Picasso the Muslim

Or, How the Bilderverbot became modern (Part 1)

FINBARR BARRY FLOOD

It is not an exaggeration to assert that modern paintings and identifies as a pseudomorphosis, using a term imported
sculptures betray a real loathing of living forms or forms of into art historical writing from geology. In its original
living beings. meaning, pseudomorphosis referred to secondary
—José Ortega y Gasset1 crystals generated in the spaces left by the disintegration
I think no one insists more than I on the uniqueness of of earlier forms, whose external morphologies they share
the Modern experience. . . . Yet I think there were some even when they differ in nature or internal structure.4
instructive anticipations of certain aspects of Modernity in Adopted by Erwin Panofsky to refer to cases where
Medieval Islâmic society, and that Islâmic iconophobia disparate artifacts or images display morphological
and its associated phenomena have some relation to those similarities (at least to the eye of the art historian) but
anticipations. differ in their function and/or meaning,5 pseudomorphic
—Marshall Hodgson2 comparisons are often criticized for emphasizing
superficial formal analogy at the expense of deeper
conceptual engagements.6 For Didi-Huberman, however,
Pseudomorphic Picassismes they illustrate “the paradoxical fecundity of anachronism,”
Writing of how anachronism can constitute the the ability of formal resemblance operating across a
frisson of reception, Georges Didi-Huberman describes cultural and/or temporal gulf to effect a rupture, a shock,
the moment when his attention was first drawn to the capable of rendering the familiar, the neglected, or even
painted faux-marble border of the Madonna of the the unknown fully visible.7
Shadows, a fresco by Fra Angelico (d. 1455) in the The heuristic value of visual catachresis or contrapuntal
convent of San Marco in Florence (fig. 1): “If I try today presentation underlies several recent exhibitions and
to recall what stopped me in my tracks in the corridor publications, which juxtapose antique or medieval
in San Marco, I think I am not mistaken in saying that it artworks with modern counterparts in order to explore
was a kind of displaced resemblance between what I relationships ranging from analogy and serendipity to
discovered there, in a Renaissance convent, and the
drippings of the American artist that I had discovered
and admired many years before.”3 An apparent 4. J. R. Blum, Die Pseudomorphosen des Mineralreichs (Stuttgart,
parergon, an ostensible supplement to the figurative 1843). Both the concept and the term had been central to Oswald
Spengler’s idiosyncratic The Decline of the West, in which he explains
scenes above, the painted panels with their mottled
that a nascent Islamic culture failed to develop its own forms of artistic
veins of depicted stone (fig. 2) were rendered fully expression as a result of the heavy legacy of earlier cultural traditions,
visible by their resemblance to the celebrated drip so that “all that wells up from the depths of the young soul is cast in
paintings of the American painter Jackson Pollock the old moulds, young feelings stiffen in senile practices, and instead
(d. 1956; fig. 3). This mental montage of quattrocento of expanding its own creative power, it can only hate the distant
power with a hate that grows to be monstrous.” O. Spengler, The
fresco and 1950s canvas constitutes what Didi-Huberman
Decline of the West (New York, 1927), 2:186.
5. E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the
Art of the Renaissance (1939; repr., New York, 1972), 70–71, and
Tomb Sculpture: Its Changing Aspects From Ancient Egypt to Bernini
1. J. Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays (New York, 1964), 26–27. For a useful overview of the historiography
on Art, Culture, and Literature (1925; repr., Princeton, 1968), 40. of the term, see Amy Knight Powell, “Bread/Head: Morphology of an
2. M. G. S. Hodgson, “Islâm and Image,” History of Religions 3, Encounter,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 7
no. 2 (1964): 221. (2016): 17–20.
3. G. Didi-Huberman, “Before the Image, before Time: The 6. Y.-A. Bois, “La pensée sauvage,” Art in America 73 (1985): 186–
Sovereignty of Anachronism,” trans. P. Mason, in Compelling Visuality: 87, and “On the Uses and Abuses of Look-alikes,” October 154 (2015):
The Work of Art in and out of History, ed. C. Farago and R. 127–49.
Zwijnenberg (Minneapolis, 2003), 41. 7. Didi-Huberman, “Before the Image,” 40.
 Flood: Picasso the Muslim 43

Figure 2. Fra Angelico, Madonna of the Shadows, detail.

Photo: Nicolò Orsi Battaglini. Color version available as an
online enhancement.

in cultural sensibility or religious taboo. The phenomenon

is thus assumed to be transhistorical and transregional,
with little attempt to interrogate the formal, practical,
or theoretical parameters of “abstraction” or to offer
synchronic studies that might complicate or even
undermine the underlying assumptions.9 Nevertheless,
the interest of these kinds of juxtapositions lies in their
ability to illuminate the rehabilitation of perceived
values of aniconism and antinaturalism in (and even as)
modernism, if not modernity tout court.
Figure 1. Fra Angelico, Madonna of the Shadows, 1450. Although the standard chronologies of modernism make
Convent of San Marco, Florence. Photo: Nicolò Orsi Battaglini.
its inception coincident with the perceived demise of
Islamic art in the late nineteenth century, the pseudomorphic
the causal and structural.8 In addition, over the past method was anticipated by several pioneering scholars
half-century, the principle of pseudomorphosis (although of premodern Islamic art. Their writings constitute an
rarely identified as such) has underlain a series of unacknowledged chapter in the variegated historiography
exhibitions around the theme of abstraction, which of the Bilderverbot, the image prohibition often assumed
juxtaposed examples of premodern Islamic art with to be an inherent characteristic of Judaism and Islam.
modern Euro-American abstract art. In almost all cases, Paradoxically, perhaps, the clichéd idea of a Bilderverbot
the assumption is that Islamic art is an art of abstraction, as a determining factor in Islamic art was mobilized by
whose assumed eschewal of figuration is variously located these scholars precisely in order to tackle entrenched
preconceptions about Islamic art and the cultures that
produced it. Among them was the Egyptian scholar Bishr
8. A. Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (New York, 2012);
A. K. Powell, Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and
Farès, who in a lecture on the spirit of Islamic ornament
the Modern Museum (New York, 2012); G. Peers, C. Barber, S. Caffey, (delivered in Cairo and published in Arabic and French
H. R. Franses, and R. Shiff, eds., Byzantine Things in the World in 1952), juxtaposed a figurative scene on an early
(Houston, 2013); G. Peers, “Transfiguring Materialities: Relational thirteenth-century Iranian jug with Picasso’s Femme-
Abstraction in Byzantium and Its Exhibition,” Convivium 2, no. 2
(2015): 112–33. For a particularly problematic example, in which the
analogical or comparative method often blurs into genealogical claims, 9. For a rare exception, see J. Jakeman, “Abstract Art and
see L. U. Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of Communication in ‘Mamluk’ Architecture” (PhD diss., University of
New Media Art (Cambridge, MA, 2010). Oxford, 1993).
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Figure 3. Jackson Pollock, Number 13A: Arabesque, 1948. Oil and enamel on canvas, 94 x 297.2 cm. Yale University Art
Gallery 1195.32.1, Gift of Richard Brown Baker, B.A. 1935. Photo: Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery © 2017 The
Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Color version available as an online enhancement.

