Picasso's brown period: was he the first to make art from excrement?

Picasso apparently used his daughter’s faeces in paintings in 1938, predating the likes of Andres Serrano by 50 years. It’s proof there’s no end to his defiant genius

Picasso did everything first. In 1907, he painted the first completely modern work of art, in any field – Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Its equivalents in music and literature, The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky and Ulysses by James Joyce, would not appear until 1913 and 1922 respectively. By then, Picasso and Georges Braque had destroyed 500 years of artistic tradition with the cubist revolution. Then in 1912 Picasso (building on an insight of Braque’s) started using found materials including newspaper and chair caning, a full year before Marcel Duchamp supposedly “invented” the readymade.

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