The White Peril and L'Art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism

An awareness on the part of Picasso and his circle of the colonial exploitation that brought African art into the domain of French culture suggests additional levels of meaning in modernist uses of primitivism. The popular image of Africa in pre-World War I France (embraced by modernists as an imagined primal spiritism), the response on the left to French colonial theory, and the inflammatory debates in the press and Chamber of Deputies in 1905-6 following the revelations of abuses against indigenous populations in the French and Belgian Congos, form an inextricable part of the power of an allusion to "Africa" in the period 1905-9 and reveal that the preference of some modernists for "primitive" cultures was as much an act of social criticism as a search for a new art.