Art-o-Gram: Picasso – an artist and three wars

Pablo Picasso is, for many people, "the artist," and the person of Picasso becomes ever more impressive the more one delves into his life. Impressive in many respects, this is about Picasso the political artist .

A warning for all people today

In the long and eventful life of the Cubist artist, a particular reality held great weight, one that seems almost unimaginable to a middle-aged German living today. His life and thought were overshadowed by wars that directly affected him in his respective circumstances.

To make it clear to every reader who lives more in the 21st than the 20th century what significance war had in the 20th century: There were around 140 wars in the 20th century , and the list of wars that directly affected Picasso's life is impressive:

• 1893, shortly after his 12th birthday, the first Rif War between Spain and Morocco began; it was also a daily topic of conversation in Spain because of the death of a famous Spanish military governor, although the fighting took place in Morocco.
• 1895 –1898 The Cuban Liberation Army fought against Spain for Cuba's autonomy in the Cuban War of Independence.
• 1896–1898 The Philippines fought against the Spanish colonial power in the Philippine Revolution.
• 1898 He witnessed Spain lose its last significant colonies in the Spanish-American War.
• 1909 The Spaniards of the exclave of Melilla on the North African coast fought again against Morocco.
• From 1900 onwards , Picasso frequently visited Paris and witnessed all the European crises that eventually led to
• 1914 which led to the First World War. No sooner had peace returned in 1918 than it broke out again
• 1921 the third Rif War between Spain and Morocco, which Spain only won in 1926 through the illegal use of mustard gas (a gas use with cancerous consequences to this day).
• 1936 The Spanish Civil War began, in which the right-wing putschists under General Francisco Franco succeeded in overthrowing the democratically elected Popular Front government of Spain by April 1939 and establishing a dictatorship that lasted until Franco's death in 1975
• 1939 World War II began, lasting until 1945, and kept the artist stranded in Paris without permission to travel until 1944.

These were 9 wars in which his home country or his respective place of residence was involved; between the ages of 12 and 63, Picasso experienced 28 years in which wars taking place in his world dominated life, and only 25 years in which no war surrounded him (many of these years, however, were characterized by political unrest and crises that later led to wars).

From 1945 until the death of the cubist master in 1973, another 40 wars took place, against which he opposed many political actions; he was very involved in the fight against the aggressive war policies of imperialist states.

Doubts persist: Picasso's controversial position as a political artist

If we look at him today, we can read “Picasso as a political artist”

His political stance was described as “sentimental” or perhaps even naive . He joined the French Communist Party in 1944 “still in the spirit of the Resistance ,” even though he never left – this sounds a bit as if he simply didn't leave out of laziness. Conversely, such “laziness” is also held against him: he is criticized for remaining a communist until his death in 1973, for not having been prompted to resign immediately by Stalin's terror, the Hungarian Uprising, or the Prague Spring.

Another interpretation is that he reacted angrily (sulkily?) to transgressions by Soviet officials, always with the same phrase: the only thing that mattered was saving the revolution. Here, he is repeatedly accused of not seeing that the behavior of Soviet politicians was dangerous, but this phrase is actually far from being frequently uttered by the artist himself…

We are allowed to read that “Picasso was no renegade”, his protests against communist excesses during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 or the Prague Spring of 1968 are described as “rebellious”, a term that probably belongs more in kindergarten, his art is interpreted as “apolitical”: not every skull underlaid with leeks, not every vanitas motif and not every dark still life is a political statement by the artist, and he resisted overly explicit attributions throughout his life anyway.

It is argued that political content is "imposed" on Picasso's later series, in which he reworked the works of old masters, because one simply cannot take Picasso too literally. Of course, the critics, from their lofty position of expertise, fail to explain why this should be the case.

His long-time art dealer David-Henry Kahnweiler is even quoted as saying that he was “the most apolitical man he had ever met.”

Overall, after reading such lines, one can hardly escape the impression that "Picasso as a political artist" wasn't all that great.

Is that really the case?

Picasso's artistic output – hampered and shaped by wars

To reiterate: Picasso experienced nine wars firsthand, spending 28 years with war and 25 years without it up to the end of World War II. These wars demonstrably shaped his thinking (for those who look more closely)

He first experienced war at the age of 16, when his country was defeated as swiftly as it was devastatingly in the Spanish-American War from April to August 1898. Although the fighting took place near the Spanish colonial territories, the then 16-year-old artist did not experience any physically tangible threats of war, but it was likely the first intellectual impetus to dedicate himself much more to the theme of war and peace than is generally apparent from accounts about him.

