Basta! Picasso was Spanish

So now that one of his paintings has been sold at Christie’s in New York for 179.4 million dollars, let’s try to make an effort at getting things straight. Basta! Enough is enough. Picasso was, is and always will be Spanish.

Now that Picasso has smashed the world record for the most expensive painting ever sold with his 1955 work “Les femmes d’ Alger”, it’s only fair to try to make people a bit more knowledgeable about the world’s most famous painter. Attempting to make an appraisal of his art would be pointless. He’s arguably the 20th century’s most relevant artist, but also a philosopher whose ideas contributed to relativism, postmodernism and deconstructivism, all of which have shaped the way we think today in the Western world. That people are still interested in him ?almost 40 years after his death? is obvious, because he is one of the five most frequently googled and mentioned artists on the Web, together with Da Vinci, Duchamp, Van Gogh and Warhol.

But the fact that people are interested in him doesn’t mean they know who he was. To begin with, Picasso is thought to be French. The Concise Britannica Encyclopedia defines him as a “French painter”. André Malraux famously said that in France only three names would remain from the 20th century: De Gaulle, Picasso and Chanel. And it goes on and on. Norman Mailer wrote about him, Anthony Hopkins played him and Jay Z raps about him, but people all around the world chalk him off as French. The truth is that Picasso was Spanish. He was baptized in the Andalusian city of Málaga on November 10th 1881 as Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad. So now that one of his paintings has been sold at Christie’s in New York for 179.4 million dollars, let’s try to make an effort at getting things straight. Basta! Enough is enough. Picasso was, is and always will be Spanish.