Annie Cohen-Solal, born in Algiers, is a doctor of letters, university professor and associate researcher at the Institute of Modern and Contemporary History. She held the position of cultural advisor in the United States, and led her teaching career from Berlin to Jerusalem via New York and Paris. Among his books, Sartre 1905-1980 (Gallimard, 1985), «Un jour, ils aura des peintres» (Gallimard, 2000, Prix Bernier de l'Académie des Beaux-Arts), Leo Castelli & les siens (Gallimard, 2010, prix Artcurial du livre d'art contemporain), Mark Rothko (Actes Sud, 2013), Magicians of the Earth: Back on a legendary exhibition with Jean-Hubert Martin (Martin Barré and Centre Pompidou editions, 2014), all translated into many languages. Her research focuses on the artist in issues of exile, uprooting and expatriation. Since 2016, she has been preparing Picasso l'étranger, an exhibition she curates at the Musée national de l'Histoire de l'Immigration, in partnership with the Musée national Picasso-Paris (from October 12, 2021 to February 13, 2022)."

A stranger named Picasso
2021 Femina Trial Award
"Why is Picasso «reported as an anarchist» at the Prefecture of Police, fifteen days before his first Parisian exhibition? Why on December 1, 1914 nearly seven hundred paintings, drawings and other works of his Cubist period are they sequestered by the French government for a period that lasts nearly ten years? Where does the almost total absence of his paintings in the country’s public collections come from until 1947? How to explain, finally, that Picasso never became a French citizen? If the work of the artist has aroused exhibitions, works and commentaries in exponential progression at the height of his immense talent, the situation of Picasso
«foreign» in France has paradoxically been neglected. It is this new angle that constitutes the subject of this book.
To enlighten it, it is necessary to exhume layers of buried documents, to find unexploited archives, to reopen, one by one, all the cards, to unfold each of the envelopes, to decipher the different handwritten writings. Then everything is organized differently and the status of the artist is much more complex than we imagined.
A foreigner named Picasso leads us into an astonishing investigation into the footsteps of the gifted artist, navigating as a great strategist in a France worked by its own tensions. We see him imposing his masterful work on the world, building his own networks and becoming a powerful vector of modernization of the country. A model to contemplate and perhaps follow."