ArtCurious · Jennifer Dasal/ArtCurious

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

July 24, 2023·32 min·2 clips

Annie Cohen-Solal reveals Picasso's secret police file that labeled him an anarchist and haunted him for decades.

This starts with a file. The host welcomes Annie Cohen-Salal for a bonus conversation about Picasso the Foreigner, a biography the New York Times described with the strange pull of a thriller. That already feels right for ArtCurious. Cohen-Salal found Picasso in the Paris police archives as foreigner number 74,664, a brutally plain label for someone whose name now feels almost too large for paper. Bureaucracy has teeth. The file begins with an accusation of anarchy in 1901 and keeps growing, so the conversation sits between the artist everyone thinks they know and the state file trailing him. The guest gets room to roam. She traces Picasso's adopted homeland across seven decades, not as a tidy love story with France, but as a relationship tangled up with creativity, money, war, and belonging. Then the art starts breathing. Between 1907 and 1914, she argues, Picasso enters an extraordinary period because he can lead the French avant-garde, surpass Matisse, and absorb the tremors of a Europe nearing collapse. That stretch has real electricity. The period feels charged by literature, philosophy, science, technology, industrialization, and all the loose material Picasso could pull into art because his antennae were up. Braque matters here too. Cohen-Salal connects Picasso's borrowing from Braque's sense of craftsmanship to collage, distortion, and the mix of high art with low materials. What is curious, though? The people who understand this work are often expatriates or culturally plural figures themselves: Gertrude and Leo Stein, Daniel-Henri Kainweiler, Wilhelm Hude, Vincent Skrama, and Karl Einstein. France is mostly not buying. Kainweiler sells the work through Prague, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German Empire, the Russian Empire, and the United States, while the French market stays almost absent. Then 1914 changes the air. Picasso becomes extremely rich, but Cohen-Salal frames that moment as one overtaken by World War I, xenophobia, and the wreckage of the network that had carried the work. The ending turns warmly practical. The host thanks Cohen-Salal, recommends the book with real affection, and sends listeners back out with the show's familiar invitation to stay curious.

As heard by us

An archival Picasso conversation that recasts genius as a story of surveillance, exile, and uneasy belonging.

ArtCurious frames Annie Cohen-Salal's Picasso the Foreigner as a return to Picasso through files, suspicion, and the politics of belonging. The episode's most compelling idea is that the artist's adopted France never quite adopted him back: his police file begins with an…

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Why you'd press play

You want Picasso framed through archives, borders, and a police file.

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