Harry Truman calls on Picasso in France, 1958

[mahatmakanejeeves]

I can't say I was expecting this:

Harry Truman calls on Picasso in France, 1958: #HSTL

Link to tweet

[Javaman]

1. ...

[Hortensis]

2. Oh, that's great. Thanks for that, Mahatma, and for pointing the

way to other photos he's tweeted. I looked for a bit more on this and found that President Truman called modern art “ham and eggs art” and called Picasso a “French Communist caricaturist.” But evidently wanted to meet him anyway. No word there on what the commie caricaturist thought of Truman personally.

When the Second World War came to France, Pablo chose to remain in Paris, unlike many other artists who fled from the German occupation. As his artistic style was considered to be degenerate by the Nazi regime, Picasso did not exhibit his work publicly during the war.

With the city under curfew, Parisians were constantly arrested and interrogated, and the artist was no exception. Picasso was particularly harassed by the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. On one occasion, while the Nazis searched his apartment, a Gestapo officer saw a photograph of one of Picasso’s most famous works, Guernica. The 1937 painting depicts the bombing of Guernica, a city in Spain attacked by the German and Italian fascists at the direction of Francisco Franco and the Spanish nationalists. When the Gestapo officer spotted the photograph, he asked Picasso, “Did you do that?” only to receive the artist’s answer: “No, you did.”