To mark the fiftieth anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death, scholars and critics are reconsidering Pablo Picasso’s life and creations. They have written about the artist’s Blue Period, Rose Period, Surrealist Period, and the inspiration for his masterpiece Guernica. But French scholar and author Annie Cohen-Solal had another approach in mind. The author of the celebrated biographies of John-Paul Sartre and Mark Rothko, Cohen-Solal channels Picasso the Foreigner: An Artist in France, 1900-1973 through the lens of Pablo Picasso the outsider in xenophobic France. The book is buttressed with thorough research, focusing on his parlous relationship with the French police and government from the moment he arrived in Paris in 1900.
The French claimed to have many reasons to be suspicious of foreigners during the Belle Époque including the high-profile Dreyfuss Affair, which divided the Third French Republic for more than ten years, and the June, 1894 assassination of French president Sadi Carnot by an Italian anarchist, Geronimo Cesario.
Cohen-Solal hooks the reader early by writing about the assassin’s file which was “Kept nearby [another report] … in another cardboard box and written barely seven years later.” That box held photos, identification cards, and police intelligence notes on Pablo Picasso. The Málaga, Spain-born Picasso was placed under surveillance because police believed he was an anarchist, a conclusion based on his association with Catalan friends Pere Mañach, his first art dealer, and Carles Casagemas, who, while depressed, aimed his revolver at a female companion. He missed her, but minutes later he shot himself in the temple at a café on Boulevard de Clichy. Picasso lamented his friend’s death with paintings Casagemas in His Coffin and The Burial of Casagemas.
The book, translated from the French by Sam Taylor, resonates best when the author writes about Picasso’s relationships with other outsiders including Max Jacob, a gay Jewish poet from Brittany. Jacob and Picasso lived together on Boulevard Voltaire and Jacob was a frequent visitor to 13 Rue Ravignan, a rickety building Jacob dubbed Bateau-Lavoir – named after the laundry boats that lumbered up and down the Seine. Jacob idolized Picasso and the artist reciprocated with heartfelt epistles: “I do not want to be where I am [Barcelona] and I cannot be where I want.” Cohen-Solal notes that “In Barcelona he felt out of place, imprisoned.” He craved the Bateau-Lavoir where he created many masterpieces including the circus-themed Family of Saltimbanques.
The author writes diligently about outsiders including Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, a German Jewish art dealer and proponent of cubism. Kahnweiler’s promotion of Picasso helped the artist finally make a profit. Another highlighted friend is Vincenc Kramář, a Czechoslovakian collector and Cubist aficionado who owned eight Picasso works including The Lovers and The Poet.
A pivotal moment in the narrative is the emergence of Picasso’s friendship with Georges Braque – at its height from 1907 through 1914. The duo established a new form of visual art – Cubism, featuring geometric shapes or cubes to portray humans and other subjects. It is Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which by “sweeping away, so to speak, all the tradition of the nineteenth century, opens the door to all Cubist research.” At the time, Picasso was exploring African sculptures, and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon portrays five nude women composed of two-dimensional surfaces with faces influenced by African culture. However, the “French press … was rife with fear that Cubism was a direct threat to the country’s identity. ‘The [Cubists] are foolish young people. [They] do not represent in any way the leading trends of the Salon.'”
[left: Picasso in Place Ravignan in Montmartre, 1904]
This contentiousness about Cubism is threaded throughout her book. In fact, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was offered to the Louvre, but the establishment rejected it. Instead, Alfred Barr convinced the board at MoMA to purchase the masterpiece.
The drama of Picasso’s Great War years is heightened because some of his friends were forced to fight – and flee – the City of Lights. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler was declared an enemy because he was German. He fled to Italy, then Switzerland. His paintings, including many of Picasso’s Cubist works, were sequestered. Vincenc Kramář joined the troops of the Triple Entente, and Picasso’s friend Guillaume Apollinaire, a French poet who devised the terms Cubism and Surrealism, was injured when a piece of shrapnel penetrated his helmet. He died soon after from Spanish influenza. His Cubist compatriot Georges Braque also abandoned Paris for the conflict.
In these sections, Cohen-Solal asks us to ponder: “How did Picasso react to the catastrophe?” She believes he did so through his art, particularly The Painter and His Model, created at the beginning of the war “to show his distress,” and that’s why, she believes, it was never really finished. Picasso “draws in black pencil: to the left, a doorframe, then a Cézanne-like painter, pensive, mustachioed, sitting crookedly on a rustic chair, leaning on one elbow, looking older, his hands heavy, staring absently at the ground,” mirroring Picasso’s loss of friendships and a pause in art critique, his productivity, and income.
Cohen-Solal’s prose is vigorous in the sections about World War II during which France’s xenophobia was at its height due to Nazi occupation. Picasso was affected directly when Nazi leaders defamed and burned 500 to 600 paintings they deemed “degenerate art,” many of them his originals. But he continued to create, living reclusively in Antibes, Royan, and Paris. Cohen-Solal captures his mood there, describing his long hair and his frayed clothes: “[he] look[ed] vaguely like a hobo.” His paintings during this time include Café à Royan, “filled with the colors of months past, but it is an empty world, devoid of life,” and Man with a Lamb:
“In contrast to the triumphant bodies of Nazi iconography, Picasso chose the theme of the ‘good shepherd’ (at the crossroads between pagan and Christian sources), with this body of a humble, fragile man who, like an offering, carries a lamb in his arms. [Picasso] deliberately joined the camp of the sick, the degenerate, the precarious (the Jew, the Romani, the disabled, homosexual, the freemason, the Bolshevik) — the camp of the Other.”
The author adroitly writes about one of the most famous pieces in the “World of Art” – Guernica, created in just a few weeks as Picasso’s reaction to the German and Italian bombing of the titular city. Extolling Picasso’s genius as he worked frantically to mourn his homeland, the author’s research indicates that his muse Dora Maar, a photographer and activist, encouraged Picasso to “give up color to work only in black and white … [and] during the development of Guernica, Dora Maar penetrated deeply into Picasso’s creative imagination, so it would be an understatement to say she played a major role … [she] was an inspiration, an advisor, but also a sort of Pygmalion.”
But the French still did not welcome the artist. He had to provide fresh fingerprints in 1938 and he was denied citizenship in 1940. The government understood “at the fringe of French society Picasso became the archetypal menace because he increasingly represented everything the patriots hated: he was rich, famous, unfathomable, uncontrollable, cosmopolitan” and Spanish.
So, why did Picasso stay in France for his entire career? The author deftly answers this question throughout Picasso the Foreigner and through an Interview that she conducted to support her 2021 exhibition “Picasso, the Foreigner” at Paris’s National Museum of the History of Immigration. In short, “Paris was the only place to be when you wanted to become an artist because there was this tension between the avant-garde and the establishment. This attracted artists from all around the world to Paris, and one of those artists was Pablo Picasso.”
Cohen-Solal does a splendid job of reimagining Picasso’s years in Paris and the torment he endured as police shadowed him for more than 50 years. Her biography recreates the artist’s mood during both world wars and the interwar period. Her study of France’s ongoing rejection of Picasso’s citizenship is startling. He was so disheartened by the French police and government that, in 1959, he rejected an offer to finally become a French citizen. Yet Pablo Picasso found his artistic expression and much more in France, and Annie Cohen-Solal’s unique voice resonates on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.
[Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux on March 21, 2023, 608 pages, $40.00 US/$53.00 CAN]
[below: the first police report on Picasso, 1901]
