When Harry Met Pablo

October 9, 2023
Journalist Algeo (All This Marvelous Potential) relates in this affable account a meeting between America’s 33rd president and one of the 20th century’s best-known artists. In June 1958, Harry and Bess Truman were on a grand Mediterranean tour when they met Pablo Picasso in Cannes, France. Truman and Picasso became unlikely friends—they visited not only the artist’s villa but several other locations in the French Mediterranean together, including the Chateau Grimaldi, a museum to which Picasso later donated significant numbers of his works. Truman did not become the modern art advocate that Picasso’s friend, Museum of Modern Art curator Alfred Barr, had hoped when he organized the meeting. Nor did Picasso, a committed communist, become a Cold Warrior, despite Truman’s attempts to convert him. But Picasso, who comes off as a rather prickly character, indulges with Truman in a rare deviation from his typical unfriendliness toward other famous figures. Alongside this entertaining travelogue, Algeo presents an institutional history of modern art in America, with a focus on the efforts of the Truman White House to promote modern American art abroad—notably abstract expressionists like Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock—as a potential cultural weapon in the Cold War. It adds up to an enjoyable slice of art history.