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Johannesburg (dpa) - Picasso in Africa was meant to showcase the influence of African art on the output of one of the world's most significant artists.
Instead, it has sparked heated public exchanges in South Africa, the exhibition host country, amid a claim that Pablo Picasso stole his inspiration from unknown African artists.
"Today the truth is on display - that Picasso would not have been the renowned creative genius he was if he had not stolen and readapted the world of anonymous artists," Sandile Memela, a spokesman for South Africa's arts and culture department wrote recently.
His sentiments, expressed in a letter to the Johannesburg-based daily Star newspaper, included a claim that the artist who died 33 years ago "lacked the courage" to admit the influence of African art on his consciousness and creativity and failed to acknowledge how it had "reignited" his "flagging talent".
Thousands of people have flocked to the exhibition of 84 original works by Picasso and 29 masks and tribal sculptures by unnamed African artists, listed as similar to those that inspired his work.
Between the February 10 opening and March 2, more than 24,000 people passed through the doors of the Standard Bank Gallery in downtown Johannesburg, where the exhibition is being hosted in partnership with the French government. Demand has been so strong that the organizers have had to extend its run.
While some members of the public agreed that Memela's attack on "the canonisation of Pablo Picasso in South Africa" was "a good thing", most South Africans with an understanding of art have trashed his views at dinner party conversations and in letters to newspapers and other media.
"The notion that Picasso owes his creative genius to his theft from African artists is a figment of Memela's imagination," Marilyn Martin, the director of art collections at the Iziko museums of Cape Town and a co-curator of the Picasso in Africa exhibition declared.
She also noted that Picasso had had a profound understanding, not only of African art at metaphysical, conceptual and formal levels, but also of "the colonial exploitation that brought African art into the domain of French culture."
"Your correspondent's reaction is reminiscent of the black fascists who were critical of Paul Simon when he collaborated with Ladysmith Black Mambazo to expand a musical genre," a reader wrote to the Star newspaper which carried Memela's original criticism.
The reader compared the case to that of impressionist painters like Van Gogh, Gaugin, Monet and Lautrec who took inspiration from Japanese prints, saying: "but the Japanese never claimed they stole the artistic genius of Japan."
He further warned that "artists, invariably, are internationalist and will use different things regardless of origin to express themselves and expand their art, and politicians and their sycophants will always come short if they try to use culture to validate their narrow and shallow philosophies."
Memela, a former culture writer, did not defend his views. To date, Picasso in Africa is the most significant Picasso collection on display in the continent. The last exhibition of works by the artist in Africa was held in Senegal in the early 1970s.
On display are Picasso's "Sitting Nude", "Reclining Woman" and "Woman with Joined Hands", a sketch he made for the "Les Demoiselles Avignon", a painting that gave Parisian prostitutes the sharp geometrical features similar to those depicted in masks from west and central Africa.
The Spanish artist who settled in France in the early 1900s is widely credited as giving African art a place in Europe by incorporating its characteristics and themes into cubism - one of the most influential movements in modern art.
Copyright 2006 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
