Pablo Picasso, ‘Les Demoiselles d'Avignon’, 1907
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas, 244 x 234 cm; image courtesy of Museum of Modern Art, New York under fair use.
With its fusion of cubist distortion, the western nude tradition and African masks, Pablo Picasso’s oil painting exemplifies modernist fascination with what it considered ‘the primitive’. The painting can be placed alongside Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring, debuted in 1913, and T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, published in 1922, not to mention a host of ancillary texts by figures including Jane Harrison and Lucien Lévy-Brühl. This fascination with the power of the primitive informed anthropological attention to indigenous religions, which were thought to reflect – according to the modernist scholar Pericles Lewis – ‘the essence of religion’ as contrasted with ‘the false refinements’ of Christian societies (Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010], p. 25).
Yet the fascination with essences and origins was also a feature of more traditional or established European and American approaches to religion. Such approaches were influenced by the eighteenth-century German theologian and hermeneutician Friedrich Schleiermacher, who ‘stressed the importance of something called Leben, or “life,” against the mortifying implications of excessive ratiocination, impersonal legalism, and mechanical causality’ (Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005], p. 95). Inspired by romantic poetry, Schleiermacher emphasised the insights afforded by intense emotion, famously defining Christian faith as neither intellectual assent to dogma nor adherence to ethical principles, but rather ‘the feeling of absolute dependence’ on God (Cited in Jay, p. 98).
William James, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, encountered Schleiermacher’s influence via the theologian’s impact on, for example, liberal Protestant biblical scholarship through the nineteenth century. The influence of Schleiermacher led Adolf von Harnack and Auguste Sabatier, both figures cited in The Varieties of Religious Experience, to attend to the Bible’s account of Christ’s relationship with God the Father, his consciousness of the Kingdom of God and to construe the subsequent development of Christian tradition as a corruption of the founding familial relationship.
Von Harnack, Sabatier and James were all fascinated with religious origins. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James opined that most religious traditions owe their inception to a ‘pattern-setter’ who exhibited special psychological capacities and an ability to awaken comparable impulses among acolytes (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature [London: Longmans Green, 1902], p. 6). Following the founder’s death, the initial intensity of a movement faded as the cult became institutionalised, opening the door for subsequent movements of reform (James, p. 433). The ‘return to the essence of religion’ – a return that helped inspire Picasso’s painting – had these longer and perhaps somewhat surprising antecedents (Lewis, p. 25). As Modernism and Religion demonstrates through its contextualisation of mysticism, modernist religion with its pursuit of essences and intensities owes as much to romantic theologians and German biblical scholarship as to the well-documented fascination with primitivism.
