Back to November 2000 Picasso's Party Line  

When Pablo Picasso applied for a visa to the United States in 1950, it threw State Department and FBI officials into full alert. The purpose of the artist's visit—his first ever to the United States—was to lead 12 delegates from the Congrès Mondial des Partisans de la Paix (World Congress of Peace Partisans) to Washington in an effort to persuade President Truman to ban the atomic bomb. The peace congress, which had been founded a year earlier in Paris and Prague, had already been identified as a powerful Communist front. More important, Picasso himself was considered a leading member of the French Communist Party and had been monitored by the FBI since 1944. After consulting the American embassies in Moscow and Paris, as well as members of Congress and the FBI, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee denied visas for the entire delegation.

Picasso's dove was the ubiquitous symbol of the peace movement, appearing on postage stamps in the Soviet Union (above) as well as on posters, T-shirts, scarves, and mugs. Collection of Gertje Utley

Picasso as a Cold Warrior for the Evil Empire? Although the artist's membership in the Communist Party in the late 1940s and early '50s is well known, it has been largely ignored by scholars as a casual flirtation, with slight, if any, bearing on his art. Picasso's work did not adhere to the dictates of Socialist Realist esthetics and was for the most part not even considered appropriate for exhibition in the Soviet Union. Besides, his market and his most important admirers were in the bourgeois West. How could he have become a weapon in the anti–American arsenal assembled by Stalin's ruthless culture czar Andrei Zhdanov?

The little–known visa incident is only one of many striking examples of Picasso's political activism recorded in Gertje Utley's Pablo Picasso: The Communist Years, published this month by Yale University Press. Picasso joined the French Communists in 1944, at the age of 63, and remained an unwavering party member for the rest of his life—through the exposure of the evils of Stalinism, the brutal Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and the subsequent desertion of many other French intellectuals with whom he had become politically active.

At the height of his involvement, his activities included debriefings by top party apparatchiks, trips around Europe to promote the international peace movement, and donations of large sums of money—often in the form of artworks—to dozens of Communist–supported causes. (Picasso supported numerous party and party–affiliated initiatives through his dealer Daniel–Henry Kahnweiler, including, for example, gifts of 2.5 million and 3 million francs in 1955 and 1956, respectively, for an annual party event.) His art expanded to include numerous party posters, on–demand sketches for the party newspaper, L'Humanité;, and such overtly political paintings as Massacre in Korea (1951), an atypical, propagandistic piece denouncing American involvement in the Korean War. He even gave his daughter the name Paloma, Spanish for dove, after the Communist peace crusade adopted his drawing of the bird as its international symbol.

"For students of Picasso, the decade right after World War II has often been considered less interesting," says Utley, an independent art historian who stumbled on the subject a decade ago as a Ph.D. student at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. "People generally look at his paintings first, and that period, simply in terms of painting, isn't that exciting." Spurred on by William Rubin, the distinguished Picasso scholar and director emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she found there was much more to the story. "It was precisely the period of his most active commitment to the Communist Party," says Utley, who was born in Berlin and had a successful career in public relations in Paris before going on to pursue art history in London and New York. "Quite a bit of time went into traveling for the party and filling the constant demands placed on him. And when you see the variety of his creative work at the time—ceramics, lithographs, and party posters—it fits very well with his political preoccupations."

With the help of her dissertation advisers—Kirk Varnedoe, chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and Robert Rosenblum, New York University professor and curator at the Guggenheim Museum—and the guidance of Tony Judt, a New York University historian and expert on French Communism, Utley turned the topic into a doctoral thesis of more than 700 pages in 1997. Poring over the voluminous boxes of uncatalogued correspondence in the archives of Paris's Musée Picasso, as well as many other sources, she discovered extensive evidence of Picasso's political activities and friendships. She interviewed more than 20 of his friends, including leading French Communist writers and painters, who had known the artist in the early postwar period. She also obtained Picasso's 187–page FBI file through the Freedom of Information Act. Finally, she examined the circumstances surrounding thousands of Picasso's works, from the simplest peace dove to Guernica, to consider how and to what extent the artist's political engagement affected his muse. This research effort was distilled into the 260 pages of the new book, which traces Picasso's Communist engagement from his youthful encounters with radical social movements to his twilight years as an inactive but still loyal party member.

