section_path: Political views
section_name: Political views
paragraph_text: Political views
  
  Picasso remained aloof from the Catalan independence movement during his youth, despite expressing general support and being friendly with activists within it. He did not join the armed forces for any side or country during World War I, the Spanish Civil War, or World War II. As a Spanish citizen living in France, Picasso was under no compulsion to fight against the invading Germans in either world war. In 1940, he applied for French citizenship, but it was refused on the grounds of his "extremist ideas evolving towards communism". This information was not revealed until 2003.
  
  At the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Picasso was 54 years of age. Soon after hostilities began, the Republicans appointed him "director of the Prado, albeit in absentia", and "he took his duties very seriously", according to John Richardson, supplying the funds to evacuate the museum's collection to Geneva. The war provided the impetus for Picasso's first overtly political work. He expressed anger and condemnation of Francisco Franco and fascists in The Dream and Lie of Franco (1937), which was produced "specifically for propagandistic and fundraising purposes". This surreal fusion of words and images was intended to be sold as a series of postcards to raise funds for the Spanish Republican cause.
  
  In 1944, Picasso joined the French Communist Party. He attended the 1948 World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace in Poland, and in 1950 received the Stalin Peace Prize from the Soviet government. A portrait of Joseph Stalin made by Picasso in 1953 drew Party criticism due to being insufficiently realistic, though he remained a loyal member of the Communist Party until his death. His dealer, D-H. Kahnweiler, a socialist, termed Picasso's communism "sentimental" rather than political, saying "He has never read a line of Karl Marx, nor of Engels of course." In a 1945 interview with Jerome Seckler, Picasso stated: "I am a Communist and my painting is Communist painting.... But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in a special way to show my politics." His commitment to communism, common among continental intellectuals and artists at the time, has long been the subject of some controversy; a notable demonstration thereof was a quote by Salvador Dalí (with whom Picasso had a rather strained relationship):
  
  Picasso es pintor, yo también;... Picasso es español, yo también; Picasso es comunista, yo tampoco. (Picasso is a painter, so am I;... Picasso is a Spaniard, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.)
  
  In the late 1940s, his old friend surrealist poet André Breton, who was a Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist, was more blunt; refusing to shake hands with Picasso, he told him: "I don't approve of your joining the Communist Party nor with the stand you have taken concerning the purges of the intellectuals after the Liberation." As a communist, Picasso opposed the intervention of the United Nations and the United States in the Korean War, and depicted it in Massacre in Korea. The art critic Kirsten Hoving Keen wrote that it was "inspired by reports of American atrocities" and considered it one of Picasso's communist works.
  
  On 9 January 1949, Picasso created Dove, a black and white lithograph. It was used to illustrate a poster at the 1949 World Peace Council and became an iconographic image of the period, known as "The dove of peace". Picasso's image was used around the world as a symbol of the Peace Congresses and communism.
  
  In 1962, he received the Lenin Peace Prize. Biographer and art critic John Berger felt his talents as an artist were "wasted" by the communists. According to Jean Cocteau 's diaries, Picasso once said to him in reference to the communists: "I have joined a family, and like all families, it's full of shit."