This project will examine the dealer Sam Kootz’s role in promoting Picasso’s art after the Second World War, when the artist had just joined the French Communist Party and America was in the midst of a witch hunt. Through a body of work viewed by the American Government as a propaganda organ of the Communist Party, we will see how Picasso’s paintings on view at that time in the United States were above all an example of “degenerate art”, displaying a certain aggressiveness and deconstruction in parallel with style of the American Abstract Expressionists, who also wished to free themselves from the Works Progress Administration (WPA).