Go to the “Electronic Reading Room” at http://foia.fbi.gov/ to find that Picasso appears in FBI files from the 1940s onward, which are now available courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act. In 1990, Herbert Mitgang (“When Picasso Spooked the FBI,” The New York Times, 11 November) revealed some of these Cold War additions to the politics of representation. With Picasso, these politics are conventionally characterized by a variety of documents, such as his contract with the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (dated 1912), and his membership card for the French Communist Party (PCF) after 1944. Such sources evoke issues of biography, agency, and historical specificity—issues that have been debated and contested fiercely within the disciplines of art history and cultural studies.

In the United States, questions about political commitment and the values of institutions devoted to art and the art market are further complicated by the legacies of the early Cold War, including revelations about FBI files on artists and intellectuals. For example, in the 1950s concerns about surveillance, paranoia, and the communist Other permeate discussions of art and culture. Anyone familiar with archives from this period will know details of struggles and debates during a period of fervent anticommunism characterized by the activities of George Dondero, Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and various government and congressional committees, including the House Un-American Activities Committee. One established academic focus has been the role of exhibitions, museums, curators, and directors, most notably Alfred Barr and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Here, the signifier “Picasso” is as revealing as the signifier “Abstract Expressionism.” For Barr, struggles over the meaning of “Picasso” ranged from curatorial classification within accounts of modernism produced in the U.S. from the 1930s onward to a serious discomfort with the politics of both Picasso and his work during the early Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s. Barr’s discomfort and the compromised strategies he and many of his curatorial colleagues employed to resist political attacks from within the U.S. were the product of specific historical circumstances, which have to be considered carefully.

In Europe the debates and issues were different, although, as historians from Serge Guilbaut to Walter Hixson have demonstrated, Europeans were not immune from overt and covert American interests. (See also Annabel Wharton, Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture [Chicago: University Chicago Press, 2001].) The relationships between culture and politics in France after the Liberation provide particular case studies. One of these is the major focus of Gertje Utley’s Picasso: The Communist Years. The book begins with a color reproduction of Picasso’s PCF membership card from 1946, which is placed opposite the table of contents. A scholarly book on this topic, with Yale University Press’s close attention to presentation and illustrations, is to be welcomed.

Inevitably, Utley’s project enters into intense methodological and historical arenas from the recent past. There is, for example, the highly influential “Rosalind Krauss effect,” which is the result of a practice that has insisted for two decades on a poststructuralist reading of Picasso’s work as a counter to approaches that are indebted to the social history of art or to any consideration of the artist’s work as engaged with contemporary social and political issues. From an alternative perspective, Otto Karl Werckmeister has reexamined Picasso’s Guernica (1937) as an icon of the political left within transformed Marxist perspectives produced by reactions to the fall of Communist governments in 1989–91. Publications by Krauss and Werckmeister, respectively, produce very different accounts of Picasso’s work, necessitating fundamental discussion of relationships between and definitions of art and politics, and a sophisticated awareness of specific moments, choices, and actions. In such a situation a book entitled Picasso: The Communist Years requires, as Karl Popper importantly stressed, a self-critical acknowledgment by the author of her interests and attitudes.

Utley’s conclusion confirms her disapproval of Picasso’s decision to join the PCF, a view permeating the book. She cites Jean Cocteau as “rightly” calling Picasso’s decision “his first anti-revolutionary gesture,” and regards it as an act inconsistent with Picasso’s “pride in the subversive quality of his art” (216). Unfortunately, Utley does not remind us here of Cocteau’s own contradictory allegiances during the Vichy regime. In May of 1942 Cocteau attended the inauguration of Arno Breker’s retrospective in Paris and published a glowing tribute to him in the journal Comoedia in the same month. Breker was Hitler’s favorite sculptor. Similarly, we are told that Picasso’s participation in the Popular Front celebrations of 1936 was “not well received by everyone” (16). André Derain, for instance, was unforgiving of Picasso’s “partisan stance” (16). Readers are not told why Derain held such a view, though it is unsurprising to anyone who has read Laurence Bertrand Dorléac’s groundbreaking book L’Histoire de l’art: Paris 1940–1944, Ordre national, traditions et modernité (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne, 1986) or Michèle Cone’s Artists under Vichy: A Case of Prejudice and Persecution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Derain was a reactionary during the 1930s and engaged in collaborationist activities under the Occupation.

