Pablo Picasso: The Communist Years
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Pablo Picasso: The Communist Years Details
From Booklist Art history meets political history in this detailed examination of Pablo Picasso's membership in the French Communist Party. Picasso joined the party relatively late: in 1944. Utley traces the artist's activities during the German occupation, discusses friends who may have influenced his decision to become a Communist, and explores the inevitable tensions between a political movement that promoted socialist realism and a painter whose work never quite fit the bill. The volume, which is lavishly illustrated with reproductions of Picasso's postwar work, does point out numerous examples where the artist used Communist iconography and themes. Utley is equally interested, however, in examining the place of Communism in Picasso's intellectual life: in the roots of the artist's commitment, his response as information about Soviet atrocities leaked out to the West, and the impact of his political activity on his artistic reputation, particularly in the U.S. Appropriate where interest in this major figure in twentieth-century art history remains strong. Mary CarrollCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Read more Review "Groundbreaking account." -- Publishers Weekly"[T]he most interesting of the new crop of books [on Picasso] . . . Utley relates [Picasso's story] with unblinking clarity . . . [Q]uietly devastating." -- Jed Pearl, New Republic Read more See all Editorial Reviews
Reviews
This beautifully-illustrated book studies Pablo Picasso's artistic and political work after he joined the French Communist Party in 1944. `An illustrious son of democratic Spain', he opposed Franco, aided the resistance in Paris and championed France's post-war cultural renaissance.Utley details Picasso's creative efforts and depicts the care and constant reworking with which he conceived, executed and reproduced his designs in different media, whether murals, paintings, sculptures, posters, postcards, prints, brooches, key chains or pottery. She disposes of the well-travelled lie that Picasso admitted that his work was all a blague, a trick played on the public. In fact, as she shows, the alleged conversation was drawn from Il Libro Nero, a collection of fictitious interviews written by Giovanni Papini.Utley shows how `a strategy elaborated at the highest levels of the American government' presented the art of the New York School as a living manifestation of democracy as opposed to communism. The US state promoted Abstract Expressionism, to make New York supersede Paris as the capital of Western art. It promoted the notion of the Nietzschean artist, the individualistic, introspective genius in his ivory tower, free from all social and political concerns, casting Picasso as the `anti-artist', compromised because committed.Yet this is a deeply anti-communist account of a good communist. Utley sneers at what she calls the communists' `illusory goal of bridging the gap between art and the people', and at `the inadequacies of the artistic policies and aspirations of the French Communist party'. It is clearly beyond the comprehension of the author, an American academic based at New York University, that Picasso was a loyal and active Party member for the rest of his long life - which says more about the author's limits than the subject's!Her stale caricature of `repressive Party' and `servile member' fails completely to explain how people of the calibre of Picasso and his friends Paul Robeson, Pablo Neruda, Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard could be Party members. Were they all dupes? Unlike, say, an American academic, who cannot imagine how anyone cannot trust the US state?