Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [99]
In an unprecedented mark of respect to a foreign painter, a special section entitled ‘Hommage à Picasso’ showed seventy-four paintings and five sculptures. On the morning of 5 October, the day before the opening of the exhibition, the front page of L’Humanité was not, as usual, devoted to the advances of the Red Army. Instead, across five columns, its headline declared:
PICASSO
THE GREATEST OF ALL LIVING ARTISTS
has joined the Party of the French Resistance
Picasso’s rise to political consciousness caused a good deal of mirth and cynicism in non-Communist ranks. Many considered the decision to join the Communist Party a sort of insurance policy to safeguard a fortune, reputedly worth 600 million francs. Cocteau wrote in his diary that it was Picasso’s ‘first anti-revolutionary gesture’.
When the Salon opened, traditionalists and friends of the excluded painters held a demonstration inside. ‘Take them down! Take them down!’ they yelled in front of Picasso’s paintings. Picasso is said to have been furious. Young right-wingers even went round Paris altering the chalked Communist slogans of ‘Pétain au poteau’ (‘Pétain for the firing squad’) to ‘Picasso au poteau’. The strength of feeling did not abate – everyone was a committed picassiste or anti-picassiste. A year later at the ballet of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, a large part of the audience hissed the curtain which he had designed.
Picasso’s commitment to the cause acted as a powerful recruiting campaign for the party. He even wrote in L’Humanité: ‘Joining the Communist Party is the logical progression of my whole life, of my whole work… How could I have hesitated? The fear of becoming engaged in the struggle? But I feel much more free, much more fulfilled.’
Picasso’s stand certainly inspired his more-resistant-than-thou colleagues. When a Resistance group asked painters for a work each to be sold for charity, Derain and Segonzac, both accused of collaboration, provided canvases. But Picasso, hearing that their work would be included, refused to give a painting; he offered 200,000 francs instead. Immediately, other artists threatened to boycott the exhibition if the two canvases by Derain and Segonzac were not withdrawn. The organizers felt forced to give way, but because the works of Derain and Segonzac were far more valuable than those of the protesters they sold them through dealers, without a word of apology to the two artists.
The dictatorship of the progressive intelligentsia after the war was a phenomenon which had a number of reasons, but few excuses. Ever since the encyclopédistes of the mid-eighteenth century had encouraged the idea that thinkers would lead the masses to salvation, revolutionary and anti-clerical ideas generated their own form of spiritual arrogance. Jacobinismnot only glorified political upheaval, endowing violence with romantic qualities, it saw Revolution as an entity with a life of its own: a terrible monster to be worshipped.
The exaltation of theory over bourgeois morality gained strength during the Resistance. Communist ruthlessness, together with the party’s vaunted professionalism, attracted many of those ashamed of France’s collapse in 1940 and the collaboration of Vichy. Never again should the right wing, which had betrayed the country, be allowed to regain control. Never again should Europe permit the horrors of Nazi rule. Only one country was strong enough and determined enough to oppose the return of fascism, and that was the Soviet Union.
Communists vigorously claimed that they were materialists, yet the wilful blindness towards the reality of life in the Soviet Union could only exist as a form of unquestioning religious belief. The spiritual aspect of Communism had been brought home to the British ambassador when a young priest came to see him in Algiers during the early summer of 1944. ‘This emaciated young priest,’ wrote Duff Cooper, in a report for Churchill’s successor, Clement Attlee, ‘with the fire of religious fanaticism burning in his eyes, assured me that having witnessed the