On June 18, 1901, Pablo Picasso started taking on a new identity—without ever realizing he had done so. He had begun the process of becoming “foreigner number 74.664,” a label given to him by the French police, who would go on to assign him the status of “un Fiché S.,” an alien who had been put under surveillance by the state.
Picasso, who had been born more than 20 years earlier in Málaga, Spain, had aroused the suspicion of authorities because he had associated with Pierre Mañach, a dealer whom the French police had determined was an anarchist. “Please investigate the aforementioned Picasso and find out his current beliefs,” the police chief wrote in one fateful missive.
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Even though Picasso would sever ties with Mañach four years later, believing that the Spanish dealer was exploiting him, the police did not let up. They would continue to amass a file about Picasso’s activities, and their findings would continue to hinder the artist, who was repeatedly tarred as a métèque, a foreigner, in the country he called home for much of his career. The police investigation would continue to haunt him, as it did in 1940, when he was denied naturalization on the basis that he was a “suspect from the national point of view.” By the end of the ’50s, Picasso had given up on becoming a Frenchman altogether, embracing his status as an étranger.
It can be hard to recall a time when France hated Picasso, who now has museums dedicated to his art and life in Paris, Antibes, Vallauris, and elsewhere. The Paris institution is one of the many that’s now toasting him to mark the 50th anniversary of his death in 1973. And so it is with surprise that many American readers will now greet Annie Cohen-Solal’s Picasso the Foreigner: An Artist in France, 1900–1973, which has at long last arrived stateside, via an English translation by Sam Taylor, two years after its release in France.
The book, along with a related 2021 exhibition based on Cohen-Solal’s research conducted in police archives and elsewhere, got a good amount of attention in France, and this sturdy, unconventional biography of Picasso ought to attract similar recognition here in the US, where we get too much literature about the artist every year, too little of it of any real substance. This book, however, is different. The research presented within is not new—word of Picasso’s surveillance by the French police first emerged 20 years ago—but Cohen-Solal’s take on it is fresh.
It is fashionable these days to knock Picasso down a peg, as the comedian Hannah Gadsby did when she labeled him a “passionate, tormented, genius, man-ballsack” in her 2018 special Nanette. She is now at work on a Brooklyn Museum show, also tied to the commemoration of Picasso’s death, that will take up “the interconnected issues of misogyny, masculinity, creativity, and ‘genius’” in his oeuvre. This is the kind of mode many in the US expect for Picasso studies in 2023.
Cohen-Solal’s book treats Picasso kindlier than Gadsby, repeatedly using that last word, “genius,” to describe him more favorably and billing him more than once as “one of the greatest artists of the [20th] century.” Some will disagree with Cohen-Solal’s acclaim for Picasso—an artist who is hardly in need of more of it, anyway. But when Cohen-Solal deals with the evidence at hand, it is tough to disparage any of her findings.
The book’s first section, focused on Picasso’s life in squalor at the turn of the 20th century, is its strongest. It follows Picasso’s time in Paris’s Montmartre district in extreme poverty, a situation that led the French police to view him as though he existed “at the very bottom of the social ladder,” as Cohen-Solal writes.
“Once the police had drawn up a file on someone,” she continues, “their official categorization would generally remain.” This is exactly what happened with Picasso.
Much of Picasso the Foreigner isn’t really about art, and Cohen-Solal brushes through wide swaths of Picasso lore simply by name-checking people, artworks, and places. (Relatively green Picasso fans should instead pull John Richardson’s multipart biography off the shelf.) Periodically, however, Cohen-Solal manages to evoke fascinating insights about Picasso’s art, as she does when addressing Family of Saltimbanques (1905), in which a group of performers forlornly looks around a desert landscape. She identifies the harlequin in the diamond-patterned suit as Picasso himself, and explains that his stony gaze emblematizes his feelings as a financially imperiled expat in France.
“They are posed there, strangers to one another, in a world where all communication is frozen,” Cohen-Solal writes, noting that the painting could be said to represent “those cracks in society” experienced by the marginalized. Ironically, the painting is one of many acclaimed ones by Picasso that now resides abroad, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and it might not have ultimately gotten there if it hadn’t headed to auction in a closely watched sale at Paris’s Drouot auction house in 1914.
