Picasso in Dakar, 1972-2022 curated by Guillaume de Sardes, Hélène Joubert, El Hadji Malick Ndiaye, and Ousseynou Wade

Abstract

Debuting amid the 2022 edition of the Dak'art Biennial, Picasso in Dakar, 1972-2022—curated by Guillaume de Sardes, Hélène Joubert, El Hadji Malick Ndiaye, and Ousseynou Wade, with project managers Chih-Chia Chung, Safia Belmenouar, Sophie Daynes-Diallo, Sarah Lagrevol—brought together works from four lending institutions: from France, the Musée Picasso and Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac; and in Senegal, the Théodore Monod Museum of African Art as well as the host venue, the Museum of Black Civilizations (Fig. 1). The exhibition marked the passage of fifty years since a solo show of the Spanish artist's work appeared at the now defunct Musée Dynamique, Dakar's first art museum to be built under the supervision of independent Senegal's inaugural president, Léopold Sédar Senghor. To revisit this 1972 moment in 2022 was to implicitly remind audiences of the city's enduring status as an African superconductor in the circuitry of the global art world. But if Picasso in Dakar, 1972-2022 was a reminder of such legacies maintained, it was also an opportunity to revisit Dakar's relationship to Picasso with critical hindsight.In the opening address of the 1972 Picasso exhibition, a show cosponsored by French president Georges Pompidou, Senghor praised the artist and suggested that his Andalusian roots gave ancestral backing to the role that African art played in the artist's creations. For Dakar's contemporary artists, Senghor proclaimed, Picasso was a model “whose kinship serves as a firm promise, and whose differentness serves as a powerful encouragement” (Senghor 1995: 228). But over the half-century that has passed since Senghor's laudatory remarks, Picasso's relationship to Africa has received important scrutiny. Simon Gikandi (2003) famously called out the “schemata of difference” upon which the artist's relationship to African art and people relied. Recent books by Suzanne Blier (2019) and Joshua Cohen (2020) have identified specific interactions shaping the artist's engagement with the continent and its cultural forms. And more broadly, the legacy of Picasso faces renewed critique well beyond the walls of academia, amid a public recognition of the role that exclusionary art canons and their protagonists have played in the ideologies of patriarchy and White supremacy.Given this context, the fraught hyphen in the title Picasso in Dakar, 1972-2022 dangled provocative questions. How might the past five decades of research and criticism equip this show to cast new light on both Picasso and Senghor? What present-day concerns, particularly regarding the intertwined political and artistic institutions of Africa and Europe, could this exhibition lend greater historical depth? Could viewing the reciprocal relationship between the artist and a single city offer specificity, multidirectionality, and analytical rigor to Picasso-Africa discourse, guiding audiences beyond familiar accounts of the European artist's gaze upon a generalized continent?This exhibition was divided into four sections. Each illustrated a different logic meant to link Picasso and the African continent to one another. The first of these, titled “Picasso's Presence in Dakar,” offered the most reciprocal, precise, and original approach to this intercontinental connection. Through wall text, historic newspapers, and other archival materials, this section introduced viewers to the multiple appearances that Picasso's work (though never the artist himself) made in Senghorian Senegal throughout the first fifteen years of national independence. A grainy press photograph, for example, shows one lucky attendee of the city's 1966 First World Festival of Negro Arts being presented with a painting, titled Tête d'Homme Barbu, that the artist donated to the event as a tombola prize. The 1972 solo exhibition devoted to Picasso at the Musée Dynamique was presented through a variety of its visual and material remains, including its promotional poster, installation photography, and exhibition catalog, as well as several newspaper clippings. Together, these materials invited their audience to ponder how exchanges between Senghor and Picasso affected the latter's artistic creations but also influenced Dakar's artists, audiences and institutions.The remaining three sections unfortunately abandoned the promising groundwork laid in the first. They instead rehearsed familiar narratives to connect the artist to an Africa that becomes increasingly generalized as the show proceeds. The second section, titled “The Studios,” relied upon enlarged photographs of the artist's European working spaces to show that objects from Africa often accompanied him. Many of these studio photographs were juxtaposed with objects that loosely resembled the ones adorning Picasso's environment. For example: a larger-than-life photograph of Picasso seated next to an ngombi, a kind of harp created by people living in and around what is now Gabon, dwarfed the vitrine next to it, which contained an altogether different ngombi from the one pictured. The difference in scale peripheralized the ngombi, causing the object to appear subservient to its role in contextualizing the photograph.Most distractingly, a photograph of Picasso taken in 1958, Pablo Picasso in His Workshop by Robert Doisneau (Fig. 2), was enlarged to stretch from floor to ceiling. In this image, the eighty-two-year-old artist stands over his works. More than a dozen of his canvases surround him, and two recognizably African figural sculptures—Senufo pombia, perhaps—are partially visible, leaning against the wall. With his arms thrown open and one finger pointed skyward, Picasso's body is the top layer of a symbolic palimpsest of Europe's White, male heroes; his posture simultaneously recalls Plato in Raphael's School of Athens (1508-11) and Caesar in Augustus of Prima Porta (1st century ce). In the photograph, Picasso's body thus threads together the European Renaissance, classical antiquity, and modernism—and accompanying tales of Western intellect, empire, and art. The image provides rich material through which to mine the most troubling ideologies sustained by Picasso's legacy. But in this exhibition, Doisneau's portrait was presented not as a provocation, but as evidence. It was included as yet further confirmation that Picasso had African art in his studio, instrumentalized to substantiate the section's implicit claim that the artist loved and appreciated Africa, however broadly conceived.The second