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Amy Miller developed her love for art and its history under the guidance of a particularly influential high school teacher and later in her personal pilgrimage to the galleries of London, Paris and Florence. A third year student at the University of Cape Town, she is majoring in English, Visual & Art History, and Classics. She intends to do postgraduate studies in South Africa and abroad, and to continue writing both fiction (she has had a number of poems published) and academic pieces. She is particularly intrigued by issues in contemporary African art and how notions thereof intersect with the traditional narrative of Western art history. It was this juncture which attracted her attention to the Picasso and Africa writing competition, in which she saw the opportunity to explore some of the salient issues surrounding the exhibition.
Her other passions include theatre, travelling widely and experiencing new cultures, teaching literature (particularly Shakespeare) to high school students, and a variety of creative pursuits such as painting.

I. A cultural manifestation of the relationship initiated between France and South Africa as part of a bilateral agreement in 1994, the polemical Picasso and Africa exhibition is, according to Minister of Arts and Culture Pallo Jordan, predicated on the notion of dialogue (Jordan,2005:1). Likewise, in the accompanying catalogue to the exhibition, curators Laurence Madeline and Marilyn Martin assert that “the time has come to focus on the relationship between Africa and Picasso and to offer, for the first time, and in Africa, a dialogue between the African continent and the artist” (2006:15). The exhibition is thus borne from an important paradigm, given the compromised history of the way in which Africa (as well as its art and artifacts) has traditionally been narrated from the outside; values and assumptions imposed on it by successive acts of Western political and cultural ventriloquism. This essay will explore some of the key issues raised by and surrounding the exhibition, with particular sensitivity towards unequal power relations between Europe and Africa, as manifested in the socio-political and cultural dimensions of their exchange.

II. The nature of the relationship between Picasso and Africa must be set against the backdrop of eighteenth and nineteenth century European colonialism, through which the West encountered many new cultures. The resulting interchange was situated within an inherently unequal power structure in which the “primitive” non-Western society was subjugated; its nature narrated by the “civilized” West in order to justify and perpetuate the colonial endeavour. The discourse of Primitivism – a set of ideas and values about the “primitive”1 – arises from this context. Significantly, Primitivism is a Western construct and “does not imply any direct dialogue between the West and its Others” (Rhodes,1994:7): it is based on Western preconceptions and imperatives. Modern artists from Gauguin at the close of the nineteenth century to the Abstract Expressionists sixty years later, were drawn to non-Western cultures, but their understanding of them was always filtered through Western discourse and its attendant ideology.

In differing and complex ways, Primitivism functioned for these artists as a framework within which to use “primitive artifacts as models for developments in their own work” and also “as symbolic of particular artistic processes” (Rhodes, 1994:7). Picasso never set foot on the African continent and yet the influence of its artifacts – which he encountered through his artistic contemporaries and forerunners (such as Vlaminck, Derain, Matisse and Gauguin), at the Trocadero museum in Paris, and increasingly in his own collection – on his creative output is unquestionable. Most critics devote their focus to the formal significance of African masks and sculptures: their comprehensive representation of human form through the reduction of volume to fundamental geometric planes is seen as central to Picasso’s development from the perceptual to the conceptual handling of form. For example, in the exhibition’s piece The Tree (1907), Picasso presents us with the different fragments and views that constitute the idea and wholeness of a tree, rather than its direct visual reality. The colours and striation of these artifacts, as well as their embellishment with real and found materials (such as the wood, fibre, fabric, nails, metal and mirrors that constitute the Kongo style power figures of the Democratic Republic of Congo) are likewise employed in his work. These aspects can be seen in the arrangement of scratches on the surface of The Tree and the way in which Guitar (1926) is assembled on a painted canvas background using a combination of paper, cloth, nails and string.

African artifacts were sometimes directly represented in Picasso’s work, but as his so-called “African period” (1907-9) progressed, they became part of the stylistic vocabulary by which he created a new and unique syntax:

Indeed, their strongest influence was on the fundamental notion of art, for in coming into contact with African and Oceanic cultures, the pioneers of twentieth century European art learned – despite the protests and disdain of their contemporaries – that art could be defined beyond the limits stipulated within Western tradition (Hassan and Oguibe, 2001:71).

Through this new syntax, Picasso challenged conventions of the very nature of art. His works, by denying long-established visual expectations, were fundamentally self-conscious and self-contained rather than pre-occupied with imitating an external reality (which had been the touchstone of art since Greco-Roman antiquity). The use of “primitive”, unfamiliar models, of identification with and subversion through the “other”, was thus not only formally, but also ideologically significant. Picasso, and other early twentieth century artists such as Matisse and Gauguin, used Primitivism to some extent as a vehicle for a counter-hegemonic critique – drawing from and depicting non-Western cultures as an alternative to the excesses, and rigidities, of Western socio-political and artistic structures (Rhodes,1994:110).

