Some lucky guy, a retired French electrician, has come up with not just one but 271 Picasso's worth at least eighty million dollars. I'd settle for that, but he claims he doesn't want to sell them. The Picasso family has sued the guy, who claims Picasso gave him the paintings in 1971, about two years before the artist's death. They say no way would he had given so much of his art away. Well, maybe not, but on the other hand, he obviously didn't care that much about money. He turned down 100,000 dollars for the work he did that went into creating the Chicago Picasso. As the works were never cataloged and were thus unknown, it seems that Picasso either did not consider this art to be of any importance, or he possibly didn't care for his family coming into possession of them for whatever reason. They could have been stolen, which is what the family seems to believe, but that's unlikely.
The paintings were created between 1900 and 1930, and nine of them are from his cubist period. For some reason, Picasso kept them in storage, and unknown, until they ended up in this man's possession more than forty years after the last one was created.
I find the one pictured above strange. It is not cubist, or surreal, like the other new Picasso's. Moreover, I find the inclusion of the swastikas disconcerting. Picasso was a communist, although this stated identification was disputed by some who knew him best.
An artist who was a contemporary of Picasso noted that "Picasso is a Spaniard, and so am I; Picasso is an artist, and so am I; Picasso is a communist, and neither am I".
And even he made the statement concerning the French Communist Party, "I have joined a family, and like all families it's full of shit".
In other words, Picasso's devotion to the communist cause is questionable at best. Is it possible that he was secretly attracted to National Socialism. On the one hand, he remained in France during the Nazi occupation, yet he had items smuggled to him that was forbidden during the Nazi regime for use in art.
Maybe there's a story behind this artwork that isn't readily apparent. Or, maybe it means nothing at all. Maybe he saw Nazism, as symbolized by the swastika, as an attempt to enforce order on a world where order was not the natural way of things. It's just hard to tell with his work exactly where he was coming from. Like the Chicago Picasso, which could be a woman, a bird, a horse, or a baboon.
Remember, this was Chicago in 1967, not the best place in the USA during that year, a year torn by division and social strife throughout the nation, with racial tensions high and the Vietnam War protests approaching a near fever pitch, while Chicago politics was at its typically corrupt level. Picasso readily agreed to his invitation to produce a sculptor for this city, and was very enthusiastic about it. I discovered that he made use of the Minotaur in several or his other works, so it would seem that he did draw on mythological components at various times throughout his artistic career.
As such, I wondered if his Chicago work might be a rendition of the following deity-Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, funerals, and embalming. Which would certainly seem to fit the history of Chicago, if anyplace. Here is Anubis
And here is the Chicago Picasso Marquette from which the sculpture was created.
Bear in mind, Picasso was at an advanced age by now so his own mortality had to be weighing on him, and knowing this would be a permanent legacy, this could have been a way of making more than one statement.
