Today in labor history April 28, 1896: Tristan Tzara was born. He was a Romanian-French poet, journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, film director. He co-founded the anti-establishment Dada movement. During Hitler’s rise to power, he participated in the anti-fascist movement and the French Communist Party. In 1934, Tzara organized a mock trial of Salvador Dalí because of his fawning over Hitler and Franco. The surrealists Andre Breton, Paul Éluard and René Crevel helped run the trial. In the 1940s, Tzara lived in Marseilles with a large group of anti-fascist artists and writers, under the protection of American diplomat Varian Fry. These included Victor Serge, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Andre Breton and Max Ernst. Later he joined the French Resistance, writing propaganda and running their pirate radio station. After the Liberation of Paris, he wrote for L'Éternelle Revue, a communist newspaper edited by Jean-Paul Sartre. Other contributors to the newspaper included Louis Aragon, Éluard, Jacques Prévert and Pablo Picasso. Varian Fry, and his communal home for radicals in hiding, was portrayed in the historical drama series “Transatlantic.”
Today in Labor History April 15, 1986: Author Jean Genet died on this day. Genet was a novelists, political activist and petty criminal. His book, The Thief’s Journal (1949), relates his experiences as a young prostitute and thief. That same year, the authorities tried to sentence him to life in prison for his ten convictions. Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso successfully petitioned the government on his behalf. In 1968, Genet was censored in the U.S. and expelled from the country after they refused him a visa. But he returned in 1970, upon an invitation by the Black Panthers. He stayed three months, giving lectures and attending the trial of Huey Newton. Later that year, he went to Palestine and visited refugee camps. He supported U.S. political prisoners Angela Davis and George Jackson. He also supported the anti-prison, anti-police brutality work of Michel Foucault, in France.
What can the back of a painting tell us about the life it’s led?
The over 100-year-old stretcher that backs Picasso’s “Three Musicians” helped our team discover details about the painting’s history and global travels. #artconservation#learnontiktok#picasso#art
Picassos "Femme à la montre" für 130 Millionen Euro versteigert
1932 porträtierte Picasso seine Geliebte Marie-Thérèse Walter. Nun ist das Gemälde für rund 130 Millionen Euro in New York versteigert worden. Es stammt aus einer der weltweit bedeutendsten Sammlungen moderner Kunst.
Israeli artists believe #Picasso's "Guernica" (which he painted in 1937 in response to the warplane bombing of #Guernica) is the best choice to depict the horrors of October 7th...
One of the artists, Zuya Cherkesy, says: "The moment everything that happened in Kibbutz Be'eri was revealed, it immediately made me think of Picasso's Guernica, because it is one of the most powerful artistic images that exist of massacre and humanitarian disaster, and it is a painting that exists in everyone's consciousness.".
Today in Labor History September 7, 1911: French poet, playwright and novelist Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested for stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum. They released him after a week. The crime had actually been committed by his former secretary. Apollinaire was one of the foremost poets of the early 20th century, as well as one of the most impassioned defenders of Cubism and a forefather of Surrealism. In fact, he was credited with coining both of these terms, the latter in1917, with respect to the ballet, Parade, with music by Erik Satie, libretto by Jean Cocteau, and costumes by Pablo Picasso. Apollinaire wrote one of the first Surrealist literary works, the play “The Breasts of Tiresias” (1917). He was admired during his lifetime by the young poets who later formed the nucleus of the Surrealist group (Breton, Aragon, Soupault). Apollinaire died during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.