Picasso was one of the most valued members of the French Communist Party – until a portrait of Stalin put him at the centre of an ideological row. Gertje R Utley on an artist true to his beliefs On October 4 1944, less than six weeks after the liberation of Paris, Pablo Picasso, then 63, joined the French Communist Party. To his surprise, the news covered more than half of the front page of the next day’s L’Humanit, the party’s official newspaper, overshadowing reports of the war. The article celebrated the entry of “the illustrious son of democratic Spain” into “la famille communiste”. Shortly after, in an interview for L’Humanit, Picasso claimed he had always fought, through the weapons of his art, like a true revolutionary. But he also said the experience of World War II had taught him that it was not sufficient to manifest political sympathies under the veil of mythologising artistic expression. “I have become a communist because our party strives more than any other to know and to build the world, to make men clearer thinkers, more free and more happy. I have become a communist because the communists are the bravest in France, in the Soviet Union, as they are in my own country, Spain. While I wait for the time when Spain can take me back again, the French Communist Party is a fatherland for me. “In it I find again all my friends – the great scientists Paul Langevin and Frdric Joliot-Curie, the great writers Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, and so many of the beautiful faces of the insurgents of Paris. I am again among brothers.”
Five days after joining the party Picasso appeared at a ceremony at the Pre Lachaise cemetery, organised as a joint memorial for those killed during the Commune of 1871 and in the Nazi occupation of Paris. Surrounded by party luminaries such as Aragon and Eluard, Aragon’s novelist wife Elsa Triolet, the writer Eduard Pignon, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and actor Jean-Louis Barrault, Picasso was prominent among what the newspaper Ce Soir estimated to be a crowd of 250 000. He also presided over the infamous gathering of the Comit Directeur du Front National des Arts, which drew up the list of artists to be purged for collaborationist activi-ties during the occupation. In 1950 he was awarded the Stalin prize for his involvement in the Mouvement de la Paix, for which he had designed the emblem of a dove. The movement, ostensibly set up by French and Polish intellectuals, was inaugurated in Wroclaw under the aegis of Andrey Zhdanov, secretary of the Soviet Central Committee and chief architect of Stalin’s ideological campaign.
Picasso’s involvement also earned him an FBI file which was kept active until his death. Heavily edited, with large sections blacked out completely, the file was sent to me upon my request, under the United States Freedom of Information Act. Third parties were to be investigated and their “security status” questioned, merely because they were acquainted with Picasso. Charlie Chaplin’s friendship with Picasso – “an admitted French CP member” – further harmed his reputation in McCarthy’s America, and led to calls for his extradition as a “subversive alien”. One particularly damning entry, for June 16 1950, which is almost totally blacked out, accused him of spying for the Soviet Union. While Picasso was never an apparatchik, there was no doubt of his commitment to the party. He was never expected to attend the mandatory weekly cell meetings or go out to sell L’Humanit as other members were. But his propaganda value as a prestigious artist was incalculable, and he generously donated time and money to the French Communist Party and associated organisations. He marched with the Front National des Intellectuels and the Front National Universitaire, and accepted honorary positions on boards and in organisations. His contributions mostly took the form of paintings donated for sale. In November 1956 alone, the dealer Kahnweiler wrote that he gave, on Picasso’s behalf, a cheque for FFr3-million for Christmas gifts for Enfants des Fusills de la Rsistance, FFr500 000 for the Comit de la Paix, FFr300 000 for the Patriote de Toulouse, FFr750 000 more for the children of war victims and FFr3-million (half a million more than the previous year) for a yearly communist party event. (To give some perspective to these figures, Chrysler bought Picasso’s Le Charnier in 1954 for FFr5-million.) The political character of many of the chari-ties Picasso sponsored can be surmised from the fact that a number of his contributions went through the hands of Georges Gosnat, member of the central committee and treasurer of the French Communist Party. If it dawned only slowly on Picasso that the party would be unceasing in its demands on his time, money and political support – requests he fulfilled to an astonishing degree, if never to full party satisfaction – he had yet to feel pressure in matters of art itself. Although in the early years of his membership the party tolerated his chosen form of expression, which departed from the party style of socialist realism, by 1947 some critics had started to remonstrate that he was not putting his art more clearly at the service of his political beliefs. In 1953 the controversy over his “privileged” beyond-the-rules status erupted. Stalin died on March 5. Aragon and editor Pierre Daix were preparing an issue of the communist journal Les Lettres Franaises when the news broke.
