The Controversies of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
Cultural appropriation or revolutionary masterpiece?
Christopher P Jones is the author of Great Paintings Explained, an examination of fifteen of art’s most enthralling images.
This intriguing painting depicts five women whose splintered faces and fractured forms were partly inspired by Iberian sculpture and African tribal masks.
Pablo Picasso painted the women with a degree of distortion unknown in European art until this point. Depicted with flattened and facetted forms, the figures are stylised to produce an expressive ornamental effect. There is no obvious source of light: instead, highlights and shadow are scattered across the picture, arranged in jagged shapes to heighten the drama.
The five women — prostitutes of a street in Barcelona famed for its brothels — are naked and bearing fruit. Their angular limbs are reduced to geometric forms, barbing against the edge of the picture frame and seeming to hold the painting open like a curtain.
Picasso made the work in 1907. At the time, he was twenty-six years old and had been a resident of Paris for three years.
It was an era when numerous European countries — France included — were expanding their imperial reach. As colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa were established, so African “exotic” artworks were being brought back to Paris museums to be gazed at and pondered over.
In that year, Picasso made a visit to Musée d’Ethnographie du Tocadéro (Trocadero Museum of Ethnology) where a collection of tribal masks captivated his attention. He later said of the visit:
“[The masks] were magic things… They were against everything — against unknown threatening spirits… I too am against everything.”
It is uncertain whether it was in May or June of 1907 that Picasso experienced his “revelation”. Later, in an interview in 1939, Picasso denied any contact with African art at the time of the painting’s making. He stated that his primary interest of this period was in Iberian sculpture, and if there was any specific influence on his work then it was from the people of ancient Iberian peninsular (today’s Spain and Portugal).
Either way, one just needs to look at the two figures on the right-hand side of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and notice their mask-like faces to see the connection.
Both faces have diagonal lines running across their cheeks like grooves carved in wood. Their noses are elongated and concave, constructed of a strip of white running from the bridge to the tip. Most of all, the jaw lines are exaggerated, unnaturally round and distended.
What was Picasso doing here? In borrowing motifs from the tribal art he saw in the Trocadero, was he being “influenced” by African art?
Or did he perform a more pernicious act, that of taking from a culture that didn’t belong to him — and in doing so, was he rehearsing the centuries-old romanticising of “primitive” people, as if the colonial enterprise had discovered a more natural expression than “civilised” man could achieve?
Exploring the Exotic
Picasso was not the only artist of Paris at the time who took an interest in the artefacts from Africa. The painter Maurice de Vlaminck had also visited the Ethnographical Museum and acquired several African statuettes and masks. According to Vlaminck, he sold one of these masks to the artist André Derain, in whose studio Picasso and Henri Matisse first encountered African sculpture.
What these artists saw was a form of art that, to their eyes, was remote and perhaps timeless, one that reached back into a vein of human creativity that pre-dated the stifling traditions of European academic art.
One way of putting it is to say that Picasso “quoted” African sculpture in his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The art critic John Berger described it like this: “Picasso’s quotations are simple, direct, and emotional.”
This was not an unusual creative manoeuvre by Picasso. As the art historian Norbert Lynton expressed, “Picasso’s career shows that appropriating visual themes or devices from the work of others was repeatedly his way out of an impasse.”
And yet viewed through an alternative lens, Picasso’s work may coincide with a form of abuse — namely cultural appropriation — engaging with what the art critic Hal Foster described as “the fetishistic recognition-and-disavowal of the primitive difference”.
Idealised Cultures
Picasso and his fellow artists were living through a cultural moment when the realities of modernity led some to idealise an alternative, retrospective tradition — a moment which, arguably, we have not yet emerged from.
One influence on Picasso, for instance, was the painter Paul Gauguin, who in 1895 took up residence in the French colony of Tahiti and had begun to use Tahitian models and emblems in his art.
Even though Gauguin believed himself to be a defender of Tahiti against colonial exploitation, modern critics decry his version of “primitivism” as exploitative, pointing out that Gauguin took adolescent mistresses on the island, one of them as young as thirteen.
