the influence of african art on contemporary european art

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The Royal African Society The Influence of African Art on Contemporary European Art Author(s): Dorothy Brooks Source: African Affairs, Vol. 55, No. 218 (Jan., 1956), pp. 51-59 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal African Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/718973 . Accessed: 18/06/2014 11:56 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Oxford University Press and The Royal African Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African Affairs. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.2.32.21 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 11:56:50 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: The Influence of African Art on Contemporary European Art

The Royal African Society

The Influence of African Art on Contemporary European ArtAuthor(s): Dorothy BrooksSource: African Affairs, Vol. 55, No. 218 (Jan., 1956), pp. 51-59Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal African SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/718973 .

Accessed: 18/06/2014 11:56

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Oxford University Press and The Royal African Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve andextend access to African Affairs.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.21 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 11:56:50 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: The Influence of African Art on Contemporary European Art

51

The nfluence of African Art on Contemporary European Art

By DOROTHY BROOKS

nOLERIDGE said in one of his letters that he did not record a new t experience, but simply recorded or externalised something which he had always known within himself.

Does this process the inter-action of an external stimulus on an inner state which produces a new act of creation help to explain the extra- ordinarily deep impact which African art forms made on the European mind at the beginning of the twentieth century ? Certainly the " discoveIy" of these dynamic sculptures was the catalyst which was to have a profound effect on the development of contemporary art an effect which has largely re-orientated the course of aesthetics. I use parenthesis for the word " dis- covery", since the Western world had long been familiar with negro arte- facts, but it was only when artists and poets saw them with the eye of innocence, as distinct from an everyday, looking eye, that their full signifi- cance became apparent. Sir Kenneth Clark points out this distinction in " Moments of Vision ", how suddenly a visual image can project itself with shattering impact on our mind, although it may have been, previous to that moment, a familiar experience. Not only were the visual, plastic arts to be fertilised by African culture, but music, dance and philosophy.

In advanced circles in Paris at the turn of the century, there was a general re-evaluation, a quest and attitude of experiment and enquiry which stemmed from the malaise of a society which felt its own increasing artificiality and sterility. In painting, what Herbert Read defines as " the rigor mortis of academicism" had been shaken by the rise of Impressionism, at its height in 1874, so that a new wind was already blowing when the Cubists fulminated their ideas in the early 1900's, and revolutionised the traditional conception of a work of art.

The first growth of a new artistic style is imperceptible, and the first moment of a shifted emphasis not easy to define, but the trend which has come to full flower in the diversity and complexity of modern art, with its co-existence of the Image and the Symbol was put in motion by Cezanne (1839-1894). The revelations which Cezanne made in the recognition of the architectonic structure of a painting are very relevant in the light of later considerations as to the great receptivity afforded to the plastic forrns of African sculpture, with their emphasised planes, elimination of unnecessary detail and treatment of volume, which constituted what the Cubists were to call " plastic logic ". For it was probably the outward forms of the new esoteric medium which first evoked a response, and only later the deeper significance, which then had an even greater and far more fundamental effect. Seurat's definition of painting as " the art of hollowing a surface" must have leapt to life on the coutemplation of Gabon sculpture, with its

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Page 3: The Influence of African Art on Contemporary European Art

52 AFRICAN AFFAIRS

concave treatment of the head. Zadkine later developed this idea of hollowed surfaces in his sculpture.

There will always be some individuals in any age or society who are able to transcend barriers of a differentiated society and its rituals, and though uninitiated are able to apprehend intuitively the underlying truths. But on the whole, the first interpretations of African art, other than those on a purely aesthetic level, owed more to vivid flights of the imagination and projections of what the European mind thought it should mean, than to an objective appraisal of its importance as a manifestation of a poetic and cosmic philosophy of life. One of the repercussions was an increased interest in the writings of the mystics, the mysteries of alchemy and magic, Cabbala and occultism) folk-lore, the art of children, the insane, etc.

