African Unification Front
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AFRICA'S MAGIC THAT TRANSFORMED MODERN ART
Feb 9th 2006 | JOHANNESBURG
From The Economist
An exhibition in South Africa reveals the depth of African influence on Picasso
 PABLO PICASSO never went to Africa. But more than three decades after his death, his art is travelling to the continent that so deeply affected his work. “Picasso and Africa”, the most extensive exhibition of the artist's work ever assembled in the region, was due to open at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg on February 10th, and will travel to the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town in April. The show, which highlights Africa's influence on Picasso's work, brings more than 80 of his paintings, drawings and sculptures together with a selection of African masks and statues similar to those that he had around him as he worked.
Picasso said that the “virus” of African art stayed with him throughout his life. He caught it in June 1907, when stumbling upon the African and Oceanic collection at the Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadéro in Paris. The fateful encounter was a revelation: “The masks were not simply sculptures like any other. Not at all. They were magical objects.” That day, he later said, he understood what painting really meant. “It is not an aesthetic process; it's a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires.”
He had been working on “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon”, which became one of his most famous paintings. The visit to the museum gave him the answers he had been looking for. This portrait of five prostitutes, which he described as his first “exorcism painting”, was his first work to bear signs of African influence, with two of the women's faces shown as African masks.
Many other signs were to follow. The exhibition shows how Picasso absorbed Africa's abstract, expressive representations of faces and bodies, and made them his own. He started fragmenting and faceting the human figure, which eventually gave birth to cubism. He was later inspired by African power masks from Congo—wood carvings used by diviners to help them communicate with the spirits—which used everyday materials, such as nails and mirrors. Picasso created one of the sculptures in the exhibition, “Head of a Woman”, out of a colander and springs; nails and newspapers find their way into other works.
The show offers visitors a glimpse into Picasso's genius at work. Many of the pieces exhibited are drawings, sculptures and studies that the artist kept in his studio and which document and dissect his experiments with a new art form. His fascination for African art had turned into a collecting bug, which he fed as he wandered the flea markets of Paris and Marseilles. He gathered over 100 African statues and masks, and kept them by him. Visitors to the exhibition, surrounded by work in progress and with African artefacts beaming their magic, feel transported to his studio.
Many of Picasso's contemporaries shared his fascination with African art. Artists such as André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Braque and Henri Matisse were also avid collectors. In the early 20th century, France's colonial push into Africa encouraged an interest in the tales and objects from mysterious, exotic lands, which travelled back with soldiers, traders and missionaries. Picasso and his fellow avant-garde artists, who had been searching for a new artistic language to break the mould of conventional representation, were exposed to forms rich in symbols.
Africa found its way in varying degrees into their work. Yet, explains Marilyn Martin, one of the exhibition's curators, Picasso had a unique understanding of the magical and ritualistic power of African art, which influenced him far beyond form. That encounter at the Ethnographic Museum transformed his artistic vision, and with it the direction of modern art.
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