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Lot Essay
This is sold with a photo-certificate from Maya Widmaier Picasso dated Fait à Paris le 11 Novembre de l'An 2004.
Picasso first met Ilya Ehrenburg, one of the most important and controversial Russian cultural figures of the 20th Century, on the eve of the First World War, after the latter had been forced to flee Tsarist Russia in order to avoid imprisonment because of his involvement in the Bolshevik underground. Their friendship and collaboration was to last more than fifty years, until Ehrenburg's death in 1967.
Having returned to Moscow in 1940, Ehrenburg met Picasso again at the Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wroclaw in Poland in August 1948, where Picasso presented his friend with a pencil sketch of him (Z 15, no. 79). Ehrenburg used Picasso's affiliation to the French Communist Party in order to defend modern art and attempt to broaden the Soviet public's access to it. In this he was eventually successful and in 1956 he organised a Picasso exhibition at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the first official show of the artist's work in the Soviet Union.
Ehrenburg's visit to Picasso in 1963 held particular significance. Ehrenburg's memoirs, People, Years, Life, had first appeared in 1960 and the Soviet regime had been strongly critical of it; even Premier Kruschev personally denounced the book, issuing a veiled threat that Ehrenburg might be arrested because of it. As Ehrenburg himself, one of the few distinguished writers to have survived Stalin's regime, recalled, Picasso warned him when they met in January 1963, 'You've reached an age when it isn't at all necessary to stand up for truth on every occasion'. Picasso had this photograph of their meeting enlarged and, having embellished it with his own characteristic brand of humour and playfulness, sent it to Ehrenburg in Moscow, a wonderful testament to the friendship of these two great men.
We are grateful to Joshua Rubenstein, the author of Tangled Loyalties, The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg, for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.
Picasso first met Ilya Ehrenburg, one of the most important and controversial Russian cultural figures of the 20th Century, on the eve of the First World War, after the latter had been forced to flee Tsarist Russia in order to avoid imprisonment because of his involvement in the Bolshevik underground. Their friendship and collaboration was to last more than fifty years, until Ehrenburg's death in 1967.
Having returned to Moscow in 1940, Ehrenburg met Picasso again at the Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wroclaw in Poland in August 1948, where Picasso presented his friend with a pencil sketch of him (Z 15, no. 79). Ehrenburg used Picasso's affiliation to the French Communist Party in order to defend modern art and attempt to broaden the Soviet public's access to it. In this he was eventually successful and in 1956 he organised a Picasso exhibition at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the first official show of the artist's work in the Soviet Union.
Ehrenburg's visit to Picasso in 1963 held particular significance. Ehrenburg's memoirs, People, Years, Life, had first appeared in 1960 and the Soviet regime had been strongly critical of it; even Premier Kruschev personally denounced the book, issuing a veiled threat that Ehrenburg might be arrested because of it. As Ehrenburg himself, one of the few distinguished writers to have survived Stalin's regime, recalled, Picasso warned him when they met in January 1963, 'You've reached an age when it isn't at all necessary to stand up for truth on every occasion'. Picasso had this photograph of their meeting enlarged and, having embellished it with his own characteristic brand of humour and playfulness, sent it to Ehrenburg in Moscow, a wonderful testament to the friendship of these two great men.
We are grateful to Joshua Rubenstein, the author of Tangled Loyalties, The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg, for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.