Picasso joined the Communist Party just as it was entering the period of its greatest influence on French cultural life. The Communist leader Maurice Thorez had been allowed to return from exile in the Soviet Union, and from 1945 to '47, Communists participated in the French government. The excesses of Stalinism had been obscured by the wartime suffering of the Soviet people and their heroic victory over the Nazis, while the G.I. Bill and later the Marshall Plan had resulted in what to some in France seemed a new kind of "occupation" by an imperialist United States. Among the adherents and fellow travelers who were drawn to the antifascist and anti–American party line were such cultural luminaries as the writers Jean–Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and the artists Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, and Tristan Tzara. Picasso biographer John Richardson, who knew the artist well and was in Paris just after the war, says, "Intellectuals espoused Communism because it was the respectable thing to do. It was, as it were, politically correct."

For Picasso, Utley observes, there were also strong personal motives. The artist considered his acceptance into the party the logical conclusion of everything his life had stood for. Born in Málaga in 1881, he was exposed to anarchist and pacifist movements as a teenager in Barcelona, well before he settled in Paris in 1904. While the extent of these encounters is still debated by scholars, by the start of World War I, Picasso had developed the lifelong antipathy to armed conflict that would play out in his energetic efforts for the Communist–sponsored peace movement. The Spanish Civil War turned him into a Franco hater and antifascist, a stance that as early as 1936 earned him the title of pintor marxista (Marxist painter) in the Spanish press. Although Picasso never read Marx and had very little knowledge of what was actually happening in the Soviet Union, Utley says, his membership in the party reflected a deep–rooted commitment to Communist ideals. "He was a real believer in the basic tenets," she notes, "even if he was convinced he could be a Communist without following everything."

Picasso's 1944 entrance into the party was an epochal event that the Communists put to immediate use. Embraced by the leadership, Picasso was soon being instructed in party matters by Thorez himself and guided into cultural militancy by his friends Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard. Although he was not expected to perform daily party functions or attend routine cell meetings, Picasso was given a prominent place in such Communist initiatives as the Nationale Front des Arts and the France–U.S.S.R. Committee. From 1947, when he settled in the Communist–ruled town of Vallauris with his companion Françoise Gilot, he became host to, among others, the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg and Georges Tabaraud, the editor of the party newspaper Patriote de Nice, which Picasso himself supported financially. He was also enlisted in international efforts, like signing a letter to President Truman protesting the NATO pact, supporting the American Communist Party, and according to one account, denouncing the U.S. government's arrest of the Hollywood Ten in 1950.

Most important, Utley argues, Picasso quickly became one of the leading figures in the Communist–led peace movement. This activity is significant in light of the role played by the movement in the early years of the Cold War. Although ostensibly created independently by intellectuals to combat nuclear armaments, the international initiative was, in fact, an orchestrated effort by Soviet commissar Zhdanov to create what Utley calls "an actively political organ in support of Soviet foreign policy, the most powerful nonmilitary weapon that the Soviet Union set up to confront NATO." Involved from the beginning, Picasso agreed to attend the inaugural conference of the movement in 1948 in Wroclaw, Poland, despite his hatred of travel and fear of flying (it was his first ride in an airplane). In 1949 he attended a similar congress in Rome, and after his delegation was denied entry to the United States in 1950, he traveled to another congress in Sheffield, England, where he gave a speech. In November of that year Picasso received the Stalin Peace Prize from the Soviet government in recognition of his efforts.

