Everyone can consult the archives of the Paris police,” writes Annie Cohen-Solal at the start of her new book, Picasso the stranger. In the police shops, she finds an inflated file. “I have just met a suspect, a “foreigner” who, on October 25, 1900, arrived for the first time in Paris, only to find himself hunted down by the police a few months later.
This foreigner’s file would grow year by year for the rest of his life, writes Cohen-Solal, stuffed with reports, transcripts of interrogations, residence permits, passport photos, fingerprints, rent receipts and requests of naturalization. The foreigner in question is Pablo Picasso, who moved to Paris at the turn of the century, where, according to the author, he was quickly branded a threat to the state.
It was an expedition into Picasso’s micro-universe. I opened the thousands of letters his mother wrote to him
Annie Cohen Solal, author
“Discovering Picasso’s police files was a shock”, says Cohen-Solal The arts journal. “I couldn’t believe how many times he had to go to the police station to get his foreign identity card [ID papers required for a foreigner], which had to be updated every two years, with his fingerprints and his passport photos where he looked like an outlaw. In Picasso’s file, opened in 1901 – when he was not yet 20 years old – the police wrote that he represented a threat to the country.
The Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, where Picasso stayed in the early 1900s © Roger Viollet
She describes her research as a “scholarly treasure hunt” for which she cross-referenced data, traveling between the police and the national archives, as well as the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. , CC. “This is how I was able to compare, for example, two police files at the same time: that of Picasso and that of Sante Geronimo Caserio, the young Italian anarchist baker who assassinated the French president in 1894”, says- she. “Picasso was described as much more dangerous by the police than Caserio!”
Cohen-Solal realized that during his first 45 years in France, Picasso was stigmatized in three ways: as a foreigner, an anarchist and avant-garde artist. “I also discovered how brilliantly Picasso handled this situation, building very solid networks, both in France and in the Western world,” says Cohen-Solal. “For example, the way he chose the very young Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler as a dealer is truly remarkable. It was a perfect choice. Kahnweiler understood his masterpiece The Ladies of Avignon [1907] before anyone else, and succeeded in promoting Picasso’s Cubist works from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires to the United States before World War I, making him a wealthy man.
The cover of Picasso’s extensive police file, which included reports, interview transcripts and fingerprints Courtesy of the Archives of the Paris Police Prefecture
The book focuses on the development of the avant-garde in the early 20th century, exploring, for example, the careers and impact of figures such as Kahnweiler. In Paris, Picasso was friends with a group of immigrants who shared a multicultural background and understood exactly what Picasso was doing during the Cubist era, Cohen-Solal adds, when no one in the French art establishment understood his innovations.
“These other expatriates are crucial to Picasso’s development,” says Cohen-Solal. “And so I decided to explore who they were, how they thought, how they evolved and how they interacted with Picasso. I described a fascinating collection of characters ranging from Gertrude Stein, the American poet, to Kahnweiler and Vincenc Kramář, the scholar from Prague, and Carl Einstein, the committed critic and intellectual from Prussia.
Picasso’s alienation also gives a new dimension to his art after 1914. Cohen-Solal argues that it was difficult to make sense of the different aesthetic periods that Picasso went through, working as a set designer and surrealist artist, for example. “Why did Picasso start working as a theater designer for Sergei Diaghilev, the director of the Ballets Russes, in the first place? This is because after December 1914, when Kahnweiler’s stock was confiscated by the police – because Kahnweiler was a German citizen – Picasso had to find other professional contacts, i.e. niches where it could function and produce, sheltered from the French State.
The book also delves into the intense relationship Picasso had with his mother, María Picasso López, through hundreds of affectionate missives between the two. “It was an expedition into Picasso’s micro-universe,” says Cohen-Solal. “I opened, one by one, the thousands of letters his mother wrote to him, noticing the way he opened them, some with his fingers, others with a knife, discovering that some were stained with paint, or coffee.”
And what did Cohen-Solal think of the Spanish artist after spending years going through all his documents? “Admittedly, I found Picasso much more convincing at the end of my research.”
• Picasso abroad: an artist in France, 1900-1973, Annie Cohen-Solal, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 608pp, $40 (hb)