My point is that Utley’s book appears to be based on the premise that communist parties were uniformly oppressive, intolerant, and inextricably connected to Stalinism. Given this premise, she asks: Why would the twentieth century’s canonically most radical artist join such a political party? Utley’s premise is an ideologically reductive legacy of the Cold War, and her question is as loaded as the one André Breton asked Picasso on his return to Paris after spending the war years abroad. Breton refused to shake his old friend’s hand because Picasso, like Paul Eluard, had joined the PCF. Breton, still committed to Trotskyist critiques, asked why Picasso had become a party member. Picasso replied that to understand the choices faced by him and others necessitated an awareness of the specific circumstances and direct experiences of the German Occupation and of the French Resistance. For Picasso, Breton was making a fixed ideological judgment, which ignored how the character of prewar debates, choices, and actions had altered for those who had remained in France after 1939. Picasso was not alone in joining the PCF. Historically, his act and those of thousands of others—from radical women aiming for universal suffrage to revolutionary miners struggling for decent pay and conditions—were made in the context of complex and contradictory transformations in politics and culture. We do well to understand these transformations and to account for their subtleties historically, theoretically, and methodologically.

Running through Utley’s book are assumptions about the relationships between art and politics. These are evident in the first two chapters. The first, “The Intellectuals and Their Party,” concludes that the relationship between intellectuals and the PCF was mostly one of individual subservience and careerist ambition. The second chapter aims to trace the “genesis” of Picasso’s engagement with the PCF from what Utley calls the “roots” of his “political inclinations” in the “socio-political climate of turn-of-the-century Barcelona” (11) through to Guernica and his membership in the PCF in 1944. This aim has two obvious problems. The first is the danger of generalization in characterizing more than forty years of work and history. The second problem is that “genesis” and “roots” suggest that there was no or little political engagement in Picasso’s work prior to the late 1930s.

Utley’s approach in Chapter 2 is to doubt political readings of Picasso’s work and subtle analyses of his political sympathies. It is also predicated on a conventional binary opposition between artworks labeled as autonomous or “poetic” and those designated as political or “didactic.” For example, Utley discusses Picasso’s collage Verre et Bouteille de Suze (1912) and the role of newspaper in such works. She states that it “would be misleading” to “exaggerate the didactic value of these works, whose effect resides precisely in their poetic ambiguities” (13). The politics of Picasso’s collage are reduced to a single reading of the newspaper clippings as didactic, while Utley asserts that the work is essentially about poetic ambiguities. To support this view she cites Robert Lubar’s criticisms of Patricia Leighten’s Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914, published in the September 1990 issue of The Art Bulletin. Utley’s use of Lubar’s review serves to inflate the importance of its contentious claims, especially in the light of substantial Cubist scholarship published since the 1980s. (See also the discussion of the political significance of the original colors of collage elements in Picasso’s Verre et Bouteille de Suze in Patricia Leighten and Mark Antliff’s new book, Cubism and Culture [London: Thames and Hudson, 2001].)

The remainder of Utley’s second chapter, including her discussion of Guernica, is similarly characterized by scholarly references to publications in her extensive bibliography. Unfortunately, these are frequently in aid of undeveloped assumptions about art and politics. The politics of autonomous art or of the sign as a site of ideological struggle do not appear to have bothered the author. Historians from Jutta Held to Werckmeister have considered the shifts and changes in the political effects and meanings of Guernica, including the impact of the rediscovery, in Barcelona in 1986, of most of the art from the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris.

Whatever the merits of Utley’s subsequent ten chapters, her book rests on assumptions and methodological inconsistencies. For example, her discussion of Picasso’s Massacre in Korea (1951) has the hallmarks of its original reception in Cold War America (151–52). Decrying Picasso’s “anachronistic desire to re-create history painting in a time of Modernism” (151), which she does not define, Utley reveals her distaste, saying that in assessing the work “one cannot help be reminded of Oscar Wilde’s view that all bad poetry is sincere” (151). These views, rooted in Barr and Clement Greenberg, are echoed through the conventions of a particular academic discourse evident since the 1950s. In a twist, Utley uses the famous photograph of a large reproduction of Massacre in Korea that was posted on the streets of Warsaw as a protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 in furtherance of this discourse. With an appeal to artworks as having an actual life, Utley here replaces her disapproval with a newfound approval: “The Massacre transcended its own limitations and realized its subversive potential when reincarnated as a vehicle of protest by Polish citizens” (152). The latter part of Utley’s sentence appears to recognize the role of readings and contexts, while the first part is hard to defend on theoretical or methodological grounds. Hence, while Utley’s scholarly book is to be welcomed, readers should be mindful of its problems.