Pablo Picasso Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist André Breton 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". Picasso was against the intervention of the United Nations and the United States in the Korean War and he depicted it in "Massacre in Korea". The art critic Kirsten Hoving Keen says that it is "inspired by reports of American atrocities" and considers it one of Picasso's communist works. In 1962, he received the Lenin Peace Prize. Biographer
Pablo Picasso by which time the artist had started to sign his work "Picasso"; before he had signed "Pablo Ruiz y Picasso". Picasso's Blue Period (1901–1904), characterized by sombre paintings rendered in shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colours, began either in Spain in early 1901, or in Paris in the second half of the year. Many paintings of gaunt mothers with children date from the Blue Period, during which Picasso divided his time between Barcelona and Paris. In his austere use of colour and sometimes doleful subject matter – prostitutes and beggars are frequent subjects – Picasso