History of art

"Cubism was born in Africa": between Pablo Picasso and African art, a story of inspiration

Pablo Picasso surrounded by his paintings in his studio in Mougins, southern France, in October 1971. © RALPH GATTI / AFP

Text by: Louise Huet

9 min

On April 8, 1973, Pablo Picasso put down the brush for the last time. 50 years later, the Spanish painter leaves behind an abundant body of work, rich in tens of thousands of paintings, engravings, sculptures, impregnated with his signature style, and his sources of inspiration that have earned him the reputation of "valuing genres and cultures". And among these many influences, is his proximity to African art.

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Negro art? Don't know! ", quipped Pablo Picasso to an art critic in 1920, in his own tone without laughter. The Iberian artist, born in 1881 in Spain, nevertheless collected African, Oceanic, Hispanic and more broadly, extra-Western art objects. This is in any case what testifies 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 the most criticized of modern art, "for his ultra misogynistic side and very violent towards women," says 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 twentieth century," says Gilles Plazy, one of his biographers. On the contrary, the one who was the figurehead of the cubist movement will persist throughout his life to detach himself from the artistic conventions of the time, in perpetual search for the answer to his question: "how to reinvent oneself to renew one's art?"

So he who is nicknamed the Minotaur will not stop drawing on what surrounds him, always looking for new forms, different reliefs, new volumes ... This is what he will find from the beginning of his career, in African art.

Pablo Picasso surrounded by primitive objects in his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir, in Paris in 1908. Frank Gelett Burgess (1866-1951) © Anne Bernas / RFI

A very fast fascination for African objects

In the early 1900s, in Europe, the era of colonial expansion was in full swing and tribal art still interested only avant-gardists such as Henri Matisse or André Derain, founders of Fauvism. Before being caught up in African know-how, Picasso first set out to discover Catalan primitive art. He made "a journey to the depths of Catalonia, where he discovered a medieval Iberian creation that strongly affected his technique," says Juliette Pozzo, in charge of Pablo Picasso's personal collection at the Musée national Picasso-Paris.

Then its shattering revelation took place in 1907. The Andalusian artist was only at the beginning of his famous masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, when the young Pablo, aged 26, went to the Trocadero Museum of Ethnology in Paris. In the middle of the "dusty andstinking" rooms, 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 that interposes itself between the hostile universe and us, a way of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as our desires. The day I understood this, I knew I had found my way," he confided to his partner Françoise Gilot (Living with Picasso, 1964).

This sacred dimension of African art, he seized it and infused it in his work to finish Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907. And indeed, how not to see in the two faces to the right of his canvas the resemblance to African masks? Subjugated, the Spanish painter seizes certain processes of this traditional art, which can be found in his representation of detailed faces, his exploration of geometries, or his use of hard lines and shading games. He draws valuable lessons from anonymous African artists, reshapes his imagination, conceives his art without any limits. Pablo Picasso then laid the first foundations of the cubist movement.

Pablo Picasso, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", 1907 © Picasso Estate 2018

An "almost mystical" influence on his work

As Juliette Pozzo analyzes, the Andalusian designer therefore maintains a relationship that is 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 several of his works, the African inspiration is striking: his three-dimensional cubist guitars "which take up certain volumes of African tsogho masks", or the white paint that Picasso used in his surrealist period of the 1920s, "which is found on some African masks covered with kaolin", notes Juliette Pozzo. Gilles Plazy also cites the famous clay sculpture of 1909, entitled Tête de femme, a portrait of his companion, Fernande Olivier. The ridges stacked on his skull and the marked lines of his face recall the features of some African statuettes.

A strong link between non-Western art and this monster of painting that earned him the exhibition "Picasso Primitive" at the Quai Branly in Paris, in 2017. But despite this incessant dialogue between his art and Africa, in all his existence, Pablo Picasso has not 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, "says Juliette Pozzo.

Pablo Picasso's sculpture entitled "Head of a Woman, Fernande" (1909), presented in New York in 2022. © ANGELA WEISS / AFP

A "vampire" of all arts, all cultures

However, according to Gilles Plazy, if Picasso was so attracted to non-Western techniques, it was rather because he saw it as an artistic playground, and not because he gave a particular symbolism to African works. "He is attracted to the possibility of transforming forms. But he is not an intellectual. He will never go to study masks or delve into the meanings of African culture. He is not interested. A curious ogre eager for new ideas, whatever he can take to inspire his art, Picasso takes, without distinction or hierarchy. "He is a gourmand, an appeaser of cultures. With art, Picasso is a vampire who reproduces, imitates, transforms," continues his biographer.

So was Pablo Picasso vampirizing 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, many feminist and postcolonial critiques of her art and life have emerged. But we know for example today that his sentence "Negro art? Don't 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 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 says. Be attached to only one inspiration? Out of the question for Picasso, as Gilles Plaza suggests.

Cubism, a movement above all African?

In 1972, a year before his death, his works traveled for the first time on the African continent, to Dakar, during a major exhibition overseen by Léopold Senghor. Close to Picasso, the very first Senegalese president wanted to shine 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 is hosting in April 2022 the exhibition "Picasso in Dakar, 1972-2022".

On this occasion, the 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 of painting. But for her, cubism, which was inspired by statues, masks and tribal lines, was born in Africa. It runs through her veins. It is her own heritage that she uses, "says Olivia Marsaud.

Spanish painter Pablo Picasso examines his ceramics in his studio in Vallauris, southern France, in April 1949. © AFP

A heritage that is both African and Western that the museum has tried to question to decenter 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 but the works. It is not known who directed these productions, and this silence is disturbing. That's 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. Yet, on closer inspection, no event dedicated to this relationship between Picasso and non-Western art seems to be planned. No partnership 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 in the private collection of Andalusian "are very fragile and therefore very rarely loaned". This topic should still be an important point of the symposium that will close this "event programming", in December 2023, says Juliette Pozzo.

Programming of this "Picasso celebration 1973-2023" to be found here.

► Read also: Between Picasso and Africa, a mutual inspiration

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