Picasso the Colonist

I have dubbed Picasso a colonist for three reasons (and I am sure there are more):
- Superiority (Narcissistically self supposed or otherwise)
- Objectification of the Other
- And the manipulation of the Other

Comparing Levine’s article to that of Gikandi’s I have found several similarities between the British colonial figure and Pablo Picasso. Firstly, the British saw themselves as “kinder”, “persevering, unflinching … patriotic … [and] love order and justice” (Levine 104). They saw themselves as superior in comparison to the colonized (105), and believed that the “modern world belonged ‘to the Anglo-Saxon race alone’” (104). Similarly, the notion of superiority in relation to Picasso emerges with the “routine maintenance” of modernism – the need to “separate the African’s art from his or her body … [so that] it could be cleansed of its danger” (Gikandi 456). This fear of contamination gives us the ‘clean’ white body of Picasso and the ‘filthy’ black body of the African. This idea of contamination is also reiterated by Levine’s article whereby assimilation was a “one-way street”; if any assimilation was to take place it would be the “colonized people who were expected to conform” (107).

*Interlude*
~ Expectations ~

There was nothing special about meeting Picasso. It was a meeting like many others, except that meeting Picasso was a big disappointment. It was a disappointment for stupid little things: I didn’t like how he looked; I didn’t like how he behaved (455).

And I can’t blame Aubrey Williams for feeling disappointed. I know I would be if my heroine turned out to be an “ordinary past-middle-aged” (455) woman. But what is interesting here is not so much that Picasso is “ordinary”, but that we have here an alternative – the Other’s expectation of the “master” (455). What exactly did Williams expect? A larger than life eccentric being? Did Williams place Picasso on a pedestal? Can we then blame the British for thinking they are far more superior than their colonies (Levine 114)?

*Interlude Over*

Secondly, both the British colonial figure and Picasso objectify the Other. “For many colonists the lands and the peoples of the Empire were also specimens to be listed, categorized and labeled” (Levine 114). Similarly, Picasso objectifies the African body as per his meeting with Williams – all that appeals to Picasso is Williams’s “fine African head” (Gikandi 455). The Africans and the colonized no longer serve as human beings, but mere bodies for calculation and models for art. In addition, Picasso chose “as models masks that seemed to be closer to a familiar European grammar about form and symmetry” (471), even here he selects and differentiates between what should be classified as aesthically suitable for his art.

Finally, both the colonial figure and Picasso manipulate the Other. Behind the “White Man’s Burden” farce, the growing colonies of the British fuelled their economy; it provided them with resources; and gloat points over the French and Dutch in their scramble for power and control (and pride) in Southeast Asia. Similarly, I would say Picasso colonizes African art and body and then “use[s] them to his own head” (Gikandi 468).

Question: Is the white (often male) author/writer/poet a colonizer as well in his/her endeavor to talk/discuss/document the exotic/subaltern/Other?

Angel