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186 12 flight of the avant-garde The first cold winter in Paris was a sign of deprivations to come. From his encampment at the Grands-Augustins studio, where he lived the entire war, Picasso could walk fifteen minutes to visit MarieTh érèse and Maya at their apartment near the Bastille. He did that every weekend. Once a week he visited Olga and Paulo where they lived on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. At Grands-Augustins, Dora Maar kept up on politics. Some of Picasso’s friends allied with the French resistance, such as Éluard, who had rejoined the Communist Party and gone underground. Eventually, Picasso’s Jewish friend Max Jacob would wear the yellow star, and he would die of illness before he could be sent to the camps. “I didn’t paint the war because I’m not the kind of painter who goes out to look for subjects, like a photographer,” Picasso said later.1 If artists such as Picasso were censured or worse, others—such as the poet Cocteau and painter Maurice Vlaminck—collaborated with the Vichy government , which mixed its calls for traditional and nationalist art with an occasional pragmatism that gave some leeway to the avant-garde.2 Artistic activity was surprisingly robust under Vichy, in fact, but the longer-term debate in Europe pitted classicism and “socialist realism” against all forms of abstraction. The fascists and Marxists were enemies, but they both opposed abstraction and held a common preference for “reality” in art. By contrast, an exiled Surrealist such as André Breton advocated “the marvelous ,” which meant fantasy. With no particular stake in that public political debate, Picasso continued easel painting (and later became interested in sculpture). What appeared on Picasso’s canvases were mostly female faces, women in armchairs , still lifes, and the occasional view of the Paris skyline. Before the war, Dora’s face had become his new template. It was often portrayed in harsh, striated lines, giving Dora—as with Fernande, Éva, Olga, and Marie-Thérèse—an identifiable ideograph. His wartime paintings were not cheerful, but a hint of dark humor often glimmered through as he mixed up the shapes of things—people and fish, for example—in comi- flight of the avant-garde || 187 cal ways. To speak of war, or the death of a friend, Picasso often turned to the cattle skull. One of those wartime icons was Still Life with Steer’s Skull (1942), a large and eerie painting (about 3 x 4 feet) done in black, purple, blue, magenta, and the incandescent white of bone. When sculpture drew his interest, Picasso’s friends in Paris helped him with a risky intrigue: obtaining bronze to cast his work. The primary result was a piece that became, after the war, a symbol of art and the resistance : the over-life-size Man with a Lamb (1944). Picasso did the sculpting with clay and plaster in the bathroom at Grands-Augustins. Then his friends took the cast to a foundry that trafficked in “illegal bronze.” The finished work was spirited back to Picasso’s studio in the dark of night. The statue, for which Picasso had begun doing sketches in July 1942, revived an old genre. It was classical humanism, a man holding a sheep, as if the good shepherd. An occasional philosopher, Picasso often said art should disrupt civilization . Now, at a time of chaos, the Man with a Lamb did the opposite : “The creative artist is to stabilize mankind on the verge of chaos,” he was reported as saying.3 On the other hand, the war and other exigencies caused him to swing between extremes. So while he produced Man with a Lamb, he also came up with the comic-Surrealist Bull’s Head (1942), made by joining a bicycle seat and handlebars he saw in a trash heap. By the time the Allied forces landed in Normandy in June 1944, a prelude to the German expulsion from Paris, Picasso was hosting fellow Spaniards at his studio. They prepared for what no one expected so quickly: liberation. During the weeks of street fighting, Picasso lived with MarieTh érèse and Maya. Picasso became an overnight celebrity as a symbol of the Paris resistance. American gis crowded into his Grands-Augustins studio for photographs. In August, he painted his first work to have a hint of springtime; he also produced violent drawings, but ones with the heroic spirit of classical painting. At age sixty...

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