Picasso the Muslim: Or, How theBilderverbotbecame modern (Part 1)

Abstract

Although the standard chronologies of modernism make its inception coincident with the perceived demise of Islamic art in the late nineteenth century, the pseudomorphic method was anticipated by several pioneering scholars of premodern Islamic art. Their writings constitute an unacknowledged chapter in the variegated historiography of the Bilderverbot, the image prohibition often assumed to be an inherent characteristic of Judaism and Islam. Paradoxically, perhaps, the clichéd idea of a Bilderverbot as a determining factor in Islamic art was mobilized by 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 Farès, who in a lecture on the spirit of Islamic ornament (delivered in Cairo and published in Arabic and French in 1952), juxtaposed a figurative scene on an early thirteenth-century Iranian jug with Picasso’s Femme-Fleur of 1947 (fig. 4) in order to illustrate “the Islamic inspiration, fortuitous or actual” in contemporary European art, especially “the affinity of picassisme with Arab-Muslim conceptual art.”10Figure 4. Bishr Farès, Essai sur l’esprit de la decoration Islamique (Cairo, 1952), plate 5.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.