Comrade Pablo Picasso’s five days in England, November 1950. By Alex Leith.

Day one

Slipping through the net

9am, November 11, 1950. A restless crowd was gathered beneath the vaulted roof of Victoria Station, waiting for the arrival of the Golden Arrow from Dover. Journalists and photographers, well-wishers and a welcoming party of Soviet sympathisers. The service was running 90 minutes late.

Chaos had broken out at Dover. Many of those disembarking from the overnight ferry were delegates travelling to the Second World Peace Congress, due to open in Sheffield two days later. To its supporters, the congress was an international gathering dedicated to preventing another catastrophic war. To the British government, and much of the national press, it was something rather different: a Soviet-sponsored propaganda exercise designed to influence opinion in Western Europe while Moscow raced to acquire nuclear parity with the United States.

Chinese forces had entered the Korean War. The Soviet Union had recently tested its first atomic bomb. The Cold War was hotting up.

The Labour government initially granted visas to around 1,750 foreign delegates. Then, at the last moment, Home Secretary James Chuter Ede changed his mind. Overnight, the visas were revoked. Most of those arriving at Dover were refused entry and put straight back on the next ferry. Other delegates were turned back at London Airport. Among those denied entry to the country were the congress president, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, the novelist Alexander Fadeyev and the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Furious at the British decision, Joliot-Curie cancelled the Sheffield summit altogether, announcing that the congress would instead reconvene a week later in Warsaw.

Yet one delegate emerged from the train at Victoria, uncharacteristically alone. He wore a Basque beret and a tweed suit, a beige raincoat slung over one shoulder. His name was Pablo Picasso.

Among the throng at Victoria was Roland Penrose – painter, collector, co-founder of London’s fledgling Institute of Contemporary Arts, and one of Picasso’s oldest English friends. As flashbulbs burst around them, the Spaniard greeted Penrose with a mixture of bewilderment and embarrassment.

“C’est terrible,” he moaned. “What could I have done that they should let me through?”

It was an extraordinary remark. Picasso was, after all, one of the world’s most famous communists. If anyone might have expected to be turned away, it was him. Though his political identity hadn’t long been forged. Before the Second World War, friends described him as almost aggressively apolitical. It was the destruction of his native Spain during the Civil War – memorialised in Guernica – and then four uneasy years living in occupied Paris that transformed him. He joined the French Communist Party in October 1944 and soon became its most celebrated recruit.

Picasso was, in many respects, an improbable communist. He was fabulously wealthy, owned several houses, and painted in a style Soviet cultural officials routinely condemned as decadent and bourgeois. “I don’t try to advise the Russians on economics,” he remarked tartly in 1949. “Why should they tell me how to paint?” When criticised by fellow communists, he shrugged: “There are always rows within a family.” Whatever his disagreements with Moscow’s artistic orthodoxy, his commitment to the movement was genuine. He donated large sums to the French Communist Party and lent his international fame to campaigns for peace. No image became more potent than the dove he designed for the 1949 World Peace Congress in Paris, a simple lithograph adapted from one of four pigeons presented to him by Henri Matisse. Within days it had become an international emblem. Picasso himself remained amused by the irony. Pigeons, he observed, were greedy, quarrelsome creatures, hardly obvious symbols of peace. Even so, the image travelled around the world, and he named his newborn daughter Paloma.

Another version of the dove had been prepared for posters advertising the Congress in Sheffield before hurriedly being repurposed to advertise the relocated congress in Warsaw. Picasso, however, was already in England. Penrose quickly realised that his guest had become a political curiosity as much as an artist. Newspapers across Britain were reporting that hundreds of delegates had been expelled while Picasso alone had slipped through the net. Rather than leave him to the attention of Fleet Street, Penrose proposed an escape. Picasso would disappear into the Sussex countryside.