Fleur of 1947 (fig. 4) in order to illustrate “the Islamic At first glance, the subject of Picasso is a surprising
inspiration, fortuitous or actual” in contemporary European one for a pioneering scholar of early Islamic art. However,
art, especially “the affinity of picassisme with Arab- the interests of de Lorey were diverse, extending to
Muslim conceptual art.”10 medieval Arab painting, on which he published several
Farès’s choice of Picasso as a point of comparison articles.13 One of these articles dealt with the lively
for the abstract figures of medieval Islamic art was to figurative tradition of medieval Arab painting, exemplified
become an established trope in twentieth-century by the work of Yahya al-Wasiti, the artist who painted
scholarship, as we shall see below. However, what Farès the most celebrated example of the genre, an illustrated
merely hints at in identifying an Islamic inspiration for copy of the Maqāmāt (Assemblies) of Abu Muhammad
cubism, “fortuitous or actual,” had in fact found much al-Qasim al-Hariri (d. 1122) produced in Iraq (probably
bolder articulation twenty years earlier in a remarkable Baghdad) in 1237 CE (fig. 6). The work of al-Wasiti
essay on Picasso and the Islamic Orient published in the proved important for the Baghdad Group for Modern Art,
Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1932, an article referenced founded in 1951, but was also invoked by modernist
by Farès.11 Its author was the French polymath and artists in other parts of the Arab world, including the
Orientalist Eustache de Lorey. An enigmatic and intriguing Algerian artist Mohamed Khadda (d. 1991), who saw in
figure, de Lorey is well-known to historians of Islamic the medieval figurative paintings formal qualities verging
art for his activities as director of the French Institute of on the abstract and calligraphic.14 For the celebrated
Archaeology and Islamic Art in Damascus between 1922 Iraqi artist Jawad Salim (d. 1961) and other members of
and 1930. During 1928 and 1929 de Lorey oversaw the the Baghdad Group, access to the Iraqi manuscript
sensational discovery of spectacular eighth-century gold- (which is now in Paris) was provided by the large-scale,
ground wall mosaics in the western courtyard portico
of the Friday Mosque of Damascus (705–15), hidden 13. Born Victor Eustache, de Lorey later adopted an ennobling
beneath a thick coat of plaster that had obscured their moniker: S. Makariou, “Eustache de Lorey (XXe siècle) historien d’art,”
brilliance for several centuries (fig. 5).12 in Dictionnaire des orientalistes de langue française, ed. F. Pouillon
(Paris, 2008), 365–66; E. de Lorey, “Peinture Musulmane ou peinture
Iranienne,” Revue des Arts Asiatiques 12, no. 1 (1938): 20–31.
14. M. Khadda, Éléments pour un art nouveau suivi des feuillets
épars liés et inédits (Algiers, 2015), 69–75. For an incisive analysis of
10. B. Farès, Essai sur l’esprit de la decoration Islamique (Cairo, Khadda’s writings, see E. Goudal, “Ecrire une histoire de l’art “modern”
1952), 29. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. en Algérie: Mohamed Khadda, pensées pour un “art nouveau,”
11. E. de Lorey, “Picasso et l’Orient Musulman,” Gazette des forthcoming online publication from the study day, Avant que la Magie
Beaux-Arts 8 (1932): 299–314. n’opère: Modernités artistiques en Afrique (Paris, 2015). I am grateful
12. E. de Lorey, “Les mosaïques de la Mosquée des Omayyades a to Emilie Goudal for drawing my attention to Khadda’s work and
Damas,” Syria 12, no. 4 (1931): 326–49. sharing her unpublished essay with me.
 Flood: Picasso the Muslim 45

Figure 4. Bishr Farès, Essai sur l’esprit de la decoration Islamique (Cairo,

1952), plate 5.

full-color illustrations in an essay on the manuscript the wheel full circle, some of Jawad Salim’s Maqāmāt-
published by Eustache de Lorey in 1938.15 Bringing inspired paintings also drew upon techniques associated
with the work of Henri Matisse and Picasso, reconciling
15. E. de Lorey, “Le Miroir de Bagdad,” L’Illustration: Journal
Hebdomadaire Universel, no. 4996 (December 3, 1938), n.p. For the
impact of al-Wasiti’s manuscript, see S. Naef, À la recherche d’une Aesthetics (Gainesville, FL, 2007), 27. The topic has been discussed by
modernité Arabe (Geneva, 1996), 241, and “Reexploring Islamic Art: Saleem al-Bahloly in his doctoral dissertation and will be developed
Modern and Contemporary Creation in the Arab World and Its in a forthcoming article, “Memories of an Origin: Yahya al-Wasiti’s
Relation to the Artistic Past,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 43 Illustrations and the Modern Art of Baghdad,” Muqarnas 34 (2017).
(2003): 168–70; N. M. Shabout, Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Unfortunately, neither was available at the time of writing.
46 RES 67/68 2016/2017

Figure 5. Umayyad Mosque, Damascus, detail of the wall mosaics in the western portico of the courtyard,
705–15 CE. Photo: Manar al-Athar Photo Archive, MAA21841_066_IMG_2213a. Color version available as
an online enhancement.

modernist techniques with historical precedents drawn the genealogy of cubism. Juxtaposing examples of
from Islamic, and specifically Arab, artistic traditions.16 premodern Islamic art with Picasso’s paintings (fig. 7),
In his publication of the Damascus mosaics, de de Lorey noted the abstract qualities of both, and
Lorey situated them within a dynamic tussle between suggested that “only a Spaniard descended from Moors”
Hellenic naturalism and Oriental abstraction: although could have Picasso’s visual sensibilities, and (quoting
the former dominated in Damascus (despite the aniconic Apollinaire) that there must be in his ancestry some distant
iconography of the mosaics), elements of the latter were Muslim given over “to the demon of abstraction.” Hence,
not entirely absent. For de Lorey, the naturalism of the the arabesque qualities of Picasso’s work were probably
mosaics ran counter to the general tendencies of early a “hereditary gift” of this purported Islamic heritage.18
Islamic art; in his evaluation, “naturalism and humanism Even more remarkably, de Lorey went on to quote
represented, for the early Muslims, rather than positive the hadith, the traditions attributed to the prophet
tendencies, the inverse of that which they could accept.”17 Muhammad (d. 632 CE), some of which express
The possible connections between the aniconic imagery disapproval of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic
of the Damascus mosaics, premodern Islamic painting, depiction. Taking this as the impetus for the perceived
and Picasso’s perceived penchant for abstraction become antinaturalism of Islamic art, de Lorey located the origins
clearer as he develops an extraordinary claim regarding of both Islamic abstraction and cubism in an Islamic
Bilderverbot, transmitted as a kind of race memory
16. A. Lenssen and S. A. Rogers, “Articulating the Contemporary,” through Picasso’s Andalusian blood. Invoking the
in A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, ed. F. B. Flood and
G. Necipoğlu (Hoboken, NJ, 2017), 2:1328–29, fig. 51.6.
stylization of the human face in Picasso’s work, de
17. E. de Lorey, “L’Hellénisme et l’Orient dans les mosaïques de la
mosque des Omaiyades,” Ars Islamica 1, no. 1 (1934): 33. 18. de Lorey, “Picasso et l’Orient Musulman,” 302, 311.
 Flood: Picasso the Muslim 47

recognize is the world with which we are familiar [i.e., the

natural world], of which the false artists [i.e., those who
indulge in mimesis] sought to provide a faithful
reproduction.19

In this way, the traditions of the prophet Muhammad,

which are central to Islamic piety and practice, are
produced as evidential documents in the history of
modern abstraction.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, de Lorey’s idiosyncratic
evaluation of Picasso’s oeuvre as causally related not
simply to Islamic art, but an Islamic aniconism canonized
in and promoted by a Bilderverbot transmitted through his
Spanish blood, did not become established art historical
orthodoxy. Causal explanations for perceived formal
affinities are rare, and this one in particular stands at the
end of a spectrum; claims of direct relation are more
commonly expressed in genealogical terms, as influence.
De Lorey’s explanation for the perceived commonalities
between premodern Islamic and modernist abstraction
was not entirely without issue, however. In his 1952
monograph on Islamic ornament, Bishr Farès (who
referenced Lorey’s essay) was at pains to emphasize
both Picasso’s Andalusian origins and the fact that Juan
Gris (d. 1927), that other great cubist pioneer, was half-
Andalusian.20 One later follower even went so far as to
offer a Maghrebi Arabic etymology for “Picasso,” derived
from the Arabic name Abu Qasim, through progressive
transformations into Bicassem, Abucassem, and then
Figure 6. A village scene, Maqamat of al-Hariri, illustrated Picasso.21 As late as 1980, a commentator explained that,
by Yahya al-Wasiti, Baghdad (?), 1237 CE. Bibliothèque “We also know that Picasso was deeply Spanish—‘A man
nationale de France, arabe 5847, fol. 138r. Photo: Courtesy of belongs to his country forever’—and that Málaga is an
the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Color version available Arab town, an inheritance of the 800-year ascendancy of
as an online enhancement.
Islam in Andalusia. Islamic art is, of course, abstract, and
the city seems to have worked its way deep into Picasso’s
Lorey quotes a well-known hadith attributed to the bones.”22
prophet Muhammad’s uncle:
These representations, so disconcerting, make one think of Between abstraction and ornament
Ibn Abbas’s response to a Persian painter who said to him:
“But, then, can I no longer represent animals? How shall I
In quite different ways, both Farès and de Lorey
practice my métier?—Decapitate the animals, was the asserted the precocious modernism (if not modernity) of
response, so that they no longer appear living, and try to premodern Islamic art. Two historical and historiographic
make them resemble flowers.” Thus, Picasso, orthodox phenomena facilitated this. First was the long-established
Muslim, makes academic figural paintings that look like still perception of Islamic art as an art of abstraction, a
lifes; he exerts all his energies so that at the Last Judgment
he will not find himself face to face with his phantoms and 19. Ibid., 308. For a recent study of the hadith relating to images,
constrained to animate them. see D. van Reenen, “The Bilderverbot, a New Survey,” Der Islam 67
(1990): 27–77.
This Arab legend symbolizes perhaps well enough, in effect,
20. Farès, Essai sur l’esprit, 14.
the preoccupations that many of his art forms demonstrate: 21. V. Beyer, “Art moderne et art Islamique,” in Occident-Orient:
a two-faced, ambiguous art par excellence. Each one of us, L’art moderne et l’art Islamique (Strasbourg, 1972), 21.
in front of his canvases, is destined to become a sort of 22. P. Hamill, “Picasso the Man,” New York Magazine, May 12,
Allah whom it is his mission to distract; what we must not 1980, 36
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Figure 7. Eustache de Lorey, “Picasso et l’Orient Musulman,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 8 (1932): 6–7.