By the time of the 1914 sale, the preeminent dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler had boosted Picasso’s fame as one of Paris’s most important artists, and the painting was bought at Drouot by Munich’s Thannhauser Galleries for a not inconsiderable sum. The press had a field day, with one journalist reporting that “huge prices were paid for vile, grotesque paintings by undesirable foreigners” and bemoaning that a German had won the painting. Extrapolate only a little further, and it wouldn’t be hard to hear a note of antisemitism in that latter sentiment, given that members of the Thannhauser family were among the many German Jews who had their belongings and wealth taken from them following the Nazis’ rise to power.
By this point, Picasso had elected himself leader of the avant-garde—and had already faced pushback in France for painting Cubist pictures in which still lifes fracture into intersecting planes, as though they were being seen from several perspectives at once.
Cohen-Solal explains that Picasso and Georges Braque, who was born in Normandy, were proclaimed “charlatans” by many in France. (The Spaniard Juan Gris does show up periodically in this book, but Cohen-Solal downplays his impact on the Cubist movement.) Adding fuel to the fire were the fact that it was non-nationals—Russian and American collectors, mainly—who bought their Cubist art.
“The collusion between a German art dealer [Kahnweiler], a Spanish artist, and collectors from Russia, Germany, and North America made cubism an avant-garde movement that ‘good Frenchmen’ could point to as being run by forgers and charlatans, creating a ‘danger’ to the integrity of the nation,” Cohen-Solal writes. “It was a battle of good and evil, tradition versus the new, the France of honest men against an invasion of dangerous foreigners.”
That last sentence perfectly describes the back half of the book, in which Picasso is repeatedly disenfranchised in the interwar period. Throughout, Cohen-Solal sprinkles in descriptions of her time sifting through reams of archival materials. Her anguish as she does so, and her embarrassment with the way her nation treated foreigners like Picasso, is only thinly veiled.
As she researches the impact that anti-immigrant laws had on Picasso during the ’20s, she recounts reopening his police file and feeling shocked at the sheer amount of times he was summoned to the police station. But she never presents him as a victim.
“So many appointments given, so many fingerprints taken, so many mugshots of him looking like an ex-con—and yet he seems to have submitted to these visits without protest,” she writes. “How did Picasso put up with these encounters with the police?
“Internationally renowned but stigmatized within his country of residence, he found himself in a paradoxical situation,” she continues. “In the world of French galleries and critics, he was idolized, while among official institutions he remained invisible, and in the eyes of French law and order he was considered with suspicion. Thanks to his political analysis, and then to his construction of an autonomous domain where he could live as master of all he surveyed, he was able to control the situation and finally to turn it to his advantage.”
Here, she’s referring to France’s post–World War II about face, which saw Picasso suddenly embraced by the same Parisian institutions that had once shunned him. Suddenly, in 1947, Picasso became the first living artist to hang his work in the Louvre—he placed his art beside works by Zurbáran, Delacroix, and others—and in 1955, more than 100,000 people visited the Musée des Arts Décoratifs to see a show toasting his 75th birthday.
Yet prejudice is exportable, and sure enough, while all this was happening, the FBI caught wind of all that French authorities had amassed on Picasso and launched its own investigation. As part of an effort to stamp out Communism in the US, Picasso was deemed a “a threat to the national security of the United States” by none other than J. Edgar Hoover himself.
According to Cohen-Solal, the situation worsened to a point when, in 1957, Alfred H. Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art decided not to invite Picasso to the US at all for an exhibition of his work, fearing embarrassment if the artist were to be sent away. (The museum had by then amassed a significant Picasso collection that includes his acclaimed 1907 canvas Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and was for a while even the steward of his 1939 painting Guernica before it could be sent to Spain at the end of the Franco regime.) The FBI somehow obtained an internal note by Barr saying as much and put it in the agency’s archives. Picasso never received a US visa to see a MoMA survey that same year. Instead, he remained in France, where he would die 16 years later, having never formally become a citizen of that country.