PICASSO AND THE CUBIST ICHTHYS

Pablo Picasso was a Spanish Communist Exiled in France, according to his quote "I am a communist and my painting is a communist painting. But if I were a shoemaker, royalist or communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in any special way to sho my politics" on an interview in 1945, besides becoming a member of the French Communist party. 

This period was very controversial in Europe for the ascent of the General Fransisco Franco to the power in Spain after the Spanish Civil War, the anti-communist alliance with Hitler and the Armies of Mussolini during WWII in which Franco participated with the Condor Legion that supported Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. He was also supported by American Troops and Catholic Church as a Martyr of War fighting atheist Communist in Europe. The executions authorized by Franco over-passed the 70.000 lives and brought a massive immigration to the American continent and France mostly that icluded many artist knowned as the Generation of 27', that included artist as Federico Garcia Lorca, Raphael Alberti, just to name a few.

Is not in any records that in this period Picasso was a member of the Generation of 27', because he remained as a pasifist during the years of Franco but he used to talk bad about him and clearly being an enemy of the Spanish Ruler.

With all of this Historical and Political Background is where i build the interpretation of THE GREEN FISH ON A WHITE PLATE located at the MFA. 

Picasso whent thought different stages of Cubist art, and his thinking as a communist and an exile during the rule of terror in Spain, he presents a marble ceramic fish, that is grotesc in size and relieve, on a simple white dish. Because of Picassos "African cubist period" this dish can be an interpretation of Spain, that has being the European country that has being conected with the roots of africa and mediterranean culiany traditions. Plates in south spain are plain, not like the ones of French or German that had been Adorned on various geometrical and heavy designs.

The fish for its size and placement gives a lot of sence of the Ichthys (that is the Greek symbol of Chist *the Christian fish*) that if we link it to picasso has a perfect concordance with the cubist drawings of picasso like the bull or the minotaur.

if we link it togheter FRANCO, SPAIN, ABUNDANCE, CHRISTIANITY, PICASSO, EXILE, we can interprete this sculpure as a critique of the Abuse and Exesive power of the Spanish Dictator over his people in early XX century that ruled a Catholic Anti-Communist Spain.

Steven Dagenais