In most cases, one suspects, Picasso, spectacularly self-centered, was to blame. (One can only speculate about why he refused to sign a petition that might have saved Jacob, an early Paris friend, from a Nazi internment camp. And one can only wonder what Braque might have thought on hearing of Picasso saying, “Braque is the woman who loved me the most.”)
Cohen-Solal — who has written biographies of Sartre and Leo Castelli — floats some ethical reservations, but her take on Picasso is positive, even celebratory. Mentions of “genius” float through the book like party balloons. “Heroic” and “fearless” recur.
Even when he is clearly problematic, she cuts him some slack. Was he an opportunist? Sure. Almost certainly that’s why, during the German occupation of France, he buddied up, for protection, with the Nazi-connected Cocteau. And it’s probably why, after the war, he veered in the other direction and joined the French Communist Party. Cohen-Solal suggests that such apparently contradictory moves — which some historians see reflected in swings between radical and “classical” phases in his art — can be explained by the existential vulnerability that the status of “foreigner” had instilled in him.
She compares his sense of this with that expressed by the American sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, though I would question an equivalence. Du Bois spoke of outsiderness in the context of race, as an identity defined by the “color line.” He was Black; Picasso was white. Their situations — the risk factors they faced — aren’t really comparable, any more than the artist’s first, funky Montmartre digs and an immigrant slum in Paris today are.
At the same time, both men came to grips with realities and pressures of difference — their own — and, rather than try to dodge or downplay it, made it their strength, made it what they were. (When, in 1959, the French government offered Picasso citizenship, after dangling the prospect earlier, he didn’t even bother to respond to the invitation.)
