Author Interview: Annie Cohen-Salal and "Picasso the Foreigner"

ArtCurious Podcast

ArtCurious

Arts, History, Visual Arts

4.8 • 847 Ratings

🗓️ 24 July 2023

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hello, listeners! I’ve got a special surprise for you this week. I’ve been waiting to share this amazing conversation that I enjoyed earlier this spring with author Annie Cohen-Salal, all about her wonderful new book, Picasso the Foreigner (translated by Sam Taylor). Before Picasso became Picasso—the iconic artist now celebrated as one of France’s leading figures—he was constantly surveilled by the French police. Amid political tensions in the spring of 1901, he was flagged as an anarchist by the security services—the first of many entries in an extensive case file. Though he soon emerged as the leader of the cubist avant-garde, and became increasingly wealthy as his reputation grew worldwide, Picasso’s art was largely excluded from public collections in France for the next four decades. The genius who conceived Guernica in 1937 as a visceral statement against fascism was even denied French citizenship three years later, on the eve of the Nazi occupation. 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. The artist never became a citizen of France, yet he generously enriched and dynamized the country’s culture like few other figures in its history. This book, for the first time, explains how. Please enjoy this bonus episode, featuring my discussion with Annie. Be sure to grab your copy of Picasso the Foreigner from Bookshop.org, below. If you prefer Amazon, that link is below as well. Please SUBSCRIBE and REVIEW our show on Apple Podcasts and FOLLOW on Spotify Instagram / Facebook / YouTube Buy Picasso the Foreigner here! SPONSORS: Lume Deodorant: Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @lumedeodorant and get over 40% off your starter pack with promo code ARTCURIOUS at lumedeodorant.com/ARTCURIOUS! #lumepod Want to advertise/sponsor our show? We have partnered with AdvertiseCast to handle our advertising/sponsorship requests. They’re great to work with and will help you advertise on our show. Please email [email protected] or click the link below to get started. https://www.advertisecast.com/ArtCuriousPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:30.7	Welcome our curious listeners to another bonus interview this time with author Annie Kohensallal. The genre of biography and the phrase
0:40.5	reads like a pulsing thriller don't often go hand in hand, especially when the subject of the
0:45.9	biography in question is one of our best-known modern artists. A man whose life and legacy must
0:52.0	surely by this point contain no surprises.
0:55.4	Yet when Annie Cohen-Solol's book, Picasso, The Foreigner, debuted,
0:59.7	that's exactly how the New York Times described it, originally only available in French.
1:05.2	Now the English translation of the book has arrived coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Picasso's death, tracing Picasso's
1:12.8	fraught relationship with his adopted homeland of France across seven decades.
1:17.8	Cohen-Solol offers us a radical, thought-provoking, and yes, undeniably thrilling, reintroduction
1:25.3	to the artist.
1:26.6	Author of widely translated biographies of Jean-Paulol Sartre, Leo Castelli, and Mark Rothko,
1:32.5	Cohen-Solal met her new subject, Foreigner Number 74,664 in the Archives of the Paris Police.
1:40.8	Through her extensive use of long understudied sources, including the case file that,
1:45.5	begun with an accusation of anarchy in 1901, grew steadily over the next decades. We encounter him as
1:53.0	well. An artist perennially under police surveillance, ignored by cultural officialdom,
1:58.5	even as he came to lead the Cubist avant-garde and rejected by a French state
	...

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