Picasso and primitive art Paris, Kansas City and Montreal by JOSHUA I. COHEN PICASSO’S NEARLY LIFELONG interest in so- called primitive art is the subject of Picasso Primitif, seen by this reviewer at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris (closed 23rd July), and currently on view at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City , under the title Through the Eyes of Picasso (to 8th April 2018). 1 Not since the controversial exhibition ‘Primitivism’ in 20th- century Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1984 has the topic received such focused consideration. 2 In Paris the display took spectacular ad- vantage of the Quai Branly’s collections from the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, where Picasso first studied African and Oce- anic sculpture in 1907. The exhibition, cur- ated by the museum’s Director, Yves Le Fur, capitalises on relationships with the Musée Picasso, Paris, and other collections in order to present an even more varied set of works than was seen in 1984. Whereas the previous exhibition centred on landmark works by Picasso in MoMA’s collection, the current one assembles a giant corpus of ‘primitive art’, including dozens of objects owned or studied by the painter. But what exactly is ‘primitive art’? No other term encapsulates Western colonialist vision quite so accurately, and yet one can nevertheless make a case for the term’s rele- vance as an art-historical category. Around the turn of the twentieth century in Paris, art primitif stood for a heterogeneous array of ancient, pre-Renaissance European, Afri- can and Oceanic arts whose inventive visual grammars came to permeate Modernist painting and sculpture. Despite – or because of – these colonial-era dynamics, so-called primitive art would forever link modernism with cultural politics. A rather different account of primitive art is elaborated in the exhibition, where gallery texts and catalogue essays do not so much interrogate as conjure the ‘primitive’ with apparent synonyms: primordial, nègre, non- academic, non-Western. The result is an even more capacious, indeed almost boundless classification of the visual traditions that might conceivably be compared with Picasso’s art. A similar impulse is reflected in the ex- hibition’s 150 or so ‘primitive’ objects, which originate from over forty countries and dozens more cultures across six continents. The first section of the exhibition offers a year-by-year chronology of Picasso’s en- counters with, and acquisitions of, ‘primi- tive’ art from 1900. The highlight is archival documentation of the Trocadéro museum around the time of Picasso’s first visit there, while he was working on Les demoiselles d’Avignon (1907; Museum of Modern Art, New York). In Paris, a two minute-long montage of digitised archival photographs of the old ethnographic galleries was played across a concave wall in an attempt to sim- ulate the artist’s visit. Overall, however, the exhibition’s chronology suffers from its limited engagement with the influence of ‘primitive art’ on Picasso, and from the limited scope of its supporting research. 3 Most conspicuously, Le Fur follows William Rubin in dating Picasso’s initial Trocadéro visit to June 1907, just a month before Demois- elles reached its first completed stage, despite more recent scholarship that places the visit several months earlier. 4 The second section of the exhibition is arranged according to three broad themes guiding juxtapositions of Picasso’s work and ‘the primitive’: stylisation (‘archetypes’); experimentation with disparate figural el- ements (‘metamorphoses’); and preoccupa- tions with sex, death, and demons (‘the Id’). These ostensible universals disguise the same kinds of arbitrary comparisons that drew so much criticism in 1984. 5 Since Picasso had never laid eyes on a particular horned mask from Mexico (cat. p. no.169; Fig.81) before painting a similar face on a ceramic tile 81. Mask, Otomi culture, Mexico. Twentieth century, before 1955. Wood, fur and animal horns, 38 by 25.2 by 21.5 cm. (Musée de l’homme, Paris; exh. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City). 82. Head of a faun, by Pablo Picasso. 1961. Painted ceramic tile, 15 by 15 cm. (Musée Picasso, Paris; exh. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City). EXHIBITIONS 944 november 2017 • clix • the burlington magazine