Traditional African art contains many of the elements which were later to come to maturity in the various developments of contemporary European art Symbolism, Pure Abstraction, Constructivism, the Neo-Cubism of Villon's " architecture in space " linked with data of prismatic colour, Expressionism and Surrealism (Magic and Symbol). Yet it was, paradoxi- cally enough, in the shaping of Cubism, a direct development in the classical tradition, that it was chiefly instrumental.

Cezanne believed in the strict purity of perceptual experience which Van Gogh later upheld. That is, he was the imagist artist, concerned with " realising his sensations '), and seeking perpetually to convey the image representationally.

Opposed to this scientific attitude came Gaugin, who as a precursor to the Symbolist movement raised doubts as to the sanctity of the representational image, and challenged for the first time the supremacy of the Greek ideal of mensuration and proportion. He wrote to Daniel de Monfreid in 1897- " The great error is the Greek, however beautiful it may be . . . Keep the Persians7 the Cambodians and a bit of the Egyptians always in mind". To the Western world, whose acceptance of the Greek ideal had persisted for 1,500 years, and furthermore had received the authoritative stamp of the Renaissance placed upon it, and the conditioning of the photographic eye of the camera, this was heretical.

Oriental art had not been limited in this way. Oriental man asks of a work of art that it should " represent by its form the eternal order and harmony of the universe" (Herbert Read). Similarly, the American Indian, the Mexican, Etruscan, archaic Greek, Iberian, Oceanic, Celtic, Eskimo and Sibero-Scythian cultures produced non-naturalistic art, and these concep- tions of reality merit an evaluation as being of equal validity or greater than the Greek conception.

The Kabuki theatre of Japan and the Classical theatre of China extend their range of experience by the use of symbolism in colour, dance, mime, acting and singing. The result is an extension of human experience into the elemen- tal which we cannot achieve in the European theatre. In the Kabuki theatre, the symbols of Flower, Snow and Moon signify the ages of man, his relation- ship to the seasons, his loves and death.

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Page 4: The Influence of African Art on Contemporary European Art

53 INFLUENCE OF AFRICAN ART

Similarly, one of the Dogon dances from the French Sudan is enacted with a symbolism within a symbolism. In a most complex ballet, it tells of how the first drum was invented by a blacksmith, who was at the same time a water-spirit. The dancer imitates the bellows) themselves a symbol of the sun, and sends rhythmically to the dancers air and steam to represent life and the word of the ancestors, till they are infused with these qualities) and themselves represent the sun, avatar of the spirit of water, of which they reproduce the movements. The chief mask imitates the movements of the course of the sun through the heavens, its rising and setting, and simul- taneously is the image of the spiral driving power of copper wound, and unwound, round the sun. (Marcel Griaule Arts de 1' Afriqge Noir).

So Gauguin was moving imperceptibly nearer the African mystique when he said of the Impressionists -" They heed only the eye and neglect the mysterious centres of thought". For him it was the search for the unity behind appearances- les correspondances which mattered. For him the work of art as a symbol must be detached from its context and transcend the particular to the universal, in the same way that Negro sculpture does not represent a man, but man, idealised as a god, or translated to ancestorship; not a woman, but woman, motherhood and fertility. The quintessence of the human form is made by compression, emphasis and distortion to embrace a whole set of values which it could not embrace by non-symbolic means. The interpretation of form is limited by photographic representation to visual perception, to the exclusion of conceptgal values.

