Original article: https://vietnamnet.vn/vn/giai-tri/picasso-co-mot-hoa-si-nguyen-ai-quoc-21370.html?fbclid=IwAR2Fm2WWA50BDv5HqOJKfT27aj9uUngONdQK3PdcuTMgFSWb8kMzXyTPbx4
French translation(The only "foreign" source I can find): https://www.lecourrier.vn/ho-chi-minh-et-picasso/461322.html
Summary:
According to my country state media, Ho met Picasso in 1911 at a hotel- the beginning of their friendship. Nguyen Ai Quoc (pseudonym of Ho Chi Minh at the time) also exchanged with other leftist writers like Romain Rolland alongside the two co-founders of a group called Clarté -Paul Vaillant Couturier and Henri Barbusse.
In 1946, Ho returned to France to participate in the Fontainebleau Agreements and snatched the chance to visit Picasso. In the meeting between the two, Picasso also drawn a portrait of Ho and then gave it to him afterward. Allegedly, the sketch has been missing since the end of the Indochina war.
Can anyone clear this up for me? I can't find any independent sources on this matter.
Indeed, the only source for that story in the book of Cần Thư Công, Bác Hồ - một tình yêu bao la, published in 1992, where he quotes HCM's former secretary, Vũ Đình Huỳnh (1905–1990). Biographies of HCM (Duiker, Brocheux, Trang-Gaspard, Ruscio) and Picasso (Richardson for the 1920s, Utley for post WW2, Françoise Gilot's memoir for 1946) do not mention Ho and Picasso hanging out together in the 1920s or 1946, let alone being friends. Still, could it have been possible?
1919-1923
First, the date of 1911 given in the article is wrong. At that time HCM was mostly at sea working as a sailor, travelling around the world. He saw France only in ports, notably Marseille and Le Havre, where he worked for some time as a gardener. He could theoretically have gone to Paris and met Picasso, but the other names cited in the story only make sense if the encounter took place after WW1. HCM returned to France possibly in 1917 but more probably in 1919 where he was noticed by the police.
The activities of HCM (then known as Nguyên Ái Quôc and who signed Nguyen-ai-Quâc in the newspapers) between 1919 and 1923 in France are known with a good level of detail, thanks to the extensive police work dedicated to the surveillance of that pesky "Annamite agitator". Informers reported on what he did, read, wrote, saw, sometimes even on what he ate or on his health (he ran a 40°C fever when he checked in Hopital Cochin for a flu!). They also copied his private notes and his letters. For the curious, the entire surveillance files and reports have been digitized and can be accessed on line here.
After the Congrès de Tours (1920), HCM was no longer just that shy, bright-eyed Annamite but a well-known activist, almost a public figure, who had had several face-to-face chats with the Minister of Colonies himself, Albert Sarraut.
And he was not just an activist who wrote fiery papers in the Humanité and other radical left-wing newpapers and participated in political meetings to denounce colonisation. A true Parisian, HCM had a French girlfriend (Marie Brière), he went to art shows (le Salon d'Automne in 1920), to museums, to concert halls (the Olympia). He had a lot of friends, mostly in left-wing circles - as claimed by Vũ Đình Huỳnh, he knew activists (and later communists) Henri Barbusse and Paul Vaillant-Couturier - but also in the art world. According to Duiker, he met celebrities such as the singer-actor Maurice Chevalier and writer Colette. He wrote a play, gave conferences (on spiritism!) and he participated in November 1922 in an art show at the Salle Auguste-Comte, rue Saint-Séverin, where he exhibited artworks. The show was organized by a free-thinker lawyer, Lucien Barquissau (who shows up in the police files); the other painters seem to have been mostly amateurs but there were several professional ones, including two minor figures of modernism: Wladimir de Terlikowski and Louis Anquetin (Le Radical, November 15, 1922). In addition to his photo retouching work, HCM also drew pictures for his newspaper Le Paria, and advertised in magazines for his "Artistic portraits" (20 francs without frame, 40 francs with frame) (L’Émancipateur, April 15, 1923).