In addition to its formal and ideological significance, the influence of Africa on Picasso was also a reflex of what he perceived to be its intrinsically “spiritual” and “magical” qualities. In the oft-recounted tale of his visit to the Trocadero museum, Picasso was drawn to African tribal objects and “fetishes” not for their formal properties, but for their spiritual resources; for what he saw as their powerful intercessory role between creator and (potentially dangerous) outside world:

Men had made those masks and other objects for a sacred purpose, a magical purpose, as a kind of mediation between themselves and the unknown hostile forces that surrounded them, in order to overcome their fear and horror by giving it a form and an image. At that moment I realised that this was what painting was all about. Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic designed as mediation between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires. When I came to that realization, I knew I had found my way (Picasso, as cited in Rhodes, 1994:116).

Picasso, inspired by this encounter, began to use African motifs as a way in which to exorcise his personal demons – to mediate between his own psyche and the external forces that threatened him. One such force was sexuality, and female sexuality in particular. Set within a broader context of negrophilé in 1920’s Paris – in which the black body (linked to popular figures such as boxers, jazz artists and performers such as Josephine Baker) itself became an “ideological artifact” (Clifford,1985:170) imbued with erotic overtones – the often exaggerated breasts, buttocks and genitals of African sculpture (such as the Fang style ancestral figures of Gabon) became an emancipating pictorial device whereby Picasso could explore and expel his simultaneous desire for and fear of women.

Thus, while fully integrated into his unique personal style and vision, Africa was clearly intrinsic to Picasso’s work on formal, ideological and intuitive levels. However, one must be aware that Picasso’s “Africa” was a personal construction rather than an objective reality: he projected onto its landscape and people his own pre-occupations and assumptions. Picasso’s version of Africa was of a vast, undifferentiated continent, underpinned by a combination of spirituality, strangeness and sexuality. His conflation of prostitutes, and their leering provocation, with the “primitive other” through the use of masks as faces in Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon, for example, demonstrates the link between sexuality and strangeness in a process of archetypal exoticism2.

It is also problematic that at this time, through the artists’ recognition of their essential “kinship” to their own ideas, African artifacts were imbued with value (Perry,1993:3); symbolically redeemed from the murky depths of superstitious tradition and lifted to the high status of “art” (Forster,1985:47). These artifacts, wrenched from their socio-cultural context (in which the majority of objects were created to fulfill religious or social functions, not for aesthetic contemplation), underwent a “double taxonomic shift”:

first from exotica to scientific specimens where the earlier cabinets of curiosities gave way to newly founded museums of natural history in the late nineteenth century; and following their ‘discovery’ by Picasso and his friends in the early decades of the twentieth century, they underwent a second promotion into art museums and galleries where they were recontextualised as art objects (Kasfir,1999:99).

This served to integrate the difference of the Other into a recognizable Western framework: once again Africa itself was metaphorically silenced by being spoken for.

Many of the critical discussions of Picasso’s use of African motifs in his work have been similarly problematic, either in the way they have perpetuated certain (mis)representations of Africa or in the way they have narrated the continent as a secondary figure; merely a foil in the universalizing monologue whose protagonist is Modernism. Operating within an increasingly pioneering tradition, artists such as Picasso are presented – in Robert Goldwater’s influential Primitivism in Modern Art (published in 1938), for example – as intuitively and independently developing formal systems that placed more emphasis on the conceptual than the perceptual in their bid to break with established tradition. African artifacts are constructed as having merely entered their frame of reference at a convenient point at which Modernist artists were most receptive to their abstracted, fragmented and flattened-out volumes – they silently corroborate Modernist tendencies rather than actively inspiring them.

Mounted by curators Kirk Varnedoe and William Rubin at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1984, the exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, embodies many of the issues endemic to discussions of Picasso’s use of African motifs. For example, in the most prominent part of the exhibition, African artifacts were displayed alongside modern works to demonstrate affinities (underlying, informing principles independently developed, rather than direct influence) between the two. The arrangement of artifacts, decontextualised and displayed without any information about their background or function, was highly selective and from only a few countries, yet presented as “Africa”. Within this totalizing view, the continent emerges as an amorphous, undifferentiated landscape of shadows, its extreme diversity denied by this essentialising lens. Furthermore, the word “tribal” connotes a sense of a society frozen in the past – a mythic space outside of history – the structural and semantic opposite of progressive Western civilization. This mysterious, silent (or, more accurately, silenced) mythic space is inscribed with qualities: “raw, truthful, and profoundly simple, a set of projections which is the precondition for the validation of these exotic influences” (Hiller,1991:12). By linking modern movements (such as Cubism) with the “tribal”, Modernism is lauded as universal (McEvilley,1984:56), its artists timeless and “in touch with a pure, direct mode of artistic expression” (Perry,1993:3). Picasso’s transcendent genius is affirmed; Africa relegated to a minor, fictionalised character in the narrative of his development.

Given this problematic (art) history, rooted in the complexities of imperial discourse and modernist appropriation, the question is: does South Africa’s exhibition succeed in rewriting this master narrative, to offer, instead, a dialogue which bespeaks the importance of both Picasso and Africa on equal terms? Certainly it is significant that Picasso and Africa is being staged in Africa itself: for the first time the relationship between Africa and Western Modernism (with Picasso as ambassador) is being narrated from within, and for, an African context. This shift is, to some extent, suggested symbolically in the spatial arrangement of the collection of twenty-nine classical African masks and sculptures and the over eighty drawings, paintings and sculptures by Picasso – the African works displayed in the centre: the European on the periphery.

In addition, the selection of Picasso’s works (though also influenced by financial and other factors) – many of them preparatory drawings and sketches from his personal collection – demonstrates the dynamic and enduring influence of African objects on Picasso’s artistic and intellectual processes. In Study for “Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon”: Head of the Crouching Woman (1907), for example, Picasso explores the visual potential, through striation and formal simplification of features, of the mask as face. In his series of bull lithographs, which can be read as a visual trajectory of modern Western art from the perceptual to the conceptual apprehension of form, the influence of African sculpture is increasingly seen in the successive images (which appear to culminate in a rock-art-like image), highlighting its importance in this particular theory of evolution. As such, Africa is granted a much greater role in the narrative of Modernism – influencing its course rather than merely conforming to it. While the emphasis in “Primitivism” 1984 was on presenting “Modernism not as an appropriative act but as a creative one” (McEvilley,1984:57), Picasso and Africa acknowledges the innovation in Picasso’s work while simultaneously drawing attention to the appropriation and interchange borne from any cultural encounter.

However, it seems Africa is still not presented on an equal footing to Picasso. In many ways it is Picasso who is constructed as the vital and varied artistic continent, whereas the sheer breadth of history and culture in Africa itself is reduced to a few masks and sculptures stripped of their context and meaning. Even in the exhibition catalogue, Laurence Madeline takes an imaginative moment to suggest that the viewer:

consider the work of Picasso to be like a whole continent, so broad, extensive and rich that it can contain all the galleries, artists, centuries, countries and images of Europe…then from 1907 to 1959 and beyond, African art might be considered one of its sub-continents (2006:21).

An entire room is dedicated to details of Picasso’s biography (establishing a helpful framework within which to engage with his art), but no information is offered about the background or function of the African artifacts – such as those displayed – which inform his work. While such information would aid the viewer’s appreciation and understanding of the objects in their own right, it seems doubly negligent in the face of the assertion (repeated in the plaques and in mounted quotes by the artist) that their spiritual and ritualistic aspects are particularly relevant to Picasso. Much like one of the major criticisms of the “Primitivism” 1984 exhibition, the artifacts are thus completely decontextualised (aside from a geographical attribution where possible), rendered (though not originally created to be) “art” by their placement in a gallery, and completely divorced from their socio-cultural significance and function. Ideologically, this omission implies that the African objects are not of interest in and of themselves, only insofar as they relate, aesthetically, to Picasso.

In addition, the artifacts are from a small selection of countries (predominantly Gabon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria and the Ivory Coast) that are nevertheless implied to represent the entire continent, as signaled in the very title “Picasso and Africa” (though, admittedly, “Picasso and five or six particular African countries” doesn’t have the same ring to it). Drawing much attention to the fact (in the museum guide, catalogue and exhibition itself) that “Picasso never visited Africa and… affirmed that he did not know the continent”, that it existed (through chance encounters with ethnological objects) “in his studio… in his head and in his spirit” (Museum Guide,2006:1), it seems the curators of Picasso and Africa were satisfied with similarly superficial knowledge and representation – limiting (or justifying) their representation of Africa in terms of what Picasso himself knew.

Nevertheless, the exhibition is certainly a triumph in voicing the extent of Africa’s influence on Picasso’s work. However, the “dialogue” on which the exhibition hinged could have been significantly strengthened through the joint exhibition of African works inspired, in turn, by Picasso (this exchange is eruditely addressed in the catalogue, but would have been more effective if accessible to the public in the exhibition itself). For example, works such as Dumile Feni’s African Guernica (1967), and Albert Adams’ South Africa triptych (1959), amongst others, could have been displayed – for in the same way that modern Western art was informed by Africa, so modern African art was influenced by the West. By illuminating the diversity and vitality of modern and contemporary African art, this would also have aided in combating the lingering (though strongly contested) discourse by which Africa is relegated to the past, its cultural manifestations validated and accepted by the West only if perceived to be “authentic”.

