PICASSO & IDEALS OF PEACE: Better Red than Fed
Pablo Picasso found himself in Paris during World War II. Stranded…….
Overall, reading through Matisse’s correspondence with Camoin in La Revue de l’Art (12, 1971) makes me suspect that Matisse’s behavior during Vichy had little to do directly with the presence of Marshall Pétain at the helm of the French government. The master could accommodate himself with “any regime, any religion, so long as each morning, at eight o’clock I can find my light, my model and my easel.” Or so he told Georges Duthuit. (Transition Forty Nine, no. 5, December 1949, p. 115). What was a more likely influence on his behavior was the absence of Picasso from the Paris art scene. For four years, Picasso, the foreigner, did not have a single exhibition of his recent work, and Matisse had the limelight all to himself. During Vichy, the foreigner who had successfully competed with the equally famous French artist (on the latter’s turf, so to speak) was not on view. At a time of French nationalism and Fascism in Franco’s Spain, the Loyalist Picasso and his art, symbols of Judeo-Marxist foreign decadence in France, were in purgatory.
A sense of fear and claustrophobia gripped the city. Life was characterised by rations, curfews and biting–cold winters where fuel shortages led to people huddling together in cafes to keep warm. There was also the chilling presence of the omnipresent Nazis. Picasso and Dora were constantly receiving news of Jewish friends who had been deported to concentration camps or tortured for taking part in the Resistance. Dora, in particular, must have been racked by anxiety as she was a member of the leftist group, Contra–Attaque. It is also believed that she had Jewish parentage.
Despite the fact that Picasso was regarded by the Nazi regime as a degenerate artist and Guernica had become a symbol of defiance against Fascism he remained free from persecution. At the time the Nazis were keen not to offend the U.S.A. and it was probably Picasso’s widespread fame that protected him. However, he was denied publicity and prevented from exhibiting his work, resulting in his disappearance from the world stage. Some of Picasso’s closest friends had been claimed by the Nazis, including the poet Max Jacob. While some artists colluded with the Germans, he vehemently refused to engage with them, declining offers of extra food and tours of Germany. According to an anecdotal account, the Gestapo searched his apartment. During their visit he showed them a black and white photograph of Guernica. When a German soldier asked him if he had done it, he replied, “No, it was you!” Picasso’s willingness to shelter anyone sent to him from the Resistance Movement was a further indication of his rebellious attitude.
…Not only were the ex- and old Fauves going to triumph at the Salons, in the galleries and elsewhere during Vichy, but they could, like Vlaminck, publish anti-Picasso diatribes in the French press (Comoedia, 6 June, 1942). They could also rise in anger when someone dared to say positive things about Picasso. Thus, Camoin tells Matisse in August 1941, after reporting on a talk in which a “Jewish” lecturer had called Picasso the greatest French painter of our time, because he has done the French the honor of coming to France to work: “I left before the end. . . . It is another proof of the hold of the Jews in our era, out of which the judeo métèque [central European] style has emerged for which Picasso is the inspiration.”
In August 1944 came the Liberation of Paris, and the first Autumn Salon to be held in the newly freed city. This time Picasso is given a room of his own that he fills with examples of his wartime production. It is a triumphant return for Picasso, marred, however, by disturbances that have remained unattributed. On Nov. 16, 1944, Matisse wrote a letter to Camoin: “Have you seen the Picasso room? It is much talked about. There were demonstrations in the street against it. What success! If there is applause, whistle.” One can guess who the demonstrators might have been — cronies of the Fauves, still ranting against the Judeo-Marxist decadent Picasso.
ADDENDUM:
Determined not to be cowed by the atmosphere of confinement and uncertainty, he continued to work feverishly, including writing poetry and making portraits and busts of Dora. In January 1941 he surprised his friends by writing a play entitled “Desire Caught by the Tail”, a curious blend of Picasso’s biting wit, allusions to Dora, macabre imagery and the bleakness of wartime Paris that culminates in disappointment for the bizarre characters obsessed with hunger, cold and love. In 1944 a clandestine reading of the play was organised, in itself an act of defiance in the face of occupation. This illustrates how deeply Picasso was embedded in the intellectual and literary circle of the time. The performance was directed by Albert Camus and the actors included Jean–Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Dora.
Read More:
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/books/cone/cone12-19-05.asp
http://angelfloresjr.multiply.com/journal/item/2615
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ADDENDUM:
Some of Spotts’s nastiest reportage concerns Parisian society women:Their salons and soirées offered a discreet way for the gratin of the Occupation to meet the gratin of cultural collaboration. This is the way it worked. At one of her soirées, the marquise de Polignac, for example, might introduce the collaborationist editor Ramon Fernandez to Gerhard Heller, the officer responsible for censoring books, who would in turn be introduced to Marie-Louise Bousquet, who would invite the German officer to a private recital in her residence on the Place du Palais-Bourbon, where the collaborationist cellist Pierre Fournier would play to a collaborationist audience. There Heller would meet, among others, the collaborationist Marcel Jouhandeau, who would introduce him to his close collabo friend Florence Gould, who would incorporate him into her collaborationist “literary” salon. This is almost exactly the way Heller infiltrated Parisian high society.
Fond of juicy gossip, Spotts tells us that American multimillionaire Florence Gould “enjoyed the pleasures of the bed, a bed that [writer Ernst] Jünger and other German officers came to know well.”
Not mentioned in this passage is the presence at Gould’s events of someone ethically above board, the resister Jean Paulhan. It was apparently at one of her dinners that Heller warned Paulhan, an editor and writer, of his imminent arrest. If nothing else, the story suggests that the word “collaborator” ought to be used sparingly in regard to people like Gould, and that even the most collaborationist salons had some moral usefulness.
Having personal contacts with Hitler’s emissaries in Paris and with collaborators as intermediaries proved beneficial not only for Paulhan but for other French personalities who needed help. The French sculptor Aristide Maillol called on his longtime German friend Breker (who was close to Hitler) to help free his young model, Dina Vierny, interned at the Drancy transit camp and about to be deported to Auschwitz. Cocteau and playwright Sacha Guitry, both frequently seen at parties at the German embassy and thus tagged as collabos, approached Heller to intercede on behalf of the poet Max Jacob. He did so, but Jacob was already dead by the time the release order came. In his autobiography, Guitry mentions being solicited by the painter Demetrios Galanis, a friend of Henri Matisse, to save from deportation Matisse’s wife, arrested for Resistance activities.
Directly on the topic of Picasso and peace, Jünger reports that Picasso told him that if it was only up to the two of them, they could have negotiated peace right there in his atelier in one afternoon. Unfortunately it was not up to them.
The point is also that the greatest artists usually understand things far more deeply than average politicians. But the numbers of truly great artists like Picasso and Jünger are in inverse proportion to the numbers of average politicians, so not much hope there!
Simon, Thanks for reading and you are most likely correct. The authors whom I quoted spread the butter a bit thick. I do apologize if I was not a little better nuanced myself; kind of learning as the narrative unfolded so to speak. Again, sorry for taking some contextual liberties and I hope to come back to the subject at a later date.
Best
Thanks for reading and your comments!