Picasso’s flirtation with the Franco regime
Picasso was no friend of Franco–or was he? “Although his political sympathies are known to have lain with the hard left, it turns out he was not above breaking bread with Franco’s regime.”, Vanessa Thorpe reports in today’s Guardian on new information discovered by Picasso experts John Richardson and Gijs van Hensbergen:
In 1956 the dictator’s representatives made a concerted, but secret, effort to woo Picasso into agreeing to the staging of a prestigious retrospective in fascist Madrid. […] News of this temporary flirtation with Franco might appear to puncture the thesis of Tate Liverpool’s summer exhibition, Picasso: Peace and Freedom, with its heavy emphasis on the artist’s leftwing credentials.
