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| Pablo Picasso Man with a Lamb 1943 |
In June 1940 the Nazis invaded and occupied Paris. Picasso's art was classified 'degenerate' and he was prohibited from exhibiting his work. He chose to remain in Paris as it had been his home since 1904. Denied naturalisation by France (he was, as an anti-Franco Spanish foreigner, suspected of being an anarchist by the French police who maintained files on him) and constantly surveilled by the Gestapo, he resisted the occupation in whatever way he could. The life-size Man with a Lamb has the appearance of being modelled spontaneously in clay. The Nazis were appropriating metals and had many bronze sculptures in Paris melted down for use in their war machine. It is known that Picasso sent some of his sculptures to foundries to be cast in bronze clandestinely. He was unwilling to yield to force or terror. In 1946 Picasso visited the annual pottery exhibition in Vallauris. He established a ceramics studio there and gifted to the town Man with a Lamb which stands in the market place. It was given in thanks for the warm welcome he had received and in return the town gave Picasso honorary citizen status. There are two other copies of this sculpture, one in Philadelphia and the other at the Picasso Museum in Paris.
In 1937 Picasso was commissioned to create a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris Exhibition. He stated, 'In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.' The French writer Michel Leiris said of Guernica, 'On a black and white canvas that depicts ancient tragedy ... Picasso also writes our letter of doom: all that we love is going to be lost.' But, as the art historian Fernando Martín Martín reminds us, Picasso left a beacon, 'At the top, stretching out from a window, a woman with an oil lamp seems to want to illuminate the encroaching panic and darkness.' Picasso said in 1937, 'I have always believed and still believe that artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to a conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilisation are at stake.'
