5/20/2023 0 Comments The foreignerThe director was successful in conveying this because the audience was laughing throughout the play and afterward were heard saying that this was "one of the best plays they have ever seen". He also wanted to convey the message that people should be themselves. Rather than the result of a decades-long campaign to stigmatize Picasso, then, it probably came down to the chaos and anxiety of a security bureaucracy confronting the opening stages of a terrifying world conflict.Further, as it relates to the director of this play, he intended to give the audience a night of fun and entertainment with comic relief. Although one functionary ruled in Picasso’s favor, the anonymous denunciation that Cohen-Solal has unearthed, together with the arrival of the Wehrmacht, may have been enough to tip the balance. In turn, the French police were probably concerned about Picasso’s ties to communists, since the French Communist Party had been banned following the German-Soviet pact of 1939. Picasso - who had not previously sought citizenship - may have been motivated by fears of an imminent Spanish-German alliance, which would have classified him as an enemy alien. The application was filed during the tense first spring of World War II, and the negative ruling came two weeks after Hitler’s armies marched into France. Bizarrely, Cohen-Solal accuses André Malraux, de Gaulle’s culture minister and a leading French intellectual, of “erasing Picasso’s name” in a 1961 eulogy to Braque, though, as she later acknowledges, Malraux organized a “vast” state exhibition devoted to Picasso a few years later and recommended him for one of France’s highest honors.Īs for Picasso’s failure to obtain French citizenship in 1940, the historians Daix and Israel provide a more straightforward explanation. Barr Jr., the legendary founding director of the Museum of Modern Art. And Picasso’s first great retrospective was not in New York but at the Georges Petit galleries in Paris, in 1932 - much to the chagrin of Alfred H. Rosenberg, Picasso’s primary dealer from 1919 to 1939, ran one of France’s leading galleries. Frenchmen such as Level and Doucet were crucial patrons of his art before and after World War I. As she observes, it was often in dialogue with the French artists Georges Braque and Henri Matisse that Picasso was spurred on to new innovations. Indeed, on the strength of Cohen-Solal’s own evidence, France was crucial to Picasso’s success, just as it was for so many other foreign artists who settled there. But for Cohen-Solal, all this is the prelude to his definitive rejection for citizenship in the spring of 1940. Elsewhere, she puts much weight on the fact that Picasso was “stigmatized” by the word “SPANISH” on his identity card, in what appears to have been a simple identification of his nationality. And then there was the continual menace of the immigration authorities, or what she calls the “all-powerful police.” The evidence is thin here, and readers may scratch their heads when Cohen-Solal writes breathlessly of the “minefield of bureaucracy” that Picasso was made to walk through, having to renew his foreign identity card about once every four years between 1919 and the start of World War II: “so many fingerprints taken, so many mugshots of him looking like an ex-con,” she writes. In Paris, by contrast, newspapers were “rife with fear that cubism was a direct threat to the country’s identity.” Even in the 1920s and 1930s, when Picasso had long since become a well-paid and highly sought-after member of the Right Bank beau monde, Cohen-Solal finds French nationalist critics attacking him and the state utterly indifferent to his work. Already in 1901, Cohen-Solal writes, he was considered an “alien suspect” for his apparent ties to anarchists four years later, one of his first solo exhibitions provoked a police investigation.īy the eve of World War I, Picasso’s star had begun its rapid rise - at least in other parts of Europe and, Cohen-Solal maintains, the United States. Montmartre, we learn, was crawling with police informants with names like Finot, Foureur, Bornibus and Giroflé as for the Bateau-Lavoir, the much-mythologized artists’ building where Picasso lived and worked during his first cubist breakthroughs, it was in reality “one of those shameful habitations that the capital offered its immigrants and marginals.” In this unpromising milieu, the young Picasso, with his broken French and outcast friends, struggled to avoid arrest or even expulsion. In place of the seedy Belle Epoque glamour usually associated with Picasso’s first years in Paris, she presents a paranoid and xenophobic city, still reeling from a decade of antisemitism and anarchist violence. Cohen-Solal lays out her case in a formidable battery of documents, statements, immigration policies and sociological research.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |