On April 8, 1973, Pablo Picasso put down his brush for the last time. 50 years later, the Spanish painter leaves behind him an abundant work, rich in tens of thousands of paintings, engravings, sculptures, impregnated with his signature style, and his sources of inspiration which have earned him the reputation ” of gender and culture “. And among these many influences is his closeness to African art.
” Negro art? Not know ! », quipped Pablo Picasso to an art critic in 1920, in his tongue-in-cheek tone. The Iberian artist, born in 1881 in Spain, nevertheless collected an abundance of African, Oceanic, Hispanic and, more broadly, extra-Western art objects. In any case, this is evidenced by the finds in his private collection and the images of his workshops, full of statuettes, tools, ornaments, masks, totems…
Picasso was an experimental painter, both one of the most acclaimed and most decried of modern art, ” for his ultra misogynistic and very violent side towards women “, emphasizes Olivia Marsaud, head of visual arts at the French Institute of Senegal. A little prodigy of drawing from the age of 14 who “could have been one of the greatest classical artists of the XXe century », Considers Gilles Plazy, one of his biographers. On the contrary, the one who was the figurehead of the cubist movement will persist throughout his life in detaching himself from the artistic conventions of the time, in perpetual quest for the answer to his question: “ how to reinvent yourself to renew your art? “.
So he, who is nicknamed the Minotaur, will never stop drawing from what surrounds him, always looking for new forms, different reliefs, new volumes… This is what he will find from the start of his career in African art.
A very rapid fascination with African objects
In the early 1900s, in Europe, the era of colonial expansion was in full swing and tribal art still only interested avant-garde artists like Henri Matisse or André Derain, founders of Fauvism. Before being grabbed by the African know-how, Picasso first set out to discover primitive Catalan art. He is doing “ a trip to the depths of Catalonia, where he discovered a medieval Iberian creation that would strongly affect his technique “, explains Juliette Pozzo, in charge of the personal collection of Pablo Picasso at the National Picasso-Paris Museum.
Then his sensational revelation took place in 1907. The Andalusian artist was then only at the beginning of his famous masterpiece, The Ladies of Avignon, when the young Pablo, aged 26, goes to the Ethnology Museum of Trocadero in Paris. In the middle of the halls dusty and stinky Picasso guesses that this visit will be decisive. “ I understood that this was the very meaning of painting. It is not an aesthetic process, it is a form of magic which interposes itself between the hostile universe and us, a way of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as on our desires. The day I realized this, I knew I had found my way “, he confided to his companion Françoise Gilot (Living with Picasso1964).
This sacred dimension of African art, he seizes it then infuses it into his work to finish The Ladies of Avignon in 1907. And indeed, how not to see in the two faces on the right of his painting the resemblance to African masks? Subjugated, the Spanish painter seizes certain processes of this traditional art, which one finds in his representation of detailed faces, his exploration of geometries, or his use of hard lines and shading effects. He draws valuable lessons from anonymous African artists, reshapes his imagination, conceives his art without any limits. Pablo Picasso then laid the first milestones of the cubist movement.
An influence “ almost mystical » about his work
As Juliette Pozzo analyzes, the Andalusian draftsman therefore maintains a relationship both ” formal ” And ” invisible, almost mystical with this African art. “ He saw in these objects a magical dimension, a very strong link with ancestral creation. “In many of his works, the African inspiration is striking: his three-dimensional cubist guitars” which reproduce certain volumes of african tsogho masks or the white paint that Picasso used in his Surrealist period of the 1920s, “ which is found on certain African masks covered with kaolin “says Juliette Pozzo. Gilles Plazy also cites the famous clay sculpture of 1909, titled head of a woman, a portrait of his partner, Fernande Olivier. The stacked crests on his skull and the marked lines of his face recall the features of certain African statuettes.
A strong link between non-Western art and this monster of painting which will earn him the exhibition ” Primitive Picasso » at the Quai Branly in Paris, in 2017. But despite this incessant dialogue between his art and Africa, throughout his life, Pablo Picasso never once set foot on the continent. ” He probably traveled more in his imagination than physically. You have to believe that his place of escapade was in his studio, in contact with his collection “, assumes Juliette Pozzo.
A ” vampire » of all arts, all cultures
However, according to Gilles Plazy, if Picasso is also attracted by non-Western techniques, it is rather because he sees in them an artistic playground, and not because he gives a particular symbolism to African works. . “ He is attracted by the possibility of transforming forms. But he is not an intellectual. He’s never going to go study the masks or delve into the meanings of African culture. It doesn’t interest him. » Ogre curious and eager for new ideas, everything he can take to inspire his art, Picasso takes, without distinction or hierarchy. “ He is a gourmand, a culture swallower. With art, Picasso is a vampire who reproduces, imitates, transforms “, continues his biographer.
So did Pablo Picasso vampirise African arts? For Olivia Marsaud, head of visual arts at the French Institute in Dakar, the answer is not so obvious. “ Picasso’s legacy is heavy. In recent years, we have seen a lot of feminist and postcolonial criticism of her art and her life. But we know for example today that his sentence “Negro art? Not know !” did not mean that he did not know African art or that he belittled it. On the contrary, for him “negro art” had no place to be. It is a total art that inspires him in the same way as the Spanish statues or the paintings of Velasquez. And he is also perhaps one of the only European artists to have seen less of the exotic side of African art, in favor of its universal side. “, she develops. To be attached to only one inspiration? Out of the question for Picasso, as Gilles Plazy suggests.
THE Cubism, a primarily African movement?
In 1972, a year before his death, his works traveled for the first time on the African continent, to Dakar, during a major exhibition chaired by Léopold Senghor. Close to Picasso, the very first Senegalese president wishes to highlight the local culture and the reciprocal influences between the Iberian sculptor and African artists. Then fifty years later, to celebrate this anniversary, the Museum of Black Civilizations welcomes in April 2022 the exhibition “ Picasso in Dakar, 1972-2022 ».
On this occasion, Senegalese artist Kiné Aw, labeled as the new “ African Picasso », presents several of his cubist works. “ With this nickname, she felt like she had copied a master painter. But for her, cubism, which was precisely inspired by statues, masks and tribal lines, was born in Africa. It runs through his veins. It’s her own heritage that she uses “, reports Olivia Marsaud.
A heritage both African and Western that the museum has tried to question in order to decentralize the figure of the Spanish painter. ” There is a big imbalance when we say that Picasso was inspired by African objects. Because in front of him, there is no one except the works. We do not know who made these productions, and this silence is disturbing. This is why we wanted to put back at the center African artists who today have a name and create in the same way as the great monuments of art “, she punctuates.
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death, France and Spain have concocted a program with no less than forty exhibitions across Europe and North America throughout 2023. However, in Looking closer, no event dedicated to this relationship between Picasso and non-Western art seems to be planned. No partnership established with an African museum either. For Juliette Pozzo, this absence is due to the fact that ” this theme is already found transversally in several exhibitions » and that the African works of the private collection of the Andalusian « are very fragile and therefore very rarely lent “. This subject should all the same be an important point of the symposium which will close this ” event programming “, in December 2023, specifies Juliette Pozzo.
Programming of this ” Picasso celebration 1973-2023 ” To find here.
► To read also: Between Picasso and Africa, a mutual inspiration