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Pierre Daix (1922 -2014)

The above photo of Pierre Daix with Picasso and Helen Parmelin (French novelist, journalist, and art critic) in 1954 is posted in the Paris Picassso Museum just outside the conference room that bears his name.

Pierre Daix wrote the following eloquent description of the Picasso's Peace Scarf when he was the Editor of Lettres Francaises:

"The Dove of Peace, a symbol whose origins are shrouded in the mists of ancient iconography, is giving new life and meaning in this design by Pablo Picasso.  A dove, reduced to its essential form, carries the olive branch upward with powerful thrusts of its wings.  The bird does not sit or float lazily on the updrafts of a warm and friendly world, but actively works to carry its message to an inimicable one.

The races of Man are painted in large, simple forms with a minimum of border distinction.  In this way Picasso graphically illustrates his realization that human beings share a heritage and that it is the artificial definitions which have prevented the development of a truly universal brotherhood.  The faces of Man, stylized representations of the Negro, Indian, Asian and Caucasian, form a square which embraces the brilliant blue shield upon which the dove flies. The forehead of one face becomes the chin of another at each corner, unifying the composition and the concept. Each profile is set against a color of another race, thus strengthening the composition and subtly unifying it.  Free spots of color, picked up from the central square, are repeated in the border. 

This is a joyful, hopeful picture which contrasts dramatically with the apocalyptic vision of war which Picasso thrust upon a shocked world in Guernica which is on loan from the artist to the Museum of Modem Art in New York City. "

Writer and Editor in Chief  LETTRES FRANCAISES

Pierre Daix was born in Ivry-sur-Seine on May 24, 1922, and died in Paris on November 2, 2014. He studied at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris before his preparatory class was transferred to Rennes at the beginning of the Second World War. In 1939, he joined the French Communist Party (P.C.F.) and entered the Resistance from the Occupation. Arrested after the demonstration on November 11, 1940 on Place de l'Étoile, he was incarcerated in nine French prisons before being deported to Mauthausen in Austria. At the Liberation, he became head of the private secretariat of Charles Tillon, Minister of Air, Armaments and Reconstruction. From 1947, he worked at Éditions sociales and the communist daily Ce soir, of which he became editorial director. He was mainly, for nearly twenty years, from 1953 to 1972, editor-in-chief of French Letters to Louis Aragon.

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The Pabloaf

One of the more unusual replicas of Picasso's famous peace scarf - the Pabloaf!

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1951 Berlin Youth Festival

The 1951 Berlin Youth Festival was an international event that took place in East Berlin, Germany from July 25 to August 5, 1951. The festival was organized by the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), a communist-led international youth organization, and was hosted by the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

The festival was attended by more than 26,000 young people from over 100 countries, including many countries that were behind the Iron Curtain at the time. The festival aimed to promote international solidarity, peace, and cultural exchange among young people from around the world.

The festival included a wide range of cultural and sporting events, such as concerts, dances, theater performances, and athletic competitions. The festival also included political events, such as speeches and discussions on issues related to peace, democracy, and socialism.

The 1951 Berlin Youth Festival was a highly politicized event that reflected the Cold War tensions of the time. The festival was seen by many in the West as a propaganda tool of the Soviet Union and its allies, and was criticized for promoting communist ideology and political propaganda.

Despite these criticisms, the 1951 Berlin Youth Festival was seen as a major success by many participants, who valued the opportunity to meet and interact with young people from around the world and to learn about different cultures and political systems. The festival helped to promote international understanding and cooperation among young people, and it remains an important symbol of international solidarity and cultural exchange during the Cold War era.

Content courtesy of Chat GPT

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About the Peace Scarf

At the age of 70, in 1951 Pablo Picasso created a peace scarf for the 5,000 young communists that were headed in early August to the 3rd International Youth Festival in Berlin.   It was almost a square meter and shows his white peace dove surrounded by the half moon profiled faces of the 4 continents (Europe, America, Asia, Africa) European, African, Asiatic, and American Indian features. In handwriting on its borders it says, “Festival Mondial de la Jeunesse et des Etudiants Pour la Prix, Berlin 5-19 Aout 1951.  The Peace Scarf was printed on cotton and silk, signed by Picasso, and sold for 450 francs at the Jeunesse Montmartre office. 

The Cold War between the Soviet Union and Western democracies was in full swing in 1951 and Picasso believed in a post World War 2 world that communism held out a greater promise for peace than Western democracies.    As a result he agreed to do this scarf for this youthful communist parade and party that was held in Berlin in August of 1951.

