Loyal and unfaithful
David Caute
hen Pablo Picasso joined the French Communist party in the autumn of 1944, soon after the liberation of Paris, where he had lived under the Nazi occupation, generally unpersecuted but periodically obliged to receive German officers in his studio, sophisticates passed it off as a typi- cally flamboyant gesture by the painter of 'Guernica', or as an act of opportunism at a moment when the communists were embarking on a massive purge of collabo- rators, real and alleged, artists included. Few thought that Picasso's communist phase would last, particularly after Zhdanov launched Stalin's postwar onslaughts on decadent Western mod- ernists and formalists, Picasso among them. He never believed in 'socialist realism' and despised the work of Andre Fougeron, the French party's Gerasimov, so why should he need the sticky embrace of the Commu- nist party?
But he did and his loyalty never really wavered until his death in 1973. He made huge donations and gave the Peace Move- ment his famous dove (in reality a Milanese pigeon given him by Matisse). He shared the standard anti-Americanism of the French Left, vigorously supporting the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee even after the Attorney General listed it as `subversive', increasingly annoying Ameri- can commentators like Henry Luce, propri- etor of Time-Life, and suffering rejection of his visa application to visit the USA. As a Spanish Republican Picasso was above all loyal to loyalty. You kept faith, you resisted American blandishments, you shared the standard indignations of the era — 'germ warfare' in Korea, the execution of the Rosenbergs — you suppressed ugly reports from Eastern Europe, you were deter- mined never, never to 'give comfort to the enemies of the Soviet Union', even when you knew they were right (but for the wrong reasons), and above all you remained a true copain. When a group of former students from Budapest wrote in November 1956 begging him 'to do for Budapest what you have done for Guernica and Korea ... Help us ...' there was no reply.
Gertje Utley's research has been painstaking and her text is by far the most comprehensive yet attempted on Picasso's politics and relationship with Maurice Thorez, Laurent Casanova, Louis Aragon and other PCF leaders. She describes the extraordinary situation whereby the French communists continued to parade on their many front pages a painter whose post- Cubist portraits and 'formalist' distortions of human anatomy inspired not only Soviet condemnation but the angry bafflement of ordinary working-class Stalinists in France. Although she mentions the Soviet critical attacks on Picasso and Matisse in 1947, plus anecdotal evidence of disparaging remarks made to Picasso privately during the Soviet-inspired Wroclaw congress, Utley accords insufficient attention to the all-important Soviet dimension. Just why the Russians were in 1954 prepared to ship paintings from their own vaults, liberated in 1918 from the great bourgeois collec- tions of Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin, to a special exhibition in Paris, laying themselves open to mockery for showing in the West what they kept hidden in Moscow and Leningrad, is not fully explained; the preceding visit of the Comedic. Frangaise to Russia and the Sovi- et diplomatic onslaught to detach France from the USA were doubtless more rele- vant than any second thoughts about Cubism and the Impressionist legacy.
In 1956 the Pushkin Museum went a step further when it opened its doors to a Picas- so exhibition only days before Soviet tanks entered Budapest. Evgeni Yevtushenko recalled: 'Like most Moscovites, I had failed to get into the Picasso exhibition when it came to Moscow — it was harder to get a ticket than to win a car in a lot- tery.' Already a Stalin laureate, Picasso was to be granted his Lenin Prize in 1962. Utley does not quite grasp the point that for two decades following the opening of the Picas- so exhibition Soviet art policy hinged, through all of its irate fluctuations under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, on an implicit distinction between foreign artists, granted a licence for gifted deviation, and the Rus- sian avant-garde, who could be shown only in Paris and London. This is a copiously illustrated book and strongly recommend- ed; I wish only that an editor had got to work on Utley's irritating stylistic habit of incessantly using Picaasso's name when a `he' or 'his' would do.
Dora Maar: With and Without Picasso is a gorgeous production, not least because it surprises by keeping faith with its title: although Dora Maar might now be unknown but for her role as Picasso's mis- tress, and the subject of his numerous `weeping woman' portraits from 1936 to 1944 (when he moved on to Frangoise Gilot), she was, it turns out, a photogra- pher of outstanding vision and technical accomplishment, a friend of Man Ray and one of the brightest stars of the Surrealist movement, as well as a painter whose copies of Picasso's tormenting portraits of herself could well belong to the master. For any one of her own original portraits of Picasso, I'm prepared to bid a million. I take nothing from Mary Ann Caws' fair and sensitive textual biography of the tragic Dora Maar (recently disparaged de haut en has in the TLS by Maar's friend James Lord) when I hail this book as one of the most beautifully conceived, designed and produced I have ever held in my hand: an absorbing combination of biographical por- traits, Maar's stunning Surrealist and com- mercial prints, reproductions of paintings, drawings, studio scenes, and her irreplace- able series of photographs charting the cre- ation of `Guernica' — Picasso's collar is surprisingly fastened by a necktie; he holds what appear to be domestic bamboo dusters in both hands.
Never once does the beautiful Maar, flu- ent in. Spanish and French, smile for the camera, not even on Mediterranean beach- es in the hedonistic company of Picasso, Eluard and Ray. In the end she, whose thirties were devoted to the magnetic Picasso, found little to smile about: his departure precipitated a nervous break- down in this highly self-controlled woman and, despite a recovery, the pain never abated. Maar's brilliant social and profes- sional life — she had been Georges Bataille's mistress before she met Picasso — contracted into self-imposed isolation and Catholic piety during the half-century between her rejection by a man 26 years older than her and her death in 1997.
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