Why police kept tabs on Picasso, 'the anarchist'

The records of 40 years of police surveillance of one of the most celebrated, "subversive" foreign residents of Paris go on display for the first time this week.

The records of 40 years of police surveillance of one of the most celebrated, "subversive" foreign residents of Paris go on display for the first time this week.

The object of suspicion, regarded at first as an anarchist terrorist and then an anti-French Communist, was Pablo Picasso, who was spied on constantly, even after he became rich and famous.

The best efforts of undercover police agents, informers and bribed concierges yielded meagre results. The early reports, soon after the unknown Spanish artist arrived in the French capital in May, 1901 record only that the 19-year-old Picasso got drunk a great deal and "sometimes even stays out all night".

As late as April, 1940, when Picasso was already one of the best-known living artists and paying a fortune in taxes to the state, his application for French citizenship was rejected by the French equivalent of MI5. His "extremist ideas" make him "suspect from the national viewpoint", the Renseignements Généraux concluded, despite a favourable report from his local police station.

Picasso's brief letter of application for French citizenship, signed with a flourish by the celebrated signature, is among the prize exhibits in the show which starts tomorrow at the Paris police museum, Le Musée de la Préfecture de Police in the 5th arrondissement.

The documents on Picasso have a fascinating history. They were among thousands of police files stolen by the Nazis during the Second World War and stolen a second time by the Russians when they captured Berlin in 1945.

They were returned to France in 140 cardboard boxes three years ago. The Picasso surveillance files are the first plum to be extracted by the police archivists. Other similar exhibitions may follow.

The great find for Picasso biographers is the letter applying for French naturalisation. The artist had never mentioned any desire to become French.

They believe he dashed off the application when war broke out and he feared that he might be extradited to Fascist Spain. The then French justice minister failed to reply, after the negative report by the security services. Picasso did not apply again.

French suspicions of Picasso when he arrived in Paris at the turn of the last century were aroused by the friends he had in the anarchist movement, which had committed more than 50 bomb attacks in France in the previous decade. The police watchers also took a close interest in the subjects of his paintings. One report says they often took a suspiciously anti-bourgeois line.

One canvas "shows poor mothers begging for money from bourgeois passers-by, who refuse them," a police report says. But Picasso never expressed any subversive opinions. In fact, his French was so bad that for many years the police reports are hardly able to record any opinion at all.

But the police chief concludes that, since Picasso shared a home with a man who is known to be an anarchist, "it is reasonable to assume he also shares his opinions".

The security services report in 1940 accuses Picasso of being a Communist fellow-traveller (true at the time). "Despite the fact that he has set himself up in France as a so-called modern painter, allowing him to earn millions of francs, apparently placed abroad, and to make himself the proprietor of a chateau at Gisors, Picasso has maintained his extremist opinions and drifted towards Communism," the report says.

"He has no right to be naturalised ... he should even be considered suspect from a national viewpoint."