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Origin of the Peace Scarf Design Elements

Picasso's artistic promotion of a dove for peace began at the 1949 Paris Peace Conference, reflecting his personal interest in peace for all of humanity. At the 1949 Peace Conference Picasso met Paul Roberson and became aware of the challenges of the black population - as well as Asian and Indian leaders.   His 1951 Berlin peace scarf was the aggregation of his symbols for peace with the dove at the center surrounded by the four different human races.

When Picasso signed the Nice “Peace scarf against atomic weapons in 1950” he realized the popularity of peace scarves for young people - a revelation that probably led him to design the peace scarf for the Berlin youth festival in 1951.  

In the photo shown below Picasso is signing the 1950 Peace Rally scarf for girl members attending the Communist sponsored International Youth for Peace rally in Nice, France. The young girl with her hand on the table is Alice Hornung, now 86, living in Germany and still active in the peace movement. According to Alice: “we weren't art connoisseurs, we were young people who worked for peace. All had had war experiences in their families or in their own lives. We were shocked by the consequences of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our aim was to do something for peace. Suddenly we were greeted by the great Picasso, whom the whole world worshiped - an amazing experience.”

Picasso Signs for Commies These girl members of the German Communist youth organization, attending the Communist sponsored International Youth for Peace rally at Nice, France, don't seem to mind going against the party line as they push and shove to get Pablo Picasso's autograph. Not only has the Communist Party denounced autograph hunting as "a decadent capitalistic pastime”, it has also labeled Picasso’s ultra-modern art as "the product of corrupt capitalism.”Above photo caption is from from the Palo Alto, CA Peninsula-Times Tribune (August 22, 1950).

Note: According to Julia Friedrich, curator of the Picasso Shared and Divided exhibit at the Museum Ludwig “The communist youth delegation (FDJ) came from Saarland, which did not belong to Germany before the Saar referendum 1955. I'm pretty sure these young people didn’t go against the party line.”

The Nice peace scarf (shown in detail above) from the Picasso signing newspaper photo. This unique scarf was signed by Pablo Picasso, French journalist Pierre Abraham, French Communist party leader Jean Kanapa, French naval officer Louis de Villefosse, Surrealist movement founder Paul Eluard, French novelist Dominique Desanti, French resistance leader André Verdet, British trade union leader Ken Gill (see his video on this site), French- Armenian poet Reuben Melik, German author Stephan Hermlin, Dutch documentary film maker Joris Ivens, and Nobel Prize winning Pablo Neruda.  The scarf has multiple dedications to Lucienne Tilman (1918 - 1977).  Organized by the Mouvement de la Paix, for “prohibition of atomic weapons”. This cloth scarf was made for the International Youth Meetings from August 13 - 20, 1950.

Scarf from the van Zuiden Picasso Scarf Collection

Shown above: Vintage 1950 Second World Congress of the Partisans of Peace scarf with white dove designed by Pablo Picasso. Made from a crepe silk.

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About Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) was undoubtedly the most famous artist of the twentieth century.  During his artistic career, which lasted more than 75 years, he created thousand of works using all kind materials, parenting, sculptures, prints, and ceramics.   He almost single-handedly created modern art.   Picasso pioneered virtually every revolution in European art and fathered American abstract art, which discarded its reliance on subject matter but which is based on his techniques and forms.  He changed art more profoundly than any other artist of this century.   First famous for his pioneering role in Cubism, Picasso continued to develop his art with a pace and vitality comparable to the accelerated technological and cultural changes of the twentieth century.   Each change embodied a radical new idea, and it might be said that Picasso lived several artistic lifetimes.

Picasso's styles are so diverse that they change not only from decade to decade but from day to day.  His creative mentality enables him to creat a soothing mother and child in a monumental classical style bathed in pastels, as well as twisting, crudely angular, multifaceted and stridently colored female who is torturously complex.  The inspiration for both paintings in the same woman.  To Picasso this is not an anomaly, for he sees that every living person is a combination of opposing forces.

He has said the is belief is in existing itself, which gives him a limitless setting from which to draw his ideas.  He does not understand beauty in concepts of a setting sun over lush fields ready for harvest or sophisticated personages sitting in splendid elegance.  His curiosity, hence, his art, includes the most commonplace as well as the most spectacular and marvelous manifestations of life.

To use Picasso's often quote words: "I paint not what I see, I paint what I know."   His greatness lies in his ability to formalize his finding into comprehensible visual terms.

Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, Spain. The son of an academic painter, José Ruiz Blasco, he began to draw at an early age. In 1895 the family moved to Barcelona, and Picasso studied there at La Lonja, the academy of fine arts. His visit to Horta de Ebro from 1898 to 1899 and his association with the group at the café Els Quatre Gats in about 1899 were crucial to his early artistic development. Picasso’s first exhibition took place in Barcelona in 1900, and that fall he went to Paris for the first of several stays during the early years of the century. Picasso settled in Paris in April 1904, and his circle of friends soon included Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Gertrude and Leo Stein, as well as two dealers, Ambroise Vollard and Berthe Weill.

His style developed from the Blue Period (1901–04) to the Rose Period (1905) to the pivotal work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and the subsequent evolution of Cubism from an Analytic phase (ca. 1908–11) to its Synthetic phase (beginning in 1912–13). Picasso’s collaboration on ballet and theatrical productions began in 1916. Soon thereafter, his work was characterized by neoclassicism and a renewed interest in drawing and figural representation. In the 1920s the artist and his wife, Olga (whom he had married in 1918), continued to live in Paris, to travel frequently, and to spend their summers at the beach. From 1925 to the 1930s Picasso was involved to a certain degree with the Surrealists, and from the fall of 1931 he was especially interested in making sculpture. In 1932, with large exhibitions at the Galeries Georges Petit, Paris, and the Kunsthaus Zürich, and the publication of the first volume of Christian Zervos’s catalogue raisonné, Picasso’s fame increased markedly.

By 1936 the Spanish Civil War had profoundly affected Picasso, the expression of which culminated in his painting Guernica (1937, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid).  Picasso’s association with the Communist Party began in 1944. From the late 1940s he lived in the south of France. Among the enormous number of exhibitions that were held during the artist’s lifetime, those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1939 and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, in 1955 were most significant. In 1961 the artist married Jacqueline Roque, and they moved to Mougins. There Picasso continued his prolific work in painting, drawing, prints, ceramics, and sculpture until his death on April 8, 1973.

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International Theater Institute World Congress, 1983

The 20th ITI Congress was held in Berlin from June 5-12, 1983. The theme was "World Theatre - World Understanding - World Peace." and the promotional poster for this congress used Picasso's 1951 Berlin Peace Scarf (see below).

International Theater Institute, ITI, was created on the initiative of the first UNESCO Director General, Sir Julian Huxley, and the playwright and novelist JB Priestly, in 1948, just after the Second World War. This was the beginning of the Cold War, when the Iron Curtain divided East and West. The aim of the founders of ITI was to build a cultural organization for the performing arts that was aligned with UNESCO’s goals on culture, education, the arts, mutual understanding and peace. It focused its endeavors on improving the status of all members of the performing arts professions. They envisaged an organization that created platforms for international exchange and for engagement in the education of the performing arts, for beginners and professionals alike, as well as using the performing arts for mutual understanding and peace.

ITI has now developed into the world’s largest organization for the performing arts, with more than 90 centers spread across every continent.

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Moscow, 1957: The Sixth Youth Festival ‘Dove Of Peace’ - Colombe De La Paix’, Silkscreen On Scarf

This linen scarf shown above was designed by Picasso to commemorate the Global Festival of Youth held in Moscow in 1957.

The 6th World Festival of Youth and Students opened in Moscow on the 28th of July 1957. It was of great importance historically as it marked the first time the Soviet Union had opened up its doors to the rest of the world under the bold political changes initiated by Nikita Khrushchev. The Luzhniki Sports Complex, Druzhba Park, Tourist Hotel Complex, Hotel Ukraina and Leninskiye Gory (today’s Vorobyovy Gory) metro station were all built for the festival. Themed flags and placards lined the city. The festival’s main symbol was Pablo Picasso’s famous drawing Dove of Peace, and the emblem was a flower with five petals symbolizing the continents. The foreign policy of the USSR was characterized by tension: the Cold War had been going on for 10 years. Receiving guests from across the globe, the Soviet Union was to demonstrate openness, friendliness and modernity. That wasn’t a difficult task at the height of the short and bright period of the Khrushchev Thaw, a time of creative freedom, great scientific discoveries, new music, new filmmaking and a new way of life, design, style and fashion.

Additional scarves from the 1957 Moscow Festival of Youth depicting Picasso's doves and the flags of the participating nations.

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Vienna Youth Festival, 1959

Picasso repeatedly created designs for humanitarian and democratic organizations. The peace scarf he created for the 7th World Festival of Youth and Students, which took place in Vienna in 1959, features hands and doves in blue on creamy color background. This design was later used as a postcard design for the 8th World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace and Friendship, Helsinki, Finland, July 27 to August 5th, 1962.

Youth festival slogan: “For Peace and Friendship and peaceful coexistence”

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Exhibitions and Museum Displays of the Peace Scarf

The peace scarf has been on display over the years in numerous museums, including the Picasso Museum in Paris, the Musee Municipal d'Art et d'Histoire de la Ville de Saint-Denis.

