“When Picasso Spooked the FBI”

After waiting for two and a half years, Herbert Mitgang received details of the FBI file on Pablo Picasso at the end of 1990 under a Freedom of Information request and published some of his findings in this article shortly afterwards. Such revelations are part of revisionist historians’ attempts to expose what lay beneath official accounts of the USA since 1945. In this instance, under its director John Edgar Hoover, the FBI maintained a voluminous secret dossier on Picasso during the Cold War. Officials were concerned about the effect of his Communism on opinion in the USA, yet their interests also lay in how to use Picasso for propaganda purposes. The artist's name continued to appear in FBI references up until 1971, when he was nearly 90 years old.