Friday 21 May 2010, 11.00–18.00

Political Picasso: Peace and Freedom in the Cold War sets out to radically reassess the significance of Picasso's involvement in the Cold War dominated politics of the late 1940s-60s. The conference investigates the understanding that Picasso's politically inspired artworks had in a range of European countries inside and outside the Soviet bloc, and in the world beyond.

Issues of 'peace' and 'freedom' continue to dominate our horizons as they did those of peace activists inside and outside the Communist parties. The conference also seeks to consider whether the moral, aesthetic and ideological weight associated with Picasso's major paintings of the time (Charnel House, 1944-5, Massacre in Korea, 1951 and their prefigurative model, Guernica, 1937) belongs to a lost age. Could visual art in our time ever again take on this burden, and if the answer is 'no', then what does this reveal about our contemporary culture and the place and power of art within it?

Speakers include Andrew Brighton, David Caute, Brigitte Leal and Diana Widmaier Picasso. Please see full programme below.

There will be an opportunity for conference attendees to view the exhibition Picasso: Peace and Freedom at Tate Liverpool from 9.00-11.00 on the day of the conference. Conference attendees will also have the opportunity to attend the Private View of the exhibition following the conference, from 18.30-20.30 at Tate Liverpool. Private View invitations admit two people.

Please note this conference takes place in the Leggate Lecture Theatre, Victoria Gallery & Museum, Ashton Street, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 3DR. The venue is a 20 minute walk from Tate Liverpool and situated close to Liverpool Lime Street station. For further directions and venue information please visit the Victoria Gallery & Museum website.

In collaboration with AHRC, Liverpool University Press, Norwich University College of the Arts and the University of Liverpool.

Liverpool University  
£40 (£30 concessions), booking required
Price includes entry to the exhibition
Price includes lunch and refreshments

10.30-11.00    Registration & Refreshments

11.00-11.20    Welcome & Introduction

Professor Phil Davis, University of Liverpool

Christoph Grunenberg, Director, Tate Liverpool

Professor Jonathan Harris, University of Liverpool (Chair)

11.20-13.00    Panel: The Cold War

Otto Karl Werckmeister: Picasso’s Property, Picasso’s Politics

David Caute: Picasso and the Russians

13.00-13.45    Lunch

13.45-15.30    Panel: Picasso’s Reception

Krzysztof Fijalkowski: Poétique/Politique: Picasso, Surrealism and Politics

Andrew Brighton: To whom did Picasso’s Communism matter?

Professor Lynda Morris: Picasso and ‘The Garbage Can of History’

15.30-16.00    Break

16.00-17.00    Panel: Picasso as a Cold War Artist

Brigitte Leal, Deputy Director of Collections, Centre Pompidou

Diana Widmaier Picasso: The Sculptures of Pablo Picasso and the Craft Industry in Vallauris in the 1950's

17.00-18.00    Plenary Discussion

18.30-20.30    Private View Picasso: Peace and Freedom, Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock L3 4BB

 

Abstracts & Biographies

Otto Karl Werckmeister: Picasso’s Property, Picasso’s Politics

Picasso never said or wrote a word to stipulate Guernica’s pictorial or ideological significance. His notorious rebuff to Alfred Barr’s question—“a bull, a horse, what else” - seems to foreclose any figure-by-figure narrative decoding. The point of his work had been to key his pre-established Minotaur-cum-bullfight imagery to the historic moment with minimal adjustments. By contrast, since Picasso remained Guernica’s owner, he was in a position to determine its political significance. Once the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris Expo had closed down, he sent it on tour to support the refugees from the Republic in defeat. In the document authorising its temporary deposit at the Museum of Modern Art, he made it a pawn for the Republic’s restoration.

Picasso’s silence on the first point spawned an avalanche of inconclusive interpretations and debates in art criticism and art history. More importantly, it gave a license to creative appropriations by political movements and individuals, at liberty to turn it into a pacifist banner for opposing an unending sequence of wars that have lasted to this day. By contrast, Picasso’s deliberate stance on the second point netted him an unprecedented authority as an arbiter of his country’s political destiny, acting through his legal representatives. From Guernica’s creation to this day, Spanish political leaders, eager to avail themselves of the picture for their own designs, had to contend with his views about freedom and democracy. 

Otto Karl Werckmeister was born in Berlin in 1934. He studied art history, philosophy, and modern German literature at the Freie Universität Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1958 with a dissertation on Late Carolingian gold reliefs. After holding research fellowships at the Warburg Institute, University of London, and the German Archaeological Institute, Madrid, he joined the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was Professor of Art History from 1971 to 1984. From 1984 to 2001, he was Mary Jane Crowe Distinguished Professor in Art History at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He now lives in Berlin. His book Icons of a Left, Chicago, 1999, includes the chapter “Picasso’s Guernica Returns to Germany”.

David Caute: Picasso and the Russians

David Caute explores Pablo Picasso’s problematic relationship with the Soviet art establishment from 1945 to 1956. Picasso joined the French Communist Party (PCF) immediately after the liberation of Paris in August 1944, an event celebrated in banner headlines by the Party daily, L’Humanité. But while the PCF vigorously celebrated Picasso’s genius as an artist, leading Soviet museum directors openly denigrated what they called his ‘surrealism’, and indeed the ‘decadence’ of his oeuvre. While his famous painting Guernica was on display in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Russians disparaged the form, if not the content, of this cri de coeur against the Nazi bombing of civilians during the Spanish Civil War. Major works pre-1914 remained locked away in Moscow’s museum cellars. While adopting Picasso’s peace dove, Moscow remained unbendingly at war with ‘modernism’ and ‘formalism’. Meeting the great artist in 1955, Isaiah Berlin reported: ‘Picasso was quite funny about how every time he was invited to Moscow he suggested that he might open an exhibition of his own work there, and how this always brought the invitation to an abrupt end.’  Finally, in 1956, a retrospective opened at the Pushkin Museum, attracting large crowds. Due to attend in person (he had never visited the USSR), Picasso changed his mind when Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary.