quality consistently attributed to cultural, racial, and/or eye of the beholder. In his celebrated Critique of
religious prescriptions and proscriptions. Second were Judgment (1790), for example, Immanuel Kant singled
developments in early twentieth-century Euro-American out Jewish and Islamic aniconism as typifying an
art often characterized as a move away from the mimetic abstraction that manifests rather than impedes or
and naturalistic and toward abstraction. It need hardly frustrates the experience of the sublime. Kant railed
be emphasized that abstraction is always a relative against material images as childish devices that inhibit
term that denotes a mode of the visual constituted in and limit the imagination (including the religious
relation to the “natural,” naturalistic, or mimetic, whether imagination), writing: “Perhaps the most sublime passage
conceived as a point of origin or foil. in the Jewish Law is the commandment: Thou shalt not
Since the eighteenth century, European writing on make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of
Judaism and Islam had tended to contrast their shared any thing that is in heaven or on earth, or under the
incapacity for naturalism and verisimilitude in the visual earth, etc. This commandment alone can explain the
arts, and consequent penchant for abstracted versions enthusiasm that the Jewish people in its civilized era felt
of the natural world, with the naturalism of Hellenism. for its religion when it compared itself with other
This distinction figured a division between the sensuous peoples, or can explain the pride that Islam inspires.”23
mimetic heritage of Greece and the more abstract or If Kant could represent Judaism and Islam as potent in
immaterial proclivities of the Orient—one which would the sublimity of their aniconism, the idealist philosopher
grow increasingly strident in European scholarship as the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries progressed.
Whether this perceived penchant for abstraction was 23. I. Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. W. S. Pluhar (Indianapolis,
seen as a virtue or a vice very much depended on the 1987), 135.
 Flood: Picasso the Muslim 49

G. W. F. Hegel took a contrary view. In the introduction Alois Riegl (d. 1905), published in 1893. In it, Riegl,
to his Lectures on Aesthetics and Fine Art (delivered in the high priest of European ornament studies, sought to
1821 and first published posthumously in 1835), Hegel counter the idea that late antique and early Islamic art
twice invoked Islamic attitudes to images in a discussion witnessed a decline of classical Greco-Roman ideals,
of the aim of art in general. Explaining that the end of seeing instead a continuous and vibrant development
art is in fact “the sensuous presentation of the Absolute of both Byzantine and Islamic ornament from that of
itself,” an end achieved through a harmonious conjunction Greece until some point around the ninth century. After
of content (the appropriate artistic idea) and form (the this, Islamic ornament began to branch from its late
material means of its realization), Hegel explains that to antique stem, producing the arabesque, “in which the
be truthful, the content must be concrete and not consist antinaturalistic and abstract quality of all early Islamic
in an abstraction: art emerges so perfectly.”26 Following a precedent
For everything genuine in spirit and nature alike is inherently
established in earlier Germanic scholarship, Riegl
concrete and, despite its universality, has nevertheless posited a relationship between the worldviews of various
subjectivity and particularity in itself. If we say, for example, civilizations and their art, adding to the discussion his
of God that he is simply one, the supreme being as such, elusive and idiosyncratic idea of Kunstwollen (literally
we have thereby only enunciated a dead abstraction of the “art-will”), as a locomotive force through which formal
sub-rational Understanding. Such a God, not apprehended transformation was effected in the evolution of ornament
himself in his concrete truth, will provide no content for across cultures. When it came to the development of the
art, especially not for visual art. Therefore the Jews and the arabesque in Islamic cultures, the operation of Kunstwollen
Turks have not been able by art to represent their God, was informed by the operation of a Bilderverbot, which
who does not even amount to such an abstraction of the mitigated the triumph of the ornamental over the figurative:
Understanding, in the positive way that the Christians have.24
“Naturally, the pace of the development was faster in
Hegel continues to discuss the concept of divinity in areas where figurative representation was deliberately
ancient Greece and its materialization in anthropomorphic inhibited, if not outright suppressed by religious statutes
forms, implicitly placing Greek anthropomorphism at one and where art, as a result, was essentially limited to
end of a spectrum whose opposite end is occupied by satisfying the decorative urge and to ornament alone.
the unrepresentable God of Jewish and Islamic belief: Here, tendril ornament eventually developed much
Christian conceptions of God occupy the comfortable more quickly than in Byzantine art, where in spite of
and reasonable middle ground between these extremes. iconoclastic tendencies, no one was able or willing to
From the second half of the nineteenth century abandon the figurative representation of religious
onward, the tension between Greek anthropomorphism subjects.”27 In Riegl’s scheme, the emergence of the
and Oriental abstraction evident here was extended to arabesque from the vegetal ornament of late antiquity
the realm of cultural production more generally. As the indexed an Islamic sensibility, a development directly
perceived apotheosis of an Oriental tendency toward linked to the triumph of the Bilderverbot, which
abstraction and stylization, the arabesque featured accelerated the operation of Kunstwollen, amplifying
frequently, reflecting the importance that ornament a tendency toward abstraction and a preference for
had assumed in late nineteenth-century debates about inorganic, inanimate forms that Riegl saw as already
culture as an index of race.25 Among the key works is present in late antique and Byzantine ornament. Writing
the groundbreaking Stilfragen (Questions of style) by in 1899, Riegl claimed that this sensibility was manifest
in the rejection of the Trinity, along with any organic
relation between spirit and matter:
24. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M.
Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1975), 1:42. In contrast to Judaism, Islam opened itself to the contest
25. The term “arabesque” itself was coined in sixteenth-century with the material world, but only its dead, inanimate
European usage at the moment when Venetian craftsmen were busy products—abstract ornament—not a contest with animate
appropriating the sinuous forms that adorned leather and metalwork nature, which included plants, animals, and human
imported from the Mamluk and Ottoman domains. Curiously, it is beings. We call this the Islamic prohibition of images.
around the same time that we can identify a specific name, islīmī, for The connection between artistic activity and worldview is
this type of scrolling vegetal ornament in the Persianate world: S.
Morison, “Venice and the Arabesque Ornament,” in Selected Essays on
the History of Letter-Forms in Manuscript and Print (Cambridge, 1980), 26. A. Riegl, Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of
142–58; B. O’Kane, “Poetry, Geometry and the Arabesque: Notes on Ornament, trans. E. Kain (Princeton, 1992), 11.
Timurid Aesthetics,” Annales Islamologiques 26 (1992): 77–78. 27. Ibid., 287.
50 RES 67/68 2016/2017

