shelidonNovember 17, 2024Leave a Comment

If you remember from the last time I talked about him, I’m not overly fond of Picasso as a man. I can’t get over his attitude towards women and I think it’s high time to rethink his appropriation of African art. The Picasso Museum itself agrees with me. That being said, this recent exhibition at Palazzo Reale in Milan makes up for any fault of the previous one at the Museum of Cultures as it adopt a particular angle: that of Picasso’s experience as an unwanted immigrant.

“The foreigner learns the art of adapting more painfully, if more searchingly, than the one who feels entitled to belong.”
— Georg Simmel 1908

The relevance of such an exhibition is well-encapsulated in the introduction proposed by our major, Beppe Sala.

1. General Framing: an Anarchist in Paris

After three failed attempts between 1900 and 1904, Picasso finally managed to settle down in Paris. With the help of some Catalan friends, he found a place to live among them in Montmartre, a neighbourhood bustling with outsiders such as artists, actors, circus performers, and foreigners.

French society at the time was going through a rough patch, with anarchist attacks rattling everyone. Between 1894 and 1901, as the new century dawned, the country was already grappling with the chaos brought on by rapid industrialization and an ageing population. The wave of violence hit when you thought it couldn’t get more intense. The assassination of President Sadi Carnot by the Italian anarchist Sante Geronimo Caserio was like the cherry on top, stirring up political and social tension – as if the Dreyfus Affair wasn’t already headline-worthy enough.

In this charged atmosphere, some folks started focusing on a “new problem”: immigration. In 1898, writer Maurice Barrès started pointing fingers, saying foreigners were “parasites” poisoning France. Paris was like a dark, confusing maze for young Pablo Ruiz Picasso, who barely knew the language, let alone the rules of the game.

1.1. First traumas in Paris: the Universal Exposition and the death of Casagemas

Alongside his friend Carlos Casagemas, Picasso arrives in Paris in October 1900 like a comet, just shy of his nineteenth birthday, ready to take the city by storm. Paris was buzzing with excitement; the World’s Fair of 1900 had just wrapped up after eight months and fifty million visitors. Picasso, still a young artist, had the honor of having one of his paintings displayed in the Spanish pavilion. The work was titled Last Moments. and it depicted a priest at the bedside of a dying woman, but it didn’t survive.

Paris was the epitome of a modern metropolis, complete with moving sidewalks, electric lights, and a shiny new metro line. Picasso and Casagemas set up camp with two French models, Odette and Germaine, in a small studio on the hill of Montmartre, surrounded by bars, cafes, narrow streets, and little squares. They were utterly enchanted by the public displays of sensuality that seemed to cast a spell over them.

In December, the duo heads back to Barcelona. But this encounter with the great city of Paris takes a tragic turn: Casagemas, heartbroken over unrequited love for Germaine, returns to Paris alone just a few weeks later. Once back in Montmartre, he confronts Germaine with a gun, then turns it on himself.

A few months later, Picasso begins painting his friend’s haunting final image on his deathbed, capturing Casagemas’s tragic end in a series of deeply emotional works.

1.2. Second Trip to Paris: the Gallery Vollard

Invited by the Catalan art dealer Pere Manach to exhibit at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery, Picasso returns from Barcelona on May 2, 1901, and moves in with Manach in Montmartre. He dives right into work, completing a whopping sixty-four paintings in just seven weeks, featuring a cast of rather unsettling characters: hunched old women, strung-out morphine addicts, heavily made-up elderly courtesans, and exhausted mothers dragging their scruffy children along.

On June 17, art critic Gustave Coquiot sings his praises, calling Picasso a “very young Spanish artist” and predicting that soon the world would be celebrating the works of Pablo Ruiz Picasso. But the very next day, things take a turn: Commissioner André Rouquier files the first police report on Picasso, labeling him as an anarchist who should be kept under special surveillance.

Despite Coquiot’s glowing review, the police officer relies mostly on the gossip of a nosy concierge, the rumors from a band of informants unleashed in Montmartre, and the themes of Picasso’s paintings as “evidence” against him. Their final conclusion? Picasso “shares the views of his compatriot host and should therefore be considered an anarchist.”

And so, Picasso’s good fortune of being welcomed into the Catalan community in Paris turns into a curse, one that would shadow him for over forty years.

1.3. The third trip

The third journey of Picasso to Paris (October 1902 – January 1903) proved to be his roughest and direst. Although helped by some of his Catalan friends, Picasso wandered the Left Bank, shifting from hostel to hostel, unable to pay for his lodgings. He sold drawings and paintings depicting the Parisian underworld of misery and marginalization. Some of the exhibitions at the Berthe Weill gallery suggested “the tormented unhappiness in the work of this young man,” according to art critic Charles Morice.

