Hey Everyone! So recently, I was invited to Paris to view an exhibition called Picasso Primitif at the Musée du quai Branly - Jacques
Jacques Chirac.
I apologize in advance for my very terrible French
If you saw my previous video on Picasso and his muses, you can probably guess I was pretty stoked to go.
Regardless of what you think of the man or the artist himself, whether you like his art
or not, it's hard to deny that he is perhaps one of the most influential, most prolific and most important artists of the past
100 years.
This show was the first of its kind: a collaboration with the Musée Picasso, to explore the development
of Picasso’s work, which are shown right alongside with indigenous non-Western art.
It’s was certainly eye opening and I want to share with you what I learned.
To give you a background on the museum itself: It’s a fairly new museum in a city of legendary
museums like the Louvre and Musee d’Orsay.
It’s only about 11 years old and it’s right next to the Eiffel Tower- in fact you
get a lovely view from their rooftop restaurant. It’s this massive, red contemporary
structure that is quite the contrast from it’s Haussmanian neighbors with with it
shares its walls.
Inside you’ll find it’s massive permanent collection which showcases the objects and
art of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas.
While the outside is open and bright, with a lush garden, the interior is dark with winding
pathways and spotlights to highlight the objects.
In part this helps conserve certain objects that were made without the intention of lasting
very long, but also it creates a sense of mystery about these foreign objects.
I want to take a pause here to
discuss a couple of things.
In particular I want to talk about what it means for this non-Western museum
to be show casing the work of a European man and his interaction with
Non- Western Art.
It's an incredibly complicated situation, but I actually think the museum
And the exhibition really takes great care to address this.
To give you a little refresher, during the early 1900s when much of this work was made,
France, along with a number of other european countries, had already been busy building
one of the largest colonial empires for the last 400 plus years.
It was basically a race to see which country could get the most land around the word - for
of course - the prestige, but also to control key trading routes, land and raw materials.
It was also seen like a sort of moral mission: to lift these primitive peoples by giving
them are more sophisticated language, culture and guiding them to the light of Catholic
religion.
Jules Ferry, the leading proponent of colonialism, declared; "The higher races have a right over
the lower races, they have a duty to civilize the inferior races."
Now, we can see how there’s a lot of problems here already.
First of all, the use of words like primitives, inferior, even non-Western, which casts Western
as the norm- It’s a very European-centric perspective.
Now there was great interest on the part of France to show off all the great
work they’ve been doing for the world, so there were a number of occasions where objects
from these places were brought to Paris for exhibition.
In fact, if you look into the history of the collection for this museum, it comes from
mainly three sources.
One is The Musée de l'Homme (or Museum of Man, which is an interesting name).
And that is a descendant of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro.. *mispronounce*
Ohh I don't know how to say anything :(
(recording of Trocadéro)
founded in 1878.
Which had been built for the third Paris World's Fair the same year.
That's the fair where major countries came in to showcase their new technologies like
Alexander Graham Bell's telephone and Thomas Edison's megaphone and phonograph.
But it also had a very popular human zoo called the "negro village", comprised of 4000 "indigenous
people".
So you can tell from that, the attitude towards these people was kind of terrible. Really. Just awful.
Turing them, quite literally, into circus acts- “Come see these exoctic and primitive
people of the past!”
The second major part of the collection comes from Musée national des Arts d'Afrique et
d'Océanie, which began as the colonial exhibition of 1931.
And that was an attempt to show off the diverse cultures and resources of France's colonial
possessions.
To highlight how their relationship with their colonies was mutually beneficial
and then really downplaying claims
of them assimilating these colonial societies.
A lot of these objects, including a portion of the museum’s collection today, we just don’t
have no idea of how they were acquired.
And there's just no way to figure that out.
We can tell this specific carving is from Mali, by a Dogon artist just by looking at
the style, subject and material.
But there’s no signature or date to know who made, from where it comes from, or how
it came into the possession of the French.
They could have been bought, or taken, or traded with people who stole them.
There was a huge demand for these objects in Europe and many people, including modern
artists like Picasso, acquired them on the cheap.
In fact, in the early 2000s, New Zealand's national museum the the Te Papa Tongarewa
made it their mission to reacquire Maori remains held in various institutions around the worlds.
