Art: The Comrade Is Decadent

“Now,” said Pablo Picasso, announcing his conversion to Communism, “I have found my true country!” That was three years ago. Last week, Moscow’s Pravda went out of its way to shout that in his true country Picasso is a prophet without honor—and, in art, a formalist to boot. Said Pravda: “The great October Socialist Revolution saved Russian art from a fate which has overtaken painting and sculpture together with other kinds of art in capitalist countries. There, debasing and formalist art represents man as a monster deprived of feeling and thought . . . and serves the selfish interests of the bourgeoisie, catering to their decadent and perverted tastes. . . . The Paris school of artists, which has long been unable to teach anyone anything … is a striking example. . . .”

Pravda’s purpose: to purge Picasso, and fellow Modern Henri Matisse (also rumored to be looking leftward), from Moscow studios. In Russia, as elsewhere, artists had always been a notoriously difficult class to regiment, and now it seemed some of the younger Muscovite painters were going so far as to neglect their appointed tasks. Instead of Stalin in heroic poses and the Red cavalry charging through the snow, they yearned to paint gutted guitars, vodka bottles and pink, reclining nudes.

Pravda’s loud bark wound up with a warning: “Soviet realistic representational art is the most advanced art in the world. . . . Nevertheless, complacency would be a dangerous mistake. . . . Heirs of decayed formalistic bourgeois art of the West still poison the pure air of Soviet art and attempt to influence young Soviet artists. It is entirely inadmissible that alongside the art of Socialist realism there should exist tendencies represented by admirers of bourgeois decadent art who consider their spiritual teachers to be the French formalists, Picasso and Matisse. . . .”

Not all Frenchmen take Picasso’s Communism seriously. Said one of Picasso’s aperitif-sipping chums, on the terrace of the Cafe Flore, the other day: “Why, my friend, Pablo is too much of a revolutionary to be a real Communist.”