An exhibition that opened in Paris in April teases a compelling question: what is the connection between the painters Henry Taylor (b. 1958) and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)? In 2007, the former painted From Congo to the Capital, and Black Again in Paris – exactly 100 years after Picasso completed Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in the same city in 1907. Working in gestural acrylic and impasto on a wooden shipping crate, Taylor depicted five Black women from destabilised perspectives, echoing Cubism’s disruption of natural representation. The composition feels compressed, almost stage-like, the figures pressed forward into the viewer’s space. At the centre stands a woman with a sharp bob: the figure represents the dancer and actor Josephine Baker, who moved to Paris from the United States in the early 20th century, alongside many African-American artists and writers, including James Baldwin, who once said that exile had saved his life. For authors such as Richard Wright and Chester Himes, Paris became a temporary reprieve from the violence of anti-Black racism in America – a capital city both liberating and watchful, hospitable yet never entirely neutral.
A disjointed white arm thrusts into Taylor’s composition – an abrupt, unsettling gesture hinting at the persistence of racialised power within Western visual culture. Its fragmentation is striking: the limb appears without a body, a partial presence exerting force. The intrusion interrupts the rhythm of the figures, introducing additional tension into an already compressed scene. With the mention of Congo in the title, Taylor gestures toward colonial histories, binding together Africa, Europe and America in a 21st-century frame.
As the viewer looks closely at From Congo to the Capital..., Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon comes clearly into view. Here too, five women are compressed into a shallow, almost claustrophobic space. Bodies distort: noses sharpen into wedges, limbs twist and waists form angular shapes. The origins of the painting are still debated, but Picasso’s encounters with African sculpture in Paris – including through a Teke mask owned by Matisse or during visits to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro – are often cited as formative. His faces do indeed take on mask-like qualities, and their abstraction contributed to early controversies about the work. Whereas Picasso rendered his figures as fractured forms, Taylor’s forms have psychological and physical weight. Flesh remains flesh; his subjects do not dissolve into geometry. His intervention in the Western canon of painting raises questions about what it means to place Black women at the centre of a composition that was once hailed as Modernism’s turning point.
Following recent exhibitions of American artists such as Philip Guston, Faith Ringgold and Jackson Pollock, the show at the Musée National Picasso-Paris – the first retrospective of Taylor in France – brings his portraits into the institution devoted to Picasso’s life and practice.
Over four decades, Taylor has excavated the nuances of the human condition through both two- and three-dimensional works, while resisting the label of ‘portraitist’. This encounter is about lineage and influence as well as proximity. It is about what happens when a contemporary artist of lived Black experience occupies the rooms of modern painting’s most mythologised figure.
‘Henry Taylor’ runs from 8 April-6 September 2026 at Musée National Picasso-Paris, 5 Rue de Thorigny, 75003 Paris. For details, visit https://www.museepicassoparis.fr
A version of this article appears in the May 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
