page 15

Pablo Picasso 1881—1973

What is an artist?

Picasso joined the French Commonist Party in 1944. As he received his party card, he said: "Now I have found my true country."

Picasso's loyalty to his political commitment has been a bone in the throat of the bourgeoisie for years. Every attempt has been made to belittle his act from claims that his joining the Communist Party in 1944 was a "caprice" to later claims that he lost interest in politics and even nursed a secret hostility to his former comrades and friends.

Although it would have been a full-time job for Picasso to answer all his detractors, there were occasions, however, when he took pains to make his position unmistakably clear - as when he appeared publicly at the Sports Palace in Paris during a celebration of his 90th birthday and publicly embraced French Communist leader Jacques Duclos.

Or when he made this statement, published in Les Lettres Francoises:

"What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only his eyes if he is a painter, or his ears if a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet, or, if he is merely a boxer, only his muscles?

"On the contrary, be is at the some time a political being, constantly alert to the heartrending, burning, or happy events in the world, moulding himself in their likeness.

"How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people and, becouse of on ivory-tower indifference, detach yourself from the life they bring with such open hands?

"No pointing is not made to decorate apartments. It is on instrument of war, for attack and defence against the enemy."

When the fascists attacked Spain, he made his herculean efforts to bridge the gap between the assumptions of "modernism," which he found finally severely limited, to the demand of life upon the artist to intervene directly in life.

"Guernica" was the result. At the some time that this remarkable work is a denunciation of fascism. In Spain it rehearses the whole history of the intellectual struggle of Picasso.

When the U.S. took over France's "dirty war" in Vietnam, Picosso denounced that intervention as late as 1970.

When a Nazi officer visited his studio in Paris during World War 2 and saw, for the first time, his "Guernica," he asked: "Did you do that?"

"No," Picasso answered, "you did."

And "Guernica" today, which Picasso sent to America in 1939 to raise money for refugees from Franco's tortures, ended up "on loon" at New York's Museum of Modern Art, where it is supposed to stay until "Spain is free."