It could seem like a flagrant case of cultural appropriation when that expression was not in common use: the story of how the Spanish artist Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881-1973 ) ended up becoming one of the greatest artistic glories of France.
Everything was more complicated. For decades, since the Malaga genius first arrived in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, the authorities treated him as a dangerous immigrant. He was subjected to police surveillance. A file of suspects was opened and never, until his death, he stopped being Spanish. The only time he applied for French nationality was in 1940, on the eve of the Nazi occupation of France. It was denied. After the Second World War , France multiplied its efforts to reconcile itself with the creator of Les Demoiselles d' Avignon and Guernica , but the old painter was no longer interested in being French at that time.
"France got Picasso back at the last minute," sums up historian Annie Cohen-Solal, author of the monumental Un étranger nommé Picasso and curator of the exhibition Picasso, étranger (Picasso , foreigner), which was inaugurated this Thursday at the Museum of the History of Immigration. "Picasso Museum was created in Paris in 1985, a museum that erases everything that had happened before."
The core of the book and the exhibition is what happened before: Picasso's adventures as a foreigner and an immigrant in France. Administrative documents and plastic works explain and contextualize his relationship with the country he lived throughout his adult life, but which, as Cohen-Solal shows, only finally accepted it and wanted to fully adopt it.
While apparently dealing with the past, the exhibition and the book speak indirectly of today's France, torn by debates about identity and in which the extreme right has solid electoral support. The discourse against immigrants often forgets that France would not be what it is without them. Some of its greatest artistic, scientific or literary figures, today a source of patriotic pride, were born abroad. "France is a country of immigration, as much as the United States, but immigration is not present in the French national narrative as it is in the American one", reflects historian Pap Ndiaye, director of the Museum of the History of Immigration.
Three dates mark the history of Picasso and France. The first is on June 18, 1901, Picasso, who is based in Barcelona, has not yet settled permanently in Paris, although he has spent time in the city. The Vollard gallery dedicates an exhibition to him. A piece of news in the newspaper Le Journal about the exhibition alerts Commissioner Rouquier, who on the aforementioned date opens his first file: a red folder with a report that, given his friendships with Catalans living in Montmartre who had welcomed him, and the topics gruesome of his paintings, he concludes: "There are reasons to consider him an anarchist."
Cohen-Solal comments: "The anarchists and the Catalans gave Picasso the keys to Paris, but they got him into a trap: this report will haunt him all his life and will feed on new reports every time his name appears in the press." The historian adds: “There are three reasons why he was a suspect: one, he is a foreigner; two, he is considered an anarchist; and three, it is avant-garde in a France that is horrified by the avant-garde because in France the Academy of Fine Arts, the most traditional in Europe, rules ”.
read in El Pais, article Marc Bassets
Video: Picasso the Spaniard in Paris
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