82. One of the African masks that Picasso might have seen during his famous visit to the Musée d’Ethnographie at the Palais du Trocadéro in 1907.
To the north of the Champs de Mars and the Eiffel Tower used to stand the Palais du Trocadéro, a relic of an earlier Exposition Universelle, in 1878.1 It consisted of a large concert hall, famed for its poor acoustics, flanked by two wings. The east wing housed the Musée de Sculpture, the west wing the Musée d’Ethnographie. The latter, almost from its inception, was a troubled institution, with the curators struggling to display adequately their expanding collection of ethnographic objects from across the world. The building itself proved remarkably unsuited to its given purpose, and the museum, starved of funds by the closing years of the nineteenth century, became shabby and dilapidated. It was regarded by many as something of a national embarrassment, and few complained when it was closed down in 1937 and its collections transferred to the Musée de l’Homme.2 The Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro would be merely a footnote in the history of Paris were it not for a single visit made by a young Spanish artist in the spring of 1907.
Pablo Picasso was as unimpressed by the Musée d’Ethnographie as most other visitors. ‘When I went to the Trocadéro,’ he later told the novelist and statesman André Malraux, ‘it was revolting. Like a flea market. The smell. I was all by myself. I wanted to get out.’ The exact date of Picasso’s visit is unknown, and the whole affair is shrouded in myth, much of it of Picasso’s own making. But there, as he told Malraux, ‘It came to me that this was very important: something was happening to me.’3
What happened to Picasso at the Trocadéro in 1907 was that he encountered African art, masks and sculptures. He may well have seen examples of African art, those belonging to his rival Henri Matisse, a year earlier at the Paris apartment of the novelist Gertrude Stein. But this all matters because in the spring and summer of 1907 Picasso painted what most art historians consider the most influential and revolutionary painting of the twentieth century, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The African masks Picasso saw at the Trocadéro have long been regarded as one of the critical influences that flowed to that most radical and disruptive of paintings.
What seems certain is that at that time Picasso had no real interest in the cultural meanings or the ritual functions of the masks that he saw at the Trocadéro or elsewhere. Although there is evidence that he later collected African sculptures, it is unknown if he ever set out to learn anything of the African societies that had produced them. What Picasso was interested in was their potential for his own art, and it may well have been at that moment at the Trocadéro that he first found – and from outside Europe – the formal inspiration and the expressive power that helped him create Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
The subject of the painting, a brothel scene, was not especially radical or unusual. The title is a reference to an infamous brothel on Carrer d’Avinyó in Barcelona, and the painting had originally been conceived as an allegory on desire, sexual disease and mortality. Preparatory sketches reveal that Picasso had initially included two male figures: a sailor and a medical student. Only the women remain in the completed painting.
83. One of Picasso's preparatory sketch for Les Demoiselles showing the two male figures – a sailor and a doctor – who are absent in the finishing painting.
84. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), perhaps the most radical, confrontational and influential painting of the twentieth century.
Picasso shows five naked prostitutes awaiting clients, their bodies formed from a series of broken, disjointed and often jagged planes. Crushed into a compressed space, they gaze out at the viewer with shocking intensity and palpable ferocity. While the faces of the three women to the left in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon are believed to have been derived from archaic Iberian sculpture, the two women on the right, their faces strikingly fractured, irregular, asymmetrical and distorted, are thought to have been influenced by the African masks. Despite the seeming clarity of his statements to André Malraux on the matter, Picasso deliberately muddied the waters around Les Demoiselles d’Avignon over many years, making a series of contradictory statements. If those distractions are set aside, what can be argued, and often has been, is that African art offered Picasso more than inspiration for his innovations in form and vitality. By channelling Africa into his art, Picasso, consciously and subconsciously, infused Les Demoiselles d’Avignon with then powerful ideas about Africa and her people. In his conversation with Malraux, Picasso stated that the masks at the Trocadéro
weren’t just like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things ... they were intercessors, mediators ... They were against everything – against unknown, threatening spirits … I too believe that everything is unknown, that everything is an enemy! Everything! Not the details – women, children, animals, tobacco, playing – but the whole of it! I understood what [they] used their sculpture for. Why sculpt like that and not some other way? ... But all the fetishes were used for the same thing. They were weapons. To help people avoid coming under the influence of spirits again, to help them become independent. They’re tools. If we give spirits a form, we become independent. Spirits, the unconscious, emotion – they’re all the same thing. I understood why I was a painter… Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must have come to me that very day, but not at all because of the forms; because it was my first exorcism – painting – yes absolutely!4
Picasso created faces inspired by African masks that he believed were potent and threatening and then placed those faces on prostitutes, thereby creating a link between two sets of ideas: early twentieth-century colonial preconceptions about racial primitivism, savagery and civilisation, and older anxieties about female sexuality and prostitution. The impact was accentuated by the sheer scale of the canvas: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is eight feet tall. When finally unveiled, the painting was too much even for the other painters of the Paris avant-garde. It was hidden away for almost a decade, yet its eventual impact on those who saw it was seismic, guiding Picasso and Georges Braque towards the revolution that was Cubism.
