You could equally well call it a collage.Īnd it was Picasso who first put bits of the real world into modern art in this way. Sampling other artists, reworking old songs, mixing it all up – it’s easy to see how the music of Kanye West fits this bill. This French word was used by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to mean a kind of creation and thought that makes use of whatever comes to hand. It praises West as a genius of “bricolage”. Let’s go back to that New York Times review of The Life of Pablo. And he himself invented what is perhaps the core of hip-hop as a style. He worked on ballets with composers such as Erik Satie and Igor Stravinsky, the creators of modern music. Would this painter who died in 1973 have found hip-hop’s radical montage of modern life disturbing? Not at all. The real connection between Picasso and hip-hop is artistic. If anyone was going to flaunt his lovers’ buttocks in art it was him – she’d have to stop the selfies. On the other hand Picasso, who was after all, born in the Victorian age, might not been happy about Kim’s control of her own image. This artist who fixated on women in his life and his work would have envied Kanye West’s marriage to a Kardashian. In Picasso Baby, Jay Z starts by wanting a Picasso on his wall but then confesses to less noble desires: “I wanna Rothko, no I wanna brothel, no, I want a wife that fuck me like a prostitute.” Hip-hop has no qualms about expressing sexuality.
So what have rappers got in common with Picasso – and would he have enjoyed their interest? There’s one obvious connection. Jay Z’s Picasso Baby paid a far more explicit homage to the great Spanish artist. But if he is really talking about that Pablo, West is not even the first rapper to do so.
The precise connection, if any, between The Life of Pablo and the life of Picasso may always be a mystery given the album is, according to the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis, “messy and incoherent … confused and scattered” or in the words of the New York Times, a work of “ aesthetic and intellectual bricolage”. The Picasso family certainly think so: the painter’s great grandson Florian, who is in the music biz himself, has said they are all Kanye fans and are delighted by this tribute from one visionary to another. But is his new album title an allusion to Pablo Picasso? It’s a tempting theory.