David Caute’s most recent book is Politics and the Novel During the Cold War (2010).  His works include The Fellow Travellers; Joseph Losey: a Revenge on Life; and Communism and the French Intellectuals. The present talk is based on a chapter from The Dancer Defects: the Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War. His novel Fatima’s Scarf was longlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize. Caute has been a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Kryzysztof Fijalkowski: Poétique/Politique: Picasso, Surrealism and Politics

Picasso's membership of the PCF from 1944 onwards put an end to his developing relationship with the Parisian surrealist group during the 1930s, a decade of turbulent political commitment for surrealism. But in the post-war era, as political positions hardened, many of Picasso's closest allies were former surrealist poets, and the complex relations and tensions between the painter, politics and surrealism after the war will be examined in this paper.

Krzysztof Fijalkowski is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Norwich University College of the Arts; his main field of research is the history and culture of international surrealism.

Andrew Brighton: To whom did Picasso’s Communism matter?

The use and abuse of Picasso in the cultural and political conflicts of the early Cold War in Britain.

Andrew Brighton is a writer, a contributing editor to Critical Quarterly and formally Senior Curator of Public Programmes at Tate Modern.

Professor Lynda Morris: Picasso and ‘The Garbage Can of History’

US formalist criticism of Picasso’s work after 1944 does not sit easily with the detailed information in the ‘Political Papers Sent To Picasso’ in his Archives at the Musée National Picasso Paris. Picasso had extensive contacts with Dr Barsky and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the US. They were under the scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee from 1946 and all twelve committee members were imprisoned in 1950. Picasso applied for a visa to visit Washington in early 1950 to deliver the Stockholm Peace Appeal to Congress. His visa application was refused. Alfred Barr did not attempt to request a visa for either of Picasso’s two exhibitions at MoMA in 1956 and 1963.

This paper will look at the links between McCarthy’s ‘Witchhunts’ and Roman Catholicism in New York and the US. MoMA feared McCarthy was targeting links between Jewish Eastern Europeans and Communism in the US. We can trace Picasso’s contacts with Stuart Davis and the Artists Union and Diego Rivera. In the late 1950s ‘The Silence’ enveloping art and politics in the US was penetrated by a new generation of artists such as Larry Rivers and R.B.Kitaj. Rauschenberg and Robert Indiana contribute a new pacifism, as did Bob Dylan’s lyrics around the time of Cuba Missile Crisis. The Communist Feminist movement Picasso encouraged in post-war Eastern Europe reappears in the US through the links to artists like Martha Rosler and Nancy Spero. With the Anti-Vietnam War Protest movement, Picasso is a political inspiration with the Mi Lai poster demonstration in front of Guernica and Tony Shafrazi’s spray graffiti on Guernica.

Professor Lynda Morris is a writer and curator based at Norwich University College of the Arts since 1980. She established EAST in Norwich in 1991, working with selectors such as Konrad Fischer, Marian Goodman and Gustav Metzger. EAST helped to develop the careers of many artists including Matthew Higgs, Jeremy Deller, Martin Creed and Lucy McKenzie. She has written for Studio International, Art Press Paris, Art Monthly, the Guardian, the Listener, Flash Art, Third Text and Kunstforum on Conceptual Art and Art and Politics. In the 1970s she organised the first UK exhibitions of Bernd & Hilla Becher, Agnes Martin (SNGMA), Gerhard Richter and she organised The Book as Artwork 1960 -1972 for Germano Celant at Nigel Greenwood Inc Ltd.

She is co-curator of Picasso: Peace and Freedom at Tate Liverpool from 21 May to 30 August 2010. Her research was enabled by a major award from the AHRC. The proposal for the exhibition came out of her research for The Artists International Association, the AIA 1933 to 1953 exhibition at the MOMA Oxford in 1982 and a Guardian Weekend article on ‘Picasso and the Sheffield Peace Congress’ published in 1980. This is the first exhibition to explore Picasso’s work in the Cold War era and how the artist transcended the ideological and aesthetic oppositions of East and West, First World and Third World.

Diana Widmaier Picasso: The Sculptures of Pablo Picasso and the Craft Industry in Vallauris in the 1950's

Throughout his life, Picasso used a diverse range of materials and techniques. His constant quest for renewal led him to meet artists and craftsmen with whom he exchanged informative dialogues that resulted in significant technical solutions. This lecture will present recently discovered information about various craftsmen or "practicians" who helped Picasso to produce a series of exceptional "assemblages" in wood, sheet metal or other various found materials. The importance of the ceramists and printers active in Vallauris has been underlined elsewhere, however the less well-known role of metal worker Joseph-Marius Tiola and carpenter Paul Massier will be explored here. The connections disclosed in this study allowed Picasso to enrich his dialogue between painting and sculpture.

Diana Widmaier Picasso is an independent art historian currently preparing a Catalogue Raisonné of Picasso's Sculptures. She studied art history at the Sorbonne-Paris IV and at the Ecole du Louvre. She also studied law at Université Assas-Paris II. She is the author of Picasso: Art can only be erotic (Prestel, 2005) and of numerous essays on the work of Pablo Picasso.

This event is related to the Picasso: Peace and Freedom exhibition