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Penrose and his wife, the photographer Lee Miller, owned Farleys House, an old farmhouse at Muddles Green, ten miles from Lewes. Picasso had visited England only once before, in 1919, when he designed the sets and costumes for Diaghilev’s The Three-Cornered Hat. During that brief stay he had made friends among London’s artistic circles, including Clive Bell, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. He may have imagined renewing those acquaintances in 1950. Instead, he found himself heading south through Sussex in Penrose’s shooting-brake car, seeking refuge from a political storm. Farleys was an ideal hiding place. There, surrounded by cows rather than reporters, Picasso relaxed almost immediately. The visit survives in some detail thanks to Lee Miller. Her archive contains a reel of photographs recording Picasso at Farleys, taken either during this first stay or when he returned a few days later. They have become familiar images: Picasso grinning beside a fingerpost to Chiddingly; Picasso greeting William, the farm’s imposing Ayrshire bull; Picasso laughing with the Penroses’ young son Antony on his knee.

When I last visited Farleys, now both museum and archive, Antony Penrose showed me enlarged contact sheets from those negatives. Just three years old when Picasso arrived, he is perhaps the last surviving eyewitness to the artist’s 1950 visit to England.

His memories are unexpectedly vivid, if not visual. Picasso, he recalled, had a distinctive smell – a mixture of eau de Cologne and Gauloises – and wore a rough tweed jacket that scratched when the boy climbed onto his lap. Lee Miller later remembered the pair wrestling across the house. ‘Picasso and Tony pummelled each other amid squeals and roars,’ she later wrote for Vogue. When Antony bit his guest, Picasso retaliated in kind before announcing with satisfaction: “Pensez! C’est le premier Anglais que j’ai jamais mordu.” (Imagine! The first Englishman I have ever bitten.)

Before I left Farleys, Antony disappeared into the archive store and returned carrying his parents’ visitors’ book. There, on the page for 11 November 1950, was Picasso’s unmistakable signature. Beneath it appeared two more names, one illegible, the other belonging to Marcel Boudin, Picasso’s chauffeur, who had driven the artist’s 1948 Oldsmobile from Paris, onto the Dieppe-Newhaven ferry, and on to Muddles Green.

Day Two

Bernal’s mural

Picasso returned to London on the morning of 12 November. The congress that had brought him to England had been cancelled before it began. Yet the handful of delegates who had avoided expulsion refused to concede defeat. If Britain would not host an international peace congress, it would at least witness a series of improvised gatherings organised by those already inside the country.

One of the principal architects of this resistance was JD Bernal. Few scientists occupied such a prominent position in post-war Britain. An Irish crystallographer of international renown, Bernal had played a major role in Allied operational research during the Second World War before returning to Birkbeck College, where his laboratory became one of the world’s leading centres for crystallography. Equally famous for his politics, he was a lifelong Marxist whose commitment to the Soviet Union frequently placed him at odds with the British establishment. He had also been one of the principal organisers of the Sheffield congress.

That evening Bernal invited Picasso out to dinner. Beforehand, there was time for one more reunion. Just a short walk from Bernal’s flat in Torrington Square lived Lydia Lopokova, widow of John Maynard Keynes. Picasso had first met the celebrated Russian ballerina in London more than 30 years earlier while working with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. According to a story that has entered Picasso folklore, he asked her whether she still danced. When she replied that she did, the pair stepped onto the pavement outside Gordon Square and performed an impromptu jig together, to the amusement of passers-by.

It was an echo of another London and another Picasso, before communism, before Guernica, before the Cold War had transformed every artistic encounter into a political event.

Dinner itself remains frustratingly elusive. No account records where Bernal took his guest. Present were the filmmaker Ivor Montagu – another organiser of the congress, later revealed to have acted as a Soviet agent – and several French delegates who had escaped the visa ban. Afterwards the party returned to Bernal’s flat, above his department at Birkbeck.

More visitors had gathered outside. A group of Soviet delegates, among them the distinguished film director Vsevolod Pudovkin, had turned up in the hope of meeting Picasso. Bernal invited everyone upstairs. The evening developed into the sort of multilingual, alcohol-fuelled gathering that often flourished in that period wherever artists, scientists and political idealists found themselves together.

Some time during the party Bernal made an unusual request. Would Picasso draw something on the wall? According to Montagu’s later recollection, Picasso climbed onto a chair, took a wax crayon and began sketching above a bookcase. He first outlined the head of a solitary man. Climbing down to inspect it, he frowned.

