Picasso's Collection of African and Oceanic Art: Masters of Metamorphosis (review)

Peter Stepan's book is a welcome addition to the recent flurry of works on Picasso's sustained encounter with non-European art. This publication is one of the fruits of collaborative work by an international group of scholars, spearheaded by Gérard Regnier, former director of the Musée Picasso in Paris. The effort resulted in a major international exhibition (and accompanying catalog) by Laurence Madeleine and Marilyn Martin, Picasso and Africa, held in 2006 at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa; sections of Stepan's essay "A Collection Parlante" first appeared in this catalog before it was expanded for the publication under review.

As with previous exhibitions that attempted to present the explosive relationship between European artists and non-European art, scholars have been galvanized by Picasso and Africa, with criticisms and accolades coming from both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed at the College Art Association's annual conference of 2006, several papers explored such themes as the problematic notions of primitivism, or the influences on Picasso as he produced his penultimate work, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1906–7. In short, historians of African art have brought fresh perspectives to a discussion usually controlled by European modernists. Stepan, however, is a historian of European art, and hence his interest in this volume is still with Picasso and his work. Although addressing issues that Picasso himself did not know at the time he collected these African works, the catalog includes little new information on non-European objects; the texts on African objects were largely culled from established texts by prominent historians of African art.

Few previous scholars have attempted to document Picasso's collection of non-European material, as much of Picasso's collection was perceived to be a sampling of tourist art of little value. However, by cataloging all known extant pieces in the former collection, Stepan argues that Picasso purposefully collected materials that would not form a collection of financial value or artistic merit. Instead, Picasso's was more of an "anti-aesthetic strategy" (14); the artist's iconoclastic drive, his communist politics, and his ardent dislike of the petite bourgeoisie, Stepan claims, suggest that he would not have a collection that "resembled those of the coffee and rubber barons, steel and oil magnates" (11). Given Picasso's philosophy of sabotage and interruption, such values as refinement, authenticity, and market value would not initially have been salient to him; more important to him were the formal qualities of the works: the more encrusted, rough, and obvious the carving of the final product, the better (14). Stepan provides an illuminating analysis of Picasso's collection as a private collection, assembled to meet his own spiritual needs and artistic values. As Picasso gradually achieved iconic status in his own right, however, his collecting habits kept pace. In 1944 he bought a brass altar head from Benin City for 350,000 francs, using one of his own paintings as a down payment. Even in his own life, Picasso refused to stay within scripted artistic categories, as he reassessed even those criteria he delineated for himself.

Stepan's archival research is his strongest contribution to both Africanist and Picasso scholarship. He makes available previously undocumented letters, photographs, and transcripts of interviews and memoirs from Picasso archives across Europe and the United States. His painstaking reconstruction of Picasso's collection of Oceanic and African art includes a detailed chronology of the artist's acquisition of the items, placing these acquisitions alongside significant landmarks in the artist's life and career. The archives from public and private collections, including many from the Picasso family itself, are presented by Stepan in the form of an analytical essay, a detailed chronology, and a catalog of the African and Oceanic objects. The Anglophone reader should keep in mind, however, that this English...