Pablo Picasso of postcards to raise funds for the Spanish Republican cause. In 1944, Picasso joined the French Communist Party, attended the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace in Poland, and in 1950 received the Stalin Peace Prize from the Soviet government. Party criticism in 1953 of his portrait of Stalin as insufficiently realistic cooled Picasso's interest in Soviet politics, 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
Picasso: Magic, Sex & Death he gave her an orientalist cast in his works featuring her. Orientalism also featured in his immense new house at Cannes, the Villa de Californie ("La Californie"), of which he proved, for a change, very "house proud". In his last major artistic phase, Picasso tried to "cannibalize" the works of his favorite "Old Masters’’, including Rembrandt, van Gogh and, most notably, Velázquez—he did 40 variations of "Las Meninas". Picasso’s penultimate household was at Château of Vauvenargues (Richardson was among the first guests) which included a swath of the mountainside of Cézanne’s famous Montagne Sainte-Victoire. In 1961, Picasso finally married Jacqueline