Pierre Daix

Pierre Daix

Born: May 24, 1922
Died: November 2, 2014
in Ivry-sur-Seine, Seine [now Val-de-Marne], France
Pierre Georges Daix (24 May 1922 – 2 November 2014) was a French journalist, writer and art historian. He was a friend and biographer of Pablo Picasso.

As a young man, Daix was an ardent Stalinist. He joined the French Communist Party at the age of 17 in 1939 when the Communist Party was banned for supporting the German-Soviet pact. In July 1940, he created a student club, the Centre laïque des auberges de la jeunesse (Claj), which served as a legal screen for the clandestine Union of Communist Students.

When David Rousset (1912-1997) spoke out about Stalin's vast system of prison camps, Daix attacked him as a liar, denying that the GULAG system existed in the Soviet Union, in a 16 page article in Les Lettres Françaises, entitled "Pourquoi M. David Rousset a-t-il inventé les camps soviétiques?". Rousset brought libel charges against Daix and there was a public trial in France, which Rousset, who had told the truth about the camps, won in 1950. As a French communist, Daix continued his uncritical support for the Soviet Union for many years, though late in life he admitted he had been wrong.

From 1980 to 1985, he was a journalist for Le Quotidien de Paris.

Source: Article "Pierre Daix" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Movies for Pierre Daix...

Sommer '39
Title: Sommer '39
Character: Self
Released: August 12, 2009
Type: Movie
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Picassos Friseur
Title: Picassos Friseur
Character: Self / Biographer
Released: October 28, 2001
Type: Movie
In 1948 Pablo Picasso met the hairdresser Eugenio Arias. Both were linked by the fate of emigration. If Picasso initially only had his hair cut by Arias, a deep friendship soon developed.
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Francisco Boix: A Photographer in Hell
Title: Francisco Boix: A Photographer in Hell
Character: Himself - Mauthausen Prisoner
Released: January 1, 2000
Type: Movie
In 1939, just finished the Spanish Civil War, Spanish republican photographer Francesc Boix escapes from Spain; but is captured by the Nazis in 1940 and imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp, in Austria, a year later. There, he works as a prisoner in the SS Photographic Service, hiding, between 1943 and 1945, around 20,000 negatives that later will be presented as evidence during several trials conducted against Nazi war criminals after World War II.
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Title: Apostrophes
Character: Self
Released: January 10, 1975
Type: TV
Apostrophes was a live, weekly, literary, prime-time, talk show on French television created and hosted by Bernard Pivot. It ran for fifteen years (724 episodes) from January 10, 1975, to June 22, 1990, and was one of the most watched shows on French television (around 6 million regular viewers). It was broadcast on Friday nights on the channel France 2 (which was called "Antenne 2" from 1975 to 1992). The hourlong show was devoted to books, authors and literature. The format varied between one-on-one interviews with a single author and open discussions between four or five authors.