By Lisa Modiano
In the spring of 1907, Pablo Picasso was earnestly searching for new and radical modes of representation that would catapult him to the forefront of the avant-garde.
Inspiration finally came in the form of a small Vili sculpture from the Democratic Republic of the Congo – yet very few are aware of the monumental impact this figurine had on the course of art history.
Immediately enthralled by the sculpture’s elongated features, streamlined forms and spiritual purpose, the encounter ignited something profound in Picasso, then just 25 years old.
His subsequent visit to Paris’s Ethnographic Museum of Trocadero, home to thousands of looted African artefacts from the French colonies, sparked a life-long fascination with art from the continent and marked a pivotal turning point in his artistic trajectory.
The artist began to obsessively collect ceremonial masks, sculptures, and totemic carvings, amassing over a hundred works that dotted the many interiors he inhabited throughout his life.
Upon returning from his visit to the Trocadero, Picasso revisited an unfinished composition in his studio, a figure painting of a scene in a brothel he frequently visited in Barcelona, Spain.
The work in question was none other than Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, now considered one of the most groundbreaking canvases of the 20th century.
Striking similarities
Nearly two-and-a-half metres tall and just over two metres wide, the painting depicts five sex workers with splintered, angular bodies, three of which stare provocatively out at the viewer.
With its bold, shard-like pictorial elements and anarchic sense of violence and sexual power, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon derailed idealised notions of beauty, shocking even Picasso’s inner circle.
While the two central figures were inspired by the sculptural busts of the artist’s native Iberia, the anthropomorphic features of the other women bear striking similarities to masks typical of sub-Saharan Africa.
The fragmented and almost mosaic-like face of the woman in the lower right corner of the work is akin to those of the Mbuya Masks of the Pende people, traditionally used to signify the end of circumcision rituals.
In the top right corner of the painting, the woman’s masked face resembles the heavily stylised masks of the Dan tribe of the Ivory Coast, distinguishable by their elongated noses and high foreheads.
Picasso and many of his peers soon turned to the raw, emotional visual language of African aesthetics, refuting the longstanding idea that art’s purpose was to imitate the natural world.
Flat planes, bold contouring and simplified forms continued to make their way into Picasso’s fragmentary compositions, steering him further and further away from the naturalism that had defined Western art since the Renaissance.
Monumental impact
This period of intense experimentation was seminal to the emergence of Cubism – the influential art movement that emphasised the distinction between painting and reality – and became the starting point for the countless radical abstract movements (the many -isms of modernism, if you will) that came to define the next century.
There is very little evidence that Picasso and the School of Paris, who were fascinated by an exotic fantasy of the ‘primitive’, paid particular attention to Africans as people and producers of culture.
When asked about the clear African influences present in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso was quick to emphasise its Iberian elements and even went so far as to completely deny his relationship with non-European art. “Negro art? [sic] Don’t know it,” the painter provocatively retorted.
The carvers, sculptors and artisans that the modernists continued to borrow from to further their own artistic practices merely functioned as anonymous muses.
So how much of what cemented Picasso as one of the founding figures of modernism was borrowed from African visual culture – and perhaps more importantly, why has the monumental impact it had on his work still not been widely acknowledged?
The year 2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso’s death. To honour the occasion, France and Spain have collaborated on a year-long retrospective exhibition series called Celebration Picasso 1973 -2023.
More than fifty exhibitions across major cultural institutions in Europe and the US will highlight the artist’s lasting legacy and draw attention to lesser-known aspects of his oeuvre.
A number of the exhibitions planned will explore his relationship with the many individuals who played an influential role in his life, including Gertrude Stein, Joan Miro, Max Beckmann, Chanel and El Greco.
Of the fifty shows scheduled to take place, however, not a single one is set to explore the dialogue between Picasso and Africa.
Idolised artist
And although a 2017 exhibition at the Musée Du Quai Branly in Paris (previously the Trocadero, where Picasso found the inspiration he’d been searching for in order to finish Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) aimed to uncover the relationship between the painter and non-Western arts, it was one of the very few European institutions ever to do so.
This begs the question: if African artisans and makers had been mastering the art of abstraction for centuries, why does art history continue to view the significant impact their work had on Modernism as a mere afterthought?
As postcolonial scholar Simon Gikandi puts it, Africa is first acknowledged as a significant episode in the history of modernism, but just as quickly dispatched to the space of ‘primitivism’ – a place where it poses no danger to the ‘purity’ of modern art.
This is not to say that we should simply reduce Picasso’s and the Modernists’ adaptation of African and non-Western aesthetics to cultural appropriation as we now know it, as the politics of colonialism was not even in its early stages in the early twentieth century.
To ‘cancel’ an artist as idolised as Pablo Picasso so many years after his death would, of course, serve little purpose.
But an artist’s flaws should, if anything, offer us the chance to reconsider and reinterpret their work. After all, it is the constant questioning of subsequent generations that will sustain and ultimately enrich the history of art as we know it.
If the art world is striving to become more inclusive, it must begin by embracing more complex and nuanced art historical narratives.
Rather than interpreting the influence African art had on Picasso’s work as a threat to his undisputable ‘genius’, perhaps institutions should forefront the introduction of these evolving narratives – and maybe even let the artefacts that inspired an entire movement finally take centre stage.
The author, Lisa Modiano is an arts professional based in Europe. She holds an MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies and a BA in Art History from the University of Leeds.
