Art: L’Affaire Picasso

Pablo Picasso’s joining of the French Communist Party and the attack on his paintings at the Paris Autumn Salon (TIME, Oct. 16) were discussed last week in a Paris cable from TIME’S Correspondent Sherry Mangan. Excerpt:

Until the occupation, Picasso’s politics, though pretty vague, were rather revolutionary than Stalinist. Obviously his formal party entry was long planned and delayed till the eve of the opening of the Salon d’Automne in order to make the maximum éclat.

You must realize the tremendous pull of the Communist Party here, which combines the enormous prestige of Red Army victories with a safe, nonrevolutionary, liberal social program. To understand what it is like here, remember New York during the Popular Front period, only it is naturally infinitely more so here. Picasso is only following a mass trend.

By four p.m. Sunday [at the Autumn Salon] a thousand gaping people had passed through the Salle Picasso and some three hundred were in the room, when from one corner arose repeated shouts of “‘Dérochez!” (“Take ’em down!”), answered by shouts from another corner, “Expliquez!” (“Explain!”), and from a third quarter, “Remboursez!” (“Money back!”). Numerous young men began carefully and nondestructively taking down the pictures from the wall.

There are three theories as to who did it: 1) Beaux Arts students; 2) painters whose works were refused by the Salon; 3) fascist youths. Almost certainly the first is correct, for the following reasons: 1) under the menu posted outside the Restaurant des Beaux Arts there appeared a small blue poster reading: Tous les anti-Picassistes: Rendezvous à 4 heures aujourd’hui; 2) all the demonstrators were very young; 3) the careful handling of pictures was much more like art students than like fascist hooligans; 4) a delegation of unidentified students called at the offices of the newspaper L’Aurore. They stated they were not collaborators or Nazis, as the Picassophile press was quick to suggest, but resisters-resisting mystification. In sum, the motive seemed to be resentment at the enormous puffing up of Picasso recently, and against his new slipshod, almost contemptuous style.