Picasso Primitif

It is safe to say that Picasso Primitif was a hit. The blockbuster collaboration between the Musée Picasso and Musée du Quai Branly featured 107 works by the artist and 193 primarily from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Journalists in the French press competed to outdo one another in their expressions of enthusiasm. The space teemed with visitors. During my own walks through the exhibition, I was astonished to see so many museum-goers raptly following the dense wall texts in the first gallery (Fig. 1). Clearly, the remarkable series of artistic encounters that took place in Paris in the early decades of the twentieth century, when innovative young painters and sculptors began finding new ways to look at so-called primitive objects, continues to fascinate. As a historian of France with a particular interest in its colonial past, however, I found myself struck by both how much the exhibition...