ART

Pablo Picasso’s Communist Party membership card is missing from the National Picasso Museum in Paris, and the French Communist Party is calling the incident an anti-Communist plot. The party’s newspaper, L’Humanite, said Wednesday that the museum had offered the “poor alibi” that a canvas figuring in the same display as the late comrade Picasso’s party papers was out on loan, leaving no place for the card. The paper linked the disappearance to the French presidential election race, saying: “Certain people, now that everything is being done to discredit the Communist Party, have judged it inconvenient to recall the link between an artistic genius and the revolutionary party.”