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.

Pierre Daix

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.

Pierre Daix

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

Pierre Daix

References

1922 births

2014 deaths

People from Ivry-sur-Seine

French Communist Party members

French journalists

French art critics

French biographers

French male writers

Writers from Île-de-France

Lycée Henri-IV alumni

Communist members of the French Resistance

Mauthausen concentration camp survivors

Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour

Deaths from cancer in France

Burials at Ivry Cemetery