Hélène Parmelin in 1956

(Picture: ex-pcf.com)

(30.12.2022) Just like we have to know the Picasso of Ilya Ehrenburg, as well as the Picasso of Pierre Daix, we have to know the Picasso of Hélène Parmelin, writer, journalist, and long-time member of the French Communist Party (PCF). Parmelin (1915-1998) is misrepresented in the important study Gertje R. Utley dedicated to the ›Communist Years‹ of the painter in 2000. At the end of 1956 she was no longer the ardent Stalinist she might have been before (if, in fact, she ever was).
Parmelin, yes, she was an ardent communist, and kept on hoping for a (more) free communism up to the year of 1980, when, together with her husband, painter Édouard Pignon, she finally left the Party. But at the end of 1956 she was at the brink of leaving the Party already.
Parmelin is an important witness as to Picasso in 1956, even if she was, as one of the members of Picasso’s inner circle, not around the painter all of the time. And why? For example because she spent some time in the Soviet Union early in 1956. Parmelin, as well as Pierre Daix and Ilya Ehrenburg, had her own angle on Picasso; and whoever – in Picasso studies – is reading Parmelin and working with Parmelin, has to know her angle, her bias, her view of the central, towering figure, who was also a central, towering figure in her life. Not only as a fellow-member of the French Communist Party. But also, and primarily as a fellow communist.

Selected Literature:
Gertje R. Utley, Picasso. The Communist Years, New Haven/London 2000;
Hélène Parmelin, Les mystères de Moscou, Paris 1956;
Hélène Parmelin, Libérez les communistes, Paris 1979

(Picture: Argentina)

(Picture: portail-collections.imec-archives.com)

One) The Best Timing – or The Worst

In hindsight it does look like the very good choice of a journalist-writer – to travel the Soviet Union, immediately after the XX. Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1956. Because this is what Hélène Parmelin did. A book, published in the summer of the same year, resulted from that trip, but as a matter of fact, it had not been a good choice, because for what was happening the journalist-writer was not prepared for.
Perhaps she had seen it coming, as had Picasso: the revelations on Stalin; perhaps she already had a sense of what was happening. But she had not seen coming that, after the XX. Party Congress, the so-called ›Secret Speech‹ began to circulate also in the Soviet Union, and she knew that this did happen, but at this time, she did not know the content of the ›Secret Speech‹, and so her book has to be seen as a very interesting testimony (for specialists), of someone who was there (in the Soviet Union, at the time the ›Secret Speech‹ was beginning to circulate, and was read, by communists, to small communist audiences), but she did not possess the necessary keys to understand what exactly was happening. And this, for a journalist, is simply a worst case scenario. At the time, in the summer of 1956, when she published her book on her trip (primarily, but not only to Moscow), it was already outdated, because the world was getting to know the content of the ›Secret Speech‹, at about the same time as her book was published. And who would have taken notice of such book?