Rif Wars between Morocco and Spain , which took place on the African continent, were certainly a topic of discussion in his family and circle of friends; he had lived in Málaga until he was 10 years old, on the coast directly opposite the battle area.

Picasso's Parisian friend and colleague from the Parisian Cubist period, Fernand Léger , almost died in a German mustard gas attack during the First World War, so he will not have been unmoved when his country won the Third Rif War by dropping over 10,000 mustard gas canisters on the enemy in 1921.

Anyone who studies Picasso's life in more detail knows that he spent more time in Madrid studying museums and artists' haunts than at the Royal Academy, precisely when the literary intellectuals of the "Generación del 98" (Generation of '98) were busy coming to terms with Spain's humiliating defeat in the Spanish-American War and the loss of Spain's supremacy as an influential colonial power.

The situation in the country was tense, both socially and politically; anarchist ideals were circulating, and the 17-year-old Picasso absorbed all the currents of this intellectual reorientation of Spain towards Europe. He experienced the returning wounded soldiers and their profound misery firsthand. The Spanish artist himself also became politically active at that time

“Manifesto of the Spanish Colony Residing in Paris,” written by the 19-year-old artist, appeared on the front page of the newspaper La Publicidad , in which he demanded an amnesty for political prisoners (anarchists arrested for anti-militarist agitation) and for Spanish citizens who had fled to France to avoid military service.

As a result, in June 1901 he was classified as an anarchist by a Parisian police commissioner, which cost him his French citizenship and thus his freedom of travel during the Second World War.

Many years of war and many atrocities against humanity were to follow, which accompanied him into old age: When the First World War broke out, he was 32, when the Second World War ended, he was 63 years old.

From 1914 to 1918, Picasso's burgeoning career was abruptly interrupted by the First World War – it broke out just as he was about to conquer the European art world. He spent the war in France, but his German art dealer, Kahnweiler, had to leave the country. While his fame among art connoisseurs grew, there were hardly any exhibitions. It wasn't until 1918 that he was again represented by art dealers, Paul Rosenberg and Georges Wildenstein , with whom he remained in contact until shortly before the Second World War.

Meanwhile, his life was shaken by the Spanish Civil War , which transformed his homeland into a dictatorship between 1936 and 1939. The coup by the military began with the bloody subjugation of the port city of A Coruña, where he had lived until the age of 14.

From Paris, Picasso supported the democratic government of Spain in its fight against the insurgent Franco. While the situation in Spain was far from peaceful – the Spanish Civil War officially ended on April 1, 1939, but Franco's reprisals against political opponents continued with extreme brutality – the international situation was escalating alarmingly until the Second World War began on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland.

Because he had opposed Franco, he was banned from exhibiting by the National Socialists ; from the beginning of the German occupation in 1940 until the liberation of Paris in August 1944, he was stuck in his Paris studio.

Modern art was not tolerated by the occupying government in Paris; slogans like “Picasso to the madhouse!” and “Matisse to the trash!” circulated. When he (along with Paris) was liberated in 1944, he joined the Communist Party.

To claim that all these years in the shadow of wars left no trace on the artist's attitude and works is truly audacious, and also quite naive.

Picasso's work was highly political and anti-war from the very beginning, and this remained true even in the years following World War II; quite the contrary. When Kahnweiler stated that he was "the most apolitical man he had ever met," it was a calculated move to open the American market to the artist, who was vehemently protesting against US war policies (which he ultimately failed to do; he never received a visa and never saw the USA).

Picasso had his own opinion

Anyone who looks a little closer will find that he has led some of his interviewers and art-savvy conversation partners by the nose with pleasure and quite cunningly.

As in the field of artistic creation, he had the courage to have his own opinion, and it certainly speaks more for him than against him that he “never allowed himself to be pinned down to a position”, only rather simple natures can be pinned down.

The artist changed his mind when he deemed it appropriate, and he didn't see many issues in black and white, but rather with nuance. Thus, he was naturally "both for and against the academy, for and against tradition, for and against political engagement"—always ready to consider the respective context.

