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Picasso
Elena Danielson, who keeps
the flame of culture burning at Hoover, writes:
"Re Picasso's politics: I suggest reading the book which
accompanies the
show and incorporates a great deal of research that the newspaper reporters
simply did not have time to absorb. It is a fascinating chapter
of
cultural history regardless of whether or not one admires Picasso's
aesthetics, which I personally don't care for. The interpretation
is
complex and nuanced in a way very few exhibit catalogs are.
It is important to know what factually did not happen:
Picasso did not
participate in the Resistance as his communist supporters tried to
assert
after the war; he did not collaborate with the Nazis as his detractors
assumed; he apparently did not make the famous rebuttal to
Abetz's
comment on Guernica "Did you do that?" -- "No, YOU
did."
What did happen takes time to unravel:
The Legion of Honor sponsored a
symposium last Saturday that addressed these complex issues of the
intersection of art and politics in occupied Paris. The German
occupation
authorities had a counter-intutitive cultural policy in Paris, different
from, say, occupied Poland. To be sure, artists which the German
administration considered danergously degenerate, such as Picasso,
were
constantly threatened with deportation to labor camps in Germany.
As
long as the artists were not Jewish and did not get directly involved
in
the Resistance, they actually enjoyed a somewhat privileged existence
in
occupied Paris. This semi-protected cultural life was not possible
in the
rest of German-controlled Europe. The Nazi military officers and
adminstrators displayed an enormous interest in art. For people
like me,
who would like to think of high art and culture as enlightening and
something that enhances tolerance and respect for human experience,
it is
very troubling.
During the planning stages, the exhibit
curator Steven Nash was told by
French museum curators that he could not do such a show in the United
States, which they assumed could not handle such a complex subject.
I
think we can."
Ronald Hilton - 10/12/98 |
