Radical Aesthetics

Picasso’s career was positioned squarely in the transition from European enlightenment to the rise of communist revolutions worldwide. Living in Nazi-occupied Paris in particular led him to join the PCF in 1944, and within a year, he mailed a personal manifesto to the New Masses magazine:

Through design and color, I have tried to penetrate deeper into a knowledge of the world and of men so that this knowledge might free us. In my own ways I have always said what I considered most true, most just and best and, therefore, most beautiful. But during the oppression and the insurrection I felt that that was not enough, that I had to fight now only with painting but with my whole being.

Within a year, Picasso would have a Federal Bureau of Investigation file in his name for working against the dominant order. But for decades before, he had done exactly that to great fanfare. His ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ (1907) portrayed ordinary working women extraordinarily, with asymmetrical faces and mismatched eyes adapted from African masks. The painting also caused controversy for its portrayal of a Catalonian brothel; sex work was an everyday part of life for the modern European artist, as was the appropriation of Indigenous styles.

This piece encapsulates the problems and pleasures of Picasso’s oeuvre. His ability to recontextualise human dimensions onto a flat plane shifted how Europe and the United States understood representation, and his wry personality made it all seem effortless. As such, his breaking of European standards easily translated into political statements against art-world malaise. ‘How is it possible to be uninterested in other men and by virtue of what cold nonchalance can you detach yourself from the life that they supply so copiously?’ he once scrawled onto a piece of paper mid-interview. ‘No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It’s an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.’

In many ways, Picasso’s upbringing in Spain during its transition out of monarchy primed him for this viewpoint, along with his prodigious reputation in school. Influenced by fellow Spaniard Francisco Goya, whose explicitly political oeuvre straddled Baroque and Modern periods, he depicted Spanish peasants, circus performers, and musicians in a non-idealised manner, normalising subjects that were rarely uplifted in the pre-Modern world.

After moving to France, Picasso faced no legal obligation to serve in the military, yet many of his masterworks addressed the myriad conflicts unfolding around him. His series ‘The Weeping Woman’ (1937), which depicts prolific French artist and mistress Dora Maar, used erratic linework and mismatched colours to convey the physical manifestation of grief during the Spanish Civil War. Likewise, the mural-sized ‘Guernica’ (1937), which is still considered the most popular anti-war painting ever made, responded to the Franco regime’s carpet-bombing of a Republican village with support from Italian and German fascists.

This painting, among others, would lead Hitler to label Picasso a ‘degenerate’ artist. When Nazi officers forced their way into his home and asked, ‘Did you do this?’ Picasso famously replied, ‘No, you did.’ Picasso had read about these events through communist newspapers such as L’Humanité, making monochromatic works like ‘Guernica’ and the similarly styled Holocaust tribute, ‘The Charnel House’ (1944-45) feel like an extension of the underground press.

Despite Soviet aversions to Modernism, Picasso won the Lenin Peace Prize twice in 1950 and ’61 for his involvement in the Mouvement de la Paix, to which he contributed its signature dove emblem. At the request of friend and Les Lettres Françaises editor Louis Aragon, he sketched Joseph Stalin’s profile for the 1953 issue honoring his death. Coincidentally, this tribute led to a series of angry calls and letters from PCF and Soviet leaders critiquing Picasso’s ‘privilege’ in diverging from socialist realism.

While he was subsequently denied an exhibition in Moscow, he remained a card-carrying PCF member until his death in 1973. Over the years, however, Picasso rubbed elbows with both communist and capitalist world leaders, creating politically charged works while amassing millions. For that reason, some consider this period to be an ‘interlude’ in an otherwise apolitical career, or a pursuit of ‘abstract peace’ over class struggle. On the other hand, Tate curator Lynda Morris has observed that art-world elites are still ‘vested in a non-political interpretation of Picasso.’

The Individual Genius, or Artist of the People?

In The Success and Failure of Picasso, Marxist art critic John Berger noted that Picasso was ‘able to see and imagine more suffering in a single horse’s head than many artists have found in a whole crucifixion.’ Yet Berger also argued that the artist’s position of ‘doubtful privilege’ prevented him from transcending his own self-interest. Control over his legacy and estrangement from revolutionary Spain, Berger contends, trapped Picasso in a feedback loop:

Imagine an artist who is exiled from his own country; who belongs to another century, who idealizes the primitive nature of his own genius in order to condemn the corrupt society in which he finds himself, who became self-sufficient, but who was to work ceaselessly in order to prove himself to himself. What is his difficulty likely to be? … He will not run out of emotions or feelings or sensations; but he will run out of subjects to contain them. And this has been Picasso’s difficulty. To have to ask himself the question: What shall I paint? And always to have to answer it alone.

Berger also argued that Cubism was ‘the only example of dialectical materialism in painting’ that would eventually be known as a diverse movement, rather than a creation of Picasso. He would be disappointed to learn that Picasso is still widely regarded as the Cubist today; Berger was right to desire more than the art market’s infatuation with individual genius.

The trajectory of an artist’s career is seldom linear. Take, for example, Picasso’s consideration of an exhibition in Franco’s Spain during the 1950s, before citing his politics as a barrier to the potential Spanish reunion. As critic Jillian Steinhauer notes, this development should not take away from our appreciation but rather help in ‘rounding out the pictures we have, chipping away at the artistic myths.’

Picasso’s story is not one of an underdog transcending elite oppression; quite the opposite—his stylistic evolution bedazzled the world at large. We can still value his powerful anti-war imagery and contributions to Cold War-era politics, when artists faced state-sanctioned punishment for any kind of revolutionary aspirations. Nearly fifty years after his death, however, Picasso’s most powerful influence should persist not in the solitary quest for greatness, but in the collective pursuit of a better world.