A vous de juger - Le portrait de Staline Paix et Liberté 1953

This original 1953 press document, entitled À vous de juger—“You Be the Judge”—was published in Paris by the French anti-Communist organisation Paix et Liberté. Its graphic design has been attributed to the Russian-born artist Yuri Annenkov, also known as Georges Annenkov, although the document itself carries no printed artist’s credit.

The publication responds to one of the most controversial episodes in the relationship between Pablo Picasso and the French Communist Party: the celebrated “Stalin Portrait Affair” of March 1953.

Following Joseph Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953, the poet and writer Louis Aragon asked Picasso to produce a commemorative portrait for Les Lettres françaises. Published on the journal’s front page on 12 March, Picasso’s charcoal drawing portrayed a surprisingly young and human Stalin, rather than the elderly, decorated leader familiar from official Soviet propaganda.

The portrait immediately caused a scandal within the French Communist Party. Its leadership publicly condemned the publication because the drawing failed to conform to the conventions of Socialist Realism and Stalin’s carefully constructed personality cult. Aragon was formally reprimanded and compelled to publish a form of self-criticism. Picasso, who had joined the Communist Party in 1944, maintained that the drawing had been conceived as a sincere expression of respect.

Paix et Liberté quickly exploited the controversy through this satirical folded document. Its four panels present a succession of imaginary “versions” supposedly illustrating Picasso’s gradual progress towards the ideal Stalinist portrait. The sequence begins with an exaggerated modernist face and culminates in an official photograph of Stalin surrounded by red stars, hammers and sickles. Beneath it appears the deliberately excessive declaration: “Immortal glory to the genius Stalin, leading light of all the arts.”

Founded in 1950 by French politician Jean-Paul David, Paix et Liberté specialised in visually striking counter-propaganda directed against the French Communist Party and the Soviet Union. Through parody and caricature, À vous de juger attacks both Stalin’s cult of personality and the restrictions imposed on artistic expression by Soviet cultural doctrine.

Printed by lithography in red and black and presented as a compact folded pamphlet, this is an uncommon example of original Cold War political ephemera. Although it is not an original work by Picasso, it is an important contemporary document directly connected to the artist and to one of the defining cultural controversies of post-war France. The design is attributed to Yuri Annenkov on the basis of documented examples originating from the artist’s archives, including a working copy bearing his handwritten corrections.

Press document

Communism - USSR - Propaganda

The Stalin portrait affair is the name given by the media and historians to a series of media and political polemics linked to a charcoal drawing commissioned from the painter Pablo Picasso in March 1953, just after Stalin's death, and their cultural and political consequences.

Good condition