Royal Academy, LondonFrom a two-headed Tahitian god to a mourner’s costume made of pearl shells, this dazzling exhibition is like having the ocean roll under your canoeIn around 1900, an artist portrayed a woman with an oval abstract face bisected by a long rigid slash of a nose, who sits with her legs wide apart to expose her triangular pubic hair framing a well-observed vagina. And no, this artist was not Picasso.This wooden figure that an islander created in today’s Republic of Palau, in the western Pacific, bears an astonishing resemblance to one of the women in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the revolutionary painting Picasso made on the far side of the world in his Montmartre studio in 1907. There’s a similarly squatting figure in Les Demoiselles and almost identical mask-like faces. At this moment in history there was such a quantum entanglement between Paris and the Pacific that artists in the two places were creating the same images. Continue reading…
Via: Oceania review – marvels of the human mind that were ripped off by modernists
Categories: English News