A Valuable Corrective

...Not only does the form of these works openly defy conventional modes of painting...

...Picasso's lasting and indiscriminate backing of the Communists has seemed a pose rather than a genuine commitment...

...In addition, three writers who were personally close to Picasso and peculiarly expressed the spirit of the early 1900s—Guillaume Apollinaire, Alfred Jarry and André Salmon—were imbued with an anarchist notion formulated by Pierre Proudhon and Piotr Kropotkin...

...This held that the artist's life and work should exemplify his dissociation from existing society...

...This is one of a number of valuable recent books examining the turn-of-thecentury era when Modernism in art and literature was born...

...the content is equally contemptuous of the politics of the age and its social emanations—as well as less esoteric than Picasso pretended and critics have assumed...

...Yes, lam conscious," hesaid, "of having always struggled by means of my painting as a true revolutionary...

...Her case is based on a review of his personal associations after he moved to Paris and an examination of the generally ignored content of his Cubist works, with special emphasis onhis collages...

...It is stimulating, informative and well-argued...

...Like Signac, Picasso moved on to Communism without ever realizing the incompatibility of the two ways of thinking...

...these years of terrible oppression have demonstrated to me that I must fight with not only my art but my whole self...

...Nevertheless, many artists, including Paul Signac, Kees van Dongen, Théophile Steinlen, and the Pissaros, remained dedicated to the doctrine...

...And many members of the younger Fauve school, like Maurice de Vlaminck and André Derain, were still sympathetic to the cause...

...Picasso's involvement in the cultural side of the lively Barcelona anarchist scene is well-known...

...Anyone studying the history of Cubism and related movements should read Re-Ordering the Universe to rectify the myth that Pablo Picasso and his coterie really believed that significance lies only in form...

...The artist's later convictions bear an oblique and disturbing relationship to his original anarchism...

...But by 1944, of course, his paintings had become fashionably bourgeois, an exemplification of the new nonrepresentational conservatism, and the disappearance of a revolutionary urge in both form and content contributed to the decline of his final decades...

...Her book, subtitled Picasso and Anarchisrn, 18971914, is deliberately revisionist, setting out to explode the myth created by Picasso, and accepted by several generations of art critics and historians, that his Cubist-period paintings were revolutionary only in form...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Patricia Leighten asserts that "discussion of Picasso and his art has wrongly proceeded on the assumption that politics simply disappeared from his consciousness after the move from Barcelona to Paris in 1904...

...But I have understood now that even that does not suffice...

...For Leighten, their formal rebellion is an extension of a political radicalism Picasso retained until his death, although it underwent various distortions and dilutions...

...When he actually joined the Communist Party in 1944, he appeared to see this as a development of his past and an open declaration of the true nature of his oeuvre...

...She also illustrates how the radical critique of society that marked Picasso's Spanish paintings continues in his early Paris works—notably the "blue period" depictions of hungry people disoriented socially and psychologically by poverty...

...Then, reading the newspaper columns Picasso used in his Cubist collages, she uncovers a similar concern with the horrors of the Balkan War of 1912-13, aprelude to the Great War...

...Leighten shows the extent of Picasso's links with anarchist and anarchisant writers and painters, especially with Apollinaire and with Jarry, the most extreme and inventive of them all...

...Along with Pablo Neruda, David Alfaro Siqueiros and other intellectuals who closed their eyes to Stalin's atrocities, he would have been out of tune and out of favor in the USSR, where Socialist Realism was the revolutionary criterion for art...

...Leighten suggests that Picasso's transition from anarchism to a romanticized version of Marxism was facilitated by his links during the 1930s with the Surrealists, who gave vocal support to Communism yet were never accepted by the French Communist Party...

...When he reached France he found that the heady anarchist activity of the 1890s had been diverted toward revolutionary syndicalism, culminating in the birth of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT...

...Anarchism no longer attracted as many artists and writers, not to mention assassins, as during the '90s, and the number of extremist magazines and reviews had declined sharply...