Pablo Picasso arrives in Paris for the second time on May 2, 1901. The previous year, without reaching 19, he has visited the universal exposure, sold some painting and achieved a contract.
The Marcarante Catalan Pere Mañach has organized him an exhibition at André Vollard’s gallery.
Picasso is going to live ten months at the house of the dealer and produce 64 works.
The police monitor foreigners living in Parisian periphery, including Montmartre Catalan colony.
With the gossip of the property, a malicious citation of the criticism of the exhibition and the militancy of his host a police report concludes on June 18 that “it has been considered an anarchist”.
The first police report of the “called Picasso Ruiz Paul whom the anarchist guarded Mañach, gives asylum” is written by Commissioner Rouquier, head of the third Brigade.
The porter said she “spoke French badly and barely became understood.”
The review had appeared in ‘Le Journal’ a week before the inauguration of the exhibition, signed by Gustave Coquiart and concluded with good Tino: “Tomorrow will celebrate the works of Picasso.”
But he described that in the paintings of the investigated they appeared “homeless beggars of the city, old and old eyes off and inert members and the young meat of juvenile prostitutes, blue eyes, loving smiles, sweetly melancholy”.
With those three brizas of nothing, the signer commissioner affirmed that “Picasso shares the ideas of his compatriot Mañach”.
Detaled data: 1.68, black and long hair, light brown incipient mustache, black jacket, soft hat of the same color “.
We are at the Palace of the Dorada Gate, the children in the -1 entertaining with the aquariums, the journalists two floors above in the presentation of ‘Picasso.
Abroad’.
This is the National Museum of Immigration History.
“A museum created as a tribute to Colonial France in 1931 but reinvented to pay tribute to the immigrants who have done France. Picasso was an expatriate artist, he never became French but he contributed a lot to France. So this is an appropriate place”
, it tells us in a quiet corner Anne Cohen-Sollal, Commissioner and author of a great research work on Picasso and his trips with the French police.
The splendid sample has paintings, drawings and sculptures of the Malaga genius, of course.
Also half a dozen documentaries of French audiovisual archives.
The singular is that it gathers numerous documents, from the member of the Communist Party to the Red Folder with the Foreign Dossier number 74,664, that of 1901.
Cohen-Solal affirms that “Picasso was treated in his early days in Paris as today are the S-themes”, what in police jargon is someone dangerous even though it lacks background.
“A signed S is anyone who is a threat to state security. The report was suspicious of anarchism. It was absurd.”
But he had consequences.
In it, Picasso acquires “three stigmas: It is foreign, left and avant-garde. France does not forgive these three stigmas,” says Cohen-Solal.
These prejudices will be decisive when Picasso requests on April 3, 1940 being French naturalized.
Picasso had good connections in the Ministry of Justice so that his request was prolerizedly processed.
On April 30, he gets the approval of the district police station.
But “a state official brought out” the 1901 doser and denied French nationality.
The official was called Émile Chevalier, was the deputy to the main inspector of the secret services and he enfused his four folios typed on May 25, 1940. In them the report that had pointed out as an anarchist and is nuanced “that preserving his ideas
Extremists, it has evolved into communism “despite” having won millions “with art.
He affirms that he “did not pay any service” to France in the Great War.
He adds that he had an incident in a cafe by Saint Germain “where he criticized our institutions and agreed to the Soviets.”
Conclusion: “This foreigner has no title to obtain naturalization.”
Case closed.
The Nazis enter Paris on June 14.
Picasso was able to achieve nationality before, in 1927, when the law only demanded to have resided three years and the painter had almost thirty.
But he did not ask her.
In 1940, Picasso rather becoming French seeks “the protection of the French State. Picasso is afraid. He knows that García Lorca has been an expiative victim in 1936, he knows that he is considered a degenerate artist in Germany, which Franco has taken power in Spain
and sentence that the Nazis will invade France. France for ‘Guernica’, he is afraid of being an expiatory victim, “explains Cohen-Solal.
There is evidence of the fear of the artist since much before war winds blow.
In 1932, Paul Eladu gets angry by the titubeos of Picasso, required to sign a request in favor of Aragon, accused by a poem: “Picasso wants to consult a lawyer before signing. He is afraid of being expelled. If he does not sign, he
We will denounce and we will attack you violently. ”
(Letter to Gala).
The painter will not tell anyone the rejection of his naturalization.
“An interesting secret, was a worthy and noble man, with a single goal, to do the most immortal workplace. The only thing that interested him was dialogue with Velázquez, the rest is prosely for him.”
During occupation, the Nazis took Berlin some dossiers of famous foreigners from French police files.
In 1945, the Soviets moved them to Moscow.
Picasso took the secret of him to the tomb (he died in 1973).
But, in 2001, the French recovered their police files and with them, the red folder number 74.664.
In 1947, Picasso donated ten works at the Museum of Modern Art and was given the status of ‘privileged resident’.
In 1958, the then Cabinet Director of. Gaulle and then President, Georges Pompidou, great lover of modern art, offered him French nationality.
Picasso did not respond.
“Picasso was beyond a passport.”