more vivid here than anywhere else in the previous history distinction between aniconism and figuration, Worringer
of mankind, except in the case of the Jews. The reversion suggested that the perpetual contrast between abstraction
to earlier Near Eastern Antiquity is readily apparent here. and empathy in the domain of art corresponds to a
No right to self-determination; unadulterated fatalism. religious distinction between transcendence and
Here we see the dead end from which ancient Near Eastern
immanence, which he relates to the distinction between
people would never escape.28
Oriental/Semitic and Greek/Hellenic civilizations.32 For
Despite his progressive endeavor to level the playing Worringer (following Riegl), the political triumph of Islam
field by emphasizing common roots and rejecting in the seventh century terminated the dynamic oscillation
notions of decline, Riegl failed to transcend the racial between Hellenic naturalism and Oriental abstraction
binary within which Semitic abstraction was opposed to that had characterized the art of earlier centuries,
Hellenic naturalism. Instead, he invoked the Bilderverbot resulting in a decisive victory for abstraction, a quality
to explain the return of an Oriental repressed characterized manifest in the rejection of naturalistic imitation in general,
by lifeless abstractions, exemplified by the arid attempts and the depiction of animate creatures in particular.
of Muslim artists to engage with the natural world. In this, In contrast to Riegl’s teleological approach to artistic
Riegl was following a trajectory already established in development, Worringer noted that although abstraction
eighteenth-century European evaluations of the arabesque, characterized the artistic volition of “savage peoples” and
the development of which was consistently attributed to “primitive epochs of art,” it was equally characteristic of
the assumption that Islam prohibited the depiction of “certain culturally developed Oriental peoples.”33 In a
animals, men, and natural things.29 slightly later work, Worringer explained that “We do not,
However, evaluations of abstraction and the arabesque as a general rule, fully appreciate the great difference
were also closely related to debates on form, style, and between primitive and Oriental art, because our European
empathy that flourished in relation to ornament in vision is not trained to detect nuances in abstract art,
German art historical discourse of the late eighteenth and because we only see what they have in common,
and nineteenth centuries. These moved the touchstone that is to say, only the unlifelikeness (unlebendigkeit), the
of artistic achievement away from mimetic imitation or remoteness from nature. In reality, there is just as much
representation to affective and formal qualities.30 Among difference between them as there is between the vague
the most influential was Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction fetishism of primitive man and the profound mysticism
and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, of Oriental man.”34 What primitive and Oriental art,
first published in 1908 and subsequently reprinted including Islamic art, have in common is an impulse
many times. Worringer drew upon an earlier interest in toward the transcendental: fetishism on the one hand,
empathy (Einfühlung) in German aesthetic theories in mysticism on the other.
order to map the binaries of Orientalism/Hellenism onto Worringer’s own sympathies are clear in his insistence
abstraction and empathy, manifestations of psychological upon the abstraction of Nordic art, as opposed to the
predispositions that serve as the determinants of artistic empathetic qualities of southern European (especially
style, and whose mutually antithetical modes define the Hellenizing) art. In this, he followed a trail pioneered by
history of artistic production.31 In an echo of Hegel’s Josef Strzygowski (d. 1941) a decade or so earlier, even if
Strzygowski had used the “un-Greek leaf ornaments” of
the Islamic arabesque to exemplify “Semitic” ornamentalism
28. A. Riegl, Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, trans. J. E. Jung
in a 1902 article with strongly racial and sexual overtones.35
(New York, 2004), 329. In a note accompanying the text, Riegl is
careful to distinguish between Oriental/Semitic fatalism and
predetermination, the doctrine so important to German Protestantism.
29. Among many others, see C. F. Roland le Virloys, Dictionnaire 32. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 101–2.
d’architecture civile, militaire, et navale, vol. 1 (Paris, 1770), 82. 33. Ibid., 15, 97–98.
30. D. Morgan, “The Idea of Abstraction in German Theories of the 34. W. Worringer, Form in Gothic (London, 1927), 37, trans. H.
Ornament from Kant to Kandinsky,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Read from Formprobleme der Gotik (Munich, 1920), 26.
Criticism 50, no. 3 (1992): 231–42. 35. J. Strzygowski, Hellas in des Orients Umarmung, reprinted from
31. W. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Allgemeine Zeitung (Munich, 1902). For a discussion, see M. Olin,
the Psychology of Style, trans. M. Bullock (Cleveland, 1967), 45. On The Nation Without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art
antecedent discussions of aesthetics and empathy, see Morgan, (Lincoln, NE, 2001), 21. Among the few modern scholars to recognize
“The Idea of Abstraction in German Theories”, 234–38; R. Vischer, the importance of Strzygowski’s problematic legacy for the nascent
Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873– discipline of Islamic art history is J. Elsner, “The Birth of Late Antiquity:
1893 (Santa Monica, CA, 1994), 89–123. Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901,” Art History 25, no. 3 (2002): 361.
 Flood: Picasso the Muslim 51

Figure 8. Ernst Kühnel, “Nordische und islamische kunst,” Die Welt als
Geschichte 1 (1935): figs. 15–18.

The Oriental-Nordic thesis of both scholars may have enigmatic notion of dynamic form, he saw both as
influenced the early work of the German Islamic art parallel manifestations of Kunstwollen (fig. 8).36
historian Ernst Kühnel (d. 1964). Writing in 1935, Kühnel
saw in the abstract forms of “Nordic” art analogies with 36. E. Kühnel, “Nordische und islamische kunst,” Die Welt als
the abstracted vegetal forms and geometric interlaces Geschichte 1 (1935): 203–17, esp. 216–17. See also M. Brion, “L’Art
favored in Islamic art; invoking Riegl’s influential if abstrait: son origine, sa nature et sa signification,” Diogène 24 (1958): 54.
52 RES 67/68 2016/2017

The ambivalent role assumed by the arabesque in du vide).39 The interdiction on figural representation
these pioneering discussions of Islam and ornament meant that Islamic artists rarely took their inspiration
reflects its ability to function variously as an emblem from nature, favoring the use of drawings over direct
of incapacity and sublimity. For those who saw the observation; even when they did, the form became
abstractions of the arabesque as indexing racial so stylized as to become geometric ornament, the
proclivity, religious proscription, or cultural aridity, arabesque being the obvious case in point. This is the
it was doubly indicted. On the one hand, it was reason, they suggest, that Islamic ornament is “as inert
symptomatic of a Semitic incapacity for mimesis or and rigid” as the religion of Islam itself.40
naturalistic representation, the appropriate goal of all According to such evaluations, an assumed proscription
artistic activity for those who claimed the Hellenic of figuration had fostered the death of art in the Islamic
tradition as their own. On the other, it exemplified a world, promoting a sterile antimimetic ornamentalism
penchant for the ornamental, for minor forms and surface emblematized by the arabesque. In a swinging indictment
decoration over the valorized naturalism of Hellenism. of the perceived sterility of Islam, published after a lecture
Explanations for both phenomena invoked cultural delivered to the Royal Anthropological Society in London
predispositions, racial impulses, and/or religious in 1945 (a not insignificant date), the anthropologist
proscriptions shared by both Jews and Arabs (and often, A. L. Kroeber wrote: “Representative art was banned.
Muslims more generally). An essay presented at the Purely decorative patterning—the name Arabesque is
International Congress of Orientalists in 1905 explains characteristic—provided only a lower-level substitute.”41
that “The arabesque appears to be essentially Semitic, A decade later, the structuralist anthropologist Claude
to reflect the needs of a religion or its prohibitions, the Lévi-Strauss revisited the apparent “collapse” of Islamic
primitive existential conditions of its creators, that is art in the nineteenth century. In his musings, Lévi-Strauss
to say an inescapable inheritance.”37 concluded (somewhat paradoxically) that this historical
Similar themes are equally apparent in both phenomenon was due to the transhistorical prohibition
germanophone and francophone scholarship of the late on images. This had precluded successful mimesis and
nineteenth and early twentieth century. Writing in 1932, encouraged a baroque profession of surface ornament,
for example, the French Orientalist Georges Marçais manifest in the proliferation of the minor arts, jeweled
represented Arab creativity as a series of lacks that encrustation and gilding, which functioned “as a veneer
extends well beyond the realm of the visual arts, to conceal rustic customs and the bigotry permeating
symptomatic (in Marçais’s view) of the Arab inability Islamic moral and religious thought.” Lévi-Strauss
to create “living fictions,” among them narrative (as continued, “Why did Moslem art collapse so completely
opposed to lyric) poetry or prose, or theater. Whether once it had passed its peak? It went from the palace to
depicting animals or plants, instead of copying from the bazaar without any transitional phase. This must
nature, Arab artists generally transposed from one have been a result of the rejection of images. Being
technique to another a theme already interpreted. deprived of all contact with reality, the artist perpetuates
Incapable of verisimilitude, in a telling mise en abyme a convention which is so anaemic that it can be neither
they produced only sterile abstractions whose reproduction rejuvenated nor refertilized. Either it is sustained by
was nothing more than the stylization of a stylization, gold or it collapses completely.”42 For Lévi-Strauss there
endless copies of unvarying simulacra of nature.38 was nothing sublime about the Bilderverbot. On the
Around the same time, the French Orientalists Gaston contrary, it had engendered a flight from mimesis,
Wiet and Louis Hautecoeur emphasized the importance
of the religious interdiction on images for understanding
the aesthetics of Islamic art. According to both, Islamic 39. On the horror vacui, see R. Ettinghausen, “The Taming of the
art is a rigid, joyless art characterized by an excess of Horror Vacui in Islamic Art,” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 123, no. 1 (1979): 15–28.
unmajestic decoration, and conducive only to dreams 40. L. Hautecoeur and G. Wiet, Les Mosqueés du Caire, 2 vols.
and melancholy, typified by the horror vacui (horreur (Paris, 1932), 1:165–66, 170.
41. A. L. Kroeber, “The Ancient Oikoumenê as an Historic Culture
Aggregate,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great
37. J.-H. Probst-Biraben, “Essai de philosophie de l’arabesque,” Britain and Ireland 75 (1945): 11. For a perceptive critique, see
Actes du XIVe Congrès International des Orientalistes Alger 1905, part 2 Hodgson, “Islâm and Image,” 226.
(Paris, 1907), 16. 42. C. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. J. Weightman and
38. G. Marçais, “La question des images dans l’art musulman,” D. Weightman (New York, 1992), 400–401. For the original French,
Byzantion 7 (1932): 171–73. see C. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (Paris, 1955), 480–81.
 Flood: Picasso the Muslim 53