Aragon immediately sent a telegram to Picasso, who was living with Franoise Gilot, requesting a drawing of Stalin. Daix and Gilot knew that Picasso, who until then had successfully foiled any hope that he would paint a portrait of Stalin, could not refuse this time. The artist’s homage for Stalin’s 70th birthday in 1949 had been nothing more than a drawing of a glass raised to the dictator’s health, which had shocked the party faithful with its breezy caption, “Staline ta sant” (Stalin, to your health). There is ample evidence that Picasso knew what Stalin looked like but Picasso claimed not to be able to summon Stalin’s features. This time he seems to have used old newspaper photographs as a reference. The portrait shows the young Stalin, face framed by thick, cropped hair, mouth partly hidden under a bushy moustache. The eyes under the strong eyebrows are those of a dreamer and offset by the prominent jawline. Picasso told Genevive Laporte, with whom he was having an affair at the time, that he had wanted to show Stalin as a man of the people, without his uniform and decorations.
But Daix has argued that the fact that Stalin’s death followed shortly after the execution of victims of the Slnsky trial in Czechoslovakia should be taken into account. Daix maintained that the victims were people whom Picasso had known personally through their involvement in the Spanish Civil War. One has to wonder, therefore, whether Picasso, in choosing to represent a young Stalin, perhaps still driven by an idealistic vision, perceived what most of the non- communist world already knew and what the communists only slowly came to accept: that in order to present an idealised image of the man, one had to go back into the early days of his life and of the revolution. Aragon and Daix were relieved to find the portrait to their liking. Daix opted for the neutral caption “Staline par Pablo Picasso, March 8 1953”. Below it ran the names of Aragon, Nobel prize-winning scientist Joliot-Curie, and Picasso – les trois mousquetaires, as they were known – the most prestigious that the party intelligentsia could invoke. The adulatory tone of the accompanying articles, which celebrate “the extraordinary man loved and revered as a master by every one of us”, stands in sharp contrast to Picasso’s drawing. Perhaps this is why his portrait was seen by many as an unforgivable act of lse-majest. For Aragon and Daix, the satisfaction with their commemorative issue was short-lived. The first negative reaction came from the employees of France Nouvelle and L’Humanit, the two papers that shared the same building as Les Lettres Franaises, who were appalled by what they considered an affront to Stalin.
Daix suspected – correctly, as it turned out – that this was instigated by the party leaders, who saw publication of the portrait as an incursion against the personality cult, and by Auguste Lecur, hardline party secretary, who welcomed this opportunity to chastise Aragon and Les Lettres Franaises for the relative independence they claimed. On seeing the journal, Elsa Triolet understood immediately that the simple fact that Picasso had dared to touch Stalin was going to infuriate the faithful, and she knew that disaster awaited them. She realised that the perceptual discrepancy between the young Georgian in the drawing and the usual representation of Stalin as “the incarnation of wisdom, courage, of all that is human, of the one who had won the war, our saviour” was too wide for believers. From the moment the paper appeared at kiosks on March 12, the editorial offices were flooded with outraged calls. On March 18 1953 a damaging communiqu appeared in L’Humanit from the secretariat of the French Communist Party, “categorically” disapproving publication of the portrait “by comrade Picasso”. It thanked and congratulated the numerous comrades who had immediately “informed the central committee of their objections” and demanded that comrade Aragon “publish the essential passages of those letters, which will provide a contribution towards a positive criticism”. Aragon was obliged to publish the communiqu in the following issue of Les Lettres Franaises, as well as a self-criticism in L’Humanit. The major reproach in the letters was that the portrait neglected to reflect the emotions of the public – “the love that the working class feel for the regretted comrade Stalin and for the Soviet Union” – and that it did not do justice to the moral, spiritual and intellectual personality of Stalin. “No, this is not Stalin’s face,” wrote one correspondent, “that face which was at once so kind and strong, so expressive, so inspiring of confidence in the honesty of our dear, great Stalin.” “Where is the radiance, the smile, the intelligence – in a word, the humanity – elsewhere always so visible in our dear Stalin’s portraits?” asked another. Picasso failed to capture the reassuring father figure, the man whose image “had for years given a face to our hopes”. The most devastating letter came from the artist Andr Fougeron, the devoted exponent of the Zhdanov-approved style of socialist realism. As Daix wrote, it possessed the weight and character of a momentous political docu-ment, because it revealed for the first time the pressure put on communist artists to conform to the party line. Fougeron expressed “the indignation and sadness of all the comrades” that Aragon, with his choice of Picasso’s portrait, gave his “tacit encouragement to continue the sterile tricks of aesthetic formalism”. As organiser of the forthcoming Karl Marx exhibition, Fougeron declared furthermore that he absolutely refused to accept the “so-called portrait” as Picasso’s contribution. Aragon was mortified, and threatened suicide. His wife, Elsa, pleaded in vain with Lecur to refrain from demanding Aragon’s self-criticism.
