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Pablo Picasso and African aesthetics

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By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

IN February 2015 the Tanzania Information Directory included a feature called How African Art Influenced Pablo Picasso. 

This development was important in the context of the Afro-Asian movement to reclaim stolen African and Asian artefacts still held by European and North American museums, the very same artefacts which Pablo Picasso used to achieve his fame and greatness following his so-called Epoque Negre or African Period of creativity from 1906 to 1910.  

But to understand the importance of the African contribution to Picasso’s career, it is necessary to say what Pablo Picasso was in his lifetime and still is in Western art history.

Picasso is generally described as the most influential artist of the first fifty years of the 20th Century; one of the most critical pioneers of Cubism and Surrealism in art; a genius and a revolutionary trail-blazer for modern Euro-American art.

Although Picasso himself was reticent about his indebtedness to African aesthetics, most art historians now agree that his breakthrough came as a result of his encounter with African sculptures and masks which revealed to him how he could escape the sterility of the European aesthetic which he felt restricted his creativity.  

The article sponsored by the Tanzania Information Directory in 2015 bluntly pointed out that Picasso was secretive about exactly what it was that he borrowed from the stolen African sculptures and masks which he studied meticulously at the Trocadero Museum in Paris and elsewhere between 1901 and 1910.

“For African artists who grew up according to the aesthetic principles of the dariro, memory breaks the boundaries of form to enrich perception and enlarge the realm of desire for the individual artist.  

“This reality is what caused Picasso to conclude that the African artist had freed himself/herself of form while the European had not.”

For in the dariro Hungwe has his own totem and he sits on the south side facing Shoko on the north side who also comes from his own totem facing Shoko and facing the south.  

Shiri also sits on the east side from the perspective of his own totem while facing Moyo on the west side who sees what is coming from behind Shiri’s back on the east side.  

Each has his or her own totem and perspective.  

But all belong to one circle, the dariro.  In this sense, the African aesthetic is neither local nor universal. 

Rather, it is relational. And it offers all participants ample freedom which Picasso recognised in the African artistic productions he studied.

The dariro therefore is a rich celebration of difference defined by totem and by position/stance on the globe and in the world.  

Indeed difference is the basis for sharing and solidarity; and what is shared cannot be the same perspective.  

It is different: unique, but a part of the globe, the circle, the dariro.  

This means African artists or performers in the dariro never look in the same direction as Europeans in the queue.  

Therefore the African artists never see exactly the same horizon.  

Each one has a unique horizon but all are all connected, united through the process and practice of ‘kuonesana’.

Kuonesana is the essence of the African aesthetic of the dariro and it thrives on difference, uniqueness.

According to Nadeen Pennisi’s: “Pablo Picasso and Africa: How African Art Influenced Pablo Picasso and His Work,” Henri Matisse, Picasso’s rival, liberated traditional European art from the need to always balance colour with form.  

Now Picasso learned from African sculptures and masks how to deconstruct form itself. 

“African art would help Picasso with the concept of abstracted form. The inspiration for this concept would occur at his momentous visits to the Trocadero Museum.” 

The museum was full of stolen African sculptures and masks.  The most influential ones had been stolen from Gabon and DRC.

“Although Picasso had seen African art before, it was not until his visit to the Trocadero Museum that he was truly confronted by it. This visit would have profound impact on his work and revolutuionalise modern (Euro-American) art.  The revelation of deconstructed forms of African sculptures would be manifested in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” 

As already stated, in the aesthetic of the dariro, memory breaks out of institutional form to liberate and enlarge individual and totemic perspectives and horizons and to widen the realm of desire while collectively everyone remains anchored in the same dariro.  

The result is not only polysemy, diversity, plurality and multi-vocality but also potential for enormous individual and collective depth.  

Once memory breaks out of current form, it becomes easier to imagine, to recognise that there are mountains under the sea.  

In current form we cannot live under the sea yet and we cannot climb those sea mountains yet.  

But when the artist and the scientist bring together their different imaginations, the resulting technology will eventually enable us to go there, live there and climb those mountains under the sea where we can imagine and visit the most gorgeous woman ever imagined, the mermaid. 

This is where science and art began, in magic. 

Technology today helps to clarify that relationship between art and science. 

Indeed, according to Robert D Romanyshyn in Technology as Symptom and Dream:

“To approach the technological world as a cultural dream is an invitation to the reader to adopt a style of thinking receptive to the undertones of life.  In dreams we are addressed by the underside of events and things, by the unspoken in what has been said, by connections and allusions which may otherwise be unnoticed. Dreams shadow waking life and what we, individually and culturally, cannot bear in conscious life we dream.” 

For Picasso, the African artist was enviable because he/she was allowed to see an individual horizon, to dream while remaining within the dariro.

Two key contradictions

From all this discussion of Picasso’s debt to African freedom of expression, two key contradictions may be recognised.

The first is that the African sculptures and masks from which Picasso learned and copied so much had been pillaged from Africa.  

The most recognisable one in Picasso’s art is a wood, brass and copper sculpture from Gabon.  

To this day museums in Brussels, Paris and London alone hold more than          320 000 (three hundred and twenty thousand) stolen African artefacts, while all the African museums in Sub-Saharan Africa, the region of origin, remain with only about 3 000 pieces.  

This is the context within which former British Prime Minister David Cameron said he opposed African and Indian movements to reclaim stolen artefacts from Europe and North America because if they were to succeed the British Museum would be left empty.

The second major contradiction is embedded in the language of Eurocentric art criticism.  

That language has created and promoted a dichotomy between what is modern and what is traditional, with modernity being presumed to be superior to tradition and even to be universal.  

In this language, Picasso is described as a moderniser, a genius and trail-blazer for modern art.  

In contrast, the artists of Gabon and Democratic Republic of Congo whose freedom and depth of expression helped to free Picasso from European formalism are described as traditional and primitive in the most pejorative sense.  

And unfortunately African artists educated in Europe and North America have for the most part accepted these categories without giving them much thought.

The complex aesthetic of the dariro described earlier is neither traditional nor modern.  

The dariro itself is neither traditional nor modern. It is relational.  

This explains why Picasso could learn so well from the freedom that it demonstrates about perception and desire freed from apparent and current form.  

The baboon, the monkey, the rhino, the lion, the elephant and the fish eagle as totems of people in the same dariro refuse to conform to one form; but they represent the same African relational memory freed from fixed forms.

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