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Picasso’s Exorcism: Fear of ‘Primitives’ and ‘Prostitutes’

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Page 1: Modernism in Art: An Intoduction.  Picasso's exorcism: Fear of 'Primitives' and 'Prostitutes

Picasso’s Exorcism:Fear of ‘Primitives’ and

‘Prostitutes’

Page 2: Modernism in Art: An Intoduction.  Picasso's exorcism: Fear of 'Primitives' and 'Prostitutes
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Picasso’s Exorcism: Fear of ‘Primitives’ and ‘Prostitutes’

Give you an understanding of the prevailing attitudes towards other cultures before and during the 19th century.

Provide an account of the background for ‘primitivism’ in art, including the work of Paul Gauguin, les Fauves, the German Expressionists and Picasso.

Develop a nuanced, critical reading of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon.

This lecture should:

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Modernity and Colonialism

1914

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Modernity and Colonialism

“There had been, from the beginning of classical speculation, two contrasting opinions about the natural state of man [...] One view, termed "soft" primitivism [...] conceives of primitive life as a golden age of plenty, innocence, and happiness -- in other words, as civilized life purged of its vices. The other, "hard" form of primitivism conceives of primitive life as an almost subhuman existence full of terrible hardships and devoid of all comforts -- in other words, as civilized life stripped of its virtues.” (Panofsky...)

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Benjamin West, The Treaty of Penn with the Indians, 1771-72

George Carter, fl.1769-1784, Death of Captain Cook, 1781

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Otherness – binary oppositions in the 19th Century world view.

Culture Nature>

Rationality Irrationality (emotion)>

Man Woman>

Western Non-Western>

Civilized > Primitive

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Imperialism and acquisition

Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, Interior

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Progress and evolution

“Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution lies behind many early anthropological and sociological definitions of the primative. It is significant however, that what were originally essentially mecanistic principles of biological transformations were quickly translated into philisophical prrof for new versions of the medieval idea of a vertically orientated ‘Great Chain of Being’ […] a ‘ladder’ on which men were arranged in ascending order of importance according to ‘race’ (and often class).”

(Rhodes 1994, p. 14)

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Exoticism and Orientalism

“...so authoritive a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought imposed by Orientalism.”

(Said, p.3)

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Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1862) Le Bain Turkish

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Jean-Léon Gérôme (1860s) Slave Market

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Jean-Léon Gérôme (1895) The Whirling Dervishes

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The Exotic in Popular Culture

Mike Leigh (1999) Topsy- Turvey.

Timothy Spall as Richard Temple, playing the Makado

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Mike Leigh (1999) Topsy- Turvey.Jim Broadbent and Allan Cordener as W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan

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Karl Girandet (1845) Geroge Catlin’s Iowa Troupe perform for Louis Philippe

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The Exotic in Popular Culture

Josephine Baker (1927) The Banana Dance at the Folies Bergere

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The Savage Mind“By the turn of the [20th Century] the belief that the vision of the savage was somehow pre-rational or childlike had passed into popular thought”

(Rhodes 1994, p. 14)

Paul Klee (1922) Head of a man going senile

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Brittany and Pont-Aven

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (1886) Le Pardon en Bretagne

Paul Gaugin (1889) La Lutte de Jacob avec l’ange (The Vision after the Sermon)

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Katsushika Hokusai (approx 1820) Sunset over the Ryogoku Bridge

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Paul Gaugin (1889) Self Portrait

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Left: Gaugin (1894) manuscript of Noa Noa. Right: Paul Gaugin (1891) The Man with the Axe

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In Germany

A house in Worpswede

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1906-7) Self-portrait with camellia sprig

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Cultural Criticism

Georg Simmel

“… the essentially intellectualistic character of mental life of the metropolis becomes intelligible over against the small town which rests more on feelings and emotional relationships. There latter are rooted in the unconscious levels of the mind and develop most readily in the steady equilibrium of unbroken customs.”

