Guest Speakers
Reading Picasso in French, German, and Czech: The Reception of the 1921–22 Traveling Exhibition Pablo Picasso
Anna Jozefacka
Luise Mahler
In 1921 Paul Rosenberg organized the first comprehensive showing of Picasso’s oeuvre since the Great War in France. A year later, he dispatched his exhibition to Germany and Czechoslovakia. This comparative analysis of the show’s three iterations considers the reception of Picasso in the distinct postwar contexts of Paris, Munich, and Prague. It unpacks internationalism as a political attitude in relationship to the artist’s work. For Central European critics, unlike their French counterparts, local prewar opinion of Cubism as a thoroughly international modern artistic undertaking continued to hold currency. Picasso in 1921-22 still embodied the idea of an international artist that resisted or operated above nationalist discourse.