When Picasso was being investigated by the French police as an enemy of the state

Pablo Picasso

arrived in Paris for the second time on May 2, 1901. The previous year, without turning 19, he had visited the Universal Exhibition, sold a painting and gotten a contract.

The Catalan dealer Pere Mañach has organized an exhibition for him at the André Vollard gallery.

Picasso is going to live for ten months at the home of his dealer and will produce 64 works.

The police monitor foreigners

living in the Parisian periphery, including the Catalan colony of Montmartre. With the gossip of the concierge of the property, a malicious quote from the critic of the exhibition and the militancy of its host, a police report concludes on June 18 that "it is necessary to consider it anarchist."

The first police report of the "so-called Picasso Ruiz Pablo to whom the guarded anarchist Mañach gives asylum" was written by Commissioner Rouquier, head of the third brigade. The caretaker said that "he spoke French badly and was barely understood." The critic had appeared in 'Le Journal' a week before the opening of the exhibition, signed by Gustave Coquiart and concluded with good sense: "Tomorrow the works of Picasso will be celebrated". But he described how

"helpless beggars from the city, old men and women with dull eyes and inert limbs and the young flesh of minor prostitutes, blue eyes, affectionate smiles, sweetly melancholic" appeared

in the

paintings

.

With those three bits of nothing, the signing curator affirmed that "Picasso shares the ideas of his compatriot Mañach".

Data of the indicated: 1.68, long black hair, incipient light brown mustache, black jacket, soft hat of the same color ".

We are in the Palace of the Golden Gate, the children in the -1 entertaining with the aquariums, the journalists two floors up in the presentation of 'Picasso.

Abroad'.

This is the National Museum of the History of Immigration.

"A museum created as a tribute to colonial France in 1931 but reinvented to

who have made France. Picasso was an expatriate artist, he never became French but he contributed a lot to France. So this is an appropriate place "Anne Cohen-Solal, curator and author of a great investigative work on Picasso and his run-ins with the French police, tells us in a quiet corner.

The splendid exhibition has paintings, drawings and sculptures of the Malaga genius, of course.

Also half a dozen documentaries from the French audiovisual archives.

The unique thing is that it brings together numerous documents, from the

card

to the red folder with the Foreigner Dossier number 74,664, the one from 1901.

Cohen-Solal affirms that "Picasso was treated in his early days in Paris as the S files are today", which in police jargon is someone dangerous even if he lacks a prior record. "An S file is anyone who poses a

. The report made him a suspect of anarchism. It was absurd." But it had consequences.

In it, Picasso acquires "three stigmas: he is a foreigner, leftist and avant-garde. France does not forgive these three stigmas", affirms Cohen-Solal. These prejudices will be decisive when Picasso asks on April 3, 1940 to be naturalized French. Picasso had good connections in the Ministry of Justice so his application was processed quickly. On April 30, he obtained the approval of the district police station. But "a state official drew up" the 1901 dossier and

.

The official's name was Émile Chevalier, he was the deputy to the main inspector of the secret services and he initialed his four typed pages on May 25, 1940. They contain the report that he had identified as an anarchist and qualifies "that while preserving his ideas extremists, has evolved into communism "despite" having made millions "from art. He claims that he "did not render any service" to France in the Great War. He adds that he had an incident in a cafe in Saint Germain "where he criticized our institutions and apologized for the Soviets." Conclusion: "this foreigner does not have any title to obtain naturalization."

. The Nazis enter Paris on June 14.

Picasso was able to obtain nationality earlier, in 1927, when the law only required that he had resided in France for three years and the painter had been there for almost thirty. But he didn't ask for it. In 1940, Picasso rather than become French seeks "the protection of the French State. Picasso is afraid. He knows that

has been a scapegoat in 1936, he knows that he is considered a degenerate artist in Germany, that Franco has taken power in Spain. and he senses that the Nazis are going to invade France. Famous for the 'Guernica', he is afraid of being a scapegoat ", explains Cohen-Solal.

There is evidence of the artist's fear long before the winds of war blow.

In 1932, Paul Eluard was angered by Picasso's hesitations, required to sign a petition in favor of Aragon, accused of a poem: "Picasso wants to consult a lawyer before signing. He is afraid of being expelled. If he does not sign, he will be we will denounce and attack him violently. "

(Letter to Gala).

The painter will not tell anyone about the rejection of his naturalization.

"

. He was a dignified and noble man, with a single objective, to make the most immortal work of art possible. The only thing that interested him was to dialogue with Velázquez, the rest is prosaic for him."

During the occupation, the Nazis took some files of famous foreigners from the French police archives to Berlin.

In 1945, the Soviets moved them to Moscow.

Picasso took his secret to the grave (he died in 1973).

But, in 2001, the French recovered their police files and with them, red folder number 74,664.

In 1947, Picasso donated ten works to the Museum of Modern Art and was granted

.

In 1958, the then De. Gaulle chief of staff and later president, Georges Pompidou, a great lover of modern art, offered him French nationality.

Picasso did not reply.

"Picasso was beyond a passport."

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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