(Simmel 1903, p.12)

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Nietsche (1844 -1900)

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Expressionism“The belief that the artist could directly convey some kind of inner feeling – emotional or spiritual – through art was a fashionable idea in German artistic and intellectual circles at the beginning of the twentieth century.”

(Frascina et al. 1993, p.63)

Erich Heckel (1910) BrückeCover page of Brücke exhibition catalogue

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1909) Badende am Moritzburg (Bathers at Moritzburg)

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1909-10) Badende in Raum (Bathers in a Room)

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Erich Heckel (1913) Day of Glass

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Les Fauves

Henri Matisse (1907) Nu bleu. Souvenir de Biska (Blue Nude. Souvenir of Biska)

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Tribal Objects

Fang Mask – formerly in the collection of Fauvist Maurice de Vlaminck

Teke-Tsaayi mask, Republic of Congo – formerly in the collection of Fauvists Andre Derain and Charles Ratton

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Picasso (1881 – 1973)

(1908)

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Pablo Picasso (1903) Blind Man’s Meal

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Two photographs of a head of a person suffering from advanced stages of syphillis (1896-7)

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Picasso in 1931. Photograph by Cecil Beaton

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Pablo Picasso (1910) Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler

Pablo Picasso (1910) Portrait of Ambroise Vollard

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“When I went to the Trocadero it was disgusting … I was all alone”

“[The Negroes’ sculpture [sic] was] against everything: against unknown, threatening spirits […] I understood: I too am against everything. I too think that everything that is unknown , is the enemy! Everything! Not just the devils – women, children, animals, tobacco, playing – but everything!”

“If we give form to the spirits, we become independent of them. The spirits the unconscious … emotion, it’s the same thing. I understood why I was a painter. All alone in that awful museum, the masks, the Red Indian dolls, the dusty mannequins. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must have come to me that day […] it was my first canvas of exorcism – yes, absolutely!”

(Picasso 1974 [1937])

Trocadero in 1900

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Pablo Picasso (1907) Studies for Les Demoiselles D’Avignon

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Pablo Picasso (1907) Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

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‘Primitivism’

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“Primitivism in Modern Art is predominantly about making the familiar strange or about maintaining the strangeness of unfamiliar experiences as a means of questioning the experiences as a means of questioning the recieved wisdom of Western Culture. This contrasts with the general trend in European Art since the Renaissance, which has sought to render the experiences of new cultures in a visual language that contains and neutralises the threat of the unkown by absorbing it into recognised systems of representation.”

(Rhodes 1994, p.75)

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Brunner, Kathleen (2004) Picasso Writing Picasso. Black Dog Publishing, London. Fitzgerald, Michael F. (1996) Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the

Market for Twentieth-Century Art. Foster, Hal (1985) The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art in Harris, J. (ed)

(1992) Art In Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts. Open University, London.

Harrison, Charles, Francis Frascina and Gill Perry (1993) Primitivism, Cubism and Abstraction. The Open University, London.

Lemke, Sieglinde (1998) Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Nietsche, Friedrich (2003) Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Penguin Books, London. Rhodes, Colin (1994) Primitivism and Modern Art. Thames and Hudson, London. Rubin, Colin (1994) Primitivism in Modern Art. Thames and Huson, London. Rubin, William (ed.) (1994) ‘Primitivism’. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Said, Edward W. (2003 [1978]) Orientalism. Penguin Books, London. Simmel, Georg (1903) The Metropolis and Mental Life. Found at:

http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/Sample_chapter/0631225137/Bridge.pdf [accessed 27/01/11]

Stocking, George W. (1985) Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture. The University of Wisconsin Press, London.

Wolf, Norbert (2006) Expressionism. Taschen, Cologne. Wood, Paul (ed.) (1999) The Challenge of the Avant-Garde. The Open University,

London.

Reading: Clifford, James (1988) Histories of the Tribal and Modern, in The Predicament of

Culture. Harvard University Press. Pp 189 – 214.