No one can fault the Brooklyn Museum It’s Pablo-Matic: Picasso according to Hannah Gadsby in an attempt to present a narrative of Picasso’s legacy that centers feminist artists, but the exhibition has justly worded criticism for its lack of critical engagement vis-à-vis the aesthetic contributions of the women artists it brandishes and their tenuous links with the corpus of Pablo Picasso. The exhibition, although lazy in its framing, raises important questions, particularly those relating to the roles of public museums and their (de)construction of the canons of art history. Instead of bringing Picasso to the fore, the exhibition might have achieved its goal more effectively by focusing on the specific contributions of feminist artists like Betye Saar, Mickalene Thomas and Marisol Escobar, among other pioneers of art. modern and contemporary art, in their own words. While viewing the exhibition, it became clear that an aesthetic association with Picasso does not bind these artists. What would an exhibition that critically engages Picasso’s modernist forms and those of his global interlocutors look like? If, as Edward Said suggested in the 1990s, one must read “in counterpoint” to revise the repressed foundations of Western colonialism – in other words, to be attuned to these interwoven perspectives – what formal innovations might we meet ? What insights into Modernism’s relationship to race and gender might we gain by situating Picasso within a global legacy of Cubism?
Picasso, like other modernists, borrowed unequivocally from the art and peoples of non-Western countries and cultures, from African masks to Orientalized depictions of Algerian women, among other unnamed female subjects. These lines remain undervalued in the genealogy of Cubism. Critical consensus too often credits Picasso’s singular genius, rather than the non-Western art forms that colonial collections and fairs brought to Europe.
Probing this legacy, alongside the significance of Picasso’s work for artists from non-Western countries and their diasporas, might have provided a more conducive setting to expand the artist’s legacy, while highlighting the legacy of the colonial history of Picasso and the perpetuation of Orientalist imagery. While typically Picasso’s use of classical Iberian, African and Egyptian art is referenced as a source of inspiration, the ethnographic and “primitivist” impulse of modernism remains a minor part of the widely accepted narrative of aesthetic formation. cubism – and the exhibition. Picasso’s use of African masks in painting has a double effect: it transforms the verisimilitude of European painting into abstract forms and unveils the intrinsic entanglement between Modernism’s splintering of traditional forms and its fascination with the elemental. , the other and the unknown.
Although Picasso often denied an interest in non-Western art, it was in many ways shaped by a historical legacy of European art rooted in unacknowledged colonial dynamics, including his Orientalist predecessors Eugène Delacroix, Jean- Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and in particular his contemporary Henri Matisse. Created at the beginning of the Algerian Revolution, Picasso’s famous series The Women of Algiers (Women of Algiers, 1954-1955) was a response to Delacroix The women of Algiers in their apartment (1834). Picasso’s series calendar may reflect his own closure to the realist mode – with all its exotic and romantic imagery – which had hitherto dominated European art forms.
While the colonial involvement of Europe remained a repressed element in Picasso’s art, the encounter of colonialism with other cultures also opened up discussions of otherness, violence and the entanglement of cultural forms. that have been tackled by artists outside of the white Euro-American canon. “Guernica” (1937), for example, was quoted and transformed by artists across global cultural contexts, such as Bahman Mohasses, Faith Ringgold and Raghava KK, among many others who would create striking works appealing to power politics and aesthetics of the painting while integrating it with other visual and political contexts that reference state violence around the world. Picasso was part of a legacy of anti-fascist artists who used the subversion of the signs and symbols of Cubism as a means of destroying traditional forms of art, disorienting the viewer, and resisting conventional modes of representation. Rather, they emphasized how abstract figures could produce psychic energies and feelings that were not limited to a place or a figure, but could introduce images and ways of perceiving that superseded historical events and could create a meaning in cultural contexts.
