Page 173 - Katalog Beyond the Box 820 final.indd

On the aspiration not to collect

in a Eurocentic way

by Christoph Balzar

By now, it is well known that art since 1945 can no longer be inter-
preted solely from Europe. Although the master narrative of ‚the
1
West and the Rest‘ persists, it is visibly losing credibility. Many whi-
te artists such as Manet, Gauguin or Picasso are still accorded an
indisputable status of genius, especially in conservative circles and
institutions, as if they had developed their ideas and works all by
themselves in their proverbial ivory towers. On the contrary, many
of them drew a not inconsiderable part of their inspiration from
ethnological museums or collections, something that is currently
a matter of some controversy because of the colonial and someti-
mes explicitly violent provenance of these sources. Some moder-
nist masterpieces are so similar to African works that they can be
considered the results of cultural appropriation. Picasso‘s painting
‚Les Demoiselles d‘Avignon‘, which is considered an art-historical
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d‘Avignon
1907, oil on canvas, 244 x 234 cm milestone and a starting point for Cubism, is characteristic of this.
The work is generally regarded as revolutionary because of the in
part highly abstracted faces of the female nudes, while at the same

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