Lene Berg

It has often been said that it was Dora Maar who got Picasso involved in politics. When they met she was a member of a group of leftwing activists called Contra-Attack, and she helped convince Picasso to join the French Communist Party in 1944. As a world famous artist and communist, he was asked to do a portrait of Stalin at the time of his death in 1953. The portrait was to be published on the front page of the communist newspaper Les Lettres françaises, and flanked by articles that praised the Soviet dictator in the most grandiose terms.

Lene Berg’s film Stalin by Picasso or Portrait of Woman with Moustache (2008) tells the story of this portrait, whose publication caused an unprecedented scandal. The film uses a kind of scrapbook aesthetic to convey how the highly politicized tactics of the cold war suddenly came to include unhinged discussions about what is art and what isn’t, what kind of picture making is moral and what kind is immoral, and what really constitutes a realistic depiction. The film also develops into a tale about two of the many “great men” of history, how their paths crossed, and how the mass media images of them continue to evolve with time and with shifting political ideologies. The film is shown as a part of the exhibition Pablo Picasso: From Arcadian Bliss to Painted Exorcism.

Curator: Joa Ljungberg