Picasso: Cubist Bathers. Or: The Bathers. That is the name of the wooden sculpture group that Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973) made in 1956 from salvaged wood.
Picasso once told why he preferred wood to marble: “I find it strange that we ever got the idea to make statues of marble. I understand that you can see something in the root of a tree, in a crack in a wall, in a corroded fragment or in a pebble… But in marble?”
On the French Riviera
At a breathtaking retrospective exhibition at MoMA in New York in 2015, 35 years after his death, the public got to know a totally new Picasso. Great impression was made by a large plateau with six wooden sculptures on it, each bearing the artist’s signature, even though he was essentially self-taught as a sculptor. Picasso had only had painting lessons at art school. The sculpture group ‘Bathers’ from 1956 was strongly reminiscent of often abstract African wooden masks, even though they represent tourists on the French Riviera. He never wanted to sell works like this. He cherished them and kept them close to him at home. That’s why this exhibition was such a surprise.
African masks source of cubism?
That echo of African art in his work is not strange. His ‘Head’ from 1958 could have been made by an African: a fruit crate with a board with two buttons nailed on as eyes. Picasso collected masks, although he never wanted to admit that they were also a source of inspiration from which cubism emerged. At that time it was not done to admire sculptures from non-Western cultures. Anyone who did commit this sin was pushed into the condescendingly titled art movement ‘primitivism’, as happened to Gauguin. What Picasso was not ashamed of was getting all the materials for this sculpture group from flea markets and dealers in used materials, with whom he had become friends on the Méditerranée.
The disqualification of ‘primitive art’ continues to this day. It is an important criticism of Janson’s art bible. It is simply no longer acceptable to only qualify art as art if it was made by someone from Europe or North America. And not mentioning that Picasso also made numerous wooden sculptures is also no longer acceptable. He already started doing that in 1907 with a primitive-looking female figure Figure that could just as well have been made by an African tribe.
On the MoMA website all wooden sculptures from this Picasso exhibition can still be seen.