This mystic endowment of apparently inanimate matter, in which, for example, in African philosophy, copper is one of the avatars of the spirit of mrater, is common to Classical Chinese philosophy, where the Five Forces, \Vood, Fire, Soil, Metal and Water possess spiritual principles. This symbolic animism finds a parallel in the French mind of Gerard de Nerval (1808 1855):-

Picasso Study, 1907 Kalabari Ijo Mask

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54 AFRICAN AFFAIRS

" Un mystere d'amoqzr dans le mteal repose;

Tout est sensible . . . Sogvent dans l'etre obsc?r habite un Disq cache';

Et comme gn oeil naissant co?zvert par les pasftieres;

Un pur esprit s'accroit sous l'etcorce des pierres." (1)

Over fifty years after this poem was written, Picasso and Braque were to

be stimulated beyond measure by the audacious use of materials in Negro

art, and incorporate metal, fibre, string, sand, stone, clay and applique

cardboard, etc., into their constructions. A definition of synthettisme by Emile Bernard in 1888 shows how the

European artist was feeling his way by a cerebral analysis to the point which

the African had reached, intuitively and emotionally. " P?zisqge l'idee est

la forme des choses resqxeillies par l'imagination qgi l'avait recxeillie, qxi en

conservait l'idee; ainsi l'idee de la chose apportait la forme convenable au

sq4jet dqs tablea? ou plqetot a so> idetal (somme des idfetes) la simplificatton de

l'essential des chosespercqxes et par consequent ex rejette le dettail. La metmoire

ne retient pas tout, mais ce qqxi frappe l'esprit. Donc formes et couleurs deve-

naient simples dans une egale unite'. En peignant de metmoire j'avais l'avantage

d'abolir l'inutile complications des formes et des tons.. II restait gq schenxa

dg spectacle regarde'. Tovtes les lignes revenaient a leur architectgre geomArique,

togs les toxs agx cogleqzrs types de la palette prismatique. Pquisqu'il s'agissait

de simplifier, il fallait retrouver lvorigine de tout; dans le soleil, les sept

coule?rs dont se compose la 1?6miere blanche (chaqqxe coglegr pqxre de la palette

y tepondant), dans la geometrte, les formes typiq?es de toutes les formes objec-

tives." (2). The atmosphere of the intellectual world when Picasso first axTived in

Paris in 1900, was that of the years of the ' great period ', when in Mont-

martre was gathered together a coruscation of painters, writers, poets and

(I) " A mystery of love reposes in metal;

Everything is aware.

*

Often in an obscure being lives a hidden God

And like a nascent eye hidden by the eyelids

A pure spirit dwells under the surface of stones." G. DE NERVAL.

(2) " Since the idea is the form of things gathered by the imagination, which had picked

up and retained the idea of the form; so the idea of the thing suggested the form

suitable to the subject of the picture or rather to its ideal (sum of ideas) the sim-

plification of the essentials of things perceived and as a consequence rejects tlle

detail. The memory does not retain everything but that which impresses the spirit.

Thus forms and colours became simple in an equal unity. In painting from memory,

I had the advantage of abolishing the useless complications of forms and tones.

There remained a schema of the thing seen. All lines reverted to their geometric

architecture, all the tones to colours of the prismatic palette type. Because it was

a question of simplifying, it was necessary to fznd the origtn of everything, in tlwe

sun, the seven colours which comprise white light (each pure colour of the palette

responding to it) in geometry, the typical forms of all objective forms.'' EMILE BERNARD.

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Page 6: The Influence of African Art on Contemporary European Art

S5 INFLEUNCE OF AFRICAN ART

philosophers, whose feverish pursuit of new ideas and experiments stands out as a luminous landmark. It was a world which engendered the Fauve ebullition of colour, led by Matisse, and which was to be transported by colour and movement of the Ballets Russes. Leger, Braque, Juan Gris, Matisse, Rousseau, Modigliani, Utrillo, Lipchitz, Dufy, with Degas and Renoir, the great figures of the older generation as occasional visitors, were the painters; Alfred Jarry, Cocteau, Gertrude Stein the writers who met to discuss the philosophies of Hegel and Heidegger and read the poetry of Baudelaire) Rimbaud and Mallarme, in the ' Bateaqx lavoir ' or Wash-house, the dilapidated studios where Picasso and his group worked.

