coordinating its display at other venues in the United States and across the globe.”

Rockefeller said he had erred a year ago in not explaining the removal of the tapestry, which had been done to clean and preserve it — always with the goal, he said, of displaying the tapestry in public again, not just at the U.N. but elsewhere.

“Simply put, at that time there was some miscommunication,” he said. After the tapestry was removed, Rockefeller said, he wrote to Guterres, “explaining what my intent had been.”

Guterres expressed thanks in a statement released by his office, quoting a letter he had written to Rockefeller upon learning in December that the tapestry would be returned. “This is most welcome news as we end a difficult year of global hardship and strife,” he said.

The canvas tapestry is a rendering of an original work that Picasso painted in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. After a 42-year stay at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the painting was moved to a Madrid museum in 1981.

It portrays the bombing of Guernica, Spain, by Nazi aircraft that killed or wounded one-third of the city’s population.

Rockefeller, the son of Nelson Rockefeller, the former vice president and New York governor, said he had always retained his own strong affinity for the tapestry, ever since his father had helped him write an eighth-grade term paper on it.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.