»…Picasso the name became a way to talk about the Thaw«. Picasso as a Political Metaphor in the Italian Communist Party in Relation to Mother Russia (1953–1968)

Between 1953 and 1968, the Italian Communist Party counted amongst its prominent members a number of the most influential art historians and critics of post-war Italy: Lionello Venturi, Corrado Maltese, Giulio Carlo Argan, Raffaello Trombadori, Mario De Micheli, and others. They were able to assume, in relation to modern art in general and to Picasso in particular, a position that had a scientific value and at the same time a political one and that took in consideration the daily life of the people, in a way which could never have been possible in the Soviet Union. The aim of the project is to analyze this Italian interpretation of the binomial Picasso-Communism, and especially its reception in Russia during the 1960s in studies by the Bolshevik historian and writer Ilya Ehrenburg and the film director and screenwriter Sergei Yutkevich, which so far have been almost completely ignored.