“My dear Philip,” Kingsley Amis wrote to Philip Larkin in April 1973, after learning that Picasso had died. “So Pablo the piss-poor paint-pusher has fallen off the hooks at last, eh? Ho ho ho. Beckett next?”
The British came late to Picasso, but once they did, they came en masse. Before the War, Picasso was almost the private property of the avant-garde in art and, after Guernica (1937), those who believed themselves to be the vanguard in politics. Institutional skepticism about Modernism remained strong after the War. An apocryphon has it that Winston Churchill told Sir Alfred Munnings, the president of the Royal Academy, that if he saw Picasso walking in front of him in Piccadilly, he would kick his backside. When Munnings told this story after an RA dinner in 1949, the war-winning watercolorist wrote to Munnings, denying that he had expressed his reservations about the Catalan Cubist in this manner. Still, it says a lot that Munnings thought the Academicians would appreciate the sentiment, and that they would believe that Churchill might have expressed it.
The British came late to Picasso, but once they did, they came en masse.
The failure to take Picasso seriously was compounded by an insistence on taking seriously his most frivolous aspect. Always good at gestures, Picasso had joined the French Communist Party after the liberation of Paris in August 1944. His donations propped up the Party into the 1950s. “The Communist Party is strong in this part of
