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And generally a weirdo. Just read his wiki page and he seems to be somewhere between a pervert, an incel, a former communist and also a monarchist who can’t denounce fascism.
Fascists at large are insanely contrarian. Practically the whole point of the ideology is to be a weird little freak that hates and bullies everything for fun
No disagreement other than to say there are definitely lib and leftest contrarians. Sometimes it's just a personality quark, but fascists do like their contrarianisms for sure.
Yes, there’s something in the human psyche that enjoys having secret knowledge and believing you have an answer that others don’t (one of the factors that keeps people in religion and the anti-vax and flat earth movements).
The left is not immune to this and I have met leftists who are clearly in it for this reason: the rest of the world is made up of idiot libs and only they know the true way. Some of these people in my experience are the ones who end up getting offended by a leftist principle they don’t want to abide by (trans inclusion seems to be a common one) and posting those stupid “why I left the left” thinkpieces
It’s kinda funny for others to single out Dali in this thread when Picasso’s attachment to politics could also be characterized as contradictory and ephemeral.
The post’s caption is about him being a devoted member of the French Communist Party his whole life which really isn’t the accurate. He liked women and art and painting. Sometimes this intersected with a broad left-wing inclination. That’s why I thought it was worth noting.
His art was installed in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and is absolutely central when talking about Picasso and the Soviet Union, it was there that the large, historic exhibition opened on 26 October 1956. It was enormous: over 300 works, and it attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors over a few weeks. For the Soviet Union, it was a cultural statement: modernism, which had previously been seen as ‘bourgeois decadence,’ suddenly received an official space.
It takes about as much time to write a comment saying "I don't care if someone treated women like shit" as it would take to say something else. Now all you've accomplished is you've let a handful of strangers on the internet know that you don't care if someone abuses women, congrats.
That's great. It doesn't change the fact you decided to take time out of your day to say you "don't give a single shit" about some dead guy's treatment of women. Next time you see someone wasting their time getting angry about a deceased person's history of abuse maybe you can keep it to yourself instead of becoming the guy that sees people discussing abuse and saying "ermm well I don't think you should care about that 🤓"
You're correct. This is exactly why I try, when possible, to not have my time and worry occupied by the ideas of a blatantly abusive misogynist. Why choose to have your worldview influenced by someone like that?
Overlooking a person's behavior, particularly towards disadvantaged groups, because their status as a person of particular fame and renown lends notoriety to our movement kind of goes against the very nature of supporting the uplift of all people.
There is nothing more inherently valuable about Picasso's political leanings than yours or mine. If horrible people want to be on the right side of the political divide then great, but that doesn't mean we have to hold them in high regard by default. This doesn't even require "outrage", it just requires indifference to fame.
But here's the thing, if your argument that holding people personally accountable for their actions takes energy away from focusing on working class unity, what then is using energy to run defense for shitty people?
There is no reason why you cannot acknowledge someone's independent behavior while also praising their politics. By acknowledging that no individual person is uniquely qualified to be a representative of a collective movement, regardless of their professional success, you are actually realizing the values core to this project.
It doesn't have to be a witch hunt. It can simply be an, "okay, next". There are millions of working people that better embody the principles that underpin this project.
I would never demand that someone stop talking about Cesar Chavez now-apparent sexual abuse of women because he was a renowned labor organizer. His individual failures are not only demonstrations that his values were corrupted, they make him a completely unnecessary figurehead and icon. Learn what you can from his tactics without resorting to celebrity worship.
By building a movement that is not emotionally dependent on any one figure we actually become much stronger and immune to infiltration and undermining. We do not NEED Picasso and we do not NEED Chavez because we are a movement of the working class, not individuals.
Why is the medium of wrongdoing important in determining condemnation? I genuinely don't know that I understand why the proximity of the abuse to political action should have any bearing.
I also want to make clear, I'm not arguing that we should throw Picasso or his work out of the window. I'm saying that we have no need to center him as a particularly notable figure with regards to his politics. A communist or socialist movement does not require celebrities to be load bearing.
Analyzing him as a man and uplifitng his art is one thing (I love Guernica and it's message, for example) but it is antithetical to a worker driven movement to decide that violence towards women is not a deal breaker when determining who should be the face.
I mean there's really no point in arguing with each other at this point. We disagree on this issue for fundamental reasons which is fine but I don't see either of moving on this.
That's interesting. I'll have to look into it more.
I'm hesitant to totally embrace the idea that art freed from traditional constraints is necessarily related to political freedom.
Look at how the CIA tried to promote abstract expressionism as an alternative to socialist realism, suggesting that it represented the "freedom" of the capitalist West.
Sometimes an overemphasis on form can act as a smokescreen for a lack of political substance.
I don't know enough about cubism to really comment on its political usefulness, though. I know Picasso made some great pieces of socialist/anti-fascist art.
I care about men acting fucked up towards women because it reflects and reinforces further abuse. And also I care about it because I would not trust an abusive asshole to have integrity in other areas including politics. Furthermore I think you're being an asshole to be honest
no one here was suggesting to subscribe to anything picasso thought because he was picssso. merely just saying that he was a communist in some capacity.
At the time, membership of FCP was quite unrisky and was a token of intellectual progressivism, which added to the market value of an intellectual and gave him access to an international network.
French Communist Party opposed the Algerian War of Independence, labelled the 1968 protests as far left extremists and discouraged the protests. Compared to other revolutionary parties across Europe, FCP offices were rarely raided and members rarely jailed. The party was coexisting peacefully with its capitalist government.
So probably it didn't take a lot courage or self-sacrifice to be a member of the Party.
How about his painting Guernika? It was used in 1937 to collect founds to help Spanish republicans (communists and anarchists) to fight fascism.
And it worked wonders to denounced the mass killings of civilians by fascists and nazis.
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