Picasso received the support of an eccentric Catalan poet and bohemian, Max Jacob, who even offered him a place to sleep in his cramped flat. He taught him French and introduced him to French literature, especially the poems of Verlaine and Rimbaud, providing him a bed in his tiny room. Picasso spent a few intense months in Paris, then decided to return to Barcelona.

1.4. The Fourth Trip: the Floating Washhouse

After his last trip to Paris, Picasso starts distancing himself from the Catalan community. He settles down at 13 Rue Ravignan, in a building that Max Jacob nicknames the Bateau-Lavoir (the “Floating Washhouse”), a true symbol of bohemian life on Montmartre hill. It’s one of the most ramshackle and rundown buildings in the city—a quick-and-dirty construction of stone, wood, and plaster, practically sliding down the hill. There’s only one source of drinking water for about thirty apartments, which are sweltering in summer and freezing in winter, and which artists convert into studios. The Bateau-Lavoir is one of those shabby slums where the city stuffs marginalized immigrants, and it’s prone to regular fires.

After Max Jacob, Picasso meets another poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, who had settled in Paris a couple of years earlier. Together, they start exploring Picasso’s new adoptive city. Like Max (who was Breton, Jewish, and gay), Apollinaire is an outsider too. He’s a foreigner in France, officially stateless, born in Rome to an unknown father and a Polish aristocrat mother.

With his new partner, the French model Fernande Olivier, who helps him integrate, Picasso lives and works at the Bateau-Lavoir for the next five years.

For an entire year, from December 1904 to December 1905, Picasso focuses on a single theme: circus performers who, like him, live in Montmartre, Paris’s neighborhood of outsiders. Les Saltimbanques (or Family of Saltimbanques, National Gallery, Washington DC) is the undisputed masterpiece of his series dedicated to acrobats. The figures radiate strength in a bleak, deserted, silent setting, representing the world of “villages without churches” described by Apollinaire in his poem Les Saltimbanques. Later on, the painting inspired another cosmopolitan poet, Rainer Maria Rilke:

“But who are they, tell me,

these Travelers,

Even more transient than we are ourselves”

(Fifth Duino Elegy)

2. The Gosol Summer and the Start of Cubism

During the summer of 1906, Picasso spends a couple of months in Gósol, a remote Pyrenean village that you could only reach by mule, along a 28-kilometer ancient trail. He stays at the inn of Pep Fontdevila, a 93-year-old innkeeper and the local kingpin of smugglers, in this mountain village where the police barely dared to show up. Since the Middle Ages, the villagers have crafted their own underground, cross-border economy, thanks to their skills, mobility, and pragmatism.

Living among them, Picasso finds a new spark, working tirelessly and thriving. Inspired by a Romanesque wooden statue of the Virgin Mary in the village church, he begins to transform his creative approach. Gradually, he starts erasing details, expressions, and anecdotal elements, moving towards a more simplified, stylized, and archetypal form.

In this “land of free people,” as he called it, Picasso carves out aesthetic paths that allow him to create his own brand of modernity. In short, the summer in Gósol marks the beginning of the heroic years of his Cubist period (1907–1914).

3. Return as a leader

In 1906, after experiencing the thrill of freedom with the smugglers in the Pyrenees, Picasso returns to Paris and, encouraged by Georges Braque, dives into a new and undoubtedly the grandest creative phase of his life. This phase will make him the leader of the Cubist avant-garde. Over seven years of intense, boundary-pushing work, Picasso and his fellow artists shake up traditional conventions and produce an impressive, almost overwhelming body of work.

The Parisian establishment looks at Cubism with suspicion, but German collectors and critics in Paris love it. They enthusiastically promote the new trend across the vast empires of northeastern Europe. New exhibitions, new collections—Picasso becomes famous and wealthy.

On February 27, 1907, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler opens a tiny art gallery in Rue Vignon, Paris. Although his family (being German Jews) had planned for him to become a banker, at just 23, he decides to follow his passion for young painters “who create the visual universe of humanity” and dives into a new adventure as a gallery owner.

Kahnweiler is one of the few early supporters of the new avant-garde. Right from the start, he meticulously catalogs every piece sold, publishes essays and studies, and connects with galleries, art critics, and collectors, especially those within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussia, German-speaking Switzerland, and the Russian Empire. He builds an exceptional network for “his artists,” a unique feat in art history.

