Through the Eyes of Picasso

This major exhibition will explore Pablo Picasso’s life-long fascination with African and Oceanic art, as well as works from the Americas, uniting his paintings and sculpture with art that fueled his own creative exploration.

In addition to paintings, sculpture, and drawings by Picasso, the exhibition will feature significant works of African and Oceanic art that transformed his artistic vision when he encountered them at the Musée d’ Ethnographie du Trocadéro (now Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris) during the early part of the 20th century. For Picasso, the allure of these masks and sculptures was in the artists’ exploration of line, abstraction of the human body, and representation of metamorphosis.

Visitors also will see works Picasso collected, lived with, and kept with him through numerous studio moves, still owned by his family, and others that are in the Picasso Museum in Paris.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

Whether you go or not, the exhibition catalog, Through the Eyes of Picasso: Face to Face with African and Oceanic Art, explores Picasso’s fascination with tribal art and the influences he repeatedly drew upon for his own oeuvre. Through hundreds of archival documents and photographs, this volume illustrates how tribal art from Africa, Oceania, the Americas, and Asia was a recurring source of inspiration for the artist. Side-by-side comparisons illustrate the links between Picasso’s oeuvre and diverse tribal arts. In both, we find the same themes—nudity, sexuality, impulses, death, and more—along with parallel artistic expressions of those themes—such as disfiguration or destruction of the body. The volume is completed with a chronology of the relevant works and photographs of the artist in his studio.

Select Through the Eyes of Picasso: Face to Face with African and Oceanic Art to learn more or to place this book in your Amazon shopping cart.