Too Bad about Mono Lisa

Painter Pablo Picasso is a cavalier kind of Communist, who no more submits to real Communist discipline than he does to any other discipline. Still, as a volunteer Communist, Picasso has contributed a flock of molting peace pigeons and the free use of his name to the party's cultural front. A fortnight ago, the party asked Picasso for a portrait of Stalin.

Picasso tried his hand at a likeness from memory. Spread over three columns, the result (see cut) appeared in the Stalin memorial issue of Les Lettres Franc,aises, Communist art and literary journal. Gibed the London Daily Mail: "Note the large, melting eyes, the tresses apparently done up in a hair net, and the coyly concealed Mona Lisa smile; it could be the portrait of a woman with a mustache." Two days later, the party Secretariat announced that it "categorically disapproved ... of the portrait," added: "Without doubting the sentiments of the great artist Picasso, whose attachment to the cause of the working class is well known, [we] regret that Comrade Aragon, member of the Central Committee and director of Les Lettres Franc,aises, permitted this publication, the more so as he had been fighting in other ways for the development of realistic art."

Onetime Poet Louis Aragon cravenly wrote three columns of self-criticism in L'Humanite. Sample: "Too often we admire indiscriminately the poetry, paintings and expressions of certain society . . . Thus the intellectuals of the militant proletariat may occasionally open the gate to counter-revolutionary bourgeois ideas."

Because the Communists can still use "great artist Picasso," though none of his 53 paintings in Moscow are allowed to be seen, self-criticism was not asked of him. But it was not expected that he should be angry. Said he, when interviewed by a non-Communist newsman: "You do not bawl out people who send you condolences, and it is customary to thank people who send wreaths, even if the flowers are somewhat faded. I sketched what I felt, since I have never seen Stalin. I put all my efforts into producing a resemblance. Apparently it was not liked. Tant pis [Too bad] . . ."

Next morning, when an astonished Secretariat inquired whether Party Member Picasso had uttered such heresy, Picasso denied having said tant pis.

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