{"id":29665,"date":"2025-07-28T22:27:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T22:27:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/29665\/"},"modified":"2025-07-28T22:27:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-28T22:27:07","slug":"picassos-demoiselles-may-not-have-been-inspired-by-african-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/29665\/","title":{"rendered":"Picasso’s ‘Demoiselles’ May Not Have Been Inspired by African Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tNew scholarship suggests that a pivotal Pablo Picasso<\/a> painting\u2014one that helped spur on modernism more broadly\u2014may have been inspired by Medieval church frescoes in the Spanish Pyrenees rather than African art, as many art historians have previously suggested.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe canvas in question, Les Demoiselles d\u2019Avignon (1907), depicts five nude women, some of whom appear to have masks for faces. Utilizing techniques derived from Cubism, Picasso fractured the women\u2019s bodies and the background behind them.<\/p>\n

\n\tAfrican art has long been put forward as the main inspiration for Les Demoiselles d\u2019Avignon, which as painted after a visit to Paris\u2019s first anthropological museum, the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Ethnographie du Trocad\u00e9ro, in June 1907. Picasso attempted to distance the work from the African art he saw there, however. \u201cBlack art? I don\u2019t know it,\u201d Picasso said in a 1920 interview.<\/p>\n

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\n\tNow, French collector and self-proclaimed \u201cart detective\u201d Alain Moreau has published a paper in the Bulletin of the Reial Acad\u00e8mia Catalana de Belles Arts Sant Jordi claiming that Picasso\u2019s engagement with African art and artifacts began after he had already completed Les Demoiselles d\u2019Avignon. The Times of London first reported<\/a> news of Moreau\u2019s paper.<\/p>\n

\n\tMoreau believes that inspiration for the piece can be found among the now-lost frescoes in the church of La Vella de Sant Crist\u00f2fol in Campdev\u00e0nol and the Romanesque murals of Sant Mart\u00ed de Fenollar in the foothills of the French Pyrenees south of Perpignan.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs part of his research, Moreau retraced the artist\u2019s travels, including a possible detour on the way to G\u00f3sol, Spain, in 1906. Joan Vidal Ventosa, a friend and art lover, suggested Picasso visit these locales. The paintings inside were supposedly gaining traction among Catalonia\u2019s intellectual elite at the time and feature similar qualities to those found in Les Demoiselles d\u2019Avignon such as facial markings, angular forms, and colorful palettes.<\/p>\n

\n\tMoreau also pointed out that the African mask that was on view alongside Les Demoiselles d\u2019Avignon in a 1939 retrospective<\/a> at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was not in Europe until 1935\u2014nearly three decades after the painting was finished. At the time, however, curator Alfred Barr claimed the mask directly inspired the work.<\/p>\n

\n\tArtists and historians have long debated the origin of inspiration behind Les Demoiselles d\u2019Avignon, with some citing the blatant cultural theft of Black art, while others have argued for its purposefully enigmatic qualities.<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, Moreau argues that the color palette, as well as the portrayal of the women\u2019s facial contours and the eyes, more acutely recall Catalonia\u2019s Medieval church paintings. He also cited the chirimbolo, the mysterious mark on one figure\u2019s face, which is often interpreted as an ear, a tumor, or an arm. The mark draws inspiration from the abstract facial markings found in Catalan Christian art.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New scholarship suggests that a pivotal Pablo Picasso painting\u2014one that helped spur on modernism more broadly\u2014may have been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29666,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,18257,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-29665","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-pablo-picasso","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}