Σελίδες

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Pablo Picasso — Why I became a Communist

By Pablo Picasso

My JOINING the Communist Party is a logical step in my life, my work and gives them their meaning. Through design and color, I have tried to penetrate deeper into a knowledge of the world and of men so that this knowledge might free us. In my own way I have always said what I considered most true, most just and best and, therefore, most beautiful. But during the oppression and the insurrection I felt that that was not enough, that I had to fight not only with painting but with my whole being. Previously, out of a sort of "innocence," I had not understood this. I have become a Communist because our party strives more than any other to know and to build the world, to make men clearer thinkers, more free and more happy. 

I have become a Communist because the Communists are the bravest in France, in the Soviet Union, as they are in my own country, Spain. I have never felt more free, more complete than since I joined. While I wait for the time when Spain can take me back again, the French Communist Party is a fatherland for me. In it I find again all my friends - the great scientists Paul Langevin and Frederick Joliot-Curie, the great writers Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, and so many of the beautiful faces of the insurgents of Paris. I am again among my brothers.

October 1944.