Pablo Picasso's Le Demoiselles D Avignon

The idea of the “primitive” has always been an attractive concept to those within “civilized” society, seeing it either as a thing to be tamed or explored. Artists usually gravitated toward the latter, using the artistic forms or concepts used by indigenous people in order to uncover a different side to civilized life. Pablo Picasso’s Le Demoiselles d’ Avignon (1907) and Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (1941) sought to do just that, pulling from African art in order to give the viewer a different look at their “civilized” life. Picasso’s Le Demoiselles d’ Avignon is a painting of, bluntly speaking, five prostitutes on a street corner in Barcelona. It is not, however, a traditional painting by any means, the women’s figures are blocky,

49, however, utilizes the primitive in a much different way, avoiding the usage of sacred objects for a “deeper” meaning. Instead, Lawrence utilizes what was right in front of him, utilizing a much more universal idea of the “primitive.” The white person in the bottom right corner of the painting is far more monstrous looking than anyone else in the painting, his brow perpetually furrowed and large, his mouth in a permanent frown, almost as if he is struggling to read the menu in his exceedingly large hands. I is the classic look of a caveman, the most primitive human being there is. Lawrence, a black man, exposes the white people for what they are, to be as uncivilized as they claim African Americans to be. They are the ones who enacted the policy of “separate but equal,” they are the ones who tied a rope across the center of the restaurant, not African Americans. They acted primitively, establishing up a hierarchy based on skin color instead of intelligence and ability. While both paintings absolutely utilize the idea of the “primitive,” Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration of the Negro, Panel no. 49 does so much more subtly and, honestly, less problematically. His painting appropriated no one’s culture, using the universal image of the pre-historic man to get his point across instead of the still existent and long exploited African people. He could have easily taken from similar ideas that Picasso did, diving into his ancestry to depict white people as monsters, but that would not only degrade his still suffering people further, but completely defeat the purpose of his