Picasso the Foreigner

Before Picasso became Picasso-the artist now celebrated as one of France’s leading figures-he was surveilled by the police. Amid political tensions in the spring of 1901, he was flagged as an anarchist by the security services. Picasso’s art was largely excluded from public collections in France for the next four decades. And the genius who conceived Guernica as a visceral statement against fascism in 1937 was even denied French citizenship on the eve of the Nazi occupation. Picasso faced a triple stigma-as a foreigner, a political radical, and an avant-garde artist.

Annie Cohen-Solal’s prizewinning Picasso the Foreigner approaches the artist’s career and art from an entirely new angle, making extensive use of long-understudied archival sources. Picasso emerges as an artist ahead of his time not only aesthetically but politically, one who ignored national modes in favor of cosmopolitan forms. Eventually he chose the south over the north, the provinces over the capital, while simultaneously achieving widespread fame. The artist never became a citizen of France, yet he enriched and dynamized its culture like few other figures in history. This book, for the first time, explains how.

Author Biography

Annie Cohen-Solal, a writer and social historian, is Distinguished Professor at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Her books include biographies of Jean-Paul Sartre, Leo Castelli, and Mark Rothko, all of which have been widely translated. Picasso the Foreigner, an exhibition curated by Cohen-Solal and based on the research for this book, appeared in Paris at the Museum of the History of Immigration in 2021.

Sam Taylor is an award-winning literary translator and novelist. He has translated more than sixty books from the French, including Laurent Binet’s HHhH and Leïla Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny.