The recuperated radical: Pablo Picasso and the debate on art and politics in France, 1942-1962.
Item
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Title
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The recuperated radical: Pablo Picasso and the debate on art and politics in France, 1942-1962.
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Identifier
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AAI9618066
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identifier
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9618066
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Creator
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Feeser, Andrea Van Laer.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Jack Flam
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Date
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1996
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | History, European
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Abstract
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"The Recuperated Radical: Pablo Picasso and the Debate on Art and Politics in France, 1942-1962" determines that Picasso was celebrated by the French Communist Party (P.C.F.) as a figurehead for its Peace Movement, and appreciated as an artist by the party only when his work accommodated propaganda requirements for Social Realism that honored Communist heroes. Such propaganda participated in postwar humanism's appeal to heroism, idealism, and productivity. This dissertation demonstrates that Picasso did not conform to these ideals in much of his work--especially in series of paintings after Delacroix's Women of Algiers (1954-55), Velazquez's Las Meninas (1957), and Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe (1959-62).;Picasso distanced himself from the P.C.F. after vicious attacks on his nonidealized 1953 Stalin portrait and the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. Because he was devalued by the P.C.F. for his distorted form, dismissed by abstract artists for his commitment to representation, and exploited not only by the P.C.F. but by the arts and entertainment industry for his mass appeal, Picasso turned to the past to battle with great painters in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and genius. By drawing on "primitive" styles (late cubist forms and child-like drawing), and by deploying the banal and/or the base (mundane realities, sex, and violence), Picasso's series undermine the P.C.F. notion of legible and uplifting art. However, rather than read these works as radical interventions, this dissertation argues that Picasso dismantled other artists' multivalent masterpieces into univocal attempts at possession thematized through sexual violation of the female body. By stridently asserting his mastery of art history and the female subject, Picasso attempted to mask the loss of his "self-possession": his important place in a critical, yet appreciative arts community. Rather than convey individuality and freedom (symbolically registered through increasingly loose and expressive brush marks that suggest spontaneity and the immediate transmission of a personal impression), Picasso's series chart the artist's explosive individuality trapped by the controlling confines of the P.C.F. and postwar commodity culture.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
