Picasso's Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece by Suzanne Preston Blier (review)

Pablo Picasso's painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907 is often used in the discipline of African art history to represent and debate the influence of African art in the development of European twentieth century modern art movements. It is used to analyze the aesthetics of Primitivism inspired by the arts of Africa and Oceania and to examine the complex historical relationship between Europe and Africa during the period marked by colonialism. But how much do we actually know about the painting in question and how much is shrouded by myths derived from the artwork's iconic status within the European art canon? While there exists a large body of literature surrounding the artwork, the predominant historical narrative has not fully acknowledged the importance of African art in Picasso's work, and there still remain many unanswered questions linked to what the painting represents and what sources were used by the artist.

In Picasso's Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece, the eminent African art professor Suzanne Preston Blier attempts to address the gaps in the literature by presenting new insights into the significance of African art in the painting. As stated in the introduction to the book, Blier proposes to move the analysis away from dominant ideas about the work representing five prostitutes and instead suggests we consider le bordel to refer to the French expression for "a mess" or "a complex situation," "recalling the mess that the world itself represents, particularly vis-à-vis issues of race, evolution, migration, and generational identity" (p. 5). With this assertion, the reader is promised a fresh critical analysis of the painting set within overlapping historical, sociopolitical contexts.

Structured in seven chapters, the book traces the period in which Picasso worked on the idea for the large-scale canvas (roughly between October 1906 and March 1907), describing in detail the artist's first encounter with African art objects owned by Henri Matisse (1869–1954), among them Vili figures from Congo. A large part of the book is dedicated to reinterpreting the painting in the light of new sources of evidence, such as the illustrated books by the German ethnologist and archaeologist Leo Frobenius (1873–1938) and the photographic medical books by Carl Heinrich Stratz (1858–1924), despite Blier repeating throughout the book that, "we have no direct evidence that Picasso saw or studied these books" (p. 16).

This would not have been an issue if Blier had shifted the focus from trying to convince the readers that Picasso used specific illustrations and photographs as references for his composition, providing us instead with greater analysis of the colonial history in which these constructed images of Africa were produced and circulated in Europe. Set in a wider context, she could have developed a stronger argument for interpreting Picasso's painting in view of how he engaged or rejected dominant European ideas of Africa operating at that time in order to understanding what Africa represented to the artist. The overemphasis on matching and comparing Les Demoiselles with individual illustrations in Frobenius and Stratz's books results in more of a detraction than an aid to understanding le bordel.

There is a further problem with the overall reading of the book which is connected to the author ascribing a racial and cultural identity to each of the demoiselles. Blier writes:

Early on I accorded each of the demoiselles a name for easy identification purposes. From left to right these female subjects include the Egyptian/Asian; the half-standing Caucasian; the central Caucasian/central figure; the standing African; and the crouching African/crouching figure. The identities help inform our understanding of the canvas

(p. xii).

While this statement seems initially to be justified for practical reasons and provides the reader with a point of interest as to where this will take them next, what ensues...