The export of Cubist art organized by Kahnweiler—with Roger Fry and Clive Bell in London; Thannhauser in Munich; Flechtheim in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Cologne, and Vienna; Stieglitz and Bremer in New York; plus Amsterdam, Budapest, Prague, and Moscow—becomes one of the most remarkable expressions of the first wave of globalization, spanning from 1870 to 1914.

When World War I breaks out, however, a wave of anti-German frenzy hits France, and the Paris government confiscates all the Cubist works Picasso had with his German art dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. This happens in December 1914, and we’re talking about 700 of Picasso’s works disappearing for nearly a decade—a blow that feels like a “real amputation” for the artist. Jealous French gallery owners, eager to ruin Kahnweiler, push for his confiscated artworks to be sold off at auction between June 1921 and May 1923. Picasso becomes a casualty of the rampant xenophobia.

4. World War I

“Braque and Derain have left for the war,” Picasso writes on August 8, 1914. Even though Spain is a neutral country in the conflict, Picasso is hit by the conflict of France, now at war with what are being rudiculyzed as the “Krauts.”

The war years shatter the network of contacts Picasso had patiently built since settling in Paris in 1904. His friendships and business connections suffer heavily, and as a foreigner who isn’t fighting and a leading figure of the avant-garde, he becomes an easy target for French nationalists who label him a “traitor,” accusing him and his “Cubism” of causing France’s aesthetic and moral decline. The international ties he’d carefully woven with art dealers, collectors, and critics before the war unravel as national interests take precedence.

4.1. Russians Relationships and the Ballet

Between 1917 and 1924, Picasso works as a set designer with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and the high-society parties hosted by art patron Étienne de Beaumont. Diaghilev had seen Picasso’s paintings in Moscow, thanks to collectors Shchukin and Morozov. Meanwhile, Étienne de Beaumont is the poster child for the aristocracy who, after the 1914-1918 period, throw themselves into philanthropy or support artists to compensate for the failings of official institutions, which are terrified of the avant-garde.

Some say that, during these years, Picasso “betrayed” himself, abandoning his aesthetic quest and his old friends. After the trauma of the Kahnweiler seizure, Picasso reinvents himself, operating in a new sphere outside of France’s official structures, navigating a European transnational space (that of the Ballets Russes), and placing himself within a global story (the ancient Greco-Roman themes loved by Étienne de Beaumont).

As nationalism rises, borders are redrawn, and accusations of betrayal fly against anyone who clouds the notion of French purity, Picasso, the savvy strategist, uses his cosmopolitan flair to break free from the isolation that had plagued him since 1914.

Classic, Cubist, Surrealist, political… Summing up Picasso’s variety of styles, especially between the two world wars, isn’t easy. From theater set design to sculpture, drawing, engraving, poetry, and political cartoons, Picasso’s creativity knows no bounds. “Picasso is like a perpetual motion machine,” a critic once wrote. “You look for him here, and he’s already over there, never taking the same path twice.”

Truth be told, these were challenging years for him in ways we can relate, as they were marked by the rise of fascism, which would plunge Europe into World War II. A foreigner in France, labeled a “degenerate artist” by Nazi Germany, and an enemy of Francoist Spain, Picasso became a person non grata—an elusive artist whose creativity was influenced by the turbulent times. As a foreigner, he had to report to the authorities every couple of years, redoing his fingerprints at the police station, which kept him under surveillance.

In this atmosphere, the Spanish Civil War hits and in just a few days, he created Guernica, a masterpiece that would become the world’s most famous artwork and the most powerful protest against the killing of innocent civilians. “The Old World has committed suicide,” commented the writer-anthropologist Michel Leiris in a stark observation.

5. The Surrealists

In the early 1920s, young Surrealist poets, disheartened by the carnage of the Great War, turn to Picasso, whom André Breton calls “the only true genius of our time, an artist like none other, perhaps not even in Antiquity.” Starting in 1923, Picasso, now discovered, admired, celebrated, and embraced by Louis Aragon, André Breton, and Paul Éluard, is drawn into this subversive galaxy filled with legendary names, all followers of Dadaism. This connection lets him return to his roots, to the world of poets.

In the past, Picasso’s Cubist works had been fervently admired by avant-garde artists and intellectuals from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russian Empire, and Prussian Empire. For over a decade, Picasso becomes the hero and inspiration of the Surrealists, a reluctant guiding spirit. He creates his so-called “magic paintings,” filled with oversized, whimsical anthropomorphic forms where the “polyphonic law of opposites” echoes, and inner demons reign.

