Picasso nearly risked his reputation for Franco exhibition
Picasso was a steadfast communist, a tireless peace campaigner, and he loathed the fascists – depicting General Franco with witty brutality in works such as The Dream and Lie of Franco (1937).
But the Picasso who consorted with Soviet officials, who was photographed examining pictures of Stalin, who received telegrams from Fidel Castro, is only part of the story.
According to John Richardson, the biographer of the artist who knew him from the 1940s to the 1960s, the Spaniard secretly undertook negotiations with Franco's representatives in 1956.
Richardson and his collaborator, art historian Gijs van Hensbergen, have discovered that the Spanish art critic José María Moreno Galván was dispatched to the Côte d'Azur, where Picasso was living, in order to open talks about holding a retrospective for the artist in Madrid.
Read entire article at The Guardian
But the Picasso who consorted with Soviet officials, who was photographed examining pictures of Stalin, who received telegrams from Fidel Castro, is only part of the story.
According to John Richardson, the biographer of the artist who knew him from the 1940s to the 1960s, the Spaniard secretly undertook negotiations with Franco's representatives in 1956.
Richardson and his collaborator, art historian Gijs van Hensbergen, have discovered that the Spanish art critic José María Moreno Galván was dispatched to the Côte d'Azur, where Picasso was living, in order to open talks about holding a retrospective for the artist in Madrid.