French police kept Pablo Picasso under surveillance for nearly 40 years — and when the Spanish-born painter applied for citizenship the authorities could not decide whether he was an anarchist or a communist so they ruled him undesirable just in case.
Recently released intelligence reports — including his 1940 citizenship application that Picasso kept secret from his family — chart the artist’s life from 1901, when he arrived in Paris for his first exhibition.
The ‘so-called modern painter’, as the first of many plodding police reports describes the then 19-year-old genius, ‘keeps irregular hours and sometimes even does not return at night’ to his lodgings at the home of ‘known anarchist’ Pierre Marrach, a gallery owner.
The 1901 report, including information from the caretaker of Marrach’s building in Montmartre and a conversation overheard in a cafe, finds ‘grounds for considering him an anarchist’. That seems to be based on one police officer’s bemusement at the art world’s enthusiasm for Picasso’s work. ‘One of his recent paintings shows soldiers in foreign uniforms beating a beggar on the ground. Also in his room are several paintings representing mothers being rebuffed as they beg from the upper classes,’ writes the officer.
The Picasso papers were returned to France three years ago from Russia, under a post-Cold War agreement that saw seven articulated lorries driving to Moscow to collect a generation’s worth of bureaucracy, confiscated by the Nazis in 1941 and seized by the Soviets in 1945.
‘I ended up with 140 cardboard boxes,’ said Claude Charlot, director of archives at the police prefecture in Paris. ‘A Russian translator who sifted through the files came to me one day with Picasso’s naturalisation application, signed by the artist. It was a huge surprise,’ said Charlot, who then consulted two art historians. Together they created an exhibition currently at the Paris Police Museum.
In a book accompanying the exhibition, art historians Pierre Daix and Armand Israel assert that Picasso steered clear of politics early in his career and joined the French Communist Party only at the end of the Second World War.
Anarchists were the Islamic fundamentalists of the early twentieth century. ‘The police did their job. They were watched and, as is the case today, 90% of suspects were innocent.’ In the late 1890s, anarchists carried out several bomb attacks in France, including one on parliament, and they assassinated French president Sadi Carnot.
In 1905, the Paris prefect of police requested a second report but Picasso could not be found for several months. This prompted police to keep a ledger of his movements, including his holiday destinations. A quizzical listing for 1907 — ‘Avignon?’ — shows up the police’s lack of intelligence. In 1907, Picasso was in a flat in Montmartre painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
Like all foreigners in France, Picasso had to renew his resident’s card every five years, feeding the bureaucracy machine with passport photos and his now priceless signature.
His marriage to Russian Olga Khokhlova in 1918 required character references (Jean Cocteau and Georges Braque) and an ‘aliens inquiry’ showing Picasso earned 25 francs a day, paid his rent regularly and was deemed a francophile. The richest hoard for the bureaucrats came after 3 April 1940 with Picasso’s application for naturalisation. In 1937, Picasso had painted Guernica — his protest against the German bombing of a Basque town — and was a clear opponent of General Francisco Franco.
The Germans were advancing and Picasso feared the alliance between the Spanish dictator and Hitler which, in France, made him the citizen of an enemy power and he faced an alien’s internment. In the event, Paris fell in June 1940.
By then, the artist had filed a comprehensive dossier backing his application and had answered detailed questionnaires. These reveal that in 1939 he paid 700 000 francs in taxes and had ‘adopted our mode of living’. A first report found in favour of his being granted citizenship.
However, the secret services repeated the 1905 allegation that Picasso was an anarchist. They wrote that ‘he was 30 years old in 1914 but did nothing for our country during the war’. They added that ‘he has made millions (most of it said to be in foreign bank accounts) and there are rumours he has prints in his studio representing the hammer and sickle’. The report concludes: ‘Picasso has retained extremist ideas and is moving towards communism.’
Picasso never received a formal rejection of his application but remained in France until his death in 1973. He never mentioned his naturalisation attempt to anyone. ‘I think he was profoundly humiliated by the fact that France didn’t say yes,’ said Charlot. ‘He never applied again.’ – Guardian Unlimited Â