Even Dalí, Miró, and Giacometti soon join the chorus of passionate admirers of Picasso.

6. Boisgeloup

In June 1930, with his income skyrocketing, Picasso buys an 18th-century chateau in Normandy, at Boisgeloup. The spacious property allows him to expand his creative repertoire, making large sculptures, engravings, and working with iron. As xenophobia rages on, shown by the riots of April 4, 1934, this “new geographical solution” gives him a sense of independence and security.

Meanwhile, at the prefecture, the “foreigners’ service” perfects an increasingly efficient control system, using a Central Criminal Registry with over four million records and two million files to keep tabs on those often accused of “stealing French jobs.” On July 12, 1932, the director of public security responds to an inquiry from the Minister of the Interior, saying, “We believe Picasso has considerable means. He pays 70,000 francs in rent for his Rue La Boétie apartment and has four servants. Recently, he acquired a large estate in Gisers [sic] […] Investigations at both the Ministry of Justice (naturalization service) and other agencies have not determined if he has changed his citizenship.”

7. After the War and the Hybrid Identity: the Minotaur

In the 1920s, with almost three million workers missing due to war casualties and injuries, foreign labor becomes a necessity and an urgent priority for France. Over a decade, the number of foreign residents doubles, reaching three million by 1931 (7% of the population). But in the 1930s, amid the economic crisis, a wave of intense xenophobia sweeps the country. On July 13, 1931, the police commissioner who issues Picasso’s foreigner ID card stamps it in big black letters with “SPANISH.” By 1938, they add his fingerprints.

So, how does Picasso react to this police surveillance?

Badly.

During the Surrealist years, he starts drawing and reimagining the mythological Minotaur—a figure that is both fragile and powerful, his double, his alter ego. “Picasso’s Minotaur is Picasso,” Kahnweiler says. It’s no coincidence that during another period of crisis, Picasso transforms the mighty Minotaur into a vulnerable figure, gently led by a little girl. With his series Blind Minotaur Led by a Little Girl with Flowers (1934), Picasso finds a subtle way to express his own vulnerability.

7.1. Garcia Lorca’s Spectre

Uncertain about the outcome of his naturalization application, Picasso lives through some rough years, even fearing he might meet the same fate as Federico García Lorca, who was brutally killed by Franco’s militias on August 19, 1936. He decides to bunker down in his Paris studio on Rue des Grands-Augustins, trying to block out the chaos around him. Fueled by his obsessive work, he revisits past themes and genres, pushing them to their absolute limits.

The titles of his paintings are chillingly precise, marked with dates and locations, revealing a meticulous, almost obsessive attention to detail. His works from this period are dark, reflecting a preoccupation with the everyday struggle.

In 1943, he creates the sculpture L’Homme au mouton (The Man with the Sheep), combining the pagan theme of Hermes carrying the ram with the Christian Good Shepherd. This piece is a response to Arno Breker (Hitler’s favorite artist), who had just exhibited his monumental nudes at the Musée de l’Orangerie. In contrast to the triumphant bodies of Nazi iconography, Picasso chooses to portray a humble, fragile man carrying the lost sheep on his shoulders, aligning himself with the weak, the ill, the marginalized, the so-called “degenerates.”

8. The triumph in the States

November 9, 1930: “Picasso is currently the idol of modern art collectors,” claims The New York Times. Starting in 1911 (following his first New York show at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery), major American collectors begin competing for Picasso’s works, as do the directors of top museums in major cities, like Alfred Barr at the MoMA.

In 1936, Barr publishes the exhibition catalog for Cubism and Abstract Art, which includes the first-ever diagram tracing the “pedigree of modern art” from 1895 to 1936, marking Picasso as a key influence on European modern art. Over time, MoMA builds an impressive collection of Picasso’s works, including Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1939—a painting the Louvre had turned down. Barr declares, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon remains one of the most astounding testaments to Picasso. Few modern works so forcefully showcase the genius’s raw energy.”

Meanwhile, French museums, governed by the “good taste” of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, hold only two Picasso paintings (both donations, neither a masterpiece). It’s hardly worth pointing out the stark contrast between Picasso’s reputation in France and the rest of the world.

9. Never a Citizen

Fearing for his safety in France as the Nazi invasion looms, Picasso decides to apply for naturalization. The application sent to the Ministry of Justice in April 1940 is brief, typed, and signed with his signature in bold black ink—his typical masterful, exuberant, and dynamic flourish, like an optimistic artist who seems certain of a positive outcome.