Picasso Museum, Picasso!, 2015

London Tate, Peace and Freedom Exhibit, 2010

Italy Venice, Il Tempo de la Pace, 2006 (also on exhibit book cover)

St. Tropez, Picasso, Choice of a Collector, 2019

Museum Ludwig, 2021-2022, Collogne, Germany (image above)

Tapestry Museum

St. Denis Museum

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World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) World Festival of Youth and Students

The peace scarf (or variants of the races of humanity and dove theme) was used again in several subsequent peace festivals and congresses.

The World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) is an international youth organization, recognized by the United Nations as an international youth non-governmental organization, and has historically characterized itself as anti-imperialist and left-wing. WFDY was founded in London in 1945 as a broad international youth movement, organized in the context of the end of World War II with the aim of uniting youth from the Allies behind an anti-fascist platform that was broadly pro-peace, anti-nuclear war, expressing friendship between youth of the capitalist and socialist nations. The WFDY Headquarters are in Budapest, Hungary. The main event of WFDY is the World Festival of Youth and Students. The last festival was held in Sochi, Russia, in October 2017. It was one of the first organizations granted general consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council.

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Codello “Quatre Visages” Silk Scarf, 1950

Original silkscreen print on silk, circa 1950, signed by Picasso with a printed signature, attached is a label showing the brand as “Codello”. Note the resemblance of these faces to the Quatre Visages ceramic plates as a precursor design for the Berlin Peace Scarf.

Size:  51 x 51.5 cms Note: Codello is a prominent Fashion brand which makes ladies scarves. It was founded by Rinaldo Codello, who was originally from Turin and moved his design house in the 1920’s to Munich.

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Commemorative Postal Issues of the 1951 Berlin Youth Festival and Pablo Picasso

These are all commemorative postal issues from countries that directly supported the 3rd Worth Youth Festival in Berlin - Germany, China, and Romania. The commemorative Russian postage stamp of Picasso and his Peace Dove (shown below) was printed 100 years after his birth.

Commemorative covers and postal stamps from the van Zuiden Picasso Peace Scarf collection

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Picasso Peace Scarf on Book and Exhibition Covers

Picasso - Il Tempo Della Peace

In 2006, 125 years after the birth of Pablo Picasso, the Brolo Center of Art and Culture dedicated a retrospective to the great Spanish master, retracing one of the happiest periods of his life and reconstructing the encounter and the most significant productions made by the painter with a technique as old as lithography. Eighty works on display, including graphic works, drawings, posters and rare archival documents, a precious exhibition to admire once more the genius of Picasso. The conference guide used an image of the Picasso Peace Scarf for it's cover page - as shown above.

L’Humanite - “Picasso, 145 dessins pour la presse et les organisations démocratiques”

This 1973 book deals with the artist’s involvement with the Peace Movement, included are 145 paintings and drawings intended for use by "democratic" organizations. Of all the paintings showcased in this book the Picasso Peace Scarf he created for the 1951 Berlin Youth Festival was featured on the book's front cover.

L'Humanité was founded in 1904 by Jean Jaures, a leader of the French Section of Worker's International. Jaurès also edited the paper until his assassination on July 31, 1914.

When the Socialists split at the 1920 Tours Congress, the Communists took control of L'Humanité. Therefore, it became a communist paper despite its socialist origin. The PCF has published it ever since. The PCF owns 40 per cent of the paper with the remaining shares held by staff, readers and "friends" of the paper.

Picasso Shared and Divided: The Artist and His Image in East and West Germany, Exhibtion from Sept. 25, 2021 - January 30, 2022

What do we as­so­ci­ate with Pab­lo Pi­cas­so? And what as­so­ci­a­tions with him did the Ger­man peo­ple have in mind dur­ing the post-war years, when he was at the height of his fame? Far more than we do: This is the main idea of the ex­hi­bi­tion, which re­veals a for­got­ten breadth, ten­sion, and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of th­ese ap­pro­pri­a­tions. It deals not on­ly with the artist, but with his au­di­ence, which in­ter­pret­ed Pi­cas­so’s art in very dif­fer­ent ways in the cap­i­tal­ist West and in the so­cial­ist East. The Ger­man Pi­cas­so was di­vid­ed, but this di­vi­sion al­so sti­m­u­lat­ed the re­cep­tion: Be­cause ev­ery­one ques­tioned his art, it had some­thing to say for ev­ery­one.

