“Out of the myth and back again in history”: proposals for approaching Pablo Picasso’s biography

Abstract

For several years now, there have been underway various works that challenge the canonical readings of Pablo Picasso’s image. Among them, the biographical analysis of the artist from a political perspective is of particular interest, insofar as his ideological and militant commitment was subject to a strict process of neutralization during the Franco regime. Consequently, starting from the Foucauldian definition of genealogy we would like to demonstrate to what extent the narratives on Picasso’s life and political commitment have been conditioned by cultural policies that masked and depoliticized any critical possibility in the interpretation of his development. A commitment that began to become effective in his youth, in the heat of Catalan anarchism, as is reflected both in his artistic production and in the documentation of the period preserved in the French archives. From this approach, we propose a biographical review of the artist that is essentially twofold: on the one hand, we will stress the possibility of using methodologies that, from Cultural Studies , such as those of the theorist Mieke Bal, defend the need for the political positioning of artistic practices. On the other hand, we will transfer this conviction to the literary field to demonstrate that it is possible to build new biographical proposals that contribute to overcoming what authors such as H. Marcuse define as a generalized narcosis. Specifically, we will take as a paradigm the biographical approach to Pablo Picasso from the anarchist aesthetic of André Rezsler. All this will allow us to consolidate an alternative narrative in which the idealized figure of the artist gives way to a broader, more collective and inclusive interpretation of the social reality in which he developed his career.