Picasso and Kim Il-sung in South Korea

 Pablo Picasso, Massacre in Korea, 1951, oil on plywood, 110 x 210cm. Musée Picasso, Paris

The contrasting fates in contemporary South Korea of a painting by Pablo Picasso and  works written by Kim Il-sung, the first leader of North Korea, throw an interesting light on how meaning and value intersects with form.  The Picasso in question is ‘Massacre in Korea’ a work from 1951 which is for the first time on exhibition in Korea at the Hangaram Museum in Seoul. The publication is Kim’s multi-volume ‘Reminiscences: With the Century’, his autobiography, which was first published in 1992.  

Until recently, both were banned in Korea. The furore over the publication of Kim’s book by a South Korean publisher without the necessary  approval from the government, followed by the ban on its sale and a police investigation, and yesterday (May 4th), the comments of a North Korean propaganda website (in English that even Google translate could have improved), that declares: ‘It is dumbfounded to see such impure forces’ reckless act to make a fuss as if a huge disaster happened and try to block their publication and distribution in a wicked way’,  indicates that Kim’s book is still just too ideologically controversial.  Not so the Picasso, apparently, which was also banned in South Korea once upon a time.

The National Security Act, which dates from 1948 was intended, as it declares, ‘to secure the security of the State and the subsistence and freedom of nationals, by regulating any anticipated activities compromising the safety of the State.’ While attempts have been made to annul the Act (for instance in 2004 by the Uri Party), it is still actively enforced. But the controversy over Kim’s memoirs has led to renewed calls for is repeal because of the obvious restriction it places on freedom of speech and information. Picasso’s painting also used to fall foul of the National Security Act. Its inspiration, which Picasso claimed was a massacre by US and ROK forces of civilians, made it too contentious for several decades in South Korea, and illustrations of it in books were censored.  But now, all and sundry can pay to see ‘Massacre in Korea’, and the media can reproduce it and make no attempt to hide its inspiration. 

What do the contrasting fates of these two works tell us? Obviously, they are not comparable on many levels. Kim Il-sung’s autobiography is written by the Eternal Leader Generalissimo of the DPRK, sworn enemy of  the ROK, and is therefore still a very loudly ticking time-bomb. Picasso was a Spaniard who joined the French Communist Party at the end of World War II, and he made this painting partly in order to show he agreed with the Party’s line on events unfolding on the Korean peninsula.

The Picasso is allowed to hang on the wall of a museum in Seoul, and a Seoul-based publisher is not permitted to print Kim’s book because the heat around the Picasso has cooled, while Kim’s autobiography remains too hot to handle. But  the point  I would like to consider here is not so much about the limits of freedom of speech and information. What strikes me as particularly interesting is what these two cases tell us about how information adheres to a medium – in this case to a painting and work of literature.  

We can say that the historical content that Picasso’s painting claims to embody is not ‘baked in’ to the work. It is added to it as a discursive level carried in a text. We cannot ‘read’ off the painting itself the fact that it is about the Korean War from just looking at it. Nothing about the look of the painting links it inherently to that historical event, let alone to a specific massacre by Americans and South Korean forces.  Indeed, Picasso seems to have deliberately fudged things so we cannot tell which army (or even which century) the soldiers belong to, or that the civilians are Korean. The relationship of the painting to the Korean War is an add-on, a verbal supplement provided by the title, and by other pieces of verbal information which serve to give it specific sources.  By contrast, Kim’s book inevitably has its relationship to the War and to the general crisis on the Korean peninsula  thoroughly baked into every page. It is inherent in the medium. We cannot separate the specific history from the way in which that history is referred to. In both cases the code in which the relationship to Korea is communicated is verbal language. But only Kim’s book actually carries this code within the medium itself. Picasso’s painting – like all visual art – has this level of coded meaning added. It is not part of the code of the painting as a painting. 

In fact, this is precisely why the communists didn’t like it. Their propaganda-concept of art demanded we see American uniforms and clearly depicted Korean civilian victims. But as a modernist, Picasso believed the meaning of his work should be communicated  visually -  through line, color, shape, form, texture, composition – through a language unique to the visual rather than one that borrowed from the language of words. The problem with the language of the visual is that it is less precise and more fluid than words. It isn’t easily pinned down. Ideologues see this as a fundamental weakness of the image. But isn’t it actually its fundamental strength?  No wonder the powerful are always trying to tag images to words, tying down the balloon of the imagination so it won’t float dangerously away.  

Picasso’s painting ‘Massacre in Korea’ is an artistic failure. This is obvious when we compare it to ’Guernica’ (1937).  But actually, ‘Guernica’ also suffers from the same basic problem I noted in relation to ‘Massacre in Korea’. If you take away the title and the surrounding historical information provided verbally, what do you see? A town in northern Spain bombed by German airplanes? Hardly. Nothing whatsoever in the painting directly links what we see on its surface to this specific event, or even to the twentieth century - apart from the lightbulb. 

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937, 349.3 x 776.6cm Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid.

But somehow it doesn’t matter. The inspiration of the painting in a specific historical event - what induced Picasso to paint it, and then made it useful propaganda for the Spanish Republic - cannot prevent  the painting from transcending such contingency to become a ‘timeless’ indictment of violence. ‘Guernica’ is quite simply a far more powerful work. Its style communicate on several levels the essential message which is the honor of war. ‘Massacre in Korea’ by comparison is lifeless, and the fact that Picasso drew on Goya’s great anti-war painting ‘The Third of May, 1808’ (1814) for the composition only goes to show how imaginatively bankrupt Picasso was.

But why was this the case, apart from the fact that even geniuses have off days? Actually ,it seems clear that the reason why ‘Guernica’ succeeds and ‘Massacre in Korea’ doesn’t is very much the result of the pressures exerted on Picasso by very contingent circumstances. With ‘Massacre in Korea’ he struggled to find  a way to fulfil his role as an advocate of communism through art while simultaneously remaining loyal to the fundamentally antithetical principles of modernist art, which stressed individualism and authenticity against the forces of ideological  conformity. Picasso found himself in an impossible situation in which he was obliged to artistically square the circle. The result? A weak compromise that at the time satisfied neither his fellow communists (not explicit enough) nor the supporters of modern art in the ‘free world’ (not abstract and difficult enough), and that has only gotten less convincing over time.

Which is maybe why it can be shown in South Korea today.  

I think these issues are worth considering because in a period when art is dominated by ‘identity politics’, we are seeing the revenge of ideology over the visual. We are advised, even coerced, into seeing images as ‘about’ something that can be conveyed clearly in words. We prioritize the clear and distinct properties of a verbal tag-on rather than give credit to the richly ambiguous potential of images.