When Harry Met Pablo
Truman, Picasso, and the Cold War Politics of Modern Art
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Truman and Picasso were contemporaries and were both shaped by and shapers of the great events of the twentieth century—the man who painted Guernica and the man who authorized the use of atomic bombs against civilians.
But in most ways, they couldn't have been more different. Picasso was a communist, and probably the only thing Harry Truman hated more than communists was modern art. Picasso was an indifferent father, a womanizer, and a millionaire. Truman was utterly devoted to his family and, despite his fame, far from a rich man. How did they come to be shaking hands in front of Picasso's studio in the south of France?
Truman's meeting with Picasso was quietly arranged by Alfred H. Barr Jr., the founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art and an early champion of Picasso. Barr knew that if he could convince these two ideological antipodes, the straight-talking politician from Missouri and the Cubist painter from Málaga, to simply shake hands, it would send a powerful message, not just to reactionary Republicans pushing McCarthyism at home, but to the whole world: modern art was not evil.
Truman author Matthew Algeo retraced the Trumans' Mediterranean vacation and visited the places they went with Picasso, including Picasso's villa, Picasso's ceramics studio in Vallauris, and Château Grimaldi, a museum in Antibes.
A rigorous history with a heartwarming center, When Harry Met Pablo intertwines the biographies of Truman and Picasso, the history of modern art, and twentieth-century American politics, but at its core it is the touching story of two old men who meet for the first time and realize they have more in common—and are more alike—than they ever imagined.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Algeo (All This Marvelous Potential) relates in this affable account a meeting between America's 33rd president and one of the 20th century's best-known artists. In June 1958, Harry and Bess Truman were on a grand Mediterranean tour when they met Pablo Picasso in Cannes, France. Truman and Picasso became unlikely friends—they visited not only the artist's villa but several other locations in the French Mediterranean together, including the Chateau Grimaldi, a museum to which Picasso later donated significant numbers of his works. Truman did not become the modern art advocate that Picasso's friend, Museum of Modern Art curator Alfred Barr, had hoped when he organized the meeting. Nor did Picasso, a committed communist, become a Cold Warrior, despite Truman's attempts to convert him. But Picasso, who comes off as a rather prickly character, indulges with Truman in a rare deviation from his typical unfriendliness toward other famous figures. Alongside this entertaining travelogue, Algeo presents an institutional history of modern art in America, with a focus on the efforts of the Truman White House to promote modern American art abroad—notably abstract expressionists like Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock—as a potential cultural weapon in the Cold War. It adds up to an enjoyable slice of art history.
