ARTISTS
Pablo Picasso
This summer’s exhibition of work by Pablo Picasso, one of modernism’s brightest stars, explores the fact that the artist referred to some of his own pictures as “exorcism paintings.”
Author André Malraux recorded a 1937 conversation with the artist in which he described being struck by a pivotal insight while viewing an exhibition of African art at the Trocadéro, Paris’s ethnographic museum, in 1907. Alone and surrounded by what were for him exotic artifacts, Picasso suddenly realized how important the African masks were as magical objects. He told Malraux how this realization fundamentally influenced his view of the role of the artist:
The [African] masks weren’t like other kinds of sculpture. Not at all. They were magical things. … They were weapons. To help people stop being dominated by spirits. … I understood why I was a painter. … ‘The Young Ladies of Avignon’ must have come to me that day, but not at all because of the forms: but because it was my first canvas of exorcism – yes, absolutely!
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This summer’s exhibition of work by Pablo Picasso, one of modernism’s brightest stars, explores the fact that the artist referred to some of his own pictures as “exorcism paintings.”
Author André Malraux recorded a 1937 conversation with the artist in which he described being struck by a pivotal insight while viewing an exhibition of African art at the Trocadéro, Paris’s ethnographic museum, in 1907. Alone and surrounded by what were for him exotic artifacts, Picasso suddenly realized how important the African masks were as magical objects. He told Malraux how this realization fundamentally influenced his view of the role of the artist:
The [African] masks weren’t like other kinds of sculpture. Not at all. They were magical things. … They were weapons. To help people stop being dominated by spirits. … I understood why I was a painter. … ‘The Young Ladies of Avignon’ must have come to me that day, but not at all because of the forms: but because it was my first canvas of exorcism – yes, absolutely!
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