Picasso, besieged by journalists eager to have him admit that his portrait sought to mock Stalin, refuted any such suggestion. Nor did the attacks against him entice Picasso to disparage the party, as some had hoped. Despite various reports that quoted Picasso as saying that one did not criticise the flowers that were sent to the funeral or the tears that were shed, Gilot recalled a more detached attitude. According to her, Picasso replied that aesthetic matters were debatable, that therefore it was the party’s right to criticise him and that he saw no need to politicise the issue.
“You’ve got the same situation in the party as in any big family,” he said. “There is always some damn fool to stir up trouble, but you have to put up with him.” In conversation with Daix, who was sent by Aragon to appease him, Picasso speculated: “Can you imagine if I had done the real Stalin, such as he has become, with his wrinkles, his pockets under the eyes, his warts. A portrait in the style of Cranach! Can you hear them scream? ‘He has disfigured Stalin! He has aged Stalin!'” He continued: “And then too, I said to myself, why not a Stalin in heroic nudity?… Yes, but, Stalin nude, and what about his virility? … If you take the pecker of the classical sculptor … So small … But, come on, Stalin, he was a true male, a bull. So then, if you give him the phallus of a bull, and you’ve got this little Stalin behind his big thing they’ll cry: But you’ve made him into a sex maniac! A satyr! “Then if you are a true realist you take your tape measure and you measure it all properly. That’s worse, you made Stalin into an ordinary man. And then, as you are ready to sacrifice yourself, you make a plaster cast of your own thing. Well, it’s even worse. What, you dare take yourself for Stalin! After all, Stalin, he must have had an erection all the time, just like the Greek statues … Tell me, you who knows, socialist realism, is that Stalin with an erection or without an erection?” When in the summer of 1954 the communists began reluctantly to acknowledge Stalin’s crimes (although little was conceded publicly), Picasso, thinking aloud, asked Daix: “Don’t you think that soon they will find that my portrait is too nice?” On another occasion, he reflected: “Fortunately I drew the young Stalin. The old one never existed. Only for the official painters.”
Picasso later called the year 1953 his saison en enfer – his season in hell. He admitted to some friends how shaken he had been by the accusations and humiliations of the scandal. The year is widely believed to signal the end of Picasso’s political commitment. Yet while his cooperation with the party was never again as close as it had been in the years 1944 to 1953, his commitment did not stop. He continued to produce drawings for the press and for poster designs, made supportive appearances at party events, and readily signed petitions and protest declarations initiated by the party. He also never discontinued his financial support. While many left because of the party’s attitude during the Hungarian uprising in 1956, Picasso reaffirmed his loyalty. In an interview with the art critic Carlton Lake in July 1957, he again confirmed his belief in communism and his intention never to leave the party. In 1962 he was awarded the Lenin prize. In August 1968, speaking with friends, he deplored the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, but failed to do so publicly. At the end of that year he refused again to speak out against his long-held political beliefs. Picasso had entered the party with enthusiasm and some idealism. It is difficult to know when the awareness of the gap between its claims and the realities set in. After Khrushchev’s “secret speech” at the 20th congress of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, in February 1956, in which he reported on the crimes of Stalin’s tyranny, it became impossible for anybody to claim ignorance. Picasso apparently was appalled: “While they asked you to do ever more for the happiness of men … they hung this one and tortured that one. And those were innocents. Will this change?” Even as the evidence of the harsh realities of the communist world mounted, even as it dawned that “they were as wrong in politics as in the arts” – a possibility he had once expressed with foreboding – he continued to refuse anyone the right to question his political engagement. Daix later maintained that although “Picasso could be unjust, capricious, even sadistic in private – in a quarter of a century, I always found him ready to assume his share of the misfortunes of whatever community he had chosen. Not only the communists, but all of his own: the Spaniards, the painters, the poets, his near relations. Ready, that is, able to give his time, his work as a painter. If this side of him remains so misunderstood, it is because the party was part of his family, and family matters were taken care of in private.” Picasso’s response to detrimental news from the Soviet Union was: “And the workers, are they still masters of their factories, and the peasants, the owners of their land? Well then, everything else is secondary – the only thing that matters is to save the revolution.” This is an edited extract from Picasso: The Communist Years by Gertje R Utley, Yale University Press