Jonathan Jones
One day last August the great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson opened his copy of Le Monde and was shocked by what he saw. There next to each other were two pictures – one of his old friend Pablo Picasso, the other of a new car, the Citron Xsara Picasso, bearing not just Picasso’s name but his signature, for which Citron has paid an undisclosed sum to Picasso’s son Claude.
Cartier-Bresson sat down and wrote a letter to Claude. “It was a private letter,” he says. “I sent it to Claude and I never got an answer.” So now he’s prepared to make the hand-written, bitingly sarcastic note public. “Dear Claude,” he begins, then upbraids Picasso’s son for a shameful lack of respect for “one of the greatest painters, a genius”.
To some people the letter might seem heavy- handed. We’re used to things being sold with postmodern jokes and quotations, like the Dennis Hopper car advert where he cruises past his younger self. “There’s a lot of synergy between Citron, which is known for innovation and style,” says the company’s British press officer, “and Picasso, who to a degree represents the same values.”
But did he? The simple answer is no. Picasso was a communist who didn’t believe in private property. His painting Guernica, a symbol of the Spanish Republic, is a nightmare of mechanised violence. Cartier- Bresson, a French Resistance hero, shared his radical politics. No wonder he finds it grotesque that Picasso should be used to sell a car, of all things. Will a percentage of the money Claude has made on the deal go to the victims of car crashes? This is a devastating letter to send a son about his father. Cartier-Bresson effectively accuses Claude of not knowing who Pablo was.
Cartier-Bresson is not alone in finding the Citron Xsara a merchandising opportunity too far. Picasso’s granddaughter Marina is so outraged that she’s suing Claude, her uncle, for what she considers an abuse of his power as director of the Picasso Administration, an organisation that represents the Picasso estate.
You can’t blame a car company for wanting to associate itself with the most famous artist of the 20th century. The mystery is why the Picasso Administration has let it. The complex story begins with Picasso’s children by Franoise Gilot – Claude and Paloma – and their strained relationship with their father. Claude has made it his life’s work to control Picasso’s copyrights, and Paloma has used her father’s name to become a fashion icon.
All becomes clear when you discover that Claude and Paloma had to fight to be Picassos at all. His illegitimate children by Gilot, they were only allowed his name because their mother fought for it in court in the forties. And Picasso’s last wife, Jacqueline Roque, tried to prevent them inheriting anything from their father at all.
Picasso had two other children before Claude and Paloma – a son, Paulo, by his Russian ballerina wife Olga , and a daughter, Maya, by Marie-Thrse Walter. In 1975, two years after Picasso’s death, Paulo died of cirrhosis of the liver, leaving two children, Marina and Bernard.
There was inevitably a bitter dispute about the estate, then valued at $260-million. The largest share went to his widow Jacqueline; her attempt to prevent Picasso’s children and grandchildren by former partners inheriting anything failed when a settlement was reached in 1977. She committed suicide in 1986.
The grandchildren, Marina and Bernard, each inherited one-fifth of the estate. Maya, his daughter by Marie-Thrse Walter, received one-tenth of Picasso’s art, as did Claude and Paloma Picasso. Claude and Paloma, however, are the two who have far more spectacularly associated themselves with their father’s name and, above all, its financial value. The psychological reasons are clear enough. While Picasso first worshipped, then tore apart, his lovers, he could be a wonderful father.
In Picasso’s middle age particularly, children meant a great deal to him. Two years after the birth of Maya in 1935, he painted Guernica, in which a child dead in a woman’s arms is his most absolute image of loss. When Picasso was involved with the Spanish struggle, the French Resistance and then the Communist Party, he fixed on children as images of new life. The corollary of the dead child in Guernica is his white dove, which he drew in 1947 when Franoise Gilot was pregnant with a daughter. Picasso gave the drawing to the Communist Party Peace Congress and called his daughter Paloma, which is Spanish for dove.
Claude and Paloma were born when Picasso was already old. By the time they were adolescents, he was disillusioned with the Communist Party and, facing death, became self-obsessed. When Franoise Gilot told him she was going to publish her hostile autobiography, Life With Picasso, he flipped, banning Claude and Paloma from ever seeing him again. He was 82.
When Picasso had his surviving children, he was a communist. To sell his name to Citron is a travesty. Picasso’s own faith in children belonged to the time when he believed in a socialist future for Europe under the sign of Paloma, the dove of peace.
During the war Picasso stayed in Paris and supported the Resistance when other artists fled abroad or kept out of the conflict. In 1944 Cartier-Bresson was himself so far underground that New York’s Museum of Modern Art planned a posthumous retrospective for him. In the same year the photographer took a highly emotional picture of Picasso. The artist stands uneasily in his dingy wartime apartment, hungry and cold like everyone else, frightened like everyone else. Set this photograph next to the Citron Xsara Picasso and you can see why Cartier-Bresson is so angry. The thing he chokes on in his letter to Claude is the association of Picasso with a car, a thing of violence that kills people.
If Picasso has anything to communicate to the next century, it is his horror of a mechanised violence that in Guernica reduces children to corpses. Cartier- Bresson is speaking up for a modernist belief in art against the postmodern irony that would merely shrug at calling a car a Picasso. We may shrug, too – but if we do, we’d better know what we’re throwing away.