Thus, the romantic notions of living within a “state of nature” are difficult to untie from the realities of colonial privilege.
Is There a Difference Between Inspiration and Appropriation?
This is a good question, for it reveals a key fault line of Western assumptions about art and creativity. The notion of “inspiration” is weighed down by many underlying assumptions about what it means to be an artist. We tend to think of artists through a romantic lens, as “geniuses” who operate somehow above the moral realm.
Yet many of these assumptions have been examined critically from the perspective of feminist art history and post-colonial studies and found to be wanting. The effect is summed up by the art critic Abigail Solomon-Godeau as “the dense interweave of racial and sexual fantasies and power both colonial and patriarchal.”
It is interesting to note that in the realm of contemporary art practice, appropriation has become an explicit technique or strategy for making art. Contemporary artists, educated in the manner by which images and objects can be co-opted and reassigned new meanings, often take this as a starting point to make new works of art. Contemporary artists make appropriation explicit and therefore attempt to strip it of its questionable motives — whilst at the same time interrogating the “myth” of creative inspiration that is so prevalent in Western notions of art-making.
Ongoing Debates
In 1984, The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) held a first-of-its-kind exhibition called ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. The show contained more than 200 tribal objects from Africa, Oceania and North America, and placed them alongside works of modern art by the likes of Gauguin, Picasso, Constantin Brâncuși and Paul Klee.
The press release for the exhibition painted a picture of the scene in Paris: “Tribal works soon began showing up in the studios of Picasso, Matisse, Vlaminck, Derain, and others, and it was not long before tribal forms — often much metamorphosed and extrapolated — could be seen in their work.”
The MOMA exhibition proposed that these modern painters found a new beauty and complexity in these tribal pieces, “previously considered mere curiosities.” At its heart, the exhibition sought to downplay the cause-and-effect connection between modern European artists and the tribal objects from Africa, Oceania and North America. Instead, it proposed natural “affinities” between them, as if both had found some natural wellspring of creative expression which the museum was objectively comparing.
The historian Hal Foster was deeply critical of the MOMA exhibition: “The founding act of this recoding is the repositioning of the tribal object as art. […] This aestheticization allows the work to be both decontextualised and commodified.”
Picasso’s painting has continued to draw criticism for its appropriations. Notably, African artists have voiced opposition. Contemporary Ugandan artist Francis Nnaggenda, for example, has stated, “People tell me my work looks like Picasso, but they have it wrong. It is Picasso who looks like me, like Africa.”
Personal Thoughts
The first time I saw Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, I was twenty-four years old and knew then about its significance in the history of art.
For students of art history, there are few paintings that compare to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon for their significance. It represented a radical break from conventions of perspective and composition, and made a violent statement about the traditions of nudity in art, replacing the ideal of the Classical nude with sexually armed and dangerous demoiselles.
And just as the painting refers to “primitive” motifs for its expression, I regarded the painting as the rudimentary forerunner to the revolutionary movements of Cubism and Futurism.
At the end of the first volume of his (so far) three-volume Picasso biography: A Life Of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881–1906, John Richardson comments: “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is the first unequivocally 20th-century masterpiece, a principal detonator of the modern movement, the cornerstone of 20th-century art.”
With plaudits like this, is the painting somehow above reproach?
When I think back over my relationship with this painting, I am led to wonder what affinities I share with the work and with the artist. In truth, I was never too comfortable with the confrontational effects of the composition: it was too rugged and somehow too belligerent for my young tastes. Yet it had a decisive effect on my “mental map” of art history and on conception of Modernism as a compelling chapter in the story of art.
In short, my excitement about the painting still remains. By this judgement, I realise I am letting Picasso and the broader story he symbolises continue to occupy the centre field. Yet I would still argue that Picasso’s appropriation was performed in a spirit of curiosity, even admiration. He saw the tribal masks as an access point into something his own culture didn’t have. If we recognise a degree of insensitivity on the artist’s part here, then it is a value we ascribe retrospectively, largely because our notions of “culture” and “identity” have been hugely reshaped by events and discussions of more recent times.
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