Matisse is recorded as having bought negro statuettes from Sauvage, a dealer in the rue de Rennes, in 1906, and in 1907 appeared the paintings which are classified as belonging to Picasso's " Negro period ". ' La Dan- ceuse Negre', 1907, ' Femme Nue ', ' Trois Femmes', ' Ng d la Draterie ' all from the same year, ' Tete', 1909, all bore many analogies with the surface forms of African sculpture. Picasso himself denies, however, having been influenced by Negro art, but says he drew inspiration from ancient Iberian art before he saw the African in museums. His paintirlgs prior to the " Negro period 2', filled with a Spanish mysticism and deep feeling for humanity, show that he was already feeling his way towards this new development of formal organisation, where elimination of colour, apart from blue, show his preoccupation with plastic problems, and his contact with negro sculpture confirmed the tendency and gave it impetus.

The first paintings were executed almost entirely in a severe monochrome, earth colours, so much excitement did he and Braque feel at this revelation of form in all its essentials, that colour became temporarily subordinate. ' La Danceuse Negre' (see page 62) is painted in black, pinkish ochre, yellow ochre and grey. The shape of the head and schematised features, the emphasised breasts, and even the striations common to many African carvings, show by the elimination of detail and the resulting simplification of line, in svhich the essential elements of the body are retained, great affinity with the geometricised treatment in Negro forms

When Cezanne specified " cones, cylinders and spheres " as being the basic elements in art, he little envisaged how these constructive principles were to be used in the hands of Picasso and Braque. The Cubist movement which they initiated carried this conception of volume further, and claimed total freedom from realism) or the representation of the image. They infused a sense of poetry into Cezanne's structural methods. In 1909 the influence of Negro sculpture was at its highest, so far as the effect on surface forms and volumes was concerned. One has only to study a painting by Picasso, e.g. ' Les Demoiselles d' Avignox ', or Braque of this period, to realise the influ- ence of this plastic invention and freedom, combined with a poetry which they found so seductive. Maillol said-" We do not know how to take such liberties as the Negroes do successfully".

European sculpture was to be liberated from its representational bonds in the same way that painting had been freed. Lipchitz, Arp, Zadkine, Brancusi,

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Page 7: The Influence of African Art on Contemporary European Art

56 AFRIGAN AFFAIRS

Calder, Gabo, Pevsner, Giacometti and Moore, are part of the great move towards a freer handling of three-dimensional form. It is in this plastic freedom, resulting from analytical and absolute Cubism that European artists found the deeper significance of the African impact, not in the initial excite- ment of the distortion and sometimes naive interpretation of the universe, and man's place in that universe. It was a recall to fundamentals.

In an exhibition organised by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1949, called " 40,000 Years of Modern Art ", it was obvious that the whole stream of art development was a series of rencontres of forms related across thousands of years by artists practising in different societies. The enigmas of analogous conceptions remain largely unexplained.

The fact that the Cubists invented new techniques to support the doubts already raised by the idealist philosophers as to the ultimate validity of sense-perceptions and dependence on the eye alone (retinal sensation) is interesting but unimportant in relation to the wider issues raised. Their representations became more schematic, their lines, curves, angles both dihedral and tetrahedral, were constructed according to an analysis which was both mental and visual. In rejecting perspective and chiaroscuro, and formulating a stereoscopic structure, they reversed the academic theory of " recession " into a picture, by starting from the canvas to move towards the spectator, thus evolving a new conception of reality and space. By this re-discovery, they postulated that art is more than a prosaic representation of reality, rather " an essentially poetic transposition of it and its tentative interpretation" (Maurice Raynal).

Thus contemporary art has moved towards the positivist role of philo- sophy, as Constable writing in 1836 had foreshadowed-" Painting is a science and should be pursued as an enquiry into the laws of nature. Why then may not landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments". Without destroying the validity of the statement, we can substitute " art " for " painting " and " landscape ", and broaden the conception to include sculpture and the plastic arts.

