'Picasso and Africa' at the Standard Bank Gallery
by Michael Smith
February sees what must be one of the biggest events on the local art calendar
for years - the opening of 'Picasso and Africa' at the Standard Bank Gallery in
Johannesburg. Curated by Laurence Madeline of the Musée Picasso in
Paris, and South Africa's Marilyn Martin, director of art collections at Iziko
Museums in Cape Town, the show boasts 84 original works by Pablo Picasso as well
as 29 African sculptures similar to those collected by Picasso (items from the
Spaniard's original collection of African and Oceanic art are either dispersed
or too fragile to travel).
With unprecedented public interest, a team of CIA-style security men replete with
two-ways, a 'boutique' selling (lots of) Picasso posters, and an extensive and
well-produced catalogue, it seems that 'Picasso and Africa' is set to be the blockbuster
to eclipse the Johannesburg shows of Miró and Chagall of the last few
years.
The event is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, the show reiterates that
Picasso's innovations of the early 20th Century didn't occur in a vacuum. Instead,
his connection to Africa, albeit a mediated one facilitated by objects and stories
brought back to Paris from the French colonies of Nigeria, Ghana and Gabon, as
well as the then Belgian Congo, galvanised his transition from Western illusionism
to the stylising conceptual rigours of Analytical Cubism. This is made abundantly
clear by the show, and was restated in the lively and informative walkabout given
by Wits' Alan Crump on Saturday February 18. While Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
(1907) (the first major work by Picasso to subvert Western art traditions going
back to the Renaissance) is not present, works in oil like Woman with
Joined Hands (Study for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon) (1907) and Head
and Shoulders of a Woman (Study for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon) (1907)
are chosen to show, along with African masks, how Picasso arrived at the radical
forms of Les Demoiselles.
The implication of this for Africa is significant: Picasso, pioneer of the European
avant-garde in the early 20th Century, looked to Africa for new forms and modes
of interpreting the world. The show thus makes a strong case for the inherent
sophistication of African art, a welcome rebuttal of centuries of Western cultural
hegemony. Indisputably, Picasso remained locked into the kind of understanding
of African art that was later to inform the controversial 'Magiciens de la Terre'
(Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1989). His view of African art objects, as primarily
ritual-based 'fetishes' for exorcism and magic, certainly doesn't support the
view of them as sophisticated. This, however, is where the curatorial finesse
of the show emerges: on this score, Picasso is not given the last word. Madeline
and Martin (with artist and African art authority Karel Nel in attendance) make
links between the forms and strategies of African art, and those developed, or
often lifted, by Picasso. So the stylisation, the formal sophistication for which
Picasso is so often credited, is shown to be a cornerstone of the rich history
of classical African art.
Secondly, and rather crucially, the exhibition stages the debate around Picasso's
appropriation of African forms and logic on African soil. The
chief offence of Western collection and display of African sculptures and masks
has often been that the works become separated from their context, and thus become
artefacts from a far-off, exotic locale. Alone and decontextualised, they often
have to fight for their lives amidst the heavily consecrated works of Western
art in a given exhibition space. Here, it is a different story. A veritable barrage
of powerful, well-chosen and well-displayed masks and sculptures confronts one
at the beginning of the exhibition. As a result they, too, become consecrated
in this sense, and hence there is a feeling here that Picasso is the visitor,
and that the African works become the benchmark.
This is an idea that is supported by the spatial arrangement of the show: the
African masks and sculptures have been placed in the gallery's central vault,
and Picasso's sketches, drawings, paintings and scupltures have been curated around
this central space. This accurately implies that they owe their origin and development
to African aesthetics, like ripples do to an epicenter. It would be dangerous
to suggest that Picasso is rendered peripheral (could Picasso ever
be peripheral?). Nevertheless, there is certainly a sense that the show is interested
in making claims for the weight and authority of African art in the domain of
stylisation and conceptual reduction of form. The African works become the fulcrum
around which the show's curatorial premise operates, ironically giving them a
new didactic functionality where the sanitising traditions of Western display
removed the old ones.
The thorny issue of the ethics of Picasso's appropriation of the culture of the
Other is, however, disappointingly sidestepped. Postcolonial critics of the 20th
Century rightly pointed out that the attitude underpinning cultural appropriation
is akin to the attitude that underpins the appropriation of land, minerals and
bodies. In a country where the issues of land restitution and mineral rights are
of such major moral relevance right now, one could be forgiven for suggesting
that a vital opportunity in this regard was lost.
Instead, the quotes chosen to explain and represent Picasso in the gallery's entrance
area mostly serve to buttress rather than interrogate the notion of an artist
with no responsibility other than to his art. Instances of 'discovery' and 'exorcism',
in which African art forms become the grist for the mill of Picasso's apparently
voracious visual appetite, are presented uncritically. In this section, the curators
seemed unable to escape the impulse to present the artist as a revolutionising
hero, a bold trailblazer to whom (Western) culture is indebted. And who can blame
them? The legend of Picasso is at least as bankable as the works themselves, and
performs its own magic wherever it goes, in this case drawing capacity crowds,
many of whom have never darkened the door of a gallery before, into Johannesburg's
CBD.
Thus, the exhibition operates on two levels, one in which the transhistorical
legend of the first great artist of the 20th century survives, and another on
which it receives a challenge. This is an important show for the claims it makes
for Africa. Nevertheless, it would've been interesting to see these two ends tied
up.
Opens: February 10
Closes: March 19
Walkabouts take place from 1pm - 2pm, Wednesdays and Fridays, and from 2pm - 3pm
on Saturdays
Standard Bank Gallery
Corner Simmonds and Frederick Street, Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 631 1889
www.sbgallery.co.za
Hours: Mon - Fri 8am - 4.30pm, Sat - Sun 9am - 4pm