which initiated the decline of Islamic art, its refuge in In 1910, Wassily Kandinsky praised Persian art for its
ornamental excess, a long-established trope in French antinaturalism (in this he was at odds with many of his
Orientalist scholarship.43 Illustrating the very high stakes contemporaries, who saw Persian art as naturalistic, in
that both representation and ornament have assumed contrast to the “Semitic” abstractions of “Arab” art) and
in etic discourses on Islam, Lévi-Strauss’s comments its subordination of composition to geometrical form, but
invoke a familiar opposition between nature and artifice, went on to warn that in the absence of an ability to
naturalism and abstraction, in which the excess or grasp the inner harmony of both, an emphasis on color
supplement figured by the surface application of gold and form alone risked producing works of mere
signifies a deficient relation to reality itself.44 decoration “suited to neckties or carpets.”47 His
In many of these accounts, the arabesque was firmly concerns were well placed, for when the expressionist
established as the index of a racially or religiously painter Franz Marc (d. 1916) visited the pioneering
inspired mentalité that both eschewed the mimetic Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst exhibition in
and existed outside of history, an idea later taken up Munich in the same year, the intricate polychromy of
by certain Muslim scholars who sought to offer a the carpets displayed there begged comparison with
transcendentalist and transhistorical explanation for the Kandinsky’s oeuvre:
forms of Islamic art.45 However, equally apparent is an It is a shame that it is not possible to hang Kandinsky’s
ambiguity or tension between the roles of the arabesque wonderful compositions and certain other works of art next
as both the essence of abstraction and the epitome to the Muhammadan carpets in the rooms of the exhibition.
of ornament. If in the nineteenth century it was the Comparisons would become inevitable and how instructive
ornamental qualities of Islamic art, indeed the idea of that would be for all of us! What is the nature of the
Islamic art as an art of ornament, that had often informed astonished admiration with which we behold this Oriental
its positive reception, at the end of the nineteenth art? Does it not mockingly reveal to us the one-sided
century and the beginning of the twentieth, the abstract limitations of our European concepts of painting? Its mastery
tendencies that had led to this penchant for the of colors and composition, a thousand times more profound
ornamental tended to be emphasized. Nevertheless, than our own, casts shame upon our conventional theories.
In Germany there is scarcely any decorative work, let alone
this pendulum swing toward emphasizing the sublimity
a carpet, which we could hang next to this art. Let us
of antimimetic Islamic forms was haunted by the charge
attempt this with Kandinsky’s compositions—they will hold
of ornamentalism.46 their own to this risky exercise, not as carpets but as
“images.”48
43. See D. Carnoy, Représentations de l’Islam dans la France du
XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1998), 245–46, 270–74. The comparison reflects the prominence of the carpet
44. Lévi-Strauss’s imagery recalls a tale about the fourth-century (and Oriental carpets in particular) as a trope in writing
BCE Greek painter Apelles, who was famous for his naturalistic on the decorative arts and design from the mid-
paintings. When a pupil painted an image of Helen of Troy covered in
gold, Apelles denounced him for concealing his lack of painterly skill
nineteenth century onward,49 a legacy reflected in
behind an excess of surface embellishment, depicting the riches of the emphasis on Kandinsky’s works as images rather
Helen since he was incapable of depicting her beauty. In Christian than examples of the minor arts. Like the trope of the
sources such as the Paedagogus of Clement of Alexandria, the tale is
presented as a contrast not only between nature and artifice, but
between truth and falsity, reality and deception. The idea anticipates of the aesthetic qualities that characterized European art: J. de
Kant’s distinction between what is intrinsic to representation and what Rochechouart, Souvenirs d’un voyage en Perse (Paris, 1867), 261–65.
is merely ornamental excess, like the gilding on a frame, a glittering For useful and nuanced discussions of the European reception of
surplus or supplement that, in its overdetermined materiality, detracts Islamic art as an ornamental art, see Necipoğlu, The Topkapı Scroll;
from the intrinsic beauty of form: J. Derrida, “The Parergon,” trans. C. R. Labrusse, “Une traverse du malheur occidental,” in Purs decors?
Owens, October 9 (1979): 18–21, 27. Arts de l’Islam, regards du XIXe siècle, ed. R. Labrusse (Paris, 2007),
45. See, e.g., C. Barbier du Meynard, review of H. Lavoix, Les 32–53; idem., “Islamic Arts and the Crisis of Representation in Modern
Peintres arabes (1876), in Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature 1, Europe,” in Flood and Necipoğlu, A Companion to Islamic Art and
no. 21 (1876): 333–35. For a formalist history of the arabesque and its Architecture, 2:1196–1218.
reception, see E. Kühnel, The Arabesque: Meaning and Transformation 47. W. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art [1910], trans.
of an Ornament, trans. R. Ettinghausen (Graz, 1977). See also M. T. H. Sadler (New York, 1977), 46–47.
G. Necipoğlu, The Topkapı Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic 48. Cited in Labrusse, “Islamic Arts,” 1212.
Architecture (Santa Monica, CA, 1995), 75–82. 49. Riegl’s interest in ornament had been spurred by his studies of
46. Writing in the 1860s, the comte de Rochechouart noted that the Islamic carpets in the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts in
the artistic taste of Persians showed them to be “ornamentalists” Vienna, where he was curator: A. Riegl, Altorientalische Teppiche
(ornemanistes) and nothing else, in whose hands painting was devoid (1892; repr., Mittenwald, 1979).
54 RES 67/68 2016/2017

arabesque with which it was often entangled, the legacy Abstraction ascendant
of the “carpet paradigm” elicited responses ranging from
As the divergent views of Kant and Hegel suggest,
ambivalence to disavowal in an emergent discourse on
the perceived eschewal of representation promoted
the aesthetics of modernism, and avant-garde painting
by a Jewish or Islamic Bilderverbot rooted in an anti-
in particular.50 We might point to the futurist manifesto
anthropomorphic impulse “was both a vice to be
of 1909, which begins with a contrast between the
condemned and a virtue to be praised.”56 To some extent,
dynamic industrial world of European modernity and
the resulting tensions are reflected in a dichotomy between
the languid Oriental ornamentalism in whose cloyingly
Islamic art as a source of cloying claustrophobia and
claustrophobic embrace the futurists begin their odyssey:
liberating purity. The emergence of a modernist penchant
“We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under
for abstraction in the avant-garde art of Europe (and later,
hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass,
America) in the early decades of the twentieth century
domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the
facilitated a pendulum swing, enabling a recalibration
prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had
based on new grounds of comparison rather than contrast.57
trampled our atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs,
The perceived flight from mimesis in Islamic art might
arguing up to the last confines of logic and blackening
still be condemned by some, but for others the abstraction
many reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling.”51
of Islamic art now paved the way for its enthusiastic
Writing on cubism in 1913, Albert Gleizes argued
comparison with the burgeoning products of twentieth-
the necessity to “avoid reducing the picture merely to
century Euro-American art.
the ornamental value of an arabesque on an oriental
Abstraction had itself often been presented in
carpet.”52 Similarly, eight years after Kandinsky wrote,
comparative and historicist terms based on perceived
and just as the First World War ended, Le Corbusier
analogies between modern avant-garde art and the art
(Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) and the cubist painter
of earlier periods. Especially in the influential school
Amédée Ozenfant published a manifesto attacking
of Viennese art history, the aesthetic values of the art
cubism as revalorizing a nonrepresentational ornamental
produced in late antiquity (out of which Islamic art
aesthetic, an antique mode of art-making common to
emerged) were hotly contested, variously imagined as
“Mycenaeans, Orientals, and Negros,” posing the rhetorical
representing a decline in the classical canons inherited
question, “What differentiates the aesthetic of a carpet
from Hellenism (a decline often ascribed to Semitic
from that of a Cubist tableau?”53 Rejecting cubism as
influence) or as a period of dynamic change and
inflected by a romantic spirit, the authors describe its
experimentation. It is in the context of the latter, positive
products as an art from which one might draw superficial
evaluation that comparisons between the art of late
entertainment or decor, like the facile arabesque: all that
antiquity and of the modern avant-garde were first made.58
annuls true beauty.54 Given the frequency with which
It has been suggested, for example, that the shift from
the arts of Islam have been invoked in relation to cubism,
so-called representational art to so-called abstract art in
the image of the arabesque is not chosen at random.
the late antique Mediterranean between roughly 100 and
Cubism might be an art of modernity, but as an art of
700 CE provides insights into the rise of abstraction in
ornament it was not, according to these authors, a
modern Euro-American art, or even that, in its formalist
modern art.55
approach and valorization of abstraction in the art of
late antiquity just a decade or two before the emergence
50. J. Masheck, “The Carpet Paradigm: Critical Prolegomena to a of cubism, the work of Alois Riegl “developed a
Theory of Flatness,” Arts Magazine 51, no. 1 (1976): 82–109, and The
Carpet Paradigm: Integral Flatness from Decorative to Fine Art (New
York, 2010), esp. 29–31, 41–43, 71–72, 100.
51. F. T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (New York, Salim (d. 1961) railed against the tastes of the Iraqi bourgeoisie, whose
1971), 39. luxurious Persian carpets he linked to a second-rate style of cubism:
52. A. Gleizes, “Opinion,” in Cubism, ed. E. F. Fry (New York, Naef, À la recherche d’une modernité, 333–34.
1966), 128. 56. K. P. Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern
53. A. Ozenfant and C.-É. Jeanneret, Après le Cubisme (Paris, Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton, 2002), 15; on
1918), 15. aniconism, see 15–19, 43.
54. Ibid., 15, 17, 20, 30. 57. For the latest scholarship on the phenomenon, see Inventing
55. It is worth noting that the link between the Persian carpet and Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art,
the indictment of certain kinds of cubist art survived well into the exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2012).
twentieth century, even in the writings of artists and critics produced in 58. See, e.g., W. Ritter von Hartel and F. Wickhoff, Die Wiener
the Arab lands. Writing in 1951, for example, the Iraqi artist Jawad Genesis, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1894–95).
 Flood: Picasso the Muslim 55

