Picasso the Andalusian was unknowingly a Muslim
In 1932, De Lorey, who was also interested in the medieval illuminated manuscripts from the Baghdad School, wrote an intriguing essay on Picasso and the Muslim East. In it, taking Cézanne into account, he stated that "it is with the East, and particularly the Muslim East, that in certain respects Cubist art and Picasso's world offer the subtlest of correspondences." To summarize de Lorey's thought, the distortions, geometrizations, and anti-naturalism of Cubism revealed an atavism, and Picasso was unknowingly a Muslim.
In the wake of Eustache de Lorey, the Egyptian scholar Bishr Farès (1906-1963), in his Essai sur l'esprit de la décoration islamique [Essay on the spirit of Islamic decoration] published in Cairo in 1952, compared a thirteenth-century Persian ceramic piece with a 1947 painting by Picasso, Metamorphosis, depicting Françoise Gilot as a woman flower. Afif Bahnassi (1928-2017) followed along the same lines in the thesis he defended at the Sorbonne in 1964, "L’Influence arabe sur la peinture moderne occidentale" [The Arab influence on modern Western painting].
In January 1973, the Palestinian artist and intellectual Kamel Boullata (1942-2019) published a landmark essay in the journal The Muslim World, titled "Classical Arab Art and Modern European Paintings: A Study in Affinities." He discussed Henri Matisse and Paul Klee, and especially Pablo Picasso, comparing the head of the bull in Guernica with an eighteenth-century Arab zodiac figure by al-Qazwini, and a 1941 portrait of Dora Maar as a bird with a figure by the Iraqi miniaturist Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti from an illustration of the Maqamat al-Hariri manuscript. Boullata supported the view that the arts of Islam and of Picasso are metaphysical; quoting Apollinaire, who claimed that geometry is to visual arts what grammar is to writing, and in agreement with Gertrude Stein, he insisted on the calligraphic—and thus, subliminally Arab—dimension of Picasso's genius.
Collection particulière
Musée Reina Sofia, Madrid
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Summary