Author Interview: Annie Cohen-Salal and "Picasso the Foreigner"
ArtCurious Podcast

Author Interview: Annie Cohen-Salal and "Picasso the Foreigner"

B2Upper-intermediateJuly 24, 202331 min
  • Interview
  • Arts & culture

Hello, listeners! I’ve got a special surprise for you this week. I’ve been waiting to share this amazing conversation that I enjoyed earlier this spring with author Annie Cohen-Salal, all about her wonderful new book, Picasso the Foreigner (translated by Sam Taylor). Before Picasso became Picasso—the iconic artist now celebrated as one of France’s leading figures—he was constantly surveilled by the French police. Amid political tensions in the spring of 1901, he was flagged as an anarchist by the security services—the first of many entries in an extensive case file. Though he soon emerged...

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0:00

Welcome, Art Curious listeners, to another bonus interview, this time with author Annie Cohen-Salal. The genre of biography and the phrase, reads like a pulsing thriller, don't often go hand in hand, especially when the subject of the biography in question is one of our best

0:18

known modern artists, a man whose life and legacy must surely by this point contain no surprises. Yet when Annie Cohen-Solal's book, Picasso the Foreigner, debuted, that's exactly how the New York Times described it, originally only available in French. Now the English translation of the book has arrived, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Picasso's death.

0:41

Tracing Picasso's fraught relationship with his adopted homeland of France across seven decades, Cohen-Salal offers us a radical, thought-provoking, and yes, undeniably thrilling, reintroduction to the artist. Author of widely translated biographies of Jean-Paul Sartre, Leo Castelli, and Mark Rothko, Cohen-Salal met her new subject, foreigner number 74,664, in the archives of the Paris police.

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