Was Picasso inspired by the animal paintings in Altamira caves when designing the bull or horse in Guernica? This is one of the hypotheses proposed by a recent Paris exhibition about the Malaga-born artist. The Human Museum is hosting a temporary show that threads Prehistoric art with cubist and surrealist genius, focusing on the interwar years between 1918 and 1939. The exhibition runs as part of the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death and can be visited until June 12.
It matters that the Museo del Hombre organized the event. The institution on the Trocade9 promenade in Paris, once a venue for some of Picasso’s first shows in the French capital, now houses paleoanthropology. There the artist encountered African sculptures and masks in 1907, an encounter that fascinated him. Many exhibitions have explored the ties between Picasso and primitive African art, inviting comparisons with cave paintings and ancient sculptures. Those comparisons helped the avant-garde master break away from traditional forms.
The exhibition curator, Ce9cile Godefroy, notes that Picasso’s interest in prehistoric art sprang from curiosity and a sharpened eye. There is a clear link between the artist’s life and the discoveries in Prehistoric art spanning the late 19th century to the mid-20th century. In 1879, the Altamira caves near Santander had already opened a door to this world. Pech Merle is cited from 1922, and Lascaux, discovered in 1940, in the south of France, all contributing to a broader dialogue between past and present.
Picasso never visited Altamira or Lascaux himself, yet he absorbed their influence through avant-garde journals that highlighted these finds starting in the 1920s. He also collected replicas of artifacts from the caves. For instance, he acquired a copy of the Venus of Lespugue, a statuette carved from mammoth ivory about 26,000 years old. In 1926, four years after the statue’s discovery, Picasso spoke of fascination with the unknown and the magic of ancient forms to the French writer, painting a picture of a mind drawn to the earliest expressions of humanity.
The powerful and enigmatic Venus of Lespugue inspired several of Picasso’s works. This influence resonates in canvases such as The Woman Throwing Stones and in works from 1929 onward, where a sense of three-dimensionality mirrors how prehistoric artists adapted to the irregular surfaces of caves. The interwar period shows Picasso shifting from stricter Cubism toward a freer language of form, a movement some have described as a magical evolution within the Cubist idiom, aligning him with the later approaches of Juan Gris and Georges Braque.
Primitive art did more than shape female figures for Picasso; it served as a broad wellspring of ideas. The show highlights roughly forty works that reveal a persistent, multifaceted dialogue with antiquity. In abstract pieces like Circles and V-Marks, black lines resemble the mark-making found in ancient stone art. Picasso also explored early human marks, such as handprints common in prehistoric caves, which appear in works like Profiles of Women in a Cropped Hand.
The search for authenticity pushed Picasso to mirror the gaze of early artists. He remained fascinated by animals, especially bulls, and some studies suggest he even collected bones. A poignant photograph from the French Riviera shows Dora Maar with a cattle skull on a beach, a striking symbol of the artist’s ongoing dialogue with nature. He also used natural objects that are simple yet striking, like beach pebbles, to build meaning in his imagery.
One notable achievement of the exhibition is its demonstration of Picasso’s multidisciplinary character. At the same time, it raises questions about the breadth of his work. The collection does not showcase a large number of singular masterworks, yet it presents a cohesive view of how antiquity, material culture, and modern creativity intertwined in Picasso’s practice. There is a notable example where a fire furnace element was repositioned to become a sculptural form reminiscent of a Paleolithic Venus, illustrating how Picasso transformed everyday objects into timeless artifacts and extended prehistory into modern art.