vocabulary which would be suitable for writing about forbidding representation of animals,” which he located
non-representational works of art which did not yet exist.”59 not only in religious impulses but also in an aesthetic
Conversely, those who saw the “rise of abstraction” sensibility.63 The important point is that in neither
and the transformation of classical aesthetics in late interpretation was the operation of a racially or
antiquity as a decline drew the same conclusion about religiously inflected image prohibition seriously doubted.
the aesthetic values of modernity. For the art historian On the contrary, the conceptualization of abstraction
Bernard Berenson (d. 1959), writing in Italy during World as antifigurative enabled the discourse on modernism
War II, the two phenomena were analogous, with the to intersect with a variety of preexisting discourses
difference that in modernity the descent from mimesis to according to which the abstract qualities of Islamic and
abstraction had taken decades, rather than the centuries Jewish art were encouraged by, or even developed as,
needed for decline to take hold in antiquity. Considering a response to religious proscriptions on figuration.
the widespread perception that the advent of Islam was Although widely accepted, such a proposition required
the culmination of a process of late antique decline, and a sidelining of the material evidence for the historical
that Islamic art was an art of ornament, it is worth noting proliferation of figurative art across a wide range of
that for Berenson, decline was manifest in a move from media. Alternatively, the stylized manner of depicting
artists to artisans, and from the figurative to “primitive the human figure might itself be invoked as a sign of
geometrical patterns, vertical and frontal designs.”60 He abstraction.64
attributed this transformation to a combination of class Ironically, even as Berenson, a Jew converted to
(the earliest Christians being ignorant slum dwellers), Catholicism, was sitting in war-torn Europe denouncing
“the fanatical hatred of the anti-Hellenic Jew against the return of the primitive and Semitic repressed as
everything that might entice him away from his bleak heralding the end of humanism, the same wellspring
abstractions,” and stoicism, with its “anti-Hellenic of Semitic transcendentalism and intellectualism was
Puritanism” and horror of the nude, which is integral being invoked in significant reevaluations of “Jewish”
to all figurative art.61 Predictably, Berenson went on to abstraction and aniconism. The contrast between
suggest that “this phenomenon seems to characterize, “primitive” figuration and sublime abstraction invoked
in our European world at least, all moments of serious by Kant found its place in Freud’s Moses and Monotheism
disintegration, as has been the case with us from the (1939), exemplified by a distinction between richly iconic
beginning of art nouveau at the end of the last century ancient Egyptian religion and proscriptively aniconic
to the so-called abstract art of to-day.”62 Judaism, respectively. For Freud, the ban on figural
By contrast to this teleology of decline directly related representation in Judaism “signified subordinating sense
to degrees of abstraction, writing in the wake of World perception to an abstract idea; it was a triumph of
War I, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset spirituality over the senses,” a renunciation that offered
had seen instead a cyclical shift between figuration a model for the workings of the human psyche itself.65
and geometric abstraction typified by “the Semitic law Similarly, while Berenson insisted that the flight from
mimesis was a harbinger of the cultural chaos around
59. W. Liebeschuetz, “The Birth of Late Antiquity,” Antiquité him, characterizing “in our European world at least, all
Tardive 12 (2004): 255. See also J. Onians, “Abstraction and moments of serious disintegration,” across the Atlantic,
Imagination in Late Antiquity,” Art History 3, no. 1 (1980): 1. On the
Jewish antinaturalism was being presented as a precursor,
interrelations between aesthetic developments in nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century European art and the “rediscovery” or valorization
if not prefiguration, of twentieth-century abstraction. At
of late antique art, see M. A. Holly, “Spirits and Ghosts in the the inaugural exhibition of the Jewish Museum in New
Historiography of Art,” in The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects York in 1944, the work of Jewish artists from antiquity
in Contemporary Perspective, ed. M. Cheetham, M. A. Holly, and to modernity was being celebrated for its “advance into
K. Moxey (Cambridge, 1998), 52–71, esp. 62–64. See also J. Elsner, realms where the consistency of the human figure becomes
“From Empirical Evidence to the Big Picture: Some Reflections on
Riegl’s Concept of Kunstwollen,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 4 (2006):
746. 63. Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art, 40–41.
60. B. Berenson, Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts (New 64. M. Olin, “ ‘Early Christian Synagogues’ and ‘Jewish Art
York, 1948), 169. Historians’: The Discovery of the Synagogue of Dura-Europos,”
61. Ibid., 166. Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 27 (2000): 17.
62. Ibid., 169. See also B. Berenson, The Arch of Constantine; or, 65. Although, paradoxically, according to Freud, the roots of
The Decline of Form (London, 1954); J. Elsner, “Berenson’s Decline, or Jewish aniconism lie in the radical pharaoh Akhnaten’s heretical (but
His ‘Arch of Constantine’ Reconsidered,” Apollo 148, no. 437 (1998): not aniconic) monotheism: S. Freud, Moses and Monotheism [1939],
20–22. trans. K. Jones (New York, 1967), 19–20, 144, 149 (quote at 144).
56 RES 67/68 2016/2017