“Il a l’air solitaire.” He looks lonely. Back on the chair he added a woman beside the figure. Someone watching objected that the drawing had little to do with world peace. Picasso responded with a characteristic flourish. Returning to the wall one final time, he gave the couple wings.

The only mural Picasso ever created in Britain had come into existence almost by accident.

It survives. When Bernal’s laboratory was demolished in the 1960s, the section of plaster bearing Picasso’s drawing was carefully removed and preserved. Today it hangs behind glass, in the Wellcome Collection, a few hundred yards away from where it was drawn.

I recently went to see it. Visitors hurried past on their way to the library. Time has not been entirely kind. The wax crayon has faded and flaked in places, but the winged couple remain unmistakably present. Looking closely, another detail caught my eye. The beige paint beneath Picasso’s drawing has been hurriedly applied, uneven and unfinished.

The explanation lies in another anecdote. A few days after the party a group of workmen turned up at the flat, and Bernal’s assistant, Stan Lenton, had to persuade them not to paint over Picasso’s impromptu artwork. Days earlier, they’d applied a first coat, it seems; the second never materialised. Suddenly another detail in Montagu’s account makes sense. He described the room as being illuminated by a single naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Bernal’s flat was evidently in the middle of redecoration when Picasso was handed the crayon.

Day Three

The auctioned dove

Early on the morning of 13 November, Picasso boarded a train at King’s Cross with Bernal and Ivor Montagu for the journey north to Sheffield.

It was an oddly quixotic expedition. The World Peace Congress had been cancelled. Most of its international delegates were now somewhere between Dover and Warsaw. Yet its organisers had resolved that Sheffield should witness some kind of gathering, however improvised. Rather than an international congress, the city would host a protest against the government’s decision to exclude so many of those who had hoped to attend.

Picasso had become its principal attraction. At Sheffield station three young organisers met the train. One of them was Bill Ronksley, later to become a prominent trade union leader, who welcomed the Spaniard with a bouquet of flowers before accompanying the party by taxi into the city.

The party’s first stop was Butler’s Café, famous locally for its vast ‘Desperate Dan’ meat pies. In Sheffield mythology, Picasso stopped off at a barber’s to have his hair trimmed. The party then proceeded to Sheffield City Hall. The organisers had every reason to expect embarrassment. Months of planning had collapsed in a matter of days. Thousands of foreign delegates were absent. Vast sums had already been spent hiring the hall, erecting a lunch marquee on a bombsite nearby, arranging accommodation, transport, interpreters and administrative staff.

But word had got out. Around 3,000 sympathisers turned up to hear the speeches. The mood was less one of defeat than defiance. Speaker after speaker condemned the government’s decision. Bernal addressed the audience, followed by the Soviet writer Boris Polevoy, whose repeated invocations of Stalin were greeted with enthusiastic applause. Hewlett Johnson, the controversial ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury, also had his say.

Then Picasso rose. He spoke in French, reading from notes through a pair of reading glasses. Rather than launch into ideology, he began with a memory. His father, he recalled, had specialised in painting pigeons, and as a boy Picasso had been required to help with the tedious business of painting their legs.

It was a characteristically oblique beginning. Even here, at the centre of a political rally, Picasso preferred stories to slogans. He finished simply. “I stand with life against death. I stand with peace against war.” The speech lasted barely a minute. At the close of the meeting one British delegate, William Moffett, appealed to the audience for donations to mitigate the disastrous financial losses. Banknotes fluttered down from the balconies. To raise more money Picasso sketched another of his famous doves. The drawing was auctioned on the spot for a guinea to an American businessman from Chicago named Mendel Terman.

It was a modest sum for a Picasso, even in 1950. Yet there was something fitting about the gesture. Over the last two years the dove had become one of the defining images of the Cold War. In Sheffield it briefly returned to being what it had always been for Picasso: a drawing made quickly, almost casually, in response to the needs of the moment. Nevertheless, it was freighted with political significance. A young Denis Healey, then working for the Foreign Office, described it as a ‘Trojan dove’.

Day Four

The exhibition Picasso never opened

Picasso returned to King’s Cross on 14 November to discover a mob waiting for him on the platform. When his train pulled in, he was met not by politicians or diplomats but by artists. Rodrigo Moynihan, then teaching at the Royal College of Art, had brought 50 of his students to the station in the hope of securing an autograph – or simply the chance to shake the hand of the most celebrated painter alive.

