MMFA exhibit shines light on African influences
MMFA show shines a light on how Picasso tapped into Africa to redefine art in the 20th century
You can tell a lot about people by their apartments — and in the case of Pablo Picasso, by their ateliers, houses and châteaux, too.
Photographs of the Spanish master in his increasingly commodious domiciles reveal an interior decor set somewhere between pleasantly cluttered and downright chaotic. For the artist, the line between work space and living space was blurry, and an essential component of his surroundings was art — his own and that of others.
A revelation of those photographs, separated in some cases by decades, is that certain pieces of art were constant, and many of them — mainly sculptures — were from Africa. Placing himself with these works, Picasso was clearly invigorated by their presence: reminding him of first principles, they also stood for him as perfectly realized works of art in their own right.
“The word ‘primitive’ cannot be used now, it’s a nonsense word, because we understand that it refers to an old-fashioned notion,” said Nathalie Bondil, director general of the MMFA and curator of the new From Africa to the Americas: Face-to-face Picasso, Past and Present. An adaptation of a show first mounted at Musée du quai Branly/Jacques Chirac in Paris, it underlines just how far we have come since the creative endeavours of Africa, Oceania and Indigenous pre-Columbian North and South America could be sectioned off as mere fad or “influence,” side notes to the main narratives of Europe-centred modernism.
Of Picasso’s domestic collection, Bondil noted: “He did not want to be a collector in the way that, say, a banker might be. His love for these pieces had nothing to do with their market value or anything like that. He didn’t keep them around in order to show them off. They were part of his personal art pantheon. He was in conversation with them, as much as he was with Matisse and Rousseau. They were participants in a constant dialogue all through his life, until the very end.”
An oft-quoted statement of Picasso’s about African art, “Don’t know it,” is a red herring. In reality, it couldn’t be further from the truth.
“He was really saying ‘I’m not an expert, I’m not an anthropologist, and I don’t want to be,’” Bondil said. “And he always stressed that he wasn’t interested in exoticism — the idea that art from abroad was ornamental, decoration, something artificial. For him, it was essential, something that did not describe (a subject), but stated an essence.”
Time tends to impart an air of inevitability to cultural inflection points, but in the story the MMFA’s show tells, it was far more a matter of chance and serendipity. It’s a version of art history where everything could hinge on a British Museum postcard received in the mail, or the chance sighting of a travel souvenir at a soiree.
In 1907, a young Picasso, a newcomer to Paris, made an impulsive visit to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, across the river from the Eiffel Tower.
Nearly driven out by the room’s musty conditions, he persevered and had his world view changed.
“The greatest artistic emotion I have felt was when I was suddenly struck by the sublime beauty of the sculptures carved by anonymous artists in Africa,” he would later say.
“Passionately religious, yet rigorously logical, these works are the most powerful and most beautiful things ever produced by the human imagination.”
Picasso being Picasso, he put his epiphany into practice almost immediately, in the seminal Les demoiselles d’Avignon. Having already done literally hundreds of studies for the painting (one of them is in the new show), he made the late decision to place African maskstyle faces on two of the work’s courtesan figures. The ripples are still being felt.
Something was undeniably in the air in 1907, and had been for some time. In 1880, the discovery of the ancient cave paintings of Altamira in Santillana del Mar, Spain, had blown the very conception of history and attribution wide open.
Clearly this was art, whether or not we had any idea yet of who had made it and why. The seeds of a reaction against the weight of the European classical tradition were being planted; Picasso had absorbed and mastered that tradition in his teens — almost in his childhood — and could have had a very comfortable life practising variations on it, but he answered to a higher calling.
He wasn’t alone, but with his unique skill-set and protean creative drive — call it genius if you want — he was undoubtedly the prime mover.
Not content with mere depiction (“There was always the element of the surreal and the symbolic in his work,” said Bondil), Picasso was nonetheless happily tied to the figurative.
He was never enticed into the abstract expressionist movement, but as one of the star items of the MMFA show attests, he could take the prosaic into previously unimagined realms.
His 1931 Large Still Life with Pedestal Table, ostensibly a depiction of a water vessel, reveals itself on closer inspection to be a human couple in the act of (ahem) coupling, and demonstrates how even at his most outré in conception Picasso never abandoned the human — and most often the female — figure. Nor did he lose sight of the talismanic, numinous power he believed the best art to possess.
“It’s a visual riddle,” said Bondil of the large-scale painting. “Picasso was making a portrait of his mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, in a way that would hide her from his wife, Olga Khoklova, with whom he was breaking up at the time. But he was going further, too. He was transforming Walter into a fertility idol.”
Amid dozens of examples of that transformative power, what distinguishes the new show from past MMFA Picasso-focused events is its demonstration of how the artist’s work fed into and drew from the work that informed it, becoming part of a century-long interchange that shows no sign of abating.
Bondil, in her program notes, quotes African European artist Théo Eshetu: “Another cultural geography is setting in — Europe is no longer the gravitational centre of the world. There is no longer a peripheral art scene. To join this new world … Africa needs to write itself, to break with the ethnological paradigm that has confined it in the straitjacket of primitivism or neo-primitivism.”
Similarly, Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe describes how, for many contemporary African artists accustomed to travel and exposed to world art currents as never before, an art of “personal reality” is supplanting the art of “institutional or political reality.”
From Africa to the Americas is part of that writing of the new. In Bondil’s description, it’s “one part esthetic, one part anthropological — what are these works for the people who created them? — and one part contemporary art.” Underlining a whole continent’s emergence from artistic anonymity, the show also presents a narrative in which Picasso, ahead of his time 110 years ago, still maintains an uncanny contemporaneity.
“It’s the beginning of a new story, about where we are now,” said Bondil.
“But it’s not ‘Goodbye Picasso and welcome the new.’ It’s a continuum. Hopefully, people can have the same feelings Picasso had when he first saw these works, and hopefully it will inspire some questions about how we respond to art, and about ownership and attribution. Emotion isn’t attached to a signature.”
It should be said, if it’s not already clear, that this isn’t strictly a Picasso show: while his might well be the name that pulls in visitors, what they’ll get is a multifarious experience that puts the most celebrated artist of the 20th century in an illuminating new context. Indeed, the Picasso works on display represent only onethird of the 300-plus items in the exhibition.
“We talk a lot about Picasso in the show because he’s such an important artist,” Bondil said. “But he is the main door, the entry point. He’s not alone. There’s a crowd around him.”
Running concurrently with the larger show, and forming an ideal complement thematically and historically, the MMFA presents Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art.
Developed by the Royal Ontario Museum, the multimedia exhibition’s stated mission is to “disrupt simplistic and comforting narratives, while affirming the longstanding relevance of black people to the fabric of Canada.”
Montreal is represented by three artists: Eddy Firmin, whose work ties themes of historical slavery to modern-day consumerism; Manuel Mathieu, who pays tribute to his Haitian-born grandmother; and Shanna Strauss, who invokes an ancestor who led a revolt against German rulers in colonial Tanzania.