Picasso, Africa, and the schemata of difference

Modernism - Modernity

Volumn 10, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 455-480

  Gikandi, Simon ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149460709     PISSN: 10716068     EISSN: 10806601     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/mod.2003.0062     Document Type: Review

References (45)

1. Rasheed Araeen, "Conversation with Aubrey Williams," Third Text 2 (1987-88): 32
2. André Malraux, Picasso's Mask (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 10; hereafter abbreviated PM
3. Writing to Kahnweiller in August 11, 1912 about some masks he had bought, Picasso didn't hesitate to describe them as (stand-ins for) Africans: "We bought some blacks [des nègres] at Marseilles and I bought a very good mask and a woman with big tits and a young black." Quoted in Natasha Staller, A Sum of Destructions: Picasso's Cultures and the Creation of Cubism (New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press, 2001), 318; hereafter abbreviated SOD
4. The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain (London: Hayward Gallery, 1989), 16-50
5. See D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), xii. Here Miller is discussing how "modern social organization" has made even scandal "a systematic function of its routine self-maintenance." For my purposes one can substitute difference or primitivism in modernism for scandal
6. See for example the debates in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, second edition, ed. Francis Frascina (New York: Routledge, 2000), especially the argument between T. J. Clark and Michael Fried, 71-112
7. My assumption here is that while the literature on black bodies and modernism has grown in recent years, as has that on race and modernism, most of it takes the African American, not the African, to be the representative black subject. See, for example, Michael North, The Dialectic of Modernism: Piace, Language, and Twentieth Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
8. and the essays collected in Race and the Modern Artist, ed. Heather Hathaway, Josef JaYab, and Jeffrey Melnick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)
9. Kahnweiler's comments were made in 1948 at the height of Picasso's canonization; Dax was writing in the 1970s; both are quoted in Yve-Alain Bois Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1990), 69
10. "Negro Art and Cubism," originally published in Prèsence Africaine, collected in Primitivism and Twentieth Century Art, ed. Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 284
11. See William Rubin, "Picasso" in "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art, vol. 1 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 260; hereafter abbreviated "Pic."
12. See, respectively, Kahnweiller "Negro Art," 285; Rubin, "Introduction" to Primitivism, 17
13. and Bois Painting as Model, 73
14. I pursue these questions in greater detail in Unmodern Subjects: Race, Art, and African Difference from which this discussion is excerpted. Discussing the way the "ghostly" makes its way into the movement of European history, Jacques Derrida observes that "Haunting would mark the very existence of Europe. It would open the space and the relation to self of what is called by this name, at least since the Middle Ages. See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 4
15. I develop this argument in "Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic," Michigan Quarterly Review XL, no. 2 (2001): 318-50
16. For the interplay of social ideals and ideas of pollution, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (New York: Routledge, 1966), 1-6
17. "War-Paint and Feathers," originally published in the Athenaeum in October 17, 1919, collected in Primitivism and Twentieth Century Art, 122
18. "War-Paint and Feathers," 122
19. See "Chronology" in Picasso: The Early Years 1892-1906, ed. Marilyn McCully (Washington, D.C. : National Gallery of Art, 1997), 48; hereafter abbreviated PEY
20. Margaret Werth, "Representing the Body in 1906" (PEY, 277-88)
21. Werth, "Representing the Body in 1906" (PEY, 277)
22. After eighty sittings, Picasso gave up "seeing" Gertrude Stein and turned to the mask as an alternative way of viewing. The significance of this turn from the human model to the mask is discussed by Michael North in The Dialectic of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 59-76
23. For a feminist reading of the Portrait of Gertrude Stein, see Tamar Darb, '"To Kill the Nineteenth Century': Sex and Spectatorship with Gertrude and Pablo," in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, ed. Christopher Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 55-76
24. But in discussing notions of disorder, we need to keep Mary Douglas's dictum in mind: "Reflections on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death." See Purity and Danger, 6
25. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y : Cornell University Press, 1981), 280
26. It would be interesting to compare Picasso's Harem with some of Matisse's Orientalist paintings. For the latter, see Roger Benjamin's Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa 1880-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), especially chapter 7, 59-90
27. Fredric Jameson, "Beyond the Cave," in Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 117
28. Simpson, Fetishism and Imagination, 11
29. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1981), 102
30. Laurent Jenny, "The Strategy of Form," in French Literary Theory Today, ed. Tzvetan Todorov, trans. R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 40
31. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1988), 190
32. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 190, 193, 195
33. Hal Forster, Recordings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1985), 184
34. Forster, Recordings, 182
35. Robert Farris Thompson, "Fang Mask," in Perspectives: Angles on African Art, James Baldwin et al (New York: Center for African Art, 1987), 190
36. Farris Thompson, "Fang Mask," 190
37. The most notorious instance of this exclusion concerns the Baule artist, Lela Kouakou, who was invited to participate in a forum on African art but was allowed to comment only on works from his ethnic region because he was deemed incapable of providing "objective" aesthetic judgments, that is, those not bound by his "traditional criteria." See Susan Vogel, "Introduction" to Perspectives: Angles on African Art, 11. For a subtle discussion of this criterion of inclusion and exclusion see Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 137-9
38. The literature on African masks is too extensive to cite here, but see Z. S. Strother, Inventing Masks: Agency and History in the Art of the Central Pende (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), especially chapter six, 39-54
39. Dramatic deployments of the mask in motion can be found in Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God (London: Heinemann, 1964)
40. and Wole Soyinka's The Road (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965)
41. See Richards, Masks of Difference, 204
42. John Roscoe, The Baganda: An Account of their Native Customs and Beliefs (London: MacMillan, 1911), ix
43. For Rattray, see Religion and Art in Ashanti (London: Oxford University Press, 1927)
44. What, for example, is the structural relationship between the destruction of the Kingdom of Benin by a British Expeditionary Force in 1897 and the availability of Benin sculpture to the British Museum? Should it surprise us that the rooted sculpture is now housed in a modern wing of the British Museum, paid for by a family that made its fortunes in the confectionaries of empire, and named after Henry Moore, a leading modernist and connoisseur of African art? For the Benin Expedition, see Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination (New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press, 1994), 7-28
45. I had suggested a similar act of deritualization, albeit too briefly, for T. S. Eliot in Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), chapter 5, 157-89