Pablo Picasso’s famous painting Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, 1907, ostensibly represents the ladies working in a brothel in Avignon, a city in the south of France. This louche setting was really just a springboard for his assault on the conventions of all of Western art going back to the Renaissance. Everything in this painting is broken up into planes, and the whole surface resembles nothing so much as a shattered mirror. It is really a proto-Cubist painting, but could also be called the first Cubist painting as it does many of the things Cubism did: present multiple points of view at once, fracture the picture plane, use arbitrary color, and make distortions of the faces and bodies of the women represented. Pay special attention to the two ladies on the right, whose faces resemble African masks. In fact Picasso did model their faces after African masks in which he found inspiration for his formal inventions. Indeed scholars have been able to pinpoint the cultural origins of at least one of the masks Picasso used for this painting. However, it is debatable that Picasso knew much about the cultures that produced these objects, and even less likely that he had any direct contact with the people that produced them. Which leads us to the following questions for our discussion this week on cultural appropriation, which occurs when a dominant culture, in this case European culture, borrows elements from another culture to which it has little or no connection or understanding. If Picasso did not have a strong understanding of the African cultures that produced these masks, was it OK for him to appropriate their images? If not, when is it OK for one culture to make use of the art and traditions of another culture? If it was not OK for Picasso to appropriate the imagery of the African masks, does that disqualify this painting as one of the great works of art of the 20th century?
