Thus beyond the religious purposes these beauties provide a paradise for the bodily senses.
ANARCHISm COLONIALISM AND and ART AS Exorcism
Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (19.2 did more than open up new approaches to form and space in painting. It had further meanings both for the artist and for his friends in Paris, who were the only people to see it for many years. Various influences bad been absorbed into the painting during its long period of gestation diverse influences such as lberian sculpture, late Cézannefigure painting and even El Greco, whose Vision of St John the Divine (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) provided a source, in reverse, for the three left- an hand demoiselles. But African ar was the final and determining catalyst. It impelled Picasso on a breakneck course when he discovered' it after he had begun the painting. African sculpture's overwhelming appeal was twofold. It held out a key towards solving Picasso's dual problem: how to radicalize strucurcand faumwithout asing important issues of contentand allusions to real-life concerns.African African art could be seen in Paris be from at least as as the 189os not only in the Ethnographical Museum but in junk-shops where fetishes from the French colonies were often on sale. Picasso and his painter friends Vlaminck, Derain and others, who were soon to discover' African art, must have been quite familiar with it for some years though without, apparently, being more than mildly interested until current events in France brought the whole subject of Africa up, and in a very pointed way. A French colonial scandal hit the headlines in 19o4-5.Arbitrary executions and murders by two French colonial officials, Gaud and Toqué, were made known and widely publicized, notably in the illustrated weekly L'Assiette au beurre, Picasso's painter friends Juan Gris and Frank Kupka both to become proniinent Cubist painters later frequently contributed. special issue on The Torture of Blacks came out in
March 1905. The most shocking instances were those of the so-called hunts' and the 14 July festivities in the French Congo. One of the hunts' was illustrated, the white hunters in their safari suits and to hats rising from their camp-stools to take aim as a covey of naked Africans was driven past them by, presumably, French army "beaters. In the same issue Bastille Day, of all days-the day when the beginning of the French Revolution is celebrated all over France was illustrated with a lithograph of the festivities at Brazzaville, the capital of the French Congo (19.5). French colonial officials are here shown applauding and jeering at the spectacle of an African being dynamited to make