The second key date for Picasso in France is April 3, 1940. On that day, Picasso signs, with his characteristic calligraphy, a demand to become a French citizen. He is already a celebrity, the great artist of the 20th century, enshrined in Paris and New York, a billionaire committed to the Spanish Republic and anti-fascism, a living classic. And it has the endorsement of influential French personalities, in vain. In a four-page report, Émile Chevalier, deputy inspector general of the Prefecture of Police, picks up the false accusation of anarchism in the 1901 report, and spreads it with other rumors and gossip. He concludes: “This foreigner has no title for obtaining naturalization; on the other hand, and after what has been said, he should be considered a suspect from the national point of view ”.
Why does Picasso want to be French? “What interested him”, replies Cohen-Solal, “was not being French, but having rights at a precise moment: that of degenerate art in Germany, Franco in Spain and the Nazis arriving in France. He was afraid of ending up like García Lorca, a scapegoat. He did not care about nationalities: before anyone had understood that his homeland was the world, he belonged to the Mediterranean sphere, he dialogued with the arts of all times ”.
Portrait of Picasso in his workshop on Schoeler Street in Paris around 1915, attributed to Georges de Zayas.© RMN-GRAND PALAIS (MUSÉE NATIONAL PICASSO-PARIS) / ADRIEN DIDIERJEAN
A few weeks after being denied French nationality, Nazi Germany conquered Paris. For four years France was occupied, Inspector Chevalier held positions of responsibility in the collaborationist administration of Vichy and Picasso continued to paint. In October 1944, after liberation, he found a homeland: the Communist Party. And in 1947 he donated ten paintings to French museums, which until then had ignored him. "Today the divorce between France and genius ends", celebrated Georges Salles, director of the Museums of France. In 1948, the Government granted him a privileged resident card "because of the personality of the person concerned."
The 1901 outcast under surveillance had become "a VIP," the catalog reads. Cohen-Solal recalls that in 1958 France offered him nationality: he rejected it. Ten years later, the Legion of Honor: also rejected it. He did not attend the great exhibition dedicated to him by the Grand Palais in Paris in 1966. Nor the exhibition dedicated to him by the Louvre in 1971 - he was the first living artist to enjoy this honor - and which is now commemorated with an exhibition at the headquarters of the Louvre in Lens, in the north of France.
It was a full-blown seduction operation orchestrated among others by the writer André Malraux, author of The Human Condition and then Minister of Culture. Malraux promoted in 1968 the law that allowed to pay inheritance rights with the donation of artistic works to the State. "It was made for Picasso, and his donation was his work," recalls Cohen-Solal. "And thanks to this, France got the Picasso inheritance."
Picasso, although he already had his museum in Barcelona, was finally an artist from France. “For me it was a kind of French heritage, very French-French”, confesses in the catalog Benjamin Stora, former director of the Museum of Immigration and promoter of the exhibition. “When I informed myself later, I said to myself: 'It's not possible! The most famous of French painters is not French! ”.
read in El Pais, article Marc Bassets
Video: Picasso the Spaniard in Paris
Comments