In the early 1920s, Picasso was already famous and he did contribute pictures to Barbusse's magazine Clarté (July 1922), a few months after Nguyên Ái Quôc started editing Le Paria (April 1922). However, Picasso was at that time staying out of politics: being a foreigner like HCM, he could be expelled anytime if authorities decided so. Picasso only abandoned fully this apolitical stance at the time of the Spanish Civil war. If he met Nguyên Ái Quôc, it would have been through mutual acquaintances in the Clarté group, or from people like Montparnasse painter Terlikowski, rather than out of political sympathy. As for Picasso finding that HCM's drawings in the Paria showed his "beautiful soul", it looks a little bit hagiographic - communist leaders are perfect human beings! - but then HCM may have done great art for the show of the Salle Auguste-Comte. We just do not know.
What is sure is that Picasso's name does not appear in the police files related to HCM. I only had a brief look at it but biographers had trawled those files for decades and never have noted the presence of Picasso. Of course, the informers were mostly occupied with his political activities, so a couple of chats with the apolitical Picasso may have been found irrelevant and not worth mentioning. The painter does not appear either in memoirs of people who knew HCM at the time, or in HCM's own stories about this time. Evidence of absence etc.: they may have seen each other at some point but there is nothing that suggests that they were "friends".
Summer 1946
In June 1946, HCM came to France for the Fontainebleau conference, now as President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. He was in Paris from the 22 June to the 15 September. Picasso, now a legendary painter, was a member of the French Communist Party since 1944. He was also a member of the Association France-Vietnam, founded a few days before HCM's arrival (I don't know when he became a member though). Picasso was then living (and very in love) with his new girlfriend Françoise Gilot, and both left Paris for Southern France in early July and stayed in Golfe-Juan until October. So there was a brief time frame, from late June to early July 1946, when Picasso and Ho could have met.
But now, we have the same problem as in 1919-1923: except for the Vũ Đình Huỳnh account, there is no mention of that meeting anywhere, by anyone. Françoise Gilot did not leave Picasso's side during that period and does not talk about her lover meeting a former friend, now a communist head of state who was making the headlines. And, even more importantly, HCM actually wrote a daily during those months (Nhật ký hành trình của Hồ Chủ tịch – Bốn tháng sang Pháp) where he details his activities (day by day, sometimes hour per hour) and the numerous people he met: politicians, activists, and artists. It's a real Who's Who of 1946 France. He talks about the Paris-based painter Vũ Cao Đàm (who made a bust of him) for instance and about meeting journalist Andrée Viollis and the other cofounders of the Association France-Vietnam. The daily was not meant for publication so it remains quite neutral, mixing simple notes about what he did and the people he met with comments about France. But he never mentions Picasso.
Conclusion
In both cases, the meeting of Hồ Chí Minh and Picasso is plausible, as in: "not technically impossible". In fact, they would have had excellent reasons to meet, both in the 1920s and in 1946! What makes the story dubious is the total lack of sources other than the late Vũ Đình Huỳnh's propaganda-laced second-hand story. One would think that the meetings of two towering figures of the 20th century, whose activities have been the subject of considerable attention for more than a century, would have been written about somewhere. Communist propaganda, so fond of Picasso's Peace Dove, did not exploit it, and neither did the HCM cult-building Vietnamese propaganda: Trần Ngọc Danh's hagiographical biography of HCM, distributed in France in 1949, mentions Léon Blum, Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Colette and the psychologist Emile Coué (twice!) among the luminaries met by HCM in France, but not Picasso. Picasso's lover does not mention it (she's 99, perhaps we could ask her!). The informers in police files did not mention it. Biographers of both men have found nothing. Hồ Chí Minh does not mention his "friend".
What to conclude then? It would be interesting to know how the book Bác Hồ - một tình yêu bao la was put together and how reliable it is. For the time being, it seems that a Ho-Picasso "Friendship" seems to be out of the question. What kind of friendship is this if nobody, even the main people involved, ever testified about it? Short meetings in the 1920s may have been possible but surely not that memorable. The 1946 meeting basically depends on the friendship established in the 1920s. Frankly, I'm suspecting a tall tale here, but it's impossible to be 100% conclusive.
Sources
“Nguyen That Thanh Alias Nguyen Ai Quoc Alias Hô Chi Minh (1919-1955),” 1955 1919. Archives nationales d’outre-mer. http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/ark:/61561/ph999nlnn.