Autor: FIR | 6. 4. 2023
Few visual artists were as originally connected in their works with the ideals and goals of the international resistance movement as Pablo Ruiz Picasso. Born on October 25, 1881 in Málaga, the subject of war moved him early on. As an art student in Barcelona, he chose motifs from the bloody conquest of South America by the colonial power Spain. He made sketches of the Spanish-American War of 1898, which marked the end of Spain as a colonial power in Latin America. Since 1900, he was in contact with anti-clerical and anarchist artistic and literary circles in Barcelona. When the reform pedagogue and pacifist Francisco Ferrer was sentenced to death on charges of being the mastermind of an anarchist insurrection attempt in Barcelona, Picasso became involved in getting the death sentence overturned in 1909.
Although he lived and worked in Paris in the 1930s, he supported Spain’s Republican government against the Franco coup. In 1937, Picasso wrote and illustrated the book Sueño y mentira de Franco, a vicious satire of the caudillo Franco. He donated the proceeds from its sales to the Spanish Republicans.
In January 1937, he was commissioned to design the Spanish pavilion at the World’s Fair in Paris. When on April 26, 1937, the German „Condor Legion“ bombed the Basque town of Guernica and 80 percent of it was destroyed (about 1600 dead), Pablo Picasso created the painting of the same name and denounced the crime on it. It was exhibited in the Spanish pavilion at the World’s Fair in Paris. To this day, it remains one of the most famous anti-war paintings. Even after that he painted the horrors of the Civil War, for example the painting Madre con niño muerto (Mother with dead child).
When half a million people fled across the Pyrenees to France after the defeat of the Republic in 1939, Picasso supported them to the best of his ability. For example, he donated large sums of money to a hospital in Toulouse that served as a headquarters for the health care of Spanish exiles. Picasso also supported Spanish artists who, like the mass of Spanish exiles, had to live in internment camps in the south of France. He encouraged them to capture the inhumane conditions there in pictures. When World War II began, Picasso applied for citizenship in his adopted country of France in early 1940, but was denied. Nevertheless, he remained in Paris during the war, refusing any contact with the Vichy regime or the German occupiers despite various offers. After the liberation, he was considered an artist who “symbolized the spirit of resistance in the most effective way”.
After the liberation of Paris, Pablo Picasso became a member of the French Communist Party in 1944, to which he belonged until his death. In 1945, he became chair of the Franco-Spanish Aid Committee for Republican Spaniards. Later he collaborated with the peace movement. For the Paris World Peace Conference in 1949, he donated his famous poster with the dove of peace. To this day, the white dove against a blue sky is well known worldwide as a symbol of the peace movement. At the International Peace Congress in Sheffield in 1950, Picasso formulated his message in simple words: “I am for life and against death. I am for peace and against war.”
Together with Louis Aragon and other artists, he put his popularity and art at the service of political campaigns. He protested the Korean War, worked to save Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, supported protests against the Indochina War, and advocated for freedom fighters who had fought for the independence of their homeland in the Algerian War. In addition, he supported the Stockholm Appeal against nuclear armaments. His last political engagement was the fight against the Vietnam War. However, he did not live to see the victory of North Vietnam over the USA in 1975. He died fifty years ago, on April 8, 1973 in the south of France in Mougins.
The FIR remembers this great artist, who not only set standards in the visual arts, but also was involved in the social struggles of his time. The FIR Seasons greeting to the year 2019 adorned his message “Peace for all people” and the corresponding picture.
International Federation of Resistants Fighters (FIR) - Association of Antifascists