questionable in the light of spiritual forces stronger than leveling ground of formalism. Writing in 1908, the art
the quest for bodily perfection.”66 Whereas one presented critic Roger Fry, who also reviewed the Munich exhibition,
abstraction as a signifier of barbarism, the other presented compared neo-impressionist and Byzantine art on formal
abstraction as a way of transcending the barbaric extremes grounds, as characterized by a common abstraction
to which the cult of the body had recently been taken. rooted in spiritual values.69 By the 1930s, at the very
Thus, the perceived transhistorical abstractions of Jewish moment when the aesthetic of whitewash was achieving
art were presented as evidence of a transcendental hegemonic status in the canon of modernism, even
spiritualism opposed to the menace of certain strands the Islamic arabesque could be rehabilitated as the
of Germanic Hellenism. embodiment of spiritual purity rather than cloying
In these comparative discourses, “abstraction” denoted ornamentality within a dichotomy between Hellenic
two quite different phenomena that were often confused sensualism and Oriental transcendentalism inflected by
or elided: first, an antimimetic or antinaturalist tendency Neoplatonic conceptions of the abstract form as leading
that informed the stylization of the real; second, an toward higher realms of being.70 Conversely, widespread
avoidance of figural representation tout court. Viewed as understandings of the arabesque as a form devoid of
the eschewal of mimesis in favor of the transcendental, both iconographic and representational qualities, being
abstraction, which had once been used to indict Judaism both “the means of signification and the thing signified,”71
and Islam in relation to the aesthetics and ethics of resonated with the perceived nonrepresentational
classicism, was now valorized as an expression of qualities of modernist abstraction, its “radical autonomy
spiritual transcendentalism even as late antique art, once and recursiveness, its ability to figure nothing but itself.”72
marginalized for its radical divergence from the canons of That such revaluations of the arabesque’s nonmimetic
classicism, was now emerging as an art of spirituality.67 qualities were happening even while Claude Lévi-Strauss
In this way, the teleology by which cultures progressed was citing the ornamental qualities of the arabesque as
from abstraction to naturalism was reversed, while the an index of the aridity of Islamic cultures underlines the
representation of a general shift from Hellenic sensualism deep ambivalence associated with what was seen as
to Semitic transcendentalism as decline was inverted. both form and mode.
In the case of Islamic art, the recognition of The more standard analogy between modern
transhistorical abstract values was consolidated in the abstraction and the perceived flatness, two-dimensionality,
move from ethnic categorization (Arab, Persian, Saracenic antisculptural qualities and rejection of naturalism in
art, etc.) to more unitary terms such as “Muhammedan” Byzantine and Islamic art was reiterated in the 1940s and
in the early decades of the twentieth century. The radical would be famously taken up by Clement Greenberg in
decontextualization of the whitewashed gallery space 1958, writing of such artists as Barnett Newman and
was itself a further abstraction initiated in Meisterwerke Mark Rothko.73 By the middle of the twentieth century,
muhammedanischer Kunst, the groundbreaking 1910 the interrelations between premodern and modern art
exhibition of Islamic art in Munich, whose pared down imbued the experience of both with something akin to
aesthetic attempted to combat the perception of Islamic intertextuality or intervisuality. The valorization of the
art as an art of bazaar crafts and decadent ornamentalism perceived abstract qualities of Islamic art was part of a
(fig. 9).68 The mode of display pioneered in Munich in
1910 represents a shift from a quasi-ethnographic
69. C. Reed, ed., A Roger Fry Reader (Chicago, 1996), 73, 81–85,
presentation to one which appeals to the formal qualities 99–110. For his review of the Munich exhibition, see R. Fry, “The
of the work; it was precisely the eschewal of questions Munich Exhibition of Muhammedan Art–I,” Burlington Magazine 17,
of context and iconography that enabled the selective no. 89 (1910): 283–85 and 288–90, and “The Munich Exhibition of
“elevation” of Islamic artifacts to sit alongside the Muhammedan Art–II,” Burlington Magazine 17, no. 90 (1910): 326–29
canonical works of Euro-American modernism on the and 332–33.
70. A. Gleizes, “Arabesques,” Cahiers du Sud 22, no. 175 (1935):
101–6.
66. S. Kayser, The Jewish Museum: Inaugural Exhibition (New 71. S. Naddaff, Arabesque: Narrative Structure and the Aesthetics
York, 1944), 2. of Repetition in 1001 Nights (Evanston, 1991), 115. See also Kühnel,
67. See, among others, M. A. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity: The Arabesque, 8–9.
Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting (Cambridge, 72. R. Slifkin, Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of
1994). Postwar American Art (Berkeley, 2013), 13.
68. See the essays in A. Lerner and A. Shalem, eds., After One 73. C. Greenberg, “Byzantine Parallels,” in Art and Culture:
Hundred Years: The 1910 Exhibition “Meisterwerke Critical Essays (Boston, 1965), 167–70. See also Onian, “Abstraction
muhammedanischer Kunst” Reconsidered (Leiden, 2010). and Imagination.”
 Flood: Picasso the Muslim 57

Figure 9. Room 72 in the Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst exhibition, Munich, 1910. Published in Friedrich Sarre and
Frederik Robert Martin, Die Ausstellung von Meisterwerken muhammedanischer Kunst in München, 1910 (Munich, 1912), vol. 1, n.p.

broader twentieth-century phenomenon in which the a complex relationship existed between the experience
experience of abstraction constituted a period taste of premodern Christian or Islamic art by a specific artist,
characterized by a feedback loop: reception of late its impact on his or her oeuvre, and the reception of
antique, medieval, and premodern Islamic art as arts of that oeuvre by those who had inculcated the values of
abstraction was informed by a twentieth-century vogue abstraction.
for abstraction, which was in turn sometimes informed
by the experience of premodern art.74 In some cases,
and Byzantium, or, Mechanization Takes Command,” Modernism/
74. See G. Duthuit, “Matisse and Byzantine Space,” Transitions 5 modernity 16, no. 1 (2009): 51–59; T. Buddensig, “Die karolingischen
(1949): 20–37; M. H. Caviness, “Broadening the Definitions of ‘Art’: Maler in Tours und die Bauhausmaler in Weimar: Wihelm Koehler und
The Reception of Medieval Works in the Context of Post-Impressionist Paul Klee,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 73 (2010): 1–18; B.
Movements,” in Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture, ed. P. J. Schellewald, “Matisse in Moskau: Die Geschichte einer Begegnung,”
Gallacher and H. Damico (Albany, NY, 1989), 259–82, and “The in Moskau: Metropole zwischen Kultur und Macht, ed. T. Grob and
Politics of Taste: An Historiography of ‘Romanesque’ Art in the S. Horber (Cologne, 2015), 97–122. Roland Betancourt, ed.,
Twentieth Century,” in Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity
Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, (Boston, 2015). For the recent suggestion of similar causal connections
NJ, 2008), 57–81; J. B. Bullen, “Byzantinism and Modernism, 1900– between classical sculpture and the art of modernism, see E.
1914,” Burlington Magazine 141 (1999): 665–75; D. Lewis, “Matisse Prettejohn, The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture (London, 2012).
58 RES 67/68 2016/2017

Picasso and Pollock were and remain the most

common points of comparison for the abstract qualities
of medieval Islamic art. Depending on the commentator,
the postulated relationship ranges from direct influence
(itself often adduced from formal analogies alone)
through vaguer assertions of affinity or resonance to
a relationship of serendipity. In an idiosyncratic but
influential essay on Islam and image published in 1964,
for example, Marshall Hodgson invoked both cubism
and Picasso in an extended comparison between
what he saw as the abstract, antinaturalist, and even
antisymbolic qualities of Islamic and modern Euro-
American art.75 Certain artifacts have played a starring
role in discussions of abstraction, among them a ninth-
century carved wooden panel from Egypt on which
the formal aspects of a vegetal design, and the careful
positioning of an eyelike drill hole, produces the gestalt
of a bird (fig. 10). In the 1930s, the panel featured in
Ernst Kühnel’s accounts of the abstract affinities between
Islamic and Nordic art, inspired by Wilhelm Worringer’s
Abstraction and Empathy (fig. 8). In 1978, Oleg Grabar
wrote of this and other works inspired by styles of
ornament developed in the 0 Abbasid capital of Samarra
in Iraq during the ninth century, noting their “modernity”:
“Their formal and aesthetic characteristics are quite
contemporary, and it is possible that Picasso, among
others, was occasionally inspired by similar designs on
Iraqi pottery.”76 In his comments on the same panel three
decades later, Grabar invoked atomism, the Bilderverbot,
and abstract expressionism as conceived by art critics
such as Greenberg who saw “an evolutionary impulse
toward abstraction and simplification inherent in artistic Figure 10. Panel with stylized vegetal
creativity.”77 ornament, Egypt, ninth–tenth century. Pine
Comparisons with Picasso remain standard: an account wood, 73 x 32 cm. Musée du Louvre, OA6023.
Photo: Les frères Chuzeville. © RMN-Grand
of the opening of an exhibition of Islamic art at the Institut
Palais / Art Resource, NY. Color version
du Monde Arabe in Paris in 2009 describes an exchange
available as an online enhancement.
between the president of the institute and the collector
whose objects were on display: “I was standing in front
of one of the objects with the President of the IMA, juxtaposed examples of medieval and early modern
Dominique Baudis, yesterday, and he exclaimed: ‘But Islamic art with contemporary works from Europe and
this is like Picasso!’ Yes, only it was painted a thousand the Islamic world even included a section on “Picasso
years before Picasso.”78 A recent Berlin exhibition, which and Qur’an” in which examples of Picasso’s lithographic
illuminations for a poetic text were juxtaposed with
75. Hodgson, “Islâm and Image,” 245–51.
medieval illuminated Qur’ans.79
76. O. Grabar, “Tulunid Wood Carving,” in The Genius of Arab As this suggests, de Lorey’s invocation of Islamic art
Civilization: Source of Renaissance, ed. J. R. Hayes (Cambridge, MA, in his 1932 essay on Picasso was pioneering, if not
1978), 110. prophetic, unusual only in its insistence upon a causal
77. O. Grabar, “When Is a Bird a Bird?” Proceedings of the relationship between medieval Islamic and Cubist
American Philosophical Society 153, no. 3 (2009): 248.
78. D. Brown, “Gold-Leafed Qur’ans Gems, Carpets and
Calligraphy in Historic Paris Show,” http://www.israinternational 79. A. S. Bruckstein and H. Budde, eds., Taswir: Islamische
.com/latest-news/226-islamic-art-showing-in-paris.html. Bildwelten und Moderne (Berlin, 2009), 55–57.
 Flood: Picasso the Muslim 59

