Picasso and the French Tradition

work by Uhde

Also known as: “Picasso et la tradition française”

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July 17, 2026

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Wilhelm Uhde was a German art collector, dealer, and writer who was significantly influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche. After studying law and art history, Uhde moved to Paris in 1904, where he opened an art gallery exhibiting Fauvist and Cubist works by artists like Pablo Picasso.1

In 1926, Uhde published Picasso et la tradition française (Picasso and the French Tradition). In this work, he analyzed Picasso's Cubist period, describing it in terms of "Gothic" attributes that contrasted with the predominantly "Latinate" tradition of French painting. Uhde's analysis, though based on speculative ideas about Picasso's ancestry, was influential in understanding a transcendental strain of modernist art that emerged after World War I.1

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Wilhelm Uhde
…et la tradition franƈaise (1926; Picasso and the French Tradition), in which he described the works of Picasso’s Cubist period in terms of their “Gothic” attributes of “piling up magnificent arrangements of vertical lines,” thereby casting them as a “complementary antithesis” to the predominantly “Latinate” tradition of French painting, which…
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…et la tradition franƈaise (1926; Picasso and the French Tradition), in which he described the works of Picasso’s Cubist period in terms of their “Gothic” attributes of “piling up magnificent arrangements of vertical lines,” thereby casting them as a “complementary antithesis” to the predominantly “Latinate” tradition of French painting, which…
Read More