An artist like Picasso is beyond the beliefs of an era. His relation to “primitive” arts began in 1907 when Pablo Picasso acquired his first non-European artwork, a tiki from the Marquesas Islands. In that same year, the artist discovered the Musée du Trocadéro, which was then specialized in African art – he would also work on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in that year, and what he saw was so strong that it would give him the gumption to finish it by July. The rest is history: it’s this painting that marks the decisive turning point in his career. Today and until June 18, the ‘Picasso Primitif’ exhibit at the Musée du Quai Branly will recall with strength and passion this privileged relationship, far from the clichés of the day. Divided into three sections, the first section “Chronology” will establish the works that Picasso saw, the ones he bought, and the ones he lived with. In a second section called “Body to Body”, the exhibit will question the way Picasso and great artists came together within the expression of universal archaisms, and the activation of the power of images. Finally, in the third section, “Primitive” takes on its literal meaning.
The exhibit opens on an interesting quote; the primitivism on display here must be thought in the opposite sense of formalist approaches. “Negro art? Don’t know it!” is what Picasso said in 1920. “My purest emotions were felt in a great forest in Spain where, at age 16, I took refuge to paint. My greatest artistic emotions were felt when the sublime beauty of sculptures executed by anonymous artists of Africa suddenly appeared to me. The works of a clergyman, passionate and rigorously logical, are the most powerful and beautiful of what human imagination has produced. I’m eager to add that, nevertheless, I detest exoticism,” specified Picasso in a correspondence to poet Guillaume Apollinaire.
Indeed, Picasso saw in African art the quintessence of expression itself. Around these figures are designed archetypal shapes, primordial, with nudity and verticality. Thus the famous painting Jeune Garçon Nu, done in 1906, takes its graphicness, its lines, and finally its truth from an Anthropomorphous Statue discovered in Nigeria, which was then part of colonial West Africa. “I want to make the nude as he is. He must be made of himself. I don’t want to make the nude myself, I don’t want anyone to be able to see the nude other than as he is,” indicated Picasso to Hélène Parmelin. It’s in this vein that Picasso always took the essence for inspired creation from African art, with all its pure and elementary force.
Leave a Reply