Interview ǀ “Smiled at smugly” – Friday

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For some, Picasso was too abstract, for others too political: A conversation with the curator Julia Friedrich about the opposing reception of the artist in East and West.

Friday: Ms. Friedrich, your exhibition “The Divided Picasso” in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne examines the impact of this artist against the background of the division of Germany. How was Picasso’s perception different in East and West?

Julia Friedrich: One can begin with the fact that until today little is known in the West that Picasso was a member of the Communist Party since 1944 and was very active there: for the socialist movement, for the peace movement, for anti-colonial liberation struggles. In the GDR the focus was on the peace fighter and the person Picasso, while in the Federal Republic the focus was on the artist, creator and innovator of painting. His political commitment was in the West, for example in a cover story of Spiegel from 1956, smiled at. He was accused of living in France as a millionaire and asked how that connected with the “alleged” communist involvement.

What made you decide to address this explosive dichotomy in an exhibition?

Both East and West Germany separated the political person Picasso from the artistic person. The Swiss art historian Konrad Farner once said that it was Picasso’s paradox that he was valued as an artist in the USA, but not allowed to enter the United States as a member of the Communist Party, and that he was welcome as a person in the USSR, but his art was not. Picasso himself was of the opinion that the artist and man could not be separated. The idea of ​​the exhibition is that you can only get an overall picture if you perceive both parts together.

Julia Friedrich is head of the graphic collection at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. There she curated major exhibitions on Blinky Palermo and Otto Freundlich, among others. For the DHM in Berlin she dealt with the history of the documenta

How did you go about the research?

I visited a lot of archives and gathered tons of material. It was clear to me from the start that the research had to be part of the exhibition because the documents don’t play a minor role for us, but rather tell and prove the story itself.

This also includes photographs, book covers, posters or newspaper articles. How do you present such heterogeneous evidence in an exhibition?

The exhibition architecture by Eran Schaerf brings the research with the works into tension, so that a new perspective is possible through the historical reception. It was important for us that we also tell the story of the Picasso exhibitions in these two states. In the GDR, for example, there was not enough money to bring expensive loans into the country, and it was often not politically possible either. Hence reproductions have been shown. The New Left, who discovered the political Picasso in the West from the 1970s, also worked a lot with reproductions. We remember this and take it up by combining originals and reproductions. It is important to tell the story openly and from different perspectives.

Picasso’s painting “The Leichenhaus” from 1945 addressed the crimes of the SS and Wehrmacht at an early stage. In 1948 Picasso visited Auschwitz. Can you already read the first divergences in the role that was attributed to him in the respective political systems from the reactions to his confrontation with the Nazi era?

That is a very concise example. The painting was never seen in Germany until the fall of the Berlin Wall, neither in the West nor in the East. It has remained quite unknown here. The first West German monograph on Picasso by Wilhelm Boeck from 1955 only lists this picture in the appendix, as a tiny black and white reproduction without specifying what can be seen on it. On the other hand, there is a publication from the GDR from the 1960s that revolves around art and resistance, which not only depicts the picture in large format, but also clearly explains that it shows Nazi crimes.

Which other motifs of Picasso are particularly meaningful for the comparison?

First there is Picasso’s perhaps most famous painting, Guernicawhich he made in 1937. From today’s perspective, it is noticeable that what the picture addresses, namely the attack on the Basque city of this name, which was largely carried out by the German Condor Legion, is not placed in the political context, but generalized: Picasso shows the victims of everyone, too of the coming wars, and somehow it is about a Spanish civil war that is far away at first. It was not until the 1970s that the West German left established the political context. In the GDR, on the other hand, this connection was named, but there were problems with the form. You had to argue for that Guernica is also an important work of art and Picasso was not only on the right side politically. And in the 1990s, of all things, the Bundeswehr included it in double-sided advertisements Guernica advertised.

The same applies to the picture “Massacre in Korea” that Picasso painted in 1953.

This picture focuses on the Korean War and the American crimes there. In 1955 it was shown in a major retrospective in Munich. The Haus der Kunst was not just any museum, but previously a propaganda palace for Nazi art. Before the picture got there, the Federal Foreign Office intervened and wrote to the director stating that any political tendency in the exhibition should be avoided. The picture was then shown anyway. In the east, however, there was a debate about the question of how the victims are portrayed in the picture: Picasso is accused of portraying the Korean people defenseless and not as heroes of the resistance. And then there is a dispute about whether it is good or bad art and why: How is something to be represented, what is representationalism, where does abstraction begin and can it have a political effect? This is a discussion that is not taking place in the West.

Now these motifs speak a clear language. But that is only a part of Picasso’s work. What about that part of his work that had no political content?

First of all, there are certainly people who would also see something political in this form. For Picasso himself, art and politics always belonged together because the artist does not live in art but in the world. In the GDR, the question of form played a major role. The accusation of non-representational and formalistic painting means that in the logic of the functionaries one places form above reality. For this reason, too, it was problematic at times to exhibit Picasso in the GDR and the entire socialist world. The dove of peace was omnipresent, but Stephan Hermlin’s 20-minute short film about Picasso, which had been shot at great expense for GDR television, was not broadcast – allegedly because there was a scratch in the picture. In the Federal Republic, on the other hand, you could see Picasso all the time. I counted over 300 exhibitions that took place in the West between 1945 and 1989. The criticism hailed him, but you had a problem with the political images.

What can you read from Picasso about the respective lives of Germans in East and West?

The FRG puts the individual in the foreground, the maker, the genius and his productivity. In 1955, Boeck called Picasso the “last, outstanding embodiment of individualism”. In the GDR the collective is in the foreground. Art has a function like all other things, like road building or science. In the West, on the contrary, its purpose is not to be subject to any ends.

Were these opposing readings reconciled after 1989 or did the West prevail here too?

There is only the West left. The fact that 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall we are holding an exhibition that still explains what the political Picasso is, shows that there is only this Western view – unless someone has been socialized in the GDR. In 2002 there was an exhibition in Chemnitz, after all in the former Karl-Marx-Stadt, with the French-language title Picasso and women. That would have been unthinkable there 20 years or 50 years ago.

The divided Picasso. The artist and his image in the FRG and the GDR Museum Ludwig, Cologne, until January 30, 2022

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