Julia Friedrich, the exhibit’s curator, explained to me why she used the Picasso Peace Cover on the cover of the exhibition book: “The motif, the faces in their four fields, corresponds with the German exhibition title "Der geteilte Picasso." "Geteilt" has at least three meanings: "divided" (four separate fields, faces, so-called "races"), "shared" (the four separate elements united on one scarf, under the sign of the dove), and "communicated" ("mitgeteilt": The shared use/reception spurred the communication of this art; it had something to say to everyone, even to those who rejected it).”

Museum exhibit at the Museum Ludwig in Colonge, Germany. Curated by: Julia Friedrich

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1951 Berlin World Youth Festival

The 3rd World Youth Festival of Youth and Students (WFYS) was held from August 5th to August 19th, 1951 in Berlin at the Communist Party Leader Walter Ulbricht Stadium.

It was organized by the World Federation of Democratic Youth. The motto of the festival was "Peace and Friendship against Nuclear Weapons"

The third WFYS was held in a period of growing international tension between the Soviet Union and Western Powers. It took place against the background of the Korean War and the spread of communism in Central Europe and China. The festival was meant to showcase the young German Democratic Republic formed in the Soviet sector of postwar Germany.

West German police and the US military tried to prevent international delegates from crossing the western sector of Germany to attend the festival. In response, an operation was arranged to smuggle young people across the country in small groups. Jan Myrdal wrote about incidents where young people were shot at when trying to cross the West German border. Ken Gill's, a former British Trade Union Leader, created the video interview below highlighting the challenges for international visitors to attend the youth festival.

65 years after this Peace Festival was held my wife and I travelled to the former location of this stadium in East Berlin in February, 2016 where I held up another youth festival peace scarf and a photo of a dove parade float. Note the location of the Berlin Cathedral (Berliner Dom) in each of these photos in the background. The Berliner Dom was damaged several times by Allied bombardments during the course of the Second World War. On May 24, 1944, a napalm bomb entered the dome and caused a destructive fire that destroyed most of the cathedral. The Berliner Dom was rebuilt after the war.

Another youth festival peace scarf design with the dove/olive branch, youth holding hands, and participating nations theme is shown above. (produced by Karavan)

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Picasso Peace Scarf Inspired Art Works

The fundamental themes of Picasso's Peace Scarf, one of the united colors of race, pigeons, interlocking faces (hands) became the main artistic components of several post 1951 World Youth Festival posters and scarves (as shown in the photos above).

Peace Scarf Artists for World Youth Festivals (from top photo to bottom): - Z. Kaia, Warsaw, 1955 - Jay Lenica, Warsaw, 1955 - Joe Simboli, Antiwar poster, 1968 - Shevtsov G, Berlin, 1973 - Jean Pierre Chabrol, Bucharest, 1953 (available in white, red, or blue backgounds) - Herve Moran, Warsaw, 1955 - Fernand Leger, France, 1953 Freedom, Peace, Solidarity was a screen print of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the convicted and executed couple accused of spying for the Soviet Union in 1953. The scarf was designed by Léger and printed on cotton scarves sold to raise money and awareness for the World Peace Movement around 1950. Léger served in the French army during WWI, and saw first-hand the atrocities of war. After WWII, Léger became an active advocate for peace, and in 1948 became a founder-member of the National Council of the World Peace Movement. 

Bucharest IV World Youth Festival Poster

The poster shown below for the Bucharest Youth Festival in 1953 credits the 3 prior Youth Festivals in Prague (1947), Budapest (1949), and Berlin (1951).

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The Dove that Goes Boom: Dove Satire

Picasso's lithograph, La Colombe (The Dove, 1949), a traditional, realistic picture of a pigeon, without an olive branch, was chosen as the emblem for the World Peace Council in Paris in April 1949 (see photo above). At the 1950 World Peace Congress in Sheffield, Picasso said that his father had taught him to paint doves, concluding, "I stand for life against death; I stand for peace against war."

At the 1952 World Peace Congress in Berlin, Picasso's Dove was depicted in a banner above the stage. Doves are often associated with the concept of peace and pacifism. The dove, sometimes a nervous and temperamental bird, also embodies the difficulty and fragilities of peace, a concept that is of itself ethereal and elusive. They often appear in political cartoons, on banners and signs at events promoting peace (such as the Olympic Games, at various anti-war/anti-violence protests, etc.), and in pacifist literature.

Anti-communists had their own take on the peace dove: the group Paix et Liberté distributed posters titled "La colombe qui fait BOUM" (the dove that goes BOOM), showing the peace dove metamorphosing into a Soviet tank. In the Herblock satirical political cartoon shown below the shackled dove is quoted as saying "On no, not again, I'm tired."