There are two types of #Picasso biographers, the ones who think he can do no wrong, and the people who think he could do no right.
Pictured above (top left) is Picasso’s well known painting, “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907”. The middle photo is a preliminary study for one of the woman featured in the first painting. Lauded as the beginning of his radical departure from traditional Western art, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, was one of the earliest paintings to incorporate aspects of Cubism. When Picasso was asked about what inspired his portraits of the two women pictured on the right side of the painting, he answered, “African art? Never heard of it!" (L'art nègre? Connais pas!)
Many Picasso scholars believe that the artist was most certainly influenced by African tribal masks despite the fact that he vehemently denied it into his old age. There is documentation of Picasso closely observing African sculptures and figurines, both in the private collections of his friends as well as France’s deeply problematic ethnographic museums, which continues to parade African art that was stolen from various countries during the height of French imperialism. Picasso is also known to have studied African masks, specifically in an illustrated book by anthropologist, Leo Frobenius. Additionally, many of his contemporaries reported that they had seen African sculptures in his studio. There’s even a photo from 1908, a year after the painting was completed that shows him surrounded by African sculptures. Can we really believe that Picasso had never heard of African art? I truly don’t think so...
We not only have an example of the most blatant form of cultural appropriation, but we can also observe how the myth of the hypersexualized African woman was perpetuated at the turn of the 20th century. Let’s take another look at the first painting 👆🏼, which depicts five women in a brothel staring intently at the viewer. The facial structure of the three women on the left resemble that of sculptures found in the Iberian peninsula, which Picasso was admittedly infatuated with for years. The two figures on the left are noticeably less demure, more animalistic in nature, with one of the figures literally dropping it low.
Considering how the bodies of African girls and women had been exploited for centuries by the time this work was made public (Google Sara Baartman), it would have been well within the cultural norms of Western Europeans to view African women as wild, wanton, and hedonistic, a characterization fully recognized by the tribal references in this work. At least thats how i interpret it. What about you?