Senator Paul Cuttoli and Professor Henri Laugier, who support his case, are hopeful, especially when the police commissioner grants initial approval, a sign that the application, “particularly urged on by the Cabinet,” is moving along smoothly. But on May 25, 1940, the Renseignements Généraux (General Intelligence Service) files a scathing four-page report that halts the process. Based on an old 1901 police report, it states that “the foreigner in question lacks the credentials for naturalization and should be considered a national security risk.”

So, what happened between April 26, when the commissioner gave his approval, and May 25, when the Renseignements Généraux issued their report? We now know that a xenophobic, Pétain-supporting, amateur painter named Émile Chevalier—a petty police official—was the one who smugly derailed Picasso’s hopes for protection.

10. The French Communist Party

On October 4, 1944, Picasso officially joins the French Communist Party. The next day, L’Humanité announces the news on its front page with a big, bold headline and a dramatic flair. Picasso later says, “I was in such a hurry to have a homeland again! I was always an exile—now I am one no longer.” He sees the party as a protective shield, a launching pad, a safeguard—and he’s not wrong.

Though tensions soon arise with the more orthodox members of the party, Picasso manages to keep his freedom intact. He’s approached by Communist mayors from various French towns and happily donates works to museums across the country, making him a key figure in the modernization of France.

Picasso steps into a new political role: the invisible artist becomes a generous donor, the outcast becomes a patron, the renegade becomes a benefactor, the outsider becomes a guardian figure. In 1953, controversy flares up when, at Stalin’s funeral, Picasso produces an ironic portrait of Stalin. Regimes are never big on irony. But the matter is smoothed over by Maurice Thorez, the General Secretary of the French Communist Party and a friend of Picasso, who understands that Picasso’s symbolic global influence is invaluable to the party. Picasso is neither punished nor scolded.

11. The Glorious Thirty

After the Liberation and the fall of Nazism, General de Gaulle comes to power, marking the beginning of a new era for France, later known as “les Trente Glorieuses”—the thirty glorious years of economic boom. For the French Communist Party, or “the party of the executed” (named for the heavy toll paid during the Resistance), a new phase also begins, with several of its leaders joining the new government.

The Communist Party strengthens the MOI (Main d’Œuvre Immigrée, the immigrant workers’ union formed in 1921), aiming to mobilize waves of political refugees—Spaniards, Italians, German and Polish Jews—who represent a valuable revolutionary force to channel into the Third International.

Picasso is known for his political views, and he’s respected in French working-class communities as well as in the country’s national contemporary art museums. The Ministry of the Interior approves local councils’ decisions to grant him honorary citizenship. Thanks to the network he has patiently built over the years, Picasso solidifies his public image.

In the summer of 1946, the superintendent of the Grimaldi Castle in Antibes welcomes Picasso for an artist residency, offering him a spacious studio on the second floor—the vast space he’d always dreamed of. Picasso also discovers Vallauris, where he learns the eleven traditional techniques for firing and glazing clay. Settling in this small village of ceramicists, he becomes a master of ceramics himself.

In 1955, at seventy-five, he decides to move to Provence, leaving the capital behind for good. Picasso chooses the South over the North, the countryside over Paris, artisans over the Academy of Fine Arts. Here, he reconnects with the historical and cultural richness of the Mediterranean world to which he has always belonged.

In his seventies and eighties, he collaborates with young local artists and artisans. While many retreat into narrow worlds with age, Picasso, now in his later years, expands his interests even further. He embarks on a grand, all-encompassing project that spans spaces, eras, and continents. He envisions a magnificent work as a composer, librettist, and conductor—a masterpiece filled with his iconic characters: bullfighters, musketeers, animals, and women, twisting conventions and inventing his own unique sense of time and space.

While continuing his dialogue with the great masters of the past, Picasso “the Communist” buys a villa in Cannes, a castle in Vauvenargues, and a farmhouse in Mougins, setting up his own vast personal territory. He lives in all these homes in the South of France, a remarkable collection of properties where he accumulates documents, personal mementos, and the countless treasures of his private collection.

When he hears that General de Gaulle wishes to grant him French citizenship and the Legion of Honor, Picasso declines—French citizenship no longer interests him.

With the “Dation Law” (1968) and the opening of the Musée National Picasso in the heart of Paris in 1985, France attempts to erase decades of exclusion—the dark years when the greatest artist of the 20th century was categorized and branded as an outsider. At the time of his death, on April 8, 1973, Pablo Picasso is the most famous foreigner in France.