Picasso the Foreigner: An Artist in France, 1900-1973

A groundbreaking new study of Pablo Picasso that reveals how the artist fought to overcome the stigma he faced as a foreigner in France.

Before Picasso became Picasso--the iconic artist now celebrated as one of France's leading figures--he was constantly surveilled by the police. Amid political tensions in the spring of 1901, he was flagged as an anarchist by the security services--the first of many entries in what would become an extensive case file. Picasso's art was largely excluded from public collections in France for the next four decades, even though he became the leader of the cubist avant-garde and was increasingly wealthy as his reputation grew worldwide. The genius who conceived Guernica as a visceral statement against fascism in 1937 was even denied French citizenship three years later, on the eve of the Nazi occupation. In a country where the police and the conservative Acad幦ie des Beaux-Arts represented two major pillars of the establishment at the time, Picasso faced a triple stigma--as a foreigner, a political radical, and an avant-garde artist.

Annie Cohen-Solal's prizewinning Picasso the Foreigner approaches the artist's career and art from an entirely new angle, making extensive use of fascinating and long-understudied archival sources. In this groundbreaking narrative, Picasso emerges as an artist ahead of his time not only aesthetically but politically, one who ignored national modes in favor of contemporary cosmopolitan forms. Cohen-Solal reveals how, in a period encompassing the brutality of World War I, the Nazi occupation, and Cold War rivalries, Picasso strategized and fought to preserve his agency, eventually leaving Paris for good in 1955. He chose the south over the north, the provinces over the capital, and craftspeople over academicians, while simultaneously achieving widespread fame. The artist never became a citizen of France, yet he enriched and dynamized its culture like few other figures in the country's history. This book, for the first time, explains how.