half of the exhibition featured about fifteen paintings and sculptures by Picasso accompanied by sculptures created throughout the African continent and yet more photographs of the artist. A section titled “Formal and Technical Correspondences” framed Picasso's relationship to African art according to visual similarity. For example, a 1906 painting by Picasso, Jeune Garçon Nu (Fig. 3), was misleadingly paired with a funerary sculpture created at around the same time (“early 20th century,” per the label) in the then-French colony of Madagascar by an Antaimoro artist. Though this juxtaposition tacitly suggested that the artist drew inspiration from the sculpture, the painting's wall text linked its influences not to such Malagasy arts but to a host of likelier candidates: Iberian sculpture, Cézanne's approach to geometry, and ancient Greek figural sculpture. Mounting juxtapositions based on superficial visual similarity rather than specific historical influences, the section essentially replicated the pseudologic of the “affinities” posited by the infamous 1984 MoMA exhibition, “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern.The final section of the show was titled “The Magical Function of Painting” (Fig. 4). Reinstating Senghor's laudatory 1973 claims about the artist, the opening text of this section posited that Picasso's connection to the arts of Africa laid not only in the formal resemblance of his works, but somewhere deeper. Picasso and the diverse artists of the African continent, this section suggested, shared philosophical and even spiritual values regarding object-making. The works on view served to substantiate rather than problematize this dubious framework through further pairings of Picasso's work alongside works of African sculpture.Conspicuously absent from the exhibition were the works and words of those best equipped to visually represent the legacy of Picasso in Dakar. Senegal's modern and contemporary artists, from those who viewed Picasso's work in the 1970s to those evaluating the artist's significance in the twenty-first century, were not represented, despite their potentially fascinating contributions. For example, Ibou Diouf and Papa Ibra Tall, well-known Senegalese artists of the Senghorian era, viewed Picasso's 1972 exhibition with celebration and suspicion, respectively. Their divergent attitudes and distinctive oeuvres could have engaged the Picasso-Dakar premise of this exhibition with much-needed precision and reciprocity.Fortunately, those willing to leave the Museum of Black Civilizations could find provocative contemporary art treating Picasso's relationship to Africa just over one mile away at the Galerie La Manège, in the exhibition Picasso Remix (see Marsaud 2022), one of the scores of independently organized shows that took place in the “Off”—the colloquial name used to describe venues not included in the official program of the Dak'Art Biennial. At the invitation of the director of the Museum of Black Civilizations, Hamady Bocoum, co-curators Olivia Marsaud and Mohamed A. Cissé organized a powerful show of recent works by sixteen artists, most of whom lived or were born in West African nations formerly colonized by France.1 According to the exhibition's opening text panel, the curators sought to reverse the direction of Picasso's gaze upon the continent by inviting African and diasporic artists to reflect upon the artist's “pictorial heritage.” QR codes on object labels throughout the exhibition allowed for visitors to use their personal devices to procure images of the works by Picasso to which the exhibited contemporary artworks made reference.In the hands of these artists, Picasso is a shapeshifter: here a muse, there a curse, and more than once, a kind of medusa, as artists confronted the seductive but objectifying power of the mythologized artist's gaze. Several artists’ works injected elements of the authors’ subjectivity and identities into Picasso's most recognizable paintings, in ways that both critiqued and instrumentalized the latter. Roméo Mivekannin's evocative riff on Guernica (Fig. 5) recreates the monumental work to scale—but Mivekannin paints his own visage over the agonized faces of Picasso's original work. Kiné Aw's Les Femmes de Nder (Fig. 6) calls to mind Picasso's famed Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), but Aw's work deterritorializes this point of reference to the northern Senegalese town of Nder. Her work takes up the multiple perspectives and geometrization of the body associated with Picasso's cubism, as well as the textural, celestial stylings of certain Ecole de Dakar artists, yielding a complex testament to the interlinked artistic inheritances of Senghor and Picasso. Franco-Beninese artist Dimitri Fagbohoun's conceptual work L'Art Nègre? Connais pas! perhaps gives the ultimate lie to the reverent and idealizing portrayal of Picasso posited in Picasso in Dakar. Fagbohoun's work is a wall-hung, illuminated neon sign reproducing the notorious quote from Picasso, which translates approximately to, “Negro Art? Never heard of it.”Bocoum's prompt to engage contemporary artists in reassessing Picasso leads one to wonder why the contemporary component was outsourced rather than incorporated into the official Picasso in Dakar show. But perhaps this kind of criticality could only have emerged with such freedom outside of Picasso in Dakar, 1972-2022 itself. The exhibition's opening text panel proclaimed, after all, its debts to the “high patronage” of Senegalese president Macky Sall and French president Emmanuel Macron, echoing the Franco-Senegalese politics that fueled its 1972 precedent fifty years before. The credit offered to these two heads of state is the most overt demonstration of the diplomatically charged pathos that quietly underpinned the exhibition as a whole. One hopes that the object loans that this collaboration set in motion might provide a more enduring precedent than the 1972 show in encouraging European and North American museums to lend both African and non-African works in their collections to institutions on the continent. In the meanwhile, rather than critically reassessing the politicized, transnational webs in which Picasso functioned, Picasso in Dakar, 1972-2022 deployed the artist as an obfuscating metonym for historically productive, mutually good-willing relationships between Senegal and France—and by extension, between Africa and Europe. Poised to reflect upon the ideologies sustained by past portrayals of Picasso's link to the continent, this exhibition instead issued that genre's most recent instance.