Annie Cohen-Solal on Picasso, with Blair Asbury Brooks, 3-29-23, the Graduate Center

Before Picasso became Picasso, he was constantly surveilled by the police. In a country where the police and the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts represented two major pillars of the establishment at the time, Picasso faced a triple stigma—as a foreigner, a political radical, and an avant-garde artist.

Picasso the Foreigner approaches the artist’s career and work from an entirely new angle, making extensive use of fascinating and long-understudied archival sources. In this groundbreaking narrative, Picasso emerges as an artist ahead of his time not only aesthetically but politically, one who ignored national modes in favor of contemporary cosmopolitan forms. The artist never became a citizen of France, yet he enriched and energized its culture like few other figures in the country’s history.

Annie Cohen-Solal is Distinguished Professor at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. She has served as the cultural counselor to the French embassy in the United States. Her books include biographies of Sartre, Leo Castelli, and Mark Rothko, all of which have been widely translated. Picasso the Foreigner was awarded the 2021 Prix Femina Essai; 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 partnership with the national Picasso Museum, in 2021.

Blair Asbury Brooks is a PhD candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center, CUNY and was the Leon Levy Center for Biography’s Dissertation Fellow in 2021-2022. Her dissertation, Heinz Berggruen: Dealing and Collecting Modern Art in the Shadow of World War II, is a comprehensive study of the life and career of the German-born dealer-collector. Previously, Brooks was Director of Exhibitions at Pace Gallery, Director at Peter Freeman, Inc., then a Director at Lisson Gallery.

Видео Annie Cohen-Solal on Picasso, with Blair Asbury Brooks, 3-29-23, the Graduate Center канала Leon Levy Center for Biography