Un extranjero llamado Picasso

Before Picasso became Picasso, the iconic artist who is today one of the world's foremost figures, he was under constant scrutiny by the police. In the midst of the political tensions of the spring of 1901, the security services identified him as an anarchist. This would become the first of many entries that would go on to form a lengthy police file. Although he soon became the leader of the Cubist avant-garde and achieved large rewards for his works as his reputation grew around the world, Picasso's art was largely excluded from public collections in France for some four decades. . The genius who conceived Guernica as a visceral statement against fascism in 1937 was denied French citizenship even three years later, on the eve of the Nazi occupation. In a country where the police and the conservative Academy of Fine Arts represented two of the main pillars of the oligarchy of the time, Picasso faced a triple stigma: foreigner, radical ideologue and avant-garde artist. A Stranger Called Picasso looks at the artist's career and work from a whole new angle, drawing on extensive archival sources that, while fascinating, have been ignored for far too long. In this groundbreaking narrative, Picasso emerges as an artist ahead of his time both aesthetically and politically, an artist who ignored national mores in favor of contemporary cosmopolitan forms. He chose the south over the north, the provinces over the capital, and artisans over academics, all the while achieving great fame. Cohen-Solal reveals how, in a period that spanned the brutality of World War I, the Nazi occupation and the rivalries of the Cold War, Picasso had to become a strategist and fight to preserve his agency, until he finally left Paris for good. in 1955. The artist never became a French citizen, but he enriched and energized its culture like few other figures in the country's history. This book explains for the first time how he did it.