Allison Moore: Picasso’s changing relationship to African art

Coffee with a Curator: Allison Moore
May 4, 2022
Join us for this installment of our Coffee with a Curator series, where Museum Staff or invited guests speak on a range of Dalí-inspired topics. In conjunction with our Picasso and the Allure of the South exhibition, this month’s lecture will feature Allison Moore, an art historian with a Ph.D. from The Graduate Center, CUNY who has worked as a professor of art history, curator and critic. Moore will discuss the relationship of Picasso to African and diaspora art over his lifetime.
In the early 1900s, Picasso was influenced by traditional African art, particularly in the development of Cubism, which occurred during the height of France’s colonization of Africa. An anarchist, Picasso was also anti-colonialist, and he was sympathetic to the writers and artists of the Negritude liberation movement, created by Black African and Caribbean poets and writers gathered in Paris in the 1930s. In 1948 Picasso met Martinican poet and writer Aimé Césaire, a leader of the Negritude movement, and made 32 etchings for his book of poems Corps Perdu (Lost Body), published in 1950. By 1971, Picasso was influencing living African artists, particularly in Senegal, where President Léopold Sédar Senghor supported a modern art movement grounded in a philosophy of Negritude.
Allison Moore
Allison Moore is an art historian with a Ph.D. from The Graduate Center, CUNY who has worked as a professor of art history, curator and critic. She is the author of “Embodying Relation: Art Photography in Mali” (Duke University Press, 2020) and numerous articles and catalog essays.