Turning Picasso

‘Turning Picasso' is the extraordinary story of the Cold War battle for Picasso's mind. Frances Stonor Saunders, author of Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, has uncovered recently declassified CIA documents which prove that America's cultural mandarins, together with the CIA, secretly planned to turn Picasso to their cause.

The plot centres around the 1957 Museum of Modern Art exhibition in New York, to celebrate Picasso's 75th birthday. The head of MoMA, tipped off by a close friend of Picasso's in France, seizes on it as an ideal opportunity to get the artist over for the exhibition, to promote the cause of Western artistic freedom and anti-Communist liberal ideals. He writes to the head of the CIA to persuade him to help get the artist over in time. The fly in the ointment is, of course, Picasso's long-term membership of the French Communist Party. This made an official invitation impossible, set against the internal cultural battle of McCarthyism and fervent anti-Communist political agenda of the time.

This very secret plot to turn Picasso is part of the wider CIA covert campaign to use contemporary artists to bolster the West's credentials as the place of creativity and freedom. They wanted to entice Picasso, the most famous artist in the world, away from Communism as a body blow to Russia. The problem was that Picasso was not for hire – and resisted becoming either a Communist apparatchik or a Western propaganda machine - valuing his freedom to live and work independently above all.

Presented by Frances Stonor Saunders

Produced by Anna Horsbrugh-Porter

A Just Radio Production for BBC Radio 3

New evidence that the CIA tried to turn Picasso to the American side in the Cold War.

50 years after Pablo Picasso's death, Frances Stonor Saunders uncovers declassified CIA documents proving their attempt to claim the artist as an American prize in the Cold War.