Picasso's “blacks” were Catalans
With Picasso, there are always things to discover. I myself still learn new things every day.” This very week, on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition Growing Up Between Two Artists , Paloma Picasso explained that the most fascinating thing about Picasso the artist was his ability to continue surprising us, as if at some point he had thrown into the river the key that opens and reveals the hidden meaning of many of his works and left that task in the hands of future scholars.
One of his most fervently studied and debated paintings is Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), his first masterpiece. It is the painting that gave rise to all modern art, and in its more than one hundred years of existence, it has been the subject of the most diverse—and even conflicting—interpretations by researchers around the world. Picasso began it with the idea of a brothel scene, but nothing certifies that these five naked women, two of them standing, with their arms raised to display their breasts and their large black eyes fixed on the viewer, are actually prostitutes. The other three figures, with flattened silhouettes and triangular breasts, wear what appear to be African masks, for many incontrovertible proof of the influence of Black art on the young 25-year-old painter.
Picasso would have borrowed images from Campdevànol and the chapel of Sant Martí de FenollarFor collector and researcher Alain Moreau, this idea is no less absurd for being so often repeated. "It's true that Picasso had a great interest in the so-called primitive African art and was a great collector of masks and exotic sculptures, but his dark period didn't begin until late 1907 and early 1908, that is, when he had already finished the canvas," he argues. In contrast, Moreau, who defines himself as an "art detective," has been gathering evidence since 1995 in support of a theory that overturns what has been widely accepted until now.
Read also “I've been living with Velázquez's girlfriend for twenty years.” Victor-M. Amela
And he claims that Picasso's blacks are not inspired by African art, but by medieval Catalan art, specifically by the now-lost frescoes of the La Vella church of Sant Cristòfol de Campdevànol (Ripollès) and the Romanesque paintings of the Sant Martí de Fenollar chapel, at the foot of the Pyrenees and about thirty kilometres from Perpignan, in northern Catalonia.
'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' at MoMA
Santi Visalli/Getty Images
the character
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Moreau notes the inexplicable contraption on the face of the young lady sitting with her back turned (right) and its similarity to the one she is wearing the character of Sant Martí from Fenollar
Mar Duran / Nord Media“Picasso himself repeatedly denied that there was any Black art in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , and in a 1920 interview in which, along with other artists, he was asked his opinion on this art, he replied: 'Art negre, connais pas' (Black art, I don't know it),” Moreau recounts. “He commissioned Christian Zervos to write a 44-page plea to disassociate himself from African models, hiding behind Iberian art, which no other artist had exploited. It was his domain.” And when that proved fruitless, thirty years later Pierre Daix, his friend and biographer, tried again to dispel the confusion with an article published in the most widely circulated French-language art magazine entitled Il n'y a pas d'art nègre dans les demoiselles d'Avignon. Now Moreau himself has once again joined the cause with a scholarly article, Picasso and Primitive Art. Picasso's 'blacks' come from French Catalonia, which has just appeared in the Bulletin of the Royal Catalan Academy of Fine Arts Sant Jordi.
Researcher Alain Moreau argues that the painter was inspired by medieval art for his first masterpiece.A Frenchman living in Barcelona, Moreau is a scholar who, at 75, researches for the love of art. His method, he acknowledges, owes more to Lieutenant Colombo or Inspector Gadget than to that of art historians. “I actually go against history. When I see something that's been talked about a lot, but it doesn't add up or there are different versions, I get to work, look for clues, try to connect the dots, and at a given moment, when I find a weak point, I pull on the loose end…”
Read alsoOne of them was found in Alfred Barr, the first director of MoMA, who supported the Black art theory of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in the 1939 exhibition "Forty Years of His Art" dedicated to the painting at the New York museum, displaying alongside the painting an African Itumbi mask that supposedly inspired his "most hideous lady." "It turns out that this mask hadn't arrived in Europe until 1935, so it's impossible that Picasso would have seen it," he argues.
At the end of his life, already in his nineties, Picasso depicted himself with a cadaverous image, with exhausted shoulders and an ape-like face,
TORSTEN BLACKWOOD/AFP
Representation of Adam in a fresco in the church of Sant Cristòfol Campdevànol
LVBut when and how did Picasso arrive in Campdevànol and Sant Martí de Fenollar? His visits are undocumented. "Most likely," Moreau ventures, "he stopped on the way to Gósol because his friend Joan Vidal Ventosa, who was the photographer for the Barcelona Museum Board, recommended he see the remains of the fresco in the church of Sant Cristòfol, now lost but of which a copy exists made by the historian Ramon de Abadal." There, Moreau discovered the figure of an Adam that would have impressed Picasso and which he captured sixty-six years later in a haunting and stark self-portrait, when, at the end of his life, he depicted himself with a cadaverous image, with exhausted shoulders and an ape-like face, bruised, unshaven, sunken cheeks, and sealed lips. Dead but still alive. How could he possibly have remembered him six decades later? “Picasso was like a refrigerator; he kept everything in his memory even if he had only seen it for a second,” he replies.
“Picasso was like a refrigerator; he kept everything in his memory even if he had seen it for a second.”
Self-portrait of 1907
National Gallery in Prague
Figure of Sant Martí de Fenollar in which Picasso seems to have replicated both the colors and the eyes and the angular chin in his self-portrait
Mar Duran / Nord MediaFor Moreau, it's also evident that he reused fragments from Sant Martí de Fenollar, which he was able to visit during a vacation in southern France in 1907, both in terms of the shapes and the chromaticity lacking in African masks. His famous 1907 self-portrait, in the Prague Museum, is said to be "a copy of the colors and exaggerated eyes, the angular chin, and the reddish color of one of its figures." The researcher also notes the similarity of the "inexplicable trinket on the face of the young lady in the foreground with the face of a boar, this growth whose meaning is unknown: an ear, a tumor, a boomerang, or an arm," with another figure in the same chapel. Or the Virgin replicated in numerous primitivist heads.
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