Two) At the Brink of Quitting the PCF

Hélène Parmelin, who, back in France, not only learned early that the ›Secret Speech‹ did exist (in fact she seems to have learned that already in the Soviet Union), but that the speech, as it did circulate, due to Polish copies, early in 1956 in French communist circles, was authentic. She seems never have been among the communist deniers of that speech, or among those communists, eager to ›frame‹ the ›Secret Speech‹ in a way that was more favourable to Stalin (with a certain percentage of a ›good Stalin‹ and a certain percentage of a ›bad› one).
Parmelin, actually, did support de-Stalinization early, and she certainly did not influence Picasso, at the end of 1956, as an ardent Stalinist. It was rather the contrary: while not being eager to blame the Soviet system as such, while uncertain as to the Hungarian Uprising (she might have been uncertain, if, in fact it was, as the communist ›framing‹ had it, a ›counterrevolution‹), she did explain why, at the end of 1956, she did not leave the Party: because she could not imagine a proletarian party, other than the PCF, outside the PCF, and her cultural roots were in the proletarian millieu. She regarded the proletarian millieu as her culture, her family, and, brief, as the source of her own vitality as a writer and activist.
In opposition she was, as far as the Party line was concerned, also in other areas (the arts; Algeria; birth control – against which the PCF was leading a campaign in 1956); and perhaps being in opposition is generally characteristic for Hélène Parmelin, also as a writer. As far as Picasso is concerned, it is obvious that Parmelin did like to have lively, passionate, sometimes wild conversations with Picasso as to the subject of the arts as well as to that of politics. Parmelin had wit (she spoke of possessing an ›inner clown‹) and intelligence, and as far as her own drama as a communist was concerned, she made simply less of that drama as a writer. Less than, for example, Pierre Daix. Perhaps it was equally painful for Parmelin, as it was for Daix, to get rid of one’s illusions, but it seems that it was a different kind of drama for Parmelin, not something that was decided relatively early (Daix only waited for Picasso to have died, to leave the Party in 1974), something fundamentally and tragically painful, and perhaps Parmelin did stick longer and more decidedly to her illusions, so that it might have been impossible to revise her own certainties in more that a fragmentary way. Because this is what Parmelin did: to speak about her journey as a militant and as a communist, here and there, and also in her writings on Picasso, but mainly in her pamphlet of 1979, in which she equalled Stalinism to a cancerous ulcer in the Party, of which communism had to be freed.

Three) The Picasso of Hélène Parmelin (vs. the Picasso of Ilya Ehrenburg and the Picasso of Pierre Daix)

The Picasso of Hélène Parmelin is the ally against the (Stalinist) Party line of the PCF. It is not a Picasso, as in Pierre Daix, a Picasso who yet was painfully entangled in politics, but in some way still did stand above such trivialities, towering, due to his creative freedom above everything. Parmelin, on the contrary, needed the ally, who was complaining again and again, and very stereotypically, for example that, by the leadership of the PCF, he was not taken seriously if he tried to talk politics with them (in fact, Picasso seems rather to have avoided to enter into such debates, and stayed on very friendly terms with the family of Maurice Thorez, leader of the PCF, also in the years after 1956). The Picasso of Hélène Parmelin embodied, to a large degree, her own standpoint, even if, due to other sources, Picasso was also, to a good degree, opportunistic, and centered, in the end, in his own art, and not in political debate. The Picasso of Ilya Ehrenburg, at least in the writings of Ehrenburg, is even more obviously a construct: because it seems that, in Ehrenburg, Picasso is always the Picasso of the Montparnasse years at around 1917, because Ehrenburg could not or did not want to raise the complicated questions of being entangled in Stalinism – with Picasso –, and especially of how exactly.

Four) Bad Timing Again

When Hélène Parmelin published, in 1979, her most ardent and partly autobiographical pamphlet, aiming at ›liberating the communists‹, it was bad timing again. Because what followed was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and in 1980, also Hélène Parmelin had finally enough and left the French Communist Party.
It had been a long way from, let’s say, being a somewhat reserved supporter of Stalin, to finally denounce Stalinism as a cancerous ulcer, from which the PCF had to be freed. And there was the tragedy of an intelligent and humorous person behind that rage that expressed in that pamphlet. Hélène Parmelin would deserve a biographer with a sense for all the aspects of that drama, but from the viewpoint of Picasso studies it must be primarily about to know about her biases, and about ›her‹ Picasso being, as that of Pierre Daix and Ilya Ehrenburg, and as that of every biographer and writer, a figure that is, to some degree, constructed by a writer. Which does not mean, or better: I would not go as far as claiming that this figure is simply an invention, no, it is simply someone as seen by someone, due to personal experiences, values, knowledge, that leads to tranmitting an image of Picasso in a certain way. And it is up to Picasso studies to know and to compare these diverse images, to discuss them, and to draw – this is the most important lesson – from all sources available. So that Picasso can appear as the multi-faceted figure that he – obviously – was.

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