abstraction rooted in historical intermarriage and Commandment on Judaism, which favors rationalism
interbreeding, not in its invocation of the Bilderverbot over sensualism. In an accompanying note, he cites
as shaping the formal values that he saw as common to one of the leaders of the Educational Alliance, “an
each. More standard was the claim for a relationship organization which undertakes the ‘Americanization’ of
rooted in the influence of Islamic art on the work of Jewish immigrants,” that “the first aim of the ‘civilizing’
modern European artists, rather than racially inflected process [Kulturmenschwerdung], which it tries to achieve
genetics. From the early twentieth century, this “influence” by means of all kinds of artistic and social instruction,
was facilitated by enhanced opportunities for European was ‘emancipation from the second commandment.’”82
artists to visit Islamic lands (many then under European If, around 1900, the perceived aniconism of Judaism
colonial rule) and to view examples of Islamic art (many was incompatible with the assimilation of immigrant Jews
acquired under colonial rule) in European museums or to American modernity, by the 1940s the Jewish and
in temporary exhibitions such as the celebrated 1910 Protestant roots of both abstract artists and the drive to
Munich exhibition, whose Persian carpets and paintings abstraction were being championed as causal factors in
were rapturously received by Henri Matisse and Wassily the emergence of abstraction in modernism.83 Hence the
Kandinsky among others.80 Bilderverbot came to be seen as causally related to the
Even here, however, the impact of Islamic abstraction rise of abstraction and the role of Jewish artists (and, more
on the aesthetics of modernism was sometimes related to controversially, the unrepresentable catastrophe of the
the role of the Bilderverbot in fostering premodern Holocaust) in this process.84
abstraction: writing of Kandinsky, whom she accompanied In the modern presentation of “Jewish” art, the claim
during a visit to Tunisia in 1904–5, Gabriele Münter of relation took various forms. On the one hand, formal
insisted that “the Moslem interdiction of representational analogies between premodern Jewish art and the abstract
painting seemed to stir his imagination,” fostering an art of modernism were highlighted. On the other, the
interest in abstraction.81 In this common scenario, the Jewish origins of some of the most celebrated practitioners
Bilderverbot is seen as causally related to the abstract and theorists of abstraction were emphasized in ways
values of Islamic art and, indirectly, to the modern artistic that suggested that their apparent rejection of figuration
traditions that it inspired. If de Lorey’s theory of a race was somehow related to the internalized proscriptions of
memory of proscription transmitted by blood imagines the Second Commandment and its rabbinical mediations.85
a relation that might best be described as genetic, the Implicit in both approaches were the assumption of
relation assumed in assertions that the Bilderverbot the Jewish roots of modernism and the notion that the
inspired the abstraction of modern Euro-American art Jews were modern avant la lettre. Invoking rabbinical
through the personal experience of Islamic art is best rulings regarding the permissibility of incomplete or
described as genealogical. antinaturalistic human figures, the American-German
Rather than seeking to challenge the idea of an Islamic rabbi Steven Schwarzschild deduced “two of the chief
or Jewish Bilderverbot as the impetus for abstraction in principles of twentieth-century modern art—abstraction
premodern art (an idea with deep roots in European and distortion” in the type of visual culture promoted by
anti-Semitism), the twentieth-century valorization of the rabbis. Writing in 1975, Schwarzschild suggested
abstraction as both stylization and antifiguration facilitated that the aesthetic vision of rabbinical Judaism was more
the inversion of earlier indictments of Jews and Arabs for modern than that promoted by “liberal” Jews who
their purported inability to capture the real, to produce championed naturalistic depiction or verisimilitude. In
mimetic art that was convincing as such. The degree
of inversion entailed in this elevation of abstraction might
be gauged from Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic 82. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and
and the “Spirit” of Capitalism (1905), in which he refers Other Writings, trans. P. Baehr and G. C. Wells (New York, 2002), 189.
83. D. Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and
to the “tremendous influence” exercised by the Second Vandalism since the French Revolution (London, 1997), 264.
84. M. Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven, 2007).
80. K. C. Lindsay and P. Vergo, eds., Kandinsky: Complete 85. D. M. Perlmutter, “Graven Images: Creative Acts of Idolatry;
Writings on Art, vol. 1, 1920–1921 (Boston, 1982), 73–76. For an a Hermeneutic Study of the Relevance of Theological Proscription of
extensive exploration of exposure to Persian (rather than Islamic) art Image-Making in Judaic Law to Contemporary Jewish Art and Artists,”
exhibitions, collections, publications, and travel, see F. Daftari, The PhD diss. (New York University, 1993); L. Saltzman, “To Figure or Not:
Influence of Persian Art on Gauguin, Matisse, and Kandinsky (New The Iconoclastic Proscription and Its Theoretical Legacy,” in Jewish
York, 1991). Identity and Modern Art History, ed. C. M. Soussloff (Berkeley, 1999),
81. E. Roditi, Dialogues on Art (Santa Barbara, 1980), 144. 68–69; Olin, The Nation Without Art, esp. 192–93.
60 RES 67/68 2016/2017

doing so, he invoked, with a certain inevitability, the underpinnings of this interest in abstraction and
oeuvre of Picasso and its “one-eyed, three-eyed, or aniconism in European scholarship on Judaism have
otherwise distorted human faces.”86 The move was been the subject of much excellent analysis.88 The way
hardly original: in 1917, the great Jewish historian and in which the idea of abstraction was similarly transformed
philosopher Gershom Scholem noted in his diary that from a lack to plenitude in much twentieth-century
“Jewish art is cubism, which has managed to abandon writing on Islamic art has, however, attracted far less
flesh.” He explains that “the Spaniard Picasso’s Woman attention. There is, moreover, a significant difference in
with the Violin seems Jewish. The prohibition against the function of abstraction in the modern presentation
‘likeness’ in Judaism leads to the division into symbols. of Jewish versus Islamic art. However implausible or
Jewish art depends not on likenesses but on rigid, thick teleological the purported connections or continuities
lines. Jewish art resists the creation of new forms and between the art of the Jews in late antiquity and that of
seeks mathematical-metaphysical knowledge. The Jewish artists of Jewish origin practicing abstraction in the
image of a man must be cubist.”87 twentieth century, the scenario assumed the perpetuation
The move from the valorization of Hellenic of a living, flourishing tradition. By contrast, although
naturalism and sensualism to Hebraic abstraction and the common ground of abstraction has underwritten a
intellectualism enabled a challenge to be mounted to series of recent exhibitions that juxtapose examples of
the traditional view that the Bilderverbot had stymied modern Euro-American and Islamic art, the comparison is
artistic creativity, even as it left the very idea of a almost exclusively with premodern Islamic art. It therefore
Bilderverbot intact. Similarly, it was precisely the precludes the assertions and implications of continuity
perceived abstract qualities of Islamic art, fostered by that have consistently characterized the instrumental
a racially inflected religious prohibition, that rendered use of abstraction in the presentation of Jewish art. The
it a suitable and consistent companion to works of second part of this article will explore the implications of
twentieth-century Euro-American artists. Ventriloquized this temporal disjunction as manifest in Euro-American
by their modern supporters, the long-dead Jews and museological practice. Returning to the pioneering Arab
Muslims of the Near East thus found that, like Molière’s artists and theorists discussed above, it will then consider
bourgeois gentilhomme who discovers that he has alternative discourses on abstraction developed by those
always spoken prose without knowing it, the abstract in the Arab lands seeking to negotiate the relationship
and aniconic visual languages for which they had so between historical and modern artistic practice. As we
often been excoriated were in fact music to the ears shall see, both endeavors were, in different ways,
of the twentieth-century avant-garde. The racialist shadowed by the specter of the Bilderverbot.

86. S. S. Schwarzschild, “The Legal Foundation of Jewish

Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 9, no. 1 (1975): 33, 37.
87. G. Scholem, Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom
Scholem, 1913–1919, ed. and trans. A. D. Skinner (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 179–80. I am
grateful to William Diebold for drawing my attention to this reference. 88. See, e.g., Bland, The Artless Jew; Olin, The Nation Without Art.