African Art History VI

Influence on modern art and architecture of
African art history

At the start of the 20th C, many artists such as Derain, Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani became enthralled by African art and began to visit the Trocadero Museum in Paris to gaze upon the unique forms, absorbing all that was presented before them.

These artists saw in this art a formal perfection countered by abstraction, asymmetry by balance, primitivism with the sophistication of design. They responded to this raw expressive power with all their faculties, not only with sight but with imagination and emotion and experienced a mystical and spiritual encounter.

This absorption exploded in a fascination in abstraction, organization and reorganization of forms, and the exploration of emotional and psychological areas that had not been investigated before. It helped them move beyond the naturalism that had defined Western art up to this point.

Now, the status of visual art was changed forever and Cubism was born, influenced by the African sculptor’s simplified use of planes and forms and the rearrangement of the human form that was based, in fact, on disproportion.

Picasso and the other group of avant-garde artists from the ‘School of Paris’ began themselves to collect tribal sculptures and artefacts that were beginning to appear in great numbers in Paris as a result of French colonization in Africa. Picasso incorporated the ceremonial masks of the Dogon tribe into his groundbreaking work like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, (1907-1909) and the influence of his Gabon masks he acquired is also seen in his white sculpture, Head of a Woman (1929-1930).

Modigliani was singular in his adaptation of the stylistic influences of the work of the Baule tribe, from the Ivory Coast. Brancusi adopted not so much the form but the use of wood as a sculpting medium just as on the other side of the world in America, sculptors such as William Zorach and Chaim Cross rejected Rodin’s cast-bronze stronghold in favor of direct carving in wood.

Matisse was influenced not only by the sculptural forms of African art but also by the handcrafted textiles he, as a member of a family of generational weavers, was drawn to Kuba cloths from the Congo, in particular, with their allover patterning became inspirational for his paper cutouts with their perspectival shifts. He noted that his impulsive use of bold color stirred the emotions and related to the ritualistic origins of African Art.

In architecture, two new principles had a radical influence on design. One was the visual effect of decorative patterning on surfaces, most notably exterior walls and the other was a new attitude to spatial environments, spaces that do not just conform to human size, to function and form but also to the psychology of human nature.

Architects such as Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer expressed themselves giving brutal form to structures and monumentalized buildings. They introduced long linear vertical lines and embellished their structures with textured murals and large bas-reliefs based on the nonlinear scaling of geometric shapes that is particular to African decoration.

African art history has had an untold influence on the global art world.