Is Picasso’s ‘Primitivist’ art still acceptable?
Alastair Sooke on the precarious position of the artist’s pieces inspired by works from Africa and the Pacific in an era of cancellation
Is it time we cancelled Picasso? This is a question that’s preoccupied me a lot lately – and not just because I recently finished the fourth instalment of John Richardson’s biography of the Spanish artist, which documents his misogynistic, manipulative behaviour towards women. Arguably, a bigger question mark hangs over a specific moment early in Picasso’s career, when he and his avant-garde comrades, while heroically (or so I’d always thought) forging the radical new visual language of modernism at the dawn of the 20th century, sought inspiration outside the European tradition, in the arts of Africa and the Pacific.
In a world where statues of slavers get toppled, and the global Black Lives Matter movement has, as it were, gone mainstream, what are we to make of Picasso’s so-called “African period”? Lasting around three years, it coincided with the creation of his revolutionary 1907 oil painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which features five naked prostitutes, two with faces resembling African masks.
This is a topic, believe me, from which curators tend to shy away; perhaps they recall the opprobrium generated by an infamous exhibition on this theme in New York in the 1980s. Surely, though, given the urgency of the ongoing debate about the West’s colonial past, our museums and galleries should confront this potentially awkward chapter in the story of modern art which used to be called “Primitivism” (a term that has long since fallen out of favour, and is now considered offensive).
That, at least, was my idea for a documentary which, to my surprise, BBC Radio 3 commissioned last year. (As a “privileged” white man, I thought I’d be the last person on this subject from whom they’d want to hear.) The finished programme, The Primitivism of Primitivism, featuring contributions from important contemporary artists such as Michael Armitage and Yinka Shonibare, as well as various museum directors, thinkers, and curators, will be broadcast from this evening. If anything, having worked on it, I find the subject even more vexed than I did before – although (spoiler alert) I believe it would be plain wrong to take down Picasso’s Demoiselles because it might cause offence.
Of course, Picasso wasn’t the only artist associated with Primitivism, which was never a movement, like Futurism, to which artists signed up, but a retrospective term coined by art historians in the mid-20th century. Its origins lay in the rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of the 19th century, against which an increasing number of disaffected artists reacted by dreaming of an alternative, utopian future inspired, paradoxically, by a prelapsarian past.
One early champion of this tendency was, of course, the Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, who, in 1891, set sail for French Polynesia in the Pacific Ocean, where he spent much of his final decade. Today, a moment of reckoning has come for Gauguin, evident in the scathing work of contemporary artists such as Gisela McDaniel or Yuki Kihara (currently representing New Zealand at the 59th Venice Biennale). According to his critics, Gauguin acted like a horrible colonialist by exploiting the indigenous population sexually and artistically.
By his death, in 1903, artefacts from Europe’s colonies had flooded into Western capitals, where they caught the eye of a younger generation – including, in Paris, Henri Matisse and André Derain, as well as Picasso, who all started collecting them. Convinced that the great tradition of Western art had grown moribund, these artists were on the hunt for alternative ideas to help them fashion something new. African and Oceanic objects weren’t the only supposedly “primitive” art that captivated them: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, for instance, is as much indebted to ancient Iberian sculpture as it is to treasures from Africa, which Picasso encountered at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris while finishing the picture, and considered a revelation.
Still, according to David Dibosa, an academic at Chelsea College of Arts, and an authority on the recent drive to “decolonise” museums, it’s sometimes impossible to separate the “beauty” of modern paintings from the brutality of the wider system that contributed to their production, since the “knowledge” artists drew upon was “gained through violence”. Cultural appropriation isn’t the issue, Dibosa says – since “that’s what artists do all the time”. Rather, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, say, is arguably controversial because, by distorting his sources to shock his viewers, Picasso was conducting “a smash-and-grab on other cultures’ ideas of beauty or refinement”.
There’s no question that, in the past, museums have got things wrong. The notorious exhibition I referred to earlier, “Primitivism” in 20th-Century Art (note those defensive inverted commas), mounted at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1984 by the head of its painting and sculpture department, William Rubin, sought to establish “affinities” between “tribal” and modern art. Its curators believed that they were doing a worthwhile job. But, for their detractors, the exhibition was appallingly hierarchical and insensitive: without fail, the stars of the show were the dramatically spot-lit paintings and sculptures by Picasso and his fellow modernists, while everything else was marginalised into a kind of bit-part, cheerleading role.
Ann Temkin, who now occupies the prestigious post once held by Rubin, had recently joined MoMA when the show opened, and remembers the “awesome”, “truly mutual noncomprehension” between its curators and their critics, both of whom felt they were in the right: “It really was a turning point,” she says, as “this art-historical narrative that had been accepted for three or four decades wasn’t accepted any more.”
What, though, about today? If you believe that MoMA made a mistake in 1984, then shouldn’t paintings like Picasso’s Demoiselles now disappear from view? Not so, says Temkin: “So, here’s where I’m a romantic: I believe in the greatness of art.” It is, she argues, the hallmark of an “epochal” artwork that, over time, it is “constantly renewed in the minds of the people who are looking at it”.
MoMA’s first director, Alfred Barr, who acquired Les Demoiselles d’Avignon for the museum in 1939, described it as a “battleground”. According to Temkin, he was referring to “the clashing of styles that almost make you feel you’re on the battlefield with the painter making this painting”. Yet today, a different battle, if you like, about the legacy of empire, is being fought upon its canvas – which is, arguably, a sign of the picture’s prescience, and Picasso’s genius: “It’s almost like it’s taken a hundred years for that aspect of this picture to come to the fore,” Temkin says. “That’s all part of its depth – an indicator, for me, of its worth.” Therefore, Temkin concludes, it shouldn’t be bundled into storage: “By putting something away, you’re not advancing the dialogue.”
Although Dibosa wants gallery-goers to consider ethics as much as aesthetics, and ruminate on “the consequences of colonial violence”, he doesn’t want Picasso cancelled, either: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is, he says, “an astounding piece, which completely rethought figuration”. Likewise, the British painter Michael Armitage, who was born in Kenya in 1984, works between London and Nairobi, and had a spellbinding solo show at the Royal Academy last year. “You can’t pretend that people never thought a certain way,” he tells me. “And you can’t pretend that Picasso isn’t important for the story of art. Like Gauguin, he’s a pretty unsavoury character, but the paintings are out of this world. The generation that takes offence or finds things problematic, it’s for the artists of today to deal with that.” He pauses. “I don’t see the point in cancelling art, because it’s not even artists – the artists are dead. You’re cancelling art for the sake of wanting a smoother narrative to history. It’s absurd.”