Unlike many of his highly intellectual friends, he was also a man of decision, of action, rather than a man of debate. This is why he is loved by all those who witnessed how political injustices and negative developments flourished ever more intensely through years of debate.

As an aside: Picasso was a fully-fledged aesthete , whose dissenting opinions, too, displayed astonishing intellectual acuity and irony. Next to such a man, dictatorial rulers who recited the dogmas of socialist realism appeared not only pretentious but also, quite quickly, rather ridiculous.

Once he was well-known enough, this creative and highly headstrong mind quite often did what he wanted, whether it was a portrait of a dictator (Stalin as a young Georgian peasant without the official party trappings) or irreverent criticism of the USA; he was only rarely apolitical, and only in those specific contexts. But certainly not in his life, or in his art

Picasso – Art as a political weapon

Picasso – Art as a Political Weapon Documentary 2013 by Laurence Thiriat Recording: ARTE 26.10.2014. Everything the Spanish master of Cubism had to say, he expressed in his painting.

War in Picasso's work

Undeterred by the prevailing opinion, he "political art" from the beginning until the end of his life:

Even among his earliest works, political statements can be found: After the death of his little sister, the devastated family moved to the other end of Spain in 1895, from the tranquil port city of A Coruña in the northwest to Barcelona in the northeast.

Barcelona was the Spanish city where industrialization reached its worst peaks, with extreme social inequalities and a catastrophic situation for the workers; wages were miserable, unemployment was high, and working conditions in the factories were among the worst in Europe.

Spanish anarchism found many followers in such a city ; Barcelona experienced numerous anarchist attacks in the 1890s. When he came to the city at the age of 14, he entered a climate in which working people were suffering and bomb attacks with human casualties and shootings were commonplace.

The teenager was not unmoved; the drawing “Caridad” (Mercy) with an obviously destitute family begging for alms and a bourgeois carriage driving away indifferently (1899) testifies to this, for example, and there are other similar drawings.

Picasso was thus exposed early in his life to a kind of state of war and the resulting social disasters, and through his artist father he met the artists in Barcelona who dealt with social and political issues and were influenced by anarchism in their thinking; this was also reflected in his Parisian circle of acquaintances and put the police on his trail there.

The events of the Spanish Civil War deeply affected Picasso, and he naturally expressed this in his art: His painting “Guernica” captures the horror that engulfed the Basque city on April 26, 1937, during the bombing by the German Condor Legion in the most compelling way; it would become perhaps the most famous anti-war painting of all time. During this period, however, he also created many other paintings that remind the viewer of Goya's haunting painting “Disasters of War.”

His commitment continued throughout, but the titles of the paintings were often later suppressed by auction houses and gallery owners as not being conducive to sales; "Mother and Child in Profile" "The Misery. Mother and Child" in 1902 , and the "Figures on the Beach" were "The Impoverished on the Shore of the Sea" .

Even a series of collages he created between 1912 and 1914 were generally dismissed as abstract work until an American art historian took a closer look at the texts and discovered in more than half of them a reference to the crises that preceded the First World War – Picasso keenly observed the emerging threat of war .

Picasso 's Minotaurs are anything but harmless bullfighting animals for the arena: Since the period after the First World War, he has been in close contact with the anti-war Communist Party of France (PCF, Parti communiste français), which was founded in 1920.

When he turned his artistic interest to Surrealism from about 1924 onwards, he came into close contact with writers and visual artists such as Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret and Pierre Unik , who also saw their work politically and were members of the PCF for a time or for many years.

The magazine La Révolution surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution) featured numerous works by Picasso around 1925. His famous Minotaur motif first appeared in his works in 1928. In 1933, his friend André Breton founded the surrealist artist magazine Minotaure , with a knife-wielding Minotaur by Picasso on the cover of the first issue.

The artist's etching series Minotauromachie from 1935 referred to Francisco de Goya's Tauromaquia from around 1815, and this was by no means only about "the connection between sexuality, violence and death, but was a concrete political statement for the Spaniards who were fighting against Napoleonic foreign rule.".

Picasso's Minotaurs were therefore almost certainly just as political and not merely "inspired by his fascination with bullfighting" as many of his other works. This is now recognized, for example, in the 1936 gouache "La Dépouille du Minotaure" ("The Remains of the Minotaur"), in which the monster, repelled by humans, symbolizes the danger of fascism.

