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LANGUAGES, LITERATURE, AND THE ARTS Peter Stepan. Picasso's Collection of African and Oceanic Art: Masters of Metamorphosis. Translated from the German by Paul Aston and Karin Skawran (Introduction), Robert McInnes (Chronology), and John Gabriel (Preface, Catalogue). Munich: Prestel, 2007. 149 pp. Photographs. Illustrations. Index. $85.00. Cloth.
Peter Stepan's book is a welcome addition to the recent flurry of works on Picasso's sustained encounter with non-European art. This publication is one of the fruits of collaborative work by an international group of scholars, spearheaded by Gérard Regnier, former director of the Musée Picasso in Paris. The effort resulted in a major international exhibition (and accompanying catalog) by Laurence Madeleine and Marilyn Martin, Picasso and Africa, held in 2006 at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa; sections of Stepan's essay "A Collection Parlante" first appeared in this catalog before it was expanded for the publication under review.
As with previous exhibitions that attempted to present the explosive relationship between European artists and non-European art, scholars have been galvanized by Picasso and Africa, with criticisms and accolades coming from both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed at the College Art Association's annual conference of 2006, several papers explored such themes as the problematic notions of primitivism, or the influences on Picasso as he produced his penultimate work, Les Demoiselles d Avignon of 1906-7. In short, historians of African art have brought fresh perspectives to a discussion usually controlled by European modernists. Stepan, however, is a historian of European art, and hence his interest in this volume is still with Picasso and his work. Although addressing issues that Picasso himself did not know at the time he collected these African works, the catalog includes little new information on non-European objects; the texts on African objects were largely culled from established texts by prominent historians of African art.
Few previous scholars have attempted to document Picasso's collection of non-European material, as much of Picasso's...