If we accept the metaphysical function of art, we see how great have been the repercussions of an animistic society upon a materialist one. Aime Cesaire the poet writes of ' I'xnson thysiqxe de l'homme et dx monde '. This cosmic re-orientation may at first have been more apprehended than rationalised, but today, Lapicque finds " the new configuration of the world ", and his work is an attempt to integrate man with the universal rhythm. " For him man creates himself in the universe and for the universe, during an incessant interaction with all that exists. He creates himself in living, and life, in himself, is action, movement, dynamic participation which implies reciprocity. In creating himself man creates the world, that of his time, the only one which he experiences in the moving reality of his presence, the end- ing of a finished past, with precise contours, and the promise of an undeter- mined future which remains to be created. Thus is justified the apparent dynamism of the works of our time, and when they are figurative (Klee, Paalen, Lapicque, Picasso) the state of gestation of their forms which are

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Page 8: The Influence of African Art on Contemporary European Art

57 INFLUENCE OF AFRICAN ART

yet to be and not yet achieved" (Madeleine Rousseau: Introdqxction a la

Connaissance de l'art moderne.) It is interesting to determine from this passage the common points of

Existentialism and African philosophyJ especially with reference to human

subjectivity, and in consideration of the widely differing societies from which

these philosophies emanated. Art is an activity within the context of society, which is the totality of

a way of life, and in the same way that " form is always the product of the

inquisitorial process of matter') and " the arborescent blossoming of agates

results . . . from the most ferocious constraint of a colloidal environment ",

(Dali) so art is shaped by society. Traditional African art was so closely integrated with the fabric and

religion of the society from which it stemmed, that to assess it on its absolute

value alone, which is considerable as we have seen, is to deny its deep sig-

nificance to the individual and to society. In the symbolism employed by

the African sculptor, we have a hierarchy of meaning, some of the most

esoteric being revealed only to the initiated. Especially in the sculpture dedicated to spiritual purposes, it is not the

visual impression of a man or an animal (the immediate perception of an

image, or perspective experience), which we are offered) but the image plus

its mental associations. These associations might be the ancestors, fertility

rites, rites de passage, in fact a comment on man's integration in the cosmic

worId, both in space and time. The whole schema of cosmic awareness is

developed and expressed with a refinement of symbolism which conveys the

quintessence of the thought or concept by symbol with a vision not possible

by other means, especially the naturalistic image. The synthesis is thus

made between art and life in its different manifestations, religion, social

custom, music and dance. In a piece of sculpture, by means of selection, emphasis and simplification,

a hieratic attitude is conveyed and we are transfixed before its magic quality.

A Dogon figure, attenuated, inclined backwards with arms upraised in a pose

of rapt adorationX conveys a contact with the elemental or divine more

comprehensively than the naturalistic folding of hands could do. The Benin

Spirit heads run less risk of descending into the realms of sentimentality, than

many a Pieta. To express, or attempt to express the inexpressible is the

function of a symbol, and we resort to this when naturalistic means have

fallen short, because it is not within their power to express the range of

human experience. The fertility masks and sculptures convey by emphasis

on the genitals and breasts, combined with a use of phallic symbols, the

need for procreation in man and the earth. We find this symbolism, the compression of a thought to project the sub-

stance in quintessence, in all forms of African expression in literature,

poetry, the concise proverb, the oblique allusion, which enters even into

medicine, where a doctor will convey his diagnosis in metaphorical terms.

" To evoke in shadow and by allusion the object which is never named "

(Mallarme).

