Picasso: Peace or Freedom Major Exhibition Tate Liverpool 2010. Preliminary international conference 2008. Publication themes Cold War USSR

Picasso's politics mattered because he was an important artist. The last taboo in the study of Picasso is his membership of the Communist Party from 1944 until his death. French/Swiss art dealers sold his pictures to American galleries and collectors. Picasso was able to maintain his millionaire's life style and his PCF integrity.

Picasso's Dove of Peace became the emblem of the Peace Congresses in Wroclaw, Paris, Stockholm, Sheffield and Rome. In 1950 Picasso arrived at Victoria Station in London for the Sheffield Peace Congress. He was detained for twelve hours by Immigration before Penrose secured his release. Picasso never visited England again, not even for Penrose's exhibition of his work at Tate 1960. Also in 1950 Picasso applied for a visa to visit the USA as one of the Partisans for Peace to present the Stockholm Peace Appeal Against Atomic Weapons to the US Congress. His request was refused and he never visited the USA but he became the symbol of the freedom of the artist in the West.

Picasso made a series of History Paintings in the post war period; The Charnel House 1944, Massacre in Korea 1950, War and Peace 1951. War shows the god of war releasing giant bacteria, a reference to the US use of germ warfare in Korea. These murals were criticised in the West as Picasso's least successful paintings. In the East he was criticised for his refusal to take the Cp line on Socialist Realism.

Picasso was a controversial figure in the USSR. Ehrenburg wrote an essay in L'Unita in 1953 on the eve of Picasso's Rome/Milan retrospective in defence of Picasso's artistic freedom Ehrenburg was a cultural ambassador to Western Europe for the USSR. He wrote the novel The Thaw. In November 1956, Picasso signed a letter to the PCF expressing profound anxiety about the suppression of the Hungarian workers' revolt by Russian tanks. Picasso's decision to remain in the PCF after 1956 was divisive. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1961. Ehrenburg organised two exhibitions of Picasso's work in Moscow in 1956 and 1963. Ehrenburg's papers are now in the Yad Vashem, 'Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance' Archive in Jerusalem

This exhibition will create a framework of the central figures, the critic's and curator's who wrote about Picasso in those years, whose ideas reflected not only the times in which they lived but also the ideology and politics of their culture. As cultural contacts between artists and art historians in Eastern and Western European have increased in recent years, this study sets out to understand the pressures that have distorted cultures both East and West, during the Cold War 1944 to 1989. Art Historians from North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the Russian Federation will record the discussions around Picasso within their own cultures - including the contradictions. It is with the contradictions that we will increase understanding.

The Battle for Picasso's Mind, is a quote from Tom Braden in 1994. Braden was the CIA Officer who put together the International Organizations Division, the organisation at the centre of America's cultural Cold War. (Stoner Saunders Who Paid the Piper p.438). The dominant image of the Cold War remains militaristic confrontation between USA and USSR personified by James Bond.

Picasso was also a controversial figure in the USSR. Ehrenburg wrote an essay in L'Unita in 1953 on the eve of Picasso's Rome/Milan retrospective in defence of Picasso's artistic freedom from Socialist Realism. Ehrenburg organised two exhibitions of Picasso's work in Moscow in 1956 and 1963. Ehrenburg wrote the novel The Thaw, which gave its name to an improvement in relations between USA and USSR after Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin. In November 1956, Picasso signed a letter to the PCF expressing profound anxiety about the suppression of the Hungarian workers' revolt by Russian tanks. Picasso series Rape of the Sabines was painted during the Cuba Missile Crisis 1961.