By Pablo Picasso
My
JOINING the Communist Party is a logical step in my life, my work
and gives them their meaning. Through design and color, I have tried
to penetrate deeper into a knowledge of the
world and of men so that this knowledge might free us. In my own way
I have always said what I considered most true, most just and best
and, therefore, most
beautiful. But during the oppression and the insurrection I felt
that that was not enough, that I had to fight not only with painting
but with my whole being. Previously, out of a sort of "innocence,"
I had not understood this. I have become a Communist because our
party strives more than any other to know and to build the world, to
make men clearer thinkers, more free and more happy.
I have
become a Communist because the Communists are the bravest in France,
in the Soviet Union, as they are in my own country, Spain. I have
never felt more free, more complete than since I joined. While I wait
for the time when Spain can take me back again, the French Communist
Party is a fatherland for me. In it I find again all my friends -
the great scientists Paul Langevin and Frederick Joliot-Curie,
the great writers Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, and so many of the
beautiful faces of the insurgents of Paris. I am again among my
brothers.
October 1944.
October 1944.
