'Haitian Working (Washing My Window) Not Begging,' (2015), by Henry Taylor. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH/MUSÉE PICASSO
After Faith Ringgold in 2023, it is now Henry Taylor's turn, with his first retrospective in France. The Musée Picasso Paris is continuing its efforts to promote awareness of African American artists, from the second half of the twentieth century to today. This approach addresses a longstanding gap: it finally compensates for the lack of interest from the Centre Pompidou and most public museums in this aspect of American artistic creation. There is another, more circumstantial reason: Like Ringgold (1930-2024) and several other African American artists, from Betye Saar to Robert Colescott (1925-2009), Taylor cites Picasso among his masters and enjoys working from his art.
The exhibition includes Taylor's own version of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon ("The Young Ladies of Avignon"), with all the figures depicted as Black women, a sardonic reinterpretation of one of Picasso's variations on Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe ("Lunch on the Grass") and an airy sculptural transposition of Femme-fleur ("Flower woman"), an allegorical portrait of Françoise Gilot. Other references are less immediately apparent, but Taylor's polychrome assemblages made from discarded objects and most of his female nudes reveal that Picasso's influence is never far from his mind.
