Picasso Moving to the Swiss Goldcoast

(Picture: B0rder)

(Picture: Argentina)

(11.4.2023) A cynic might say that an artist might be perceived as being socially established, if wealthy buyers show willing to buy his works without having seen them before (and some of these customers might even be inclined to say that, in case they would ever see these works, they would not even like them). Pablo Picasso probably had such customers in the 1950s, customers, however, showing willing to ignore Picasso’s adherence to the French Communist Party, and also ignoring the fact that, by paying large sums of money to Picasso (and his dealer), they indirectly supported the communist cause, since Picasso was supporting the communist cause (while his dealer suggested that his adherence to this cause was rather sentimental and not to be taken very seriously). Brief: Picasso’s place in the culture of his time was rather ambiguous, and a recent study (by Annie Cohen-Solal) of Picasso’s relation to French society and to the French authorities is highlighting this ambiguity even more. Picasso was a foreigner in France, and his situation was complicated, despite his fame.
With another exercise in biographical writing I would like to highlight this fundamental ambiguity even more. With a simple transposition: Since, in 1932 and during a boat trip on Lake Zurich, Picasso declared that he appreciated the landscape and some of the architecture seen, and since he also declared that he could imagine to work here, we would like to imagine that Picasso indeed had spent his later life in Switzerland. More precisely: that Picasso had moved, in the 1950s, into a villa at the Swiss Goldcoast, at the shores of Lake Zurich.

1) Moving to the Swiss Goldcoast

It is probably rather little known that Paulo, Picasso’s son from first marriage, had lived in Switzerland during the Second World War. And the (fictional) scenario we would like to imagine here, is not far fetched at all.
We imagine that, instead of staying in Paris during the war, Picasso had left Paris for Geneva to be near his son. And this due to situations in Paris that had forced him to leave.
While living in Geneva he would have met Françoise Gilot there, spending also much time in the South of France, and the story of Picasso and Françoise Gilot would have enfolded in exactly the same way it actually did enfold, only in Geneva and in the South of France. A separation occured in 1953, and Jacqueline Roque appeared on the scene, who could imagine to live in the German-speaking part of Switzerland (she was fluent in English, which would have helped), and the two of them, on a visit at Zurich, discovered a rather bourgeois villa at the Swiss Goldcoast, a villa that Picasso bought in 1955.
So far so good. But what would be the more general consequences of such scenario?

2) A Different Kind, but Still a Communist Environement: Hans Erni and Konrad Farner

Inspired by thoughts of Sartre we might say: aesthetic revolution is in need of conservative social support, and Picasso, the modernist painter, had won the support of a conservative class of buyers early. Now, in the 1950s, he was living on the fruits of his fame, denying largely to display a conservative aesthetic according to the ideological needs of the communist revolution he actually was supporting. This was the fundamental ambiguity of Picasso’s status during the 1950s, and this would not have been very differently in Switzerland. But it would have been a slightly different social environment. Let’s say that Picasso would never have joined the Partei der Arbeit (PDA), but that he sympathized with it. Instead of Édouard Pignon perhaps Hans Erni would have become a friend to discuss painting on a level of painting, and perhaps it would have been art historian Konrad Farner, who occasionally had indeed published on Picasso, to provide us with intimate insights concerning Picasso’s way of working.

3) Picasso and Fritz Zorn

But the contrafactual scenario that we are imgining here does also raise the question as to how the Swiss Goldcoast would have reacted to Picasso, perhaps in 1956, and at the time of the Hungarian Uprising: if we imagine this part of Switzerland being as conservative and bourgeois as it is imagined in literature, as in Fritz Zorn’s Mars, for example, we might think that the presence of Picasso in this millieu would have triggered even more severe conflict between establishment and counterculture. Counterculture would have highlighted Picasso’s art as a sort of conversation about sexuality and politics, while a bourgeois establishment, in fiction, but perhaps also in real life, would have avoided to even perceive Picasso’s art as being something related to the issues of sexuality and politics. And the biographical excercise he have been embarking here actually is meant also to raise the question: to what degree the perception of Picasso is or has been actually a bourgeois perception, and to what degree Picasso is actually a mere myth, ubiquitous perhaps, but more or less void of anything, and certainly not a cultural force anymore that would trigger a conversation on sexuality or politics. This period is long gone, and today, in 2023, it seems rather be the man, Picasso, triggering conversation on masculinity or colonialism, and rather as a man and not as an artist, or by works of art.

But perhaps Pablo Picasso, in our fictional scenario, would have joined the initiative to envision (and perhaps to build) a new kind of city in Switzerland, a initiative in which writer Max Frisch participated (achtung: die Schweiz). We would like to imagine that, in such way, Picasso might have contributed to Swiss culture immediately and directly. And perhaps he would have realized what he had imagined, in 1932, when contemplating the old Tonhalle at the shore of Lake Zurich, a kind of Trocadéro palace which was later demolished and replaced by a new concert hall, perhaps Picasso would have helped to preserve the old, and to envision the new, in terms of architecture and city planning, and we would see, today, Picasso differently, and perhaps also as an architect and city planner.

Selected Literature:
Hanns Welti, Picasso auf dem Zürichsee, in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung No. 1693 (14 September 1932), p. 6 [»Hier könnte ich wohnen. Hier könnte ich arbeiten. Nicht zu südlich. Nicht zu hart nördlich.«];
Annie Cohen-Solal, Picasso the Foreigner. An Artist in France, 1900-1973, New York 2023 [2021]

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM
HOME

Top of the page

Microstory of Art Main Index

Dietrich Seybold Homepage

© DS