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Page 9: The Influence of African Art on Contemporary European Art

8 AFRICAN AFFAIRS

Thus the African public was able to understand the symbol, and accept its validity, without the interpretation of a critic. They understood the idea in its eidetic purity, in a way which few of the public today confronted by modern art can, because it does not educe the relationship between the image and the symbol which is pre-requisite for the understanding of modern art. Therefore the isolation of the artist from the public which exists in Europe was not present in African society. The artist had no need of a go-between in the role of critic, because the convention was understood by all. There were some forms of naturalistic art in traditional African sculpture, of which the Ife heads are fine examplesJ but even these are highly idealised.

Similarly, the difficulties of patronage which the European artist experi- ences, with the making of concessions which it usually involves, were not present in African society, where the tribe was patron, and participated collectively and individually. There was in effect, a symbolic transfer of emotion, by what European psychologists would call ' good Gestalt '. " The theory of perception visual perception itself only makes sense, only becomes coherent by virtue of an organising faculty within the nervous system. We should not be able to cope with the multiplicity of impressions which the eye receives were we not at the same time capable of organising these impressions into a coherent pattern-(K. Koffka ' Problems in the Psycho- logy of Art').7'

The subsequent developments in contemporary European artX in the progression towards complete abstraction and the apparent complete dis- appearance of the object as such, we can only pass over very briefly. There is a unifying thread between the complete abstractions of Kadinsky and Mondrian and the work of the early symbolists. Whitehead (" Symbolism- Its Meaning and Effect ") would say that an apparently completely abstract art is due to the suppression of intermediate links from symbol to symbol.

In the field of metaphysical painting, Chagall, Chirico and Klee brought a new fantasy, what they called the discovery of super-reality through the magic of symbols. " We used to represent things visible on earth which we enjoyed seeing or would have liked to see. Now we reveal the reality of visible things and thereby express the belief that visible reality is merely an isolated phenomenon latently outnumbered by other realities ". And " Do we really know whether this life is more important than the life to come ? "- (Paul Klee).

With Dali and Miro and the growth of Surrealism, we find a combination of magic, myth, pure fantasy and poetic impulse derived from the dream state. The link with Africa is again strong, since the art of ancient Egypt is strongly coloured by participation in magic and the part it played in com- munication with the gods.

Through all time there has been this continual search for the expression of ultimate values, the ' aq-dela', and we cannot confine the contemporary movement to those who lived within its span. Blake, Goya, and Bosch are three among the many who by their spiritual affinity were precursors of the new aesthetic. They can echo with Henry Moore-" Beauty in the later

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59 INFLUENCE OF AFRICAN ART

Ibibio wooden mask

Greek or Renaissance sense, is not the aim in my sculpture. Between beauty of expression and power of expression there is a difference of function. The first aims at pleasing the senses, the second has a spiritual vitality which for me is more moving and goes deeper than the senses. Because a work does not aim at reproducing natural appearances it is not therefore an escape from life- but maybe a penetration into reality-not a sedative or a drug, not just the exercise of good taste, the provision of pleasatlt shapes and colours in a pleasing combination, not a decoration to life, bxt an expression of the sig- nificance of life, a stimulation to greater effort of living ".

Shelley, in " A Defence of Poetry", speaks to us from an age to which the tensions of a scientific era were unknown - an era in increasing need of a recall to fundamentals either through the stimulus of a society which has not lost its cosmic integration or by a re-discovery of its pristine vision. " Their 7 (the poets) " language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension until the wol ds which represent them become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have thus been disorganised, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse. These similitudes or relations are finely said by Lord Bacon to be ' the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world' (De Augment. Scient. Cap. I Lib. III), and he considers ' the faculty which l)erceives them as the storehovse of axioms common to all knowledge '."

Head by Picasso, 1909

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Page 11: The Influence of African Art on Contemporary European Art

(Collection of Roland Penrose)

LA OANCEUSE NEGRE by

Pablo Picasso

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Page 12: The Influence of African Art on Contemporary European Art

(Horniman Museum)

MOTHER WITH CHILDRF,N (late l9th Century Yoruha, Nigeria)

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