A 21st century institution cannot center Picasso’s legacy without also highlighting the overarching forms, artists, and practices that remain omitted from the Euro-American canon of Cubist and abstract art. To do so is simply irresponsible. Using It’s Pablo-Matic As a starting point, here is a non-exhaustive list of artists whose works are directly related to Picasso and offer marginalized perspectives in the historical canon of Euro-American art:
Baya Mahieddine (1931-1988)
Nestled in Baya’s paintings are symbols from Algerian folk tales: birds that morph into snakes and princesses that merge into streams. His gouache paintings of Algerian women, some depicting individuals, others pairs, are formed in curvilinear lines and bright colors that draw the viewer in. The Algerian artist (who often went by her first name) inspired the works of André Breton, Henri Matisse, and Picasso, yet her work has rarely been shown alongside these major figures.
Zubeida Agha (1922–1997)
A pioneering artist of Pakistani modernism, Agha’s explorations in abstraction prioritize rhythm and mood over content. Drawing inspiration from Cubism’s attention to form and color, as well as artists like Amrita Sher-Gil, known for her striking portraits of women, Agha’s paintings offer an alternative to realistic depictions of the post-partition landscape, rather reflecting these new barriers and borders. through the expression of color and line in his work.
Bahman Mohasses (1931-2010)
Mohasses was an Iranian modernist whose body of work could not be easily equated with national movements of modernism rooted in local Iranian traditions like the contemporary Saqqakhaneh movement or the canonical “schools” of modern art. His works of painting, sculpture, and collage incorporated minotaurs, faceless heads, and androgynous figures. Picasso’s work allowed Mohasses to conceive of destruction not just as violence repeated throughout history, but as a means by which art could be created.
Faith Ringgold (1930–)
Strangely absent from the Brooklyn Museum exhibition is Ringgold’s stunning quilted work, which confronts Picasso’s appropriation of African masks head-on. In “Picasso’s Studio”, Ringgold exposes Modernism’s debt to African arts, centering the character of Willia Marie Simone as both model and artist, surrounded by Picasso and the masks that were integral to the development of Cubism. The quilt border text gives Willia a voice as an active creator in the story of the origins of modernism.
Ahmad Mursi (1930–)
A major figure in Arab modernism, Morsi is a poet, painter and critic from Alexandria, Egypt. After moving to New York in 1983, his iconic portraits of stylized figures began to incorporate references to the sea, along with other recurring symbols: fish out of water, mythical horses, and almond-eyed abstract figures. “Weeping Women II” swaps Picasso’s Weeping Woman for the collective faces of Iraqi women mourning the loss of Arab lives and families at the hands of US-initiated wars. Morsi is the author of the first Arabic monograph on Picasso.
Yinka Shonibare (1962–)
Using objects from European antiquity and African arts, the Anglo-Nigerian artist creates African sculptures, quilts and masks that interrogate the sense of appropriation and the dynamics of cultural “authenticity” (positioning non-Western artists as producers of culture removed from global contexts or cultural transformations). Shonibare subverts the colonial dynamics in which Euro-American modernists appropriated non-European works by making hybrid pieces that disrupt these power dynamics in culture and display.
Farah Atassi (nineteen eighty one-)
Women are at the center of Atassi’s bold paintings, which are filled with striking geometric shapes and lines that define space and depth. Actualizing Cubism for the present, Atassi reinvigorates the subject of the female model, a staple of male-dominated Cubism, by endowing his models with a sense of subjectivity in the contemporary world.
At the forefront of Picasso’s legacy and his role in the larger narrative of Euro-American abstraction is a concern with the reconsideration of traditional modes of representation in the 20th century. The artists above are part of this lineage and bring new dimensions to an overarching narrative of abstraction and formal innovation in a world where ongoing violence shatters the relationship between image and meaning, as well as modes of perception. These artists not only upended the conventions of image-making in their own national traditions, but they also presented anti-colonial, anti-racist, and feminist perspectives often overlooked in Euro-American modernism. The strength of such a comparative framework lies in what these artists can, with their own forms and perspectives, teach us about the world.