During World War II in Paris, he did what he could, donating large sums to support the forced laborers in the Pas-de-Calais region. As soon as he was able to escape his Parisian arrest during the war, the artist moved to the South of France, to a peaceful freedom, but he was by no means less politically active

“The Ossuary” (1944/45) begun while still in Paris , is a painting with the appearance of a black and white photograph, as if taken live from a newsreel, with intertwined bodies of prisoners who could have come from the Spanish Civil War or from a French internment camp created by Hitler.

1952, the two paintings “War and Peace” , in the vestibule of a Romanesque chapel at Vallauris Castle, which the municipality of Vallauris made available to the painter.

Picasso's "Temple of Peace" contrasts war and peace in two monumental compositions that meet again in the vaulted ceiling. "La Guerre" (War) and "Le Paix" (Peace) were both works opposed to the Korean War, as was the powerful "Massacres en Corée" (Massacres in Korea) from the same year, which addresses a US war crime during the Korean War (1950–1953).

In 1954, he painted "Women of Algiers," inspired by the French painter Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), in a series of 15 paintings and numerous drawings. This was his response to the Algerian War, in which Algeria broke away from France from 1954 to 1962; Picasso's "Women of Algiers" embodied the resistance.

In 1957, he created various variations of "Las Meninas" based on the famous painting by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. The "Menina Cycle" consists of 44 reproductions of the original, 9 dove scenes, 3 landscapes, and a portrait of his last love, Jacqueline Roque. Velázquez's painting held lifelong significance for Picasso; he first saw it at the age of fourteen, considering it "the pinnacle of world art." He frequently engaged with Velázquez's Meninas, and the 1957 series represents the culmination of this fascination.

Las Meninas reminds him of the early death of his sister, reflects his struggle for true art until his 75th year, his anger and despair at the increasing criticism of his late work (and are proof against it), the whole of Picasso's life is contained in these pictures: The little Infanta stands for his idea of ​​innocence and purity, preserved forever with the image of the perfect innocent child, achieved on the 44th attempt, the doves stand for his belief in peace, the “war-threatening” mastiff of the Spanish king he replaces with his friendly dachshund Lump.

Picasso continuously supported those in distress with considerable financial contributions, and he produced drawings, always printed on the front pages of the respective newspapers, making statements about the situation with considerable influence.

Later, in the midst of the Cold War, he put his stamp on world peace with the globally valid symbol of the dove of peace , and Picasso, with his lifelong political commitment, truly deserves to know that the dove of peace was his invention.

His political influence can still be felt in politics today: When the Iraq War loomed in February 2003 and the American Secretary of State Colin Powell advocated for the war before the UN Security Council, the tapestry with his “Guernica” in the UN building in New York was covered up – the unvarnished view of the famous anti-war image appeared too explosive to the warmongers.

Can we learn anything from this discussion about Picasso's political activities? Oh yes, and not what all those art critics imagine, who spread the idea that he shouldn't be taken seriously as a political artist: We can learn that it's dangerous when a caste trained in a certain way sets out to acquire the interpretive competence about "the truth" because everyone else supposedly has no clue…

In our daily lives, such a striving can be observed in many ways, for example, when a civil judge declares that "he is not interested in finding the truth in a civil trial" and has to be convinced otherwise by the Federal Constitutional Court. Even a perhaps naive protest à la Picasso will contribute more to counteracting the erosion of the rule of law in many areas of our society than reserved intellectual regret without consequences in reality.

“I am for life against death; I am for peace against war,” in most cases it is that easy to take a stand in social imbalances, and then it is no longer difficult to act accordingly.

, according to some art critics, his reinterpretation of Manet's "Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe" "Art-o-Gramm: Picasso – The Artist, Life and Love" ).

Picasso's life is described in "Art-o-Gram: Picasso – A Long Life for Art", his work and genius are the subject of "Art-o-Gram: Picasso – Born an Artist" and "Art-o-Gram: Picasso – Famous Art and Its Secret" , and the lasting impact of his work to this day is explored in "Art-o-Gram: Picasso – A Guarantee for Top Ranking" and "Art-o-Gram: Picasso Today" .