Not Wanted II shows the different ways in which Western culture has used and represented non-Western objects and people.
The entire drawing is composed of western pictures, which represent people and objects of other cultures. The oldest pictures are colonial time postcards printed in the beginning of the 20th century, the newest ones are from modern magazines. Pictures are also taken from museum catalogues and news imagery. It is, therefore, a kind of drawn collage combining these various sources of Western exoticism and fetishisation.
Picasso’s production represents in the drawing a Western hegemony of art that named abstract art and Cubist expression as its own invention. Similar representations, however, can be found in the art of other cultures long before the emergence of Western modernism. These include Persian and Mogul miniatures, orthodoxy icons, Asian tantric paintings, indigenous and paleoart.