Annie Cohen-Solal - Picasso the Foreigner: An Artist in France, 1900-1973

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

To the artists who,

in pursuit of their careers,

traverse the plains of Africa

or cross the Mediterranean

in a makeshift boat

With loving gratitude

to Marc and to Archibald,

whose life commitments

inspired each of this books pages

Anyone can consult the archives of the Paris police. All you have to do is take Line 5 of the Mtro, get off at the Hoche station, then make your way through the sad, winding country lanes of Le Pr-Saint-Gervais, a small commune in the northern suburbs, until you reach a modern building thatwith its two entrances, one for deliveries and the other for customersis reminiscent of a factory from the 1950s. Behind the reception desk, the police employee creates your readers card with the cold formality of someone processing a passport request. He hands you the key to a gray locker, where you leave your coat, bag, and private documents. Once they have located what youre looking for, you are allowed to take a few pages of blank paper and a pencil into a freezing, glass-walled room where three other police employees keep watch as you are led to a cardboard box full of papers.

I have just encountered a suspecta foreigner who, on October 25, 1900, arrived in Paris for the first time, only to find himself trailed by the police a few months later. His case file would grow with every passing year for the rest of his life: reports; interrogation transcripts; residence permits; ID photos; fingerprints; rent receipts; naturalization requests; letters of transit; documents from various investigations; information on his wife, son, parents, and friends; testimonials about his moral character; summaries of his political views; a list of his addresses; and correspondence from not only police chiefs but also high-ranking politicians such as the foreign minister and the prime minister. Among all these documents, I did not spot a single crime, apart from that of his not being French. On some of these papers you see the word spanish stamped in capital letters, signaling the suspects difference, his exclusion, his stigma.

Certain phrases betray xenophobia or political suspicion: Although he was 30 years old in 1914, he did not serve our country during the war [] despite enjoying in France a situation enabling him, as a so-called modern painter, to earn millions of francs (apparently kept abroad) and to buy a chateau near Gisors, [he] retained his extremist ideas while veering toward communism. Sometimes the allegations are not much more than gossip: On May 7 he was the subject of a report stating that recently, while in the caf located at 172 Blvd St Germain, he was taken to task by an off-duty Polish officer for openly criticizing our country and defending the Soviets. In some cases, the wording betrays an eagerness to suspect him on the basis of his associates: [He] is known to our services, having been identified as an anarchist in 1905, when he was living at 130 b Blvd Clichy with one of his countrymen, also an anarchist, who was under police surveillance. Other phrases reveal condescension toward this foreigner: The buildings concierge has never heard him expressing subversive opinions, but it is true that he speaks very bad French so that it is very difficult to understand him. The last documents in the file announce the authorities final verdict, as clear-cut as a guillotine: This foreigner does not qualify for naturalization; moreover, given the previous material, he must be considered highly suspect from a national point of view.

I feel as if I am seeing the entire history of a country and its ghosts unfolding before my eyes. I swear that I am not Jewish, under the terms of the law of June 2, 1941, this foreigner writes, in red ink, to renew his residence permit on November 30, 1942.

Stigma is the word that haunts me after those hours spent looking through dozens of yellowed pages. During the years I have spent using archives for my research, I have become convinced that all archives speak. In fact, those sickening papers gave me a completely new image of this man, one that goes far beyond the documents I already knew. Sitting in the Mtro car on the way home, feeling overwhelmed, I found myself staring at the names of the stations on Line 5, starting with Place dItalie in the south of Paris. In the other direction, toward the north, after Hoche, I see glise de Pantin, then Bobigny-Pantin-Raymond Queneau, before the final station: Bobigny-Pablo Picasso. This is the name of the suspect whose files I have just consulted: foreigner number 74.664, his police records established more than a century ago. Today, we would call this the file of an alien suspectin French, un Fich Sa foreigner under active police surveillance because he was, at one point, suspected for any number of reasons of wanting to harm the security of the State.

A few days after my discovery of the stigma attached to Picasso in the police archives, a new exhibition opened at the Muse du Quai Branly: Picasso Primitif. I was immediately struck by the imposing black-and-white poster facing the Seine, showing two huge faces (each nine feet high) staring calmly at the people of Paris: the triumphant sixty-year-old artist and, beside him, an African mask. What you see is their all-powerful eyes: Picassos black pupils and the empty sockets of the mask. What are they looking at? The visitors swarming in the gardens of the museum? The Seine, once celebrated by Picassos friend Apollinaire, still flowing implacably before them? Or what if it were something else? What if Picasso, photographed at the height of his fame, were gazing triumphantly toward the Pont de lAlma, calmly and simply indicating the precise place where, in October 1900, during his first ever trip to Parisat eighteen years old, unable to speak a word of Frenchhe rushed to the Spanish section of the Grand Palais at the Exhibition Universelle wherewhat an honor for someone so young!one of his paintings was being shown.

In the spring of 2017, I see in this poster of Picasso at the Muse du Quai Branly a staggering clash between the image of the Fich S locked away in the police archives and that of the legendary artist celebrated all over the world. What has become of that brilliant, fervent kid who came to Paris with his friend Carles Casagemas, the Pablo Ruiz Picasso who entered Paris on the eve of his nineteenth birthday like a meteor, with no doubt at all about his ability to conquer the city? In the self-portrait Yo, Picasso, painted in May 1901 during his second trip to Paris, he depicts himself in a white shirt and orange ascot, a dynamic, arrogant, invincible young man, convinced of his own genius. Everything is blue, except for the pale mask of his face. The world he leans against is solid, impenetrable, turquoise. The coat he wears is an impervious mass of navy. The shadows of his face are delicate and bluish. He doesnt move, asks no questions, makes no appeal. He is a vulnerable, dejected young man, his gaze strangely vacant. His slight divergent squint is barely perceptible. Picassos early years in Paris are reflected perfectly in these self-portraits: after the initial exaltation of his arrival, life grew difficult, hostile, disturbing, almost baleful.