African Art and Architecture

D

3

Other Traditions

Rich traditions of woodcarving among the Zulu, Shona, Sotho, and others have produced small figures as well as headrests, staffs, pipes, doors, and ceremonial vessels. Women made finely decorated pots, particularly pots for storing beer.

Among several groups in Botswana and South Africa, women in the 20th century have used mural painting to express ideas about control over domestic space. Mural painting developed among the Ndebele in the 1930s and 1940s. It became a way of expressing ethnic identity on the isolated farmsteads where they lived after European colonists drove them out of their native homes.

VI

Influence of African Art on Western Art

In the 20th century, African art has greatly influenced much Western art and the concepts of beauty that underlie it. For centuries, however, exposure to African art had little effect on European art. The concepts behind African art—its function in ritual and its emphasis on abstract patterning rather than representation—made it so foreign to European sensibilities that many Europeans did not consider it art at all. In the 20th century, a search for new artistic forms led European artists to look anew at the abstract forms of African art.

A

Early Influence

Prior to the 20th century, anthropologists and others who were interested in African cultures viewed the objects these cultures produced as interesting cultural artifacts, but they did not consider them as art. The earliest documented entry of a piece of African art into a European collection occurred around 1470, with a work that a Portuguese collector acquired from the kingdom of Kongo. By the late 19th century, many more Europeans were collecting objects from sub-Saharan Africa. They housed them in ethnographic museums, alongside examples of flora and fauna, as artifacts of exotic cultures.

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B

Influence on Modern Art

Wider recognition of the artistic value of African artifacts began in the early 20th century. Western artists at that time sought to break free from established artistic conventions, and in doing so they rediscovered African sculpture. Their enthusiasm for African art was based on form; Western artists had only vague and romanticized ideas about the cultures that had produced the art.

Modern European art movements such as cubism, expressionism, and fauvism exploded with a new freedom of form that drew strongly on African art. The abstract character of African art refreshed and inspired pioneers of modern European art such as painters Pablo Picasso, André Derain, and Amedeo Modigliani and sculptors Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti, and Henry Moore.

Spanish artist Pablo Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York City) is probably the best-known Western painting inspired by African art. It features a group of female figures whose angular forms and large facial features resemble African masks. Although Picasso denied any African influence on this painting, his friend and colleague André Derain wrote that he introduced Picasso to African art in 1905, and Picasso himself later spoke of the strong impression African art had made on him.

African art also inspired many 20th-century American artists. In 1902 American artist Meta Warrick Fuller created Talking Skull, a sculpture based on reliquary figures from the Kota of Gabon. More recently, American sculptor Martin Puryear borrowed the forms and traditional techniques of African basketry and carpentry, adapting them to the more formal and abstract aims of modern Western art. In the 1990s American artist Renée Stout based her sculptures on figures created by the Kongo people of central Africa.

C

Studying African Art

The study of the history of African art presents a number of challenges. Most surviving objects are of relatively recent origin because so much African art is made of perishable materials, such as wood or grasses. It also is subjected to vigorous use, in contrast to most Western art, which is displayed in houses or museums. Moreover, researchers have no scientific tests that can accurately date objects of relatively recent origin. In many cases, they must rely on records provided by those who collected the art.

Because early ethnographers (scientists who study human cultures) collected works of African art as cultural artifacts rather than as art, they generally failed to record the names of individual artists, precise dates for the objects, or information on why or how the objects were used. Nor did they concern themselves with the aesthetic or cultural values that Africans associated with these objects. As a result, the topics that routinely concern historians of Western art—the style and development of specific artists, the chronology of artistic trends, or the more subtle aspects of those trends—are considerably more difficult to research in studying African art.

It was not until the end of the 19th century that Western perceptions about African art began to change. A British expedition in 1897, which destroyed and looted the city of Benin, brought back a number of artifacts, and in the early 20th century other expeditions were launched to acquire objects from central Africa. These objects are now on display in museums in the West, although an effort to have them returned to Africa was underway at the turn of the 21st century. As collections of African art have grown, Westerners have gradually come to a fuller understanding of African art, its cultural functions, and its aesthetic values.

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