Picasso churned out numerous sketches and posters for party causes, including portraits of Thorez and Ehrenburg, a controversial newspaper drawing of Stalin at the time of the Soviet leader's death, in 1953, and idealized sketches of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg a year after their execution in the United States for divulging nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Picasso's iconic dove, reworked countless times by the artist, became ubiquitous in the peace movement and even appeared on postage stamps in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. So popular was the dove image in the 1950s that the CIA–backed Paix et Liberté movement targeted it for caricature in anti–Communist propaganda campaigns.

In the United States, where Picasso's reputation had reached new heights shortly before the war, the artist's political activities were taken seriously by the government. As early as 1945, shortly after the bureau opened its file on the artist, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover personally contacted the American embassy in Paris to request further information on Picasso, and the United States Office of Cable and Radio Censorship was instructed to report to the bureau cables to and from the artist. Among the jumble of information and rumors collected in the FBI file is a 1950 entry that goes so far as to accuse the artist of spying for the Soviet Union, a charge that was never substantiated.

The American press, Utley shows, responded to Picasso's politics with a combination of bemusement and dismay. Initially, his opinions were dismissed as those of a political naif. But as the Cold War alignment hardened in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the artist was increasingly criticized for his party work. In 1949 an article in ARTnews attacked Picasso as a "staunch poster–designer and part–time propagandist." A year later, the New York Times derided his "fat little pigeons." By 1954 the New York Sunday Mirror had stated that "before the red bug bit him Picasso was the greatest artist of our time." According to Utley, Picasso's Communism may have encouraged the general decline of his reputation in America in the 1950s and turned off some of his American buyers.

Still, even during the years of his greatest political involvement, Picasso never followed the party–endorsed Socialist Realist style in his art. Although they were admired by some of the party intellectuals, his paintings, with their deformed figures, were generally considered inappropriate for digestion by the Communist rank and file and were not reproduced in Communist newspapers. At the Wroclaw conference, Picasso was even attacked for his decadent style by Alexander Fadeyev, president of the Union of Soviet Writers. But Picasso resisted making esthetic accommodations to Communist orthodoxy. "In Russia, they hated his work but liked his politics," Gilot recalls. "In America, they hated his politics but liked his work. When he came back from the Wroclaw conference, he said, 'I'm hated everywhere, I like it that way!'"

Nonetheless, Utley says, Picasso took the party criticisms seriously, and a good deal of his work during this period embraced—in its own way—the social ideas and themes of the Communist cause. The artist's preoccupation in the 1940s and '50s with the simple handcraft of ceramics and the multiple–production possibilities of lithography, she suggests, related to his conscious desire to close the gap between high art and the masses. His party posters were designed to be cheaply copied, and he even considered ways to have his paintings reproduced, to increase their accessibility. Although many of these efforts were ultimately fruitless—collectors were always the first to snap up any Picasso works, including the posters—they gave the partisan press an opportunity to cast the famous artist as a man of the people. "Picasso's work and life among the potters," Utley writes, "was also a goldmine for Communist writers. It allowed them to counter the adverse image of Picasso the Communist millionaire with that of the simplicity of his life in Vallauris."

But perhaps the greatest testaments to Picasso's political loyalty, Utley argues, were his unwillingness to criticize the French party and his continued support even after Soviet politics had become distasteful to many former Communist intellectuals. For example, despite his own reservations about the party's increasingly rigid Socialist Realist orthodoxy, Picasso refused to sign a 1948 letter by a group of leading Communist writers asking the party to loosen its cultural stance. The party's dogmatic approach to culture became more severe in 1950, when Thorez left the leadership and the most hard–line factions took over. Instead of curtailing his party activities, Picasso went on, in early 1951, to produce what Utley calls his "first openly didactic painting in support of a Soviet political position." In fact, Massacre in Korea, depicting soldiers firing on a group of naked women, is considered of marginal artistic value due to its overwrought ideological message. (Richardson calls it "one of the worst Picassos ever painted.") The artist was widely attacked in the party for his portrait of a young and unheroic Stalin in Les Lettres Françaises after the leader's death, yet he did not sever his Communist ties. Even after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, Picasso refused to join many other French Communist intellectuals in denouncing the aggression, for which he was harshly criticized in an open letter by the great Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz. But the artist—following the example of such party stalwarts as his close friend, the Communist writer Hélène Parmelin—was unmoved.