The same early twentieth century cultural encounter (borne of colonial expansion) that informed a break in the Western artistic tradition, likewise affected African artistic production3. New styles, skills, media and iconography entered the African cultural milieu through increasing urbanization, exposure to Western art, literature and religion, as well as through missionary and independent art schools (though many placed an emphasis on craft rather than fine art), such as the L ‘Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Egypt, centres founded in Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal and the Ivory Coast by the Societe Africaine de Culture in Paris (Jephson,1989:21) and South Africa’s Polly Street Art Centre and Rorke’s Drift.

African artists responded to the resulting palimpsest of artistic sources they encountered in varying ways, negotiating the territory between inherited tradition, daily reality, and new, foreign influences. For example, the Nigerian Aina Onabolu, a ground-breaking African Modernist who encountered Western imagery in foreign texts, worked towards achieving naturalism and pictorial illusion in his portraits even as Picasso was subverting this Western paradigm through the influence of “traditional” African art (Martin,2006:152). South African artists such as George Pemba and Gerard Sekoto 4 combined inherently local subject matter – often dynamic scenes of urban black experience – with European modes: Pemba adopted the traditionally “English” medium of watercolour (Martin,2006:158), while Sekoto experimented with non-descriptive colour reminiscent of Fauvism, as well as an Expressionistic brushstroke and style.

The appropriation of aspects of European art by individual African artists resulted in work that is incredibly skillful, innovative and diverse, but for many years it was declaimed by the West as derivative and “inauthentic”. The argument was based on an inherent double standard: European Modernism was celebrated for its experimentation, stylistic flux and ability to assimilate outside influences and cultures – Africa was only validated if its cultural manifestations affirmed a Western perception of it: static, ancient, untainted, spiritual, anonymous. This notion still pervades much art criticism as the West struggles to integrate modern and contemporary African art into its canonical framework.

Just as problematic as the West’s lament of a loss of African “authenticity” is an African pre-occupation with Western “cultural colonialism” (for example, Sandile Memela’s controversial letter to the Star, in which he accused Picasso of “stealing” from Africa). Certainly the appropriation of African motifs should be understood against a wider backdrop of political and economic imperialism, but to claim that Africa has been aesthetically plundered is to narrate Africa as the victim, to once again deny dialogue. As evidenced in the above discussion, European and African art were mutually influential: “all encounters produce change” (Martin,2006:151). Every cultural manifestation is a constant protean process of appropriation, integration and revitalisation to suit the needs of a specific time, place, people and function. The visual arts particularly do not exist in a silent vacuum, but in conversation with the world and its various constituting factors.

III. The Picasso and Africa exhibition is not only significant for the dialogue it represents, but for that which it has engendered. The debate it has sparked in the media has brought many important issues and questions (some of them touched on in this essay) to the fore and engaged the public in an unprecedented fashion. Though the exhibition itself has been dismantled, these questions and issues remain; the “living dialogue” continues.

Notes:

1 Primitivism is a complex discourse and its various exponents can be understood to operate either within (the mind, or Western society itself, for example, in Gauguin’s study of the peasant culture of the Bretons) or without (in non-Western cultures). I shall be using it in reference to a Western construct of non-Western cultures.

2 Hal Forster explores in greater detail the ideological and psychological links between Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles and African artefacts in his seminal article The Primitive Unconscious of Modern Art.

3 As Sidney Kasfir asserts in African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow, African artistic production was, of course, also subject to change before colonialism (a fact often unacknowledged in the search for “authenticity”), for example through shifting internal social dynamics, the introduction of Islam to West Africa, and interactions with Portuguese traders.

4 Sekoto was closely associated with the New Group – a set of artists, including Gregoire Boonzaier, Walter Battiss and Alexis Preller, which tried to further modernist trends within a conservative South African artistic context.
References:

Clifford, James. (April 1985). Histories of the Tribal and the Modern. Art in America,
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Forster, Hal. (1985). The Primitive Unconscious of Modern Art. October, 34, 58-70.

Hassan, Salah M. and Oguibe, Olu. (Winter 2001 ). “Authentic/Ex-Centric” at the Venice
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Hiller, Susan (ed.) The Myth of Primitivism. Perspectives on Art. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

Jephson, Amanda Anne. Aspects of Twentieth Century Black South African Art – Up to
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Jordan, Z. Pallo. Minister’s Speech: Media Announcement of Picasso and Africa
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Kasfir, Sidney. African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow. In Olu Oguibe and Okqui Enwezor (eds.) Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace. London: inIVA, 1999. 89-113.

Madeline, Laurence and Martin, Marilyn. Picasso and Africa. Cape Town: Bell-Roberts Publishing, 2006.

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What’s on at Iziko. Museum Guide April – June 2006.

Keywords: African, Art, Competition, Culture, Picasso, Writing