Wed, Jun 02, 2010 page15

• Black-and-white Picasso turns gray

  The self-exiled Spanish artist held secret talks with Franco over an exhibition plan that could have destroyed his status as hero of the Left

  • By Charlotte Higgins / THE GUARDIAN
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  Picasso was a steadfast communist, a tireless peace campaigner, and he loathed the fascists — depicting General Franco with witty brutality in works such as The Dream and Lie of Franco (1937).

  But the Picasso who consorted with Soviet officials, who was photographed examining pictures of Stalin, who received telegrams from Fidel Castro, is only part of the story.

  According to John Richardson, the biographer of the artist who knew him from the 1940s to the 1960s, the Spaniard secretly undertook negotiations with Franco’s representatives in 1956.

  

  Picasso poses in front of his painting Guernica in this 1937 photo taken by David Seymour.

  PHOTO: BLOOMBERG

  Richardson and his collaborator, art historian Gijs van Hensbergen, have discovered that the Spanish art critic Jose Maria Moreno Galvan was dispatched to the Cote d’Azur, where Picasso was living, in order to open talks about holding a retrospective for the artist in Madrid.

  The critic reported back to the Spanish cultural attache in Paris, Jose Luis Messia, who responded: “What a pity Garcia Lorca [poet, dramatist and theater director] isn’t alive, we could have killed two birds with one stone.”

  The point was that had Picasso accepted the proposals it would

  have been a major coup for the Falangists, “destroying Picasso’s status as a hero of the left; he would have been regarded as a traitor to the left for going back to Spain,” according to Richardson.

  As it happened the negotiations — which, had they continued, would have been conducted by Messia and involved the director of the Madrid Museo de Arte Contemporaneo — ground to a halt because they were leaked to the press.

  The talks were conducted on a basis of secrecy and the Spanish minister of foreign affairs had decreed that if the news leaked the whole affair would be denied, according to Van Hensbergen.

  But they were sufficiently far advanced and known among a small circle for a concerned group of Spanish notables to send a letter to Picasso entreating him not to be tempted by the proposal — as recorded by Jean Cocteau in his diary.

  According to Richardson and Van Hensbergen, who are working together on the fourth volume of Richardson’s biography of Picasso, the point is that Picasso’s views were “10 times more subtle than you can imagine ... nothing about his views were black-and-white; the history of this period is a history of gray areas.”

  Far from unquestioningly loyal, he once remarked to Cocteau of the communists: “I have joined a family, and like all families, it’s full of shit,” Richardson reports.

  Competing with his communist convictions were his deep love of his homeland, and his desire for recognition there. “At that moment, the idea of a retrospective was more important to him than the Communist party,” said Richardson.

  “So much for the notion of Picasso as a committed communist always toeing the party line,” he writes in his catalogue essay for the forthcoming Picasso exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in London. The show, Picasso: The Mediterranean Years, opens on Friday, and is curated by Richardson.

  According to Van Hensbergen, Picasso’s perhaps most famous

  work of the late 1950s can be

  re-examined in the light of the

  abortive Madrid exhibition.

  In 1957 he began a series of variations on Diego Velazquez’s 1656 masterpiece Las Meninas — an enigmatic vision of figures at the court of Philip IV, one of the most important works in Spanish, and indeed European, art history.

  The works, which are currently on loan to Tate Liverpool’s exhibition Picasso: Peace and Freedom, are evidence of Picasso’s re-engaging with Spain and Spanish art history, according to Van Hensbergen. “He was using the art of the golden age in Spain to assert his avant-garde credentials,” said Richardson.

  Richardson first met Picasso as a young man when he was living with the art collector Douglas Cooper in the south of France. Picasso was established in Vallauris, in the hills between Cannes and Antibes.

  In the 1950s Cooper and Richardson would regularly meet up with Picasso for lunch before going to watch bullfights. Among the artist’s entourage was Jacqueline Roque — one of the “contenders for the role of maitresse-en-titre,” as Richardson’s catalogue essay puts it.

  “Jacqueline and I were about 28, and everyone else was much older,” said Richardson. “We were like the kids among grown-ups and so got on very well.” Picasso, born in 1881, was by this time in his 70s.

  “It was like the judgment of Paris, but to my mind there was no question Jacqueline was going to get [the role of official mistress],” said Richardson. “She had big boobs plonked on top of a big arse and big eyes.

  “To be Picasso’s mistress you had to be prepared to sacrifice oneself entirely on the altar of his art. She adored him.

  “She was both submissive but also a strong character; she became very much Madame Picasso. She wasn’t at all pro-communist. In fact there were many jokes about how crass the communist visitors were.”

  Picasso was also, says Richardson, a wonderful friend, physically affectionate and warm. “Though with everything you can say about Picasso the reverse is also true. He was loyal — and capable of great disloyalty.” He added: “I loved him, and he needed love. He needed it like a vampire needs blood.”
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