Henry Taylor’s “Where thoughts provoke”

What’s the difference between Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and Henry Taylor’s From Congo to the Capital, and Black Again (2007), a twenty-first-century version of the same painting, made a hundred years later? Both of them include African masks, which were notoriously inspired by Picasso’s visit to an ethnographic museum, filled with colonial loot, on the Place du Trocadero in Paris.1 Two of the five women in each painting wear them. They are exaggerated and strange in Picasso’s, but smaller and more smoothly integrated in Taylor’s, as if they’ve been healed, a fever broken, their swelling subsided, an illness passed.

The real difference between the two paintings, however, is even more obvious than that. It’s the colors. Picasso’s women are pink, an arrangement of presumably white women, most likely prostitutes, all crammed into the space of a bordello, where they pose for an unseen audience. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is one of the most intensely studied paintings in the history of art, yet the words used to describe these women are invariably “aggressive” and “confrontational.” In Taylor’s version, they have become warmer and more reflective, nearly lost in thought. They have also become women of color, Black women, real women including Josephine Baker, their heads and bodies painted fluidly in a rich spectrum of brown, auburn, and ocher.

Picasso shattered and fragmented his figures, and the result was Cubism. A century later, Taylor restores them and makes them whole, gives them rhythm and a space to dance. Picasso described Les Demoiselles as an exorcism, but Taylor’s reinterpretation is more like an embrace. “I love other people,” he has said repeatedly in interviews.2 It’s an ethos that defines his work, which includes sculptures and installations as well as portraits and history paintings, all of which are given ample room to breathe in Taylor’s first major museum show in Europe. It’s also a useful tool for understanding not only how Taylor relates to Picasso but also what contemporary art can do when it is jammed into a genre of institutions that have been named for and dedicated to the legacies of their modern masters.

With around a hundred artworks spread throughout thirteen rooms and judiciously divided between two floors, “Where thoughts provoke” opens with a powerful trio. Two monumental paintings, We Were Framed (2014), and an untitled triptych (2019), overlook an installation of two sawhorses, one mounting the other, with a hammer in place of the penetrating animal’s penis. The untitled triptych includes a regal portrait of the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture, a remake of a text work by Glenn Ligon, and a painting based on a 1963 photograph of mourners gathered for a funeral after the bombing of an Alabama church, which killed four young girls. The works are arranged so that members of the crowd, their facial expressions ranging from wary and skeptical to fearful and furious, appear to be reacting to the sawhorses, whose forms echo in We Were Framed. That ricochet of formal gestures, masterful sight lines, charged encounters, and buoyant references continues throughout the exhibition, which is titled after the 2015 painting Where thoughts provoke, getting deep in the shallow water, of an abstracted Black figure, knees up and head down, resting in a distinctly institutional bathtub.

Whole galleries and alcoves are filled with Taylor’s installations of repurposed materials. It’s like a jungle (2011) includes broomsticks, broken furniture, milk crates, cardboard boxes, a random lacrosse stick, jerrycans, stacks of softballs and cigarette packs, and enigmatic missives such as “I know I caused you a lot of pain yesterday,” scrawled onto a white box topped with a plastic horse figurine. Those same spaces are lined with vitrines holding tiny paintings and tender assemblages. As convincing as Taylor’s objects may be, his paintings hit all of this exhibition’s high notes, including his iconic Screaming Head (1990); the irrepressible charm of Sweet (2012); and the hard-won dignity of Haitian working (washing my window) not begging (2015).

Subtly curated by Joanne Snrech, “Where thoughts provoke” moves through Taylor’s portraits of Jay-Z and Martin Luther King, Jr., circles around the artist’s responses to the Vietnam War and the Great Depression, and only then proceeds into his art historical engagements with Picasso (by way of David Hammons) and Édouard Manet.3 There, From Congo to the Capital hangs on its own. Picasso’s Demoiselles is present only in reproduction, as a reference image. The two artists rest side by side solely through their remakes of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863). That’s the exhibition’s climax and raison d’être, but the denouement is just as strong, with Taylor’s THE TIMES THAY AIN’T CHANGING, FAST ENOUGH! (2017), a painting of Philando Castile’s murder, in pointed conversation with LOOK (2015) and Gettin It Done (2016), three scenes of Black American life at once tragic, poignant, and mundane.

“Where thoughts provoke” is one in a series of exhibitions treading lightly over the uneven terrain of Picasso’s influence on younger artists. Eight to ten years ago, the Musée Picasso was mainly churning through its own collection or setting Picasso in dialogue with his peers, including Alberto Giacometti and Alexander Calder. Then came pairings of Picasso with Jackson Pollock (an obvious choice) and Sophie Calle (deranged and amazing). The Taylor show follows exhibitions of Faith Ringgold, Philip Guston, and Raymond Pettibon. Every few years, the museum ventures a thematic show, with an exhibition on the Harlem Renaissance scheduled for next spring.

There are hundreds if not thousands of museums around the world devoted to single artists, many privately funded, most clustered in Europe. Some stick to their titular subjects as heritage concerns. Others have long since fanned out to more general programming. Others still exist to make their artists known and to save their work from oblivion. But there are more and more in between who are using the connections between their artists and others, not only to organize bold and increasingly comprehensive exhibitions of lesser-known figures, but also to undo the structures of modern art (the exclusionary canon, the white-male-western narrative), proposing alternatives that generate new scholarship while remaining blissfully open-ended. The Musée Picasso is one such institution, alongside the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern and the Giacometti Institute in Paris. As Taylor declares in a catalog interview: “Modernism is like punk, it [gives] you that permission to be loose, to explore, to follow where the materials lead.”4

There are clear limits to what these artist-museums can do. Most glaringly, they ensure the central position and legitimating function of their modern masters. There’s really no room for an artist like Gisela McDaniel, for example, whose burn-it-all-down approach to the work of Paul Gauguin, among others, is just as needed in current art historical debates. While certainly critical, Taylor comes at Picasso from a place of love, and possible redemption. After all, Taylor’s formative experience as an artist was sketching the patients of a psychiatric hospital where he worked the night shift for ten years. (Put him in conversation with Frantz Fanon next.) With all of his subjects, Taylor looks for the signs of their humanity, then changes the colors. “I tend to go for what I feel,” he once said to the photographer Deana Lawson when she asked him about those colors. “I know what cobalt blue does as opposed to other types of blue. So I make those kinds of decisions, but for the most part, I try to find absolute freedom,” he explained. “When I’m painting, I want to be free.”5