Art: Pablo, Come Home

The name of Pablo Picasso has been officially anathema in his native Spain ever since Franco. Last week it fluttered through the conversation of Madrid’s arty set as persistently as one of the master’s mechanical Communist peace doves. While suspicious plainclothesmen strained to detect something subversive in the highbrow cafe controversies, the government wondered how to suppress Spain’s liveliest and most political art wrangle in 15 years.

The fuss was kicked up in the first place by Jesus de Perceval, a sleepy-eyed but ambitious young painter from Almeria. Last month, at the opening of Madrid’s Hispano-American Art Biennale, Perceval drew the critics’ praise for his Beheading of the Innocents, a large Renaissance-style canvas with eclectically costumed figures, including Roman soldiers, Andalusian mothers and a sky full of angels and DC-6s. The artist was personally congratulated by Franco himself.

It was a few days before anybody noticed in the background of The Beheading a strangely familiar bald head, crowned by a dove. Sure enough, it was Pablo Picasso. With closer attention, experts also spotted Salvador Dali in the patent-leather hat of a civil guardsman.

As the word got around, crowds streamed into the Crystal Palace to see the painting. Sanchez Bella, organizer of the Biennale, tried to look pleased. Said he: “At the Biennale we even have Picasso’s Soviet dove.” Said Artist Perceval, sweating, after a long talk with the police: “The dove is not Soviet. It is just a poor little dove who lives in the patio of my home.”

On the crest of the controversy, Surrealist Dali bounced into Madrid with a prepared lecture on “Picasso and I.” Crowds greeted him with shouts of “Viva Picasso!” Spoke Dali: “There is no difference between Picasso and myself as men. We are both painters, both Spaniards, both geniuses . . .”

Hundreds of Spanish intellectuals hopefully signed their name to a telegram Dali vowed to dispatch to Picasso: “Know that despite your current Communism we consider your authentic genius an inseparable patrimony of our spiritual empire . . .” It was an invitation to Pablo to break with Communism and come back home to Spain.

Would Pablo accept? Said he last week: “I have received no telegram. The question does not arise.”