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
Guernica (Picasso) allegedly asked him, upon seeing a photo of "Guernica" in his apartment, "Did you do that?" Picasso responded, "No, you did." The photographer Dora Maar—who had worked with Picasso since mid-1936, photographing his studio and teaching him the technique of cameraless photography— documented the stages "Guernica" went through on its way to completion. Apart from their documentary and publicity value, Maar's photographs "helped Picasso to eschew color and give the work the black-and-white immediacy of a photograph", according to John Richardson. The work was painted using a matte house paint specially formulated at Picasso's request to have the least possible