One of the objects in question were the mokomokai, or Maori tattooed heads held in the Quai Branly,
and the objects were formally returned to New Zealand in 2012.
It’s a tricky landscape to navigate: what right do museums have to possess these objects,
or to even show these objects? For example, some of these objects were made for rituals
they're not made to be preserved. They're made for maybe an initiation ceremony
Where only the older men and young boys were allowed to see the objects
Women were not allowed to see certain things.
What does it mean for the museum to be showing this to anyone who comes in?
In same cases, these groups of people no longer even exist.
During the tour of the permanent collection, I was stuck by the amount of sensitivity necessary
to work in this space.
There’s a sense of responsibility to preserve history and knowledge of these cultures that
are no longer existing, or quickly declining,
but also a great joy in sharing the limited knowledge that was very difficult to acquire
Trying to understand how various people live, how they think about the world, their religion and virtues.
It’s important to understand their original contexts, but to also consider it’s current
situation: are these objects art or artefacts?
The third major source are recently acquired pieces by the museum itself.
Thankfully, today, there’s less shadiness. They're better documented and there's more of a process.
But especially when it comes to institutions like the Quai Branly, they are a lot more thorough, and sensitive, and
selective in this process.
That being said, when it was still open, the Trocadero museum was very popular among modern
artists - including the man in question today:
Pablo Picasso.
While it’s easy to go down this path discussing cultural appropriation and simply linking
the visual similarities between Picasso’s work and non-Western Art,
the show, however, takes a very interesting approach.
The exhibition is split into two categories that approach the relationship from two different
ways: The first is chronological and follows Picasso’s work, in key times that he comes
into contact with non-Western art.
Many of which are actually on display like the object he first acquired: a Tiki from
the Marquesas Islands, and the Nevimbumbao body mask from Matisse, which Picasso refused
to take until Matisse’s death in 1954.
After Picasso’s visit to the Trocadero Museum, he apparently reworked his famous Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon.
The visual similarities of the faces of the women are often compared to African masks.
He is quoted by Francoise Gilot in Life with Picasso, saying
A big argument of the show is that Picasso was not simply inspired visually by these
objects.
In fact, he said that he wasn’t even aware of “Negro Art” the term used to refer
to objects that were not just African, but basically anything that wasn’t European
or Asian.
He wasn’t interested in the excoticism of these objects, and instead identified with
these works as equal, works of art that spoke to him deeply.
The second part of the exhibition approaches this by exploring the similarities in stylization
and themes: First, though archetypal body positions, like
nudity, verticality of the human form, and the simplification of the body into sign.
In Metamorphosis, they compare Picasso’s interest in images containing other images,
recursive imagery, and the use of animal-human forms, like the Minotaur, which was often
used by Picasso to represent himself.
They also show how he started create assemblages from found objects - a technique often used
in non-Western works.
Finally, in id, they discuss the primal nature shared between these works: the importance
of urges and Instinct.
His fascination with the gaze, face, mouth and genitalia are abstracted and distorted.
They become especially gruesome during times of war and when the artist struggled with
loss.
The objects are placed in a way where sometimes it’s hard to tell, which works are Picasso,
and which are made by unknown artists - placing them on the same level as Art.
Picasso felt there was something about these things that were truly at the core of human
experience.
Photographs show that he collected and kept these objects intermingled with his work,
throughout his studio and quotes show his admiration, respect, and even fear of the
power of these objects.
The title, Picasso Primitif, isn’t just a nod to the weight of the term in art history,
but rather refers to that initial deepest and most fundamental part of the human experience
that is understood by all.
And this, they argue, is what Picasso deeply identified with in these non-Western objects.
It was through conversations with these objects that Picasso was able to break from formal
Western approaches and change the course of Modern Art.
I hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you did, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to this channel
Little Art Talks
If you want to continue riding that Picasso train, I do have another video on Picasso
and his various muses: his lovers, his women, his wives.
Things like that.
A huge thank you to the Museum, quai Branly
I apologize for my French again
But they were amazing, It was just a good tour. I had such a great time and the tour was just spot on.
If you are in Paris or visiting Paris this summer, You should definitely go visit
Picasso Primitif will be up until July 23, 2017.
So I hope you guys will have a chance to check it out. And if you miss the show they have other wonderful exhibitions.
The permanent collection is also fantastic
So I hope you'll have the chance to check it out.
As always, thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time!