"If he had entered the party out of any kind of opportunism, he would have had so many opportunities to leave," says Utley. "When Thorez left for the Soviet Union, or when Stalin was exposed, he could have easily said, 'That's enough!' If he had had no more interest attached to it, why didn't he quit in '56? That would have been the most propitious moment. The fact that he remained in the party must have been for a very personal commitment."

Utley's portrayal of Picasso as a loyal partisan, carefully guided by party leaders, has raised provocative questions for scholars of the artist, who have been more attuned to his protean artistic output and unbridled individualism. According to Richardson, Utley "has made sense of a very murky period—difficult and mysterious—in Picasso's life. Her conclusion that Picasso was committed to Communism, although he had no idea what Communism really was about, is compelling. Here is this man who hated any form of discipline or orthodoxy yet was surprisingly loyal and, in so far as he could, toed the party line."

Patricia Leighten, professor of art history at Duke University and a scholar of Picasso's political life before World War I, says that this kind of study is invaluable in "revisiting certain issues and seeing the artist as a historical figure. There has been a desire on the part of critics to examine his work in isolation, a reluctance to put Picasso in the broader European social and cultural context of his times." For Leighten, the artist's adherence to Communism is a natural extension of his embrace of anarchist and pacifist ideas in the first decades of the century. "My feeling is that his early anarchism informs his whole engagement with leftism," she says. "It does not mean that every work he did was political, much less anarchist, but it does add crucial information to our understanding."

Some who knew Picasso during the postwar period are skeptical about giving fresh scrutiny to his political activities. In an interview from Paris with ARTnews, the artist's close friend Pierre Daix, an art critic and historian who was a leading party member in the 1940s and '50s and the editor of Les Lettres Françaises, questions whether there is much to add to what is already known. "I don't think there are new things here," says Daix, who wrote about the artist's Communist years in his 1977 biography, La Vie de peintre de Pablo Picasso. "All of his activities with the party, all of that was already clear. Picasso joined the Communist Party under circumstances that are well known, and we know the rest of the story. There is no mystery, no secrets." Daix does note, however, that scholars are beginning to devote more attention to Picasso's drawings and posters for the party, as in the exhibition "Picasso and the Press," which was assembled by the Musée Picasso in Antibes last year and recently traveled to Paris for a festival celebrating the 70th anniversary of the newspaper L'Humanité;.

Gilot, who lived with Picasso during his most active years in the party and is now based in New York, cautions not to read too much into the artist's Communist ties. "To make a big thing out of it is wrong," she says. "In his mind, he wanted not to be simply a privileged person, a very well known painter. He wanted to be with the people. But I don't think it went much further than that." She acknowledges that Picasso's prestige was enormously important to the Communist leadership—"It was a nice name to drop"—but doubts that the party ever really attempted to indoctrinate the artist. "It was difficult to influence or manipulate a man like him. He never followed exactly the party line."

But as Utley's book suggests, it was precisely Picasso's unique position—that he was so popular in the West and rarely doctrinaire in his own work—that gave him such a powerful role in the cultural dimension of the Cold War. "Thorez realized this best," Utley says. "Let him alone, he serves us best when he is seen in Europe and America as happy among us, and paints as a man."

Years later, Picasso's friend Ehrenburg would come to his own conclusions about the aging artist, who, après tout, remained as devoted to the Communist Party as ever. In his 1966 memoirs (in a passage Utley does not cite), Ehrenburg writes: "Hundreds of millions of people know and love Picasso only through the doves. The snobs sneer at those people. Picasso's detractors accuse him of having sought an easy success. Yet the peace doves are closely connected with all the rest of his work, the minotaurs and the goats, the old men and the girls. . . . Of course it is impossible to know Picasso by the dove alone, but one has to be a Picasso to make such a dove."

Hugh Eakin is a senior editor of ARTnews.