During the journey, as he so often did, Picasso had drawn another impromptu picture. On the back of a dining-car menu he sketched a dinosaur, added the word ‘Pax’, together with Russian and Spanish political emblems, and handed the artwork to the waiter.

On the train, an Evening Standard reporter had fought through the crowd long enough to ask what Picasso thought of the government’s decision to prevent the World Peace Congress from taking place. The artist’s answer was mischievous. “I think the action of Attlee banning the World Peace Congress has done a great deal for world peace. It has given us a tremendous amount of publicity when otherwise we should have had very little.”

Vintage Picasso: a political point delivered with a smile. By now one question had become unavoidable. Why had Comrade Picasso been allowed into Britain at all? The answer lies elsewhere in London. For months the Arts Council had been preparing an exhibition of Picasso’s recent ceramics from Vallauris at the New Burlington Galleries in Piccadilly, next to the Royal Academy. Its organisers had deliberately arranged the private view to coincide with his visit to England and had invited the artist to attend as guest of honour. The government may have regarded the World Peace Congress with suspicion, but the prestige of welcoming the world’s most famous living artist was rather different.

At four o’clock that afternoon the Galleries filled with critics, collectors and artists waiting for Picasso’s arrival. Among them was Patrick Campbell, the satirical columnist of The Weekly Dispatch, who had been set a provocative assignment. His editor wanted him to persuade Picasso to sketch a horse, then carry the drawing upstairs to Sir Alfred Munnings, equine artist, President of the Royal Academy, and one of Picasso’s fiercest detractors, to ask for his opinion.

When I went looking for the rooms that used to house the Galleries, they happened to be closed for refurbishment. Campbell’s description, however, is vivid enough to reconstruct the scene. He remembered ‘a large number of human exotics’ representing every tribe of the post-war British art world, all anticipating the rush that would engulf Picasso the moment he appeared: ‘beards, fringes, sandals, black velvet and amber beads.’

They waited in vain. Unknown to anyone assembled in Piccadilly, Picasso had already written to the Arts Council: ‘In view of the British Government’s repressive action towards the Second World Peace Congress and its conduct towards so many of my friends and colleagues, I have decided to cancel my acceptance of your invitation.’

It was perhaps the most eloquent gesture he could have made. Britain had admitted the artist while excluding his fellow delegates. In solidarity, Picasso refused to behave as though nothing had happened. Instead of attending his own exhibition, he vanished. Roland Penrose and Lee Miller spirited him away to their Kensington flat in Hornton Street, leaving journalists to wonder where the guest of honour had gone.

Years later Antony Penrose told me a story from that afternoon that reveals another side of Picasso altogether.

Looking from the window, Picasso noticed the sign for nearby Pitt Street and began talking, not about politics or painting, but about the extraordinary aristocratic traveller, Lady Hester Stanhope, the niece of William Pitt the Younger. As a young lad living in Galicia he had visited the grave of Sir John Moore, killed in the Battle of La Coruña in 1809. Learning that Moore’s last words were a profession of love for Lady Stanhope, he had read her memoir, and become obsessed by her exploits, imagining her to be the epitome of English womanhood. His father, he further explained, had been an enthusiastic Anglophile, admired the Pre-Raphaelites and loved wearing English suits. Thus England had occupied the young Picasso’s imagination long before he ever crossed the Channel.

Indeed, he confessed something remarkable to Roland Penrose. When he left Barcelona for Paris in 1904, he had imagined the French capital merely as a stopping-off point. His real ambition had been to end up in London. Paris had intervened. It is one of those tantalising historical might-have-beens. Had Picasso continued north instead of settling in Montmartre, the history of 20th-century art might have unfolded rather differently.

That evening another invitation arrived. Feliks Topolski, the Polish-born painter whose Warwick Avenue studio had become one of London’s great artistic meeting places, decided that if Picasso would not attend his own private view, London should instead come to him.

‘It fell to me,’ Topolski later wrote, ‘to introduce Picasso to the angels of London.’

