Many of the artists featured in the special exhibition Van Gogh to Pollock: Modern Rebels, Masterworks from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery are also represented in the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum. This is the fifth in a series of blog posts that will highlight Milwaukee’s artworks during the run of the exhibition.
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) is not usually considered a political artist. His favorite artistic subjects were still-lifes, portraits, harlequins, and other seemingly uncontroversial images.
But in some key instances, world events were an important influence on him. We don’t have to look far to find an example: the Milwaukee Art Museum’s The Cock of the Liberation (Le Coq de la Liberation), painted by Picasso in 1944.