For decades France has adopted Picasso, making him a prodigal son. But much of his life he did not see it like that at all. Quite the contrary. The man from Malaga arrived in Paris for the first time in October 1900, where he would soon settle, and would finally do so in the south, dying in Mougins in 1973. But for decades neither the political police nor the artistic academy nor the official establishments -the Louvre In 1929, he rejected the donation of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by the collector Jacques Doucet and today it is at MoMA, which appreciated the genius early on – they had no sympathy for him. He was a foreigner, an outsider who arrived at a time when, after the Dreyfus affair, and the assassination of President Sadi Carnot in 1894 by an Italian anarchist, France was maddened against the emigrant.
Considered an anarchist because of his relationship with the Catalan nuclei that welcomed him upon his arrival in the French capital, he would be filed and extensively investigated. A file, 74,664, with a hundred yellowed pages that the sociologist Annie Cohen-Solal unearthed in the Paris Police Prefecture, oozes, remarks, xenophobia and distrust and is devastating when in 1940! he is denied French nationality: “This foreigner does not deserve anything to obtain naturalization; on the other hand, he must be considered highly suspect from the national point of view ”.
Cohen-Solal is now publishing in Spain A Foreigner Called Picasso (Paidós), winner of the Fémina Essay Award, in which he narrates the complicated relationship of the author of Guernica with France and traces a significant history of the relationship of the neighboring country with the foreign. The author, who had already written a biography of Sartre and had “enough monuments”, did not want to write about Picasso. But at the inauguration in 2014 of the Museum of the History of Immigration in Paris, “with a terrible history, opened in 1931 as the Museum of the Colonies,” he told the center’s research manager that one day “they had to talk about a major immigrant who never became a Frenchman, Picasso.” She would end up doing it.
First, he looked for the letters with the family “where you find out how an immigrant feels.” “Her mother of hers, María, wrote to him two and three times a week until her death in 1938 and told him that she loves him, she never forgets him and that he is the best. Isn’t that how you create a genius? Then I went to the Police Prefecture. His file was unbearable, scandalous, he looked like a criminal. He was in a difficult situation until 1944. At that time France was a very xenophobic country, especially against people from the south. And it is extraordinary because the one who writes the first report against Picasso does it for good reasons: his name is in the newspapers and they say that he is the man of the future, a great artist at the age of 19″, recalls Cohen-Solal.
But, he points out, “those who had welcomed him in Paris were Catalan anarchists and it turned out to be a trap for him. Thus his first report will say: ‘He does not speak our language. He receives newspapers in a language I do not understand. He paints women who ask bourgeois for money they won’t give it to him. The concierge says he comes home late. He lives with a supposedly anarchist man. Therefore, he is a threat to the French state. From then on, every time there is a story in a newspaper there is a report. They say: How is it possible that this foreigner earns so much money and buys himself a castle? A foreigner! They were jealous.”
And remember that another foreigner, his dealer, Kahnweiler, expropriated all the paintings at the outbreak of the First World War for being German. Among them, “700 of Picasso’s most heroic period, auctioned after the war: he feels destroyed, amputated.” “After the confiscation, he has no status in France and is looking for a niche, someone to work with, and the first is Diaghilev for his Ballets Russes. That’s why he’s going in that direction. He then meets Étienne de Beaumont when after the war the aristocracy returns to the scene. And then he meets surrealists like Dalí and Miró and a young generation that sees him as his hero. And he turns to surrealism. I explain the evolution of his style by the evolution of his status in French society”, he reasons.
A status that will be complicated by degenerate Nazi art and the Spanish Civil War: “He is as afraid of being assassinated as Lorca, because he is very visible, which I think is why he asks for French nationality, to be protected. It is not that he wants to be French, but rather not to be assassinated by Francoists ”. But a deputy inspector of the Prefecture, Émile Chevalier, “a mediocre painter and a petenista”, he says, will deny it. And in the face of powers with which he does not fit in, “he decided to join the Communist Party in 1944 in order to make himself visible at a time of great visibility for his resistance to the Nazis. He will give them money but at the same time he will make a portrait where Stalin looks ridiculous, he will say what he wants to say ”. An affiliation in the middle of the cold war, in the country that Hoover’s FBI had praised for him, open his own file, 187 pages, dossier 100-337396 with the labels Security matter-C –for communist– and subversive, which portrays him as a “threat to the national security of the United States.”
