‘The enchantments of Oceania and Africa’: 1906–1909

Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires.

- Pablo Picasso

In 1907 Picasso painted the complex and now iconic Les demoiselles d’Avignon. A dense and shallow composition of angular, contorted figures, it shocked and perplexed even his most avant-garde contemporaries. Matisse thought it an ‘audacious hoax’, a parody of the increasingly abstract treatment of figures in modern painting. Picasso himself called the painting an ‘exorcism’.

His studies for Les demoiselles d’Avignon on display in this room reveal the range of influences and approaches that went into producing this landmark work. They are not studies in the traditional sense but, typically for Picasso, explorations of possible types that may or may not be included in the final composition. Particularly evident is his growing fascination with tribal art, as seen in the mask-like, chiselled features and angular bodies that caused such extreme reactions to the final work.

Captivated by the Tahitian-inspired works of Paul Gauguin and the Pacific and African collections of the Louvre and the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (now the Musée de l’Homme), in 1907 Picasso acquired a carved tiki figure that influenced his first wood carving, the totemic oak Figure 1907. The sculpture’s rough-hewn appearance captures the ‘naive’ quality of so-called ‘primitive’ art that Picasso and several of his contemporaries found compelling. Tête de femme (Fernande) (Head of a woman (Fernande)) 1909, a bronze portrait of his lover Fernande Olivier, uses a more complex, rhythmic repetition of angular forms – a suggestion of the ‘cubist’ style that would dominate his work in the coming years.