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

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.

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