By the time Penrose escorted his friend into the crowded studio the party was already in full swing. Stephen Spender was there. So were Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein, Graham Sutherland and Herbert Read. Later, after a late sitting in the House of Commons, the Labour politicians George Strauss and Aneurin Bevan arrived.

Topolski never forgot Picasso’s entrance. ‘Dashing, neat and little,’ he wrote. ‘A veritable monkey… a child genius – vain, ageless, naughty, energy-loaded and never wrong.’

It was exactly the kind of evening journalists longed to witness. Most were kept outside. Only one young Evening Standard reporter succeeded in getting in, and her account emerged the next day heavily rewritten by the paper’s editors. Picasso’s wealth, his donations to communist causes and George Strauss’s presence all became ammunition in a political argument. The implication was unmistakable: anyone prepared to celebrate Picasso must necessarily sympathise with communism.

The guests themselves, on reading the piece, were outraged. Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Herbert Read, Stephen Spender, Rodrigo Moynihan, Ruskin Spear and Roland Penrose jointly wrote to the newspaper.

‘We, who were fellow guests,’ they protested, ‘wish to state that the party was a liberal-minded gesture of welcome to a great artist… We deplore the attitude of a newspaper which says in effect: ‘Picasso is a Communist. Anyone who wants to meet Picasso is a Communist sympathiser.’’

The letter neatly captured the tension running through Picasso’s entire visit. Britain had struggled to decide whether he was a political problem or an artistic genius. In the end he had become both.

Day Five

The long goodbye

Patrick Campbell, frustrated at missing Picasso in Piccadilly, spent the following morning trying to track him down, as he reported in The Weekly Dispatch.

Eventually he reached Lee Miller, in her Kensington flat, by telephone. “Listen, Lee,” he asked, “have you got Picasso?” “Honey,” she replied, “I’m awfully sorry. He’s gone away.” “You wouldn’t tell me a lie?” “I would, honey – if I had to. Things are very difficult.” Lee was telling only half the truth. She and Roland Penrose had indeed ‘got Picasso’, and once again they removed him from the attention of Fleet Street. Before returning to Farleys they took a detour to Brighton. Picasso wanted to see John Nash’s extraordinary Royal Pavilion, prompted by a pre-war photograph Lee had once shown him in which the shadow of their friend Eileen Agar fell across one of its fantastical columns.

It was, perhaps, the only sightseeing he managed during his five days in England.

Back at Farleys the mood relaxed once more. Picasso resumed his games with young Antony Penrose and produced at least two works. In Roland’s copy of Góngora’s poems he added a personal ink drawing beside the printed illustrations he had already contributed to the book. Then, using red and black Indian ink, he filled the opening page of the of the Institute of Contemporary Arts newly acquired visitors’ book with four boldly drawn bulls, perhaps inspired by William, Farleys’ imposing Ayrshire bull.

There may – or may not – have been a third work. One of Sussex’s favourite local legends insists that Picasso wandered into the Six Bells at Chiddingly, ordered a pint of bitter and, finding himself without money, offered to settle the bill with a sketch on a beer mat.

“You can pay with good English money like everybody else,” the landlord supposedly replied, removing the pint before Picasso could drink it.

It is a wonderful story, though I don’t believe it. When I mentioned it to Antony Penrose, he smiled sceptically. His parents, he pointed out, would never have left Picasso to wander the village alone; had they been with him they would certainly have stood him a drink. Like so many legends attached to famous people, this one survives because everyone wishes it had happened.

The following year, in Vogue, Lee Miller reflected on the small souvenirs Picasso had chosen to carry home from England. Alongside Kwells for seasickness and postcards of the Royal Pavilion were a peaked school cap for himself and another for his son Paolo, a Bournvita mug decorated with a sleepy man in a nightcap, a photograph of Roland’s great-aunt Priscilla Hannah attending the Bath Peace Conference of 1875, and a toy red London bus. For five days Britain had argued over whether Pablo Picasso was a genius or a hoax, an artist or a propagandist. If his dramatic arrival in England had made front-page news, his departure passed unnoticed by the press. One imagines him standing on deck as the boat pulled away from the quayside, waving to Roland Penrose and Lee Miller before watching Newhaven’s yellow cliffs recede into the distance. He never returned to England.