Cubist Artists and African Sculpture

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Cubist Artists were drawn to African sculpture because'Cubist artists were drawn to African sculpture because it offered a model of formal simplification based on folk traditions and it represented not only an influence but also a way of recapturing the representational power' that the arts of civilised, cultured Europe had lost. One of the cubist's aims was to undermine Western artistic traditions and embrace the primitiveness' of African sculpture opposed to the indulgent West.

Indeed, the aesthetics of traditional African sculpture became a powerful influence among cubist artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque as they blended the highly stylized treatment of the human figure in African sculpture with painting styles derived from other artistic styles, such as Post-Impressionism.

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African masks, in particular, deeply affected the style and subject matter of the cubist movement. Braque was quoted in Petrine Archer-Shaw's book saying that negro masksopened a new horizon for me. They made it possible for me to make contact with instinctive things, with inhibited feeling that went against the false tradition that I hated.

' The simplified shapes and lack of concern with realist depiction of the sculptures attracted them to including and incorporating this style in their own work. The sources of cubism are to be found within art itself, primarily in African sculpture and the paintings of Cezanne. At the same time Braque was studying the volumetric style that had grown out of Cezanne's analysis of perception.

By 1909 Picasso and Braque began to merge the conceptual freedom suggested by African art with Cezanne's geometry to describe a reality at the same time perceptual and conceptual.

Cubist art has many similarities to primitive art and Raynal describes how the cubists could be compared to primitive artists, "Instead of painting the objects as they saw them, they painted them as they thought them, and it is precisely this law that the Cubists have readopted, amplified, and codified under the well-known name of fourth dimension. Indeed, the fourth dimension provided a rationale for the two major cubist methods for portraying form and space: the artist's liberty to form or deform an object and his rejection of perspective. The connection of the fourth dimension with African art and the way it supported the Cubist's advocacy of a conceptual approach to reality has been expanded by LeRoy Breunig and Jean-Claude Hevalier in their analysis of the evolution of Apollinaire's, as they also connect the understanding of the fourth dimension with the deformation in African sculpture admired so deeply by the Cubists.

Although they do mention contemporary interest in the fourth dimension, Breunig and Chevalier tend to regard Apollinaire's use of "the fourth dimension as a metaphor for distortion. Linda Dalrymple Henderson notes that Apollinaire associated the deformation that results from the artist's vision of the fourth dimension with the conceptual truth of African sculpture and Gleize and Metzinger connected it with non-Euclidean geometry. Although African sculpture was an extremely important aspect in the creation of cubism. Cezanne also influenced the cubist artists, through his technique of combining multiple viewpoints as an initial protest of perspective. Furthermore, cubist painters wished to reject the three-dimensional perspective of Renaissance perspective by including an existence of a fourth dimension.

The cubist artists had been searching for a new artistic language to break the mould of conventional representation, and African sculpture was rich in symbols and abstract shapes that interested the inventive artistic minds of the cubists. Picasso was especially fascinated by African sculpture and one such example that was influenced by African masks was his renown painting of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. The Demoiselles simultaneously invoked and demolished the canon celebrated in the great museums where Picasso had trained. What differentiated this picture was the way its distortions challenged the most basic assumptions about pictorial depiction of figures and of space, and the sheer immediacy of its confrontation with such a controversial subject. Furthermore, Picasso concentrated on the new possibilities for figural representation suggested by African art in his painting. This portrait of five prostitutes, which he described as his first exorcism painting, was his first work that has signs of African influence, with two of the women's faces shown as resembling African masks, whereas the figures to left have more Iberian features.

After being introduced to African art by Matisse, he truly discovered' it for himself during his visit to the Trocadero. The five figures in the composition are all nude, with large eyes, and are all rigid like mannequins. Their stiff bodies are depicted in flesh coloured tones and black and white. Reference to African art allowed Picasso to primitivize his figures. Lomas discusses why it was seen as so revolutionary, as it was not the normal way of depicting faces and bodies and it was the first time the viewer can see the influence of African art taking hold. It was considered ground-breaking as it's about approaching the subject in a more conceptual way and presenting different viewpoints, for example the heads of the central figures have full faces but at the same time we are given the profile of others. It depicts how art is moving away from a natural and true to life depiction towards a more radical way of painting. Considered the first painting of cubism by representing three dimensions, angularly drawn forms (not rounded by chiaroscuro) and colour on a flat surface. Kahnweiler calls it the beginning of cubism; whereas Golding sees it as in no sense a cubist picture. However, as a work that opens the way to cubism by adumbrating certain of the pictorial practises, it could be argued that the compression, flattening of space and the use of multiple viewpoints makes it an early example of cubism. Indeed, the painting opened up new possibilities of painting.

Despite Braque not being immediately impressed by Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, his painting of Large Nude in 1908 could be seen as having been influenced by Picasso's Les Demoiselles and African masks. Although it is a rather less radical take on Picasso's use of distorted planes and shallow space; Braque began experimenting with a fragmented style and this painting can be seen as one of his earliest works in cubism. There are similarities to Picasso's women in Les Demoiselles such as the simplified, mask like facial features, painterly and exaggerated brushstrokes, narrow colour palette and clear inspiration from primitive art in the cubist style. Braque painted the single figure of the Large Nude during the analytical cubism stage which developed between 1908 and 1912. It is termed analytical cubism because of its structured dissection of the subject, viewpoint-by-viewpoint, resulting in a fragmentary image of multiple viewpoints and overlapping planes. The most complex period of Analytic Cubism has been called "Hermetic Cubism." The colors became even more monochromatic, the planes became even more complexly layered, and space was compacted even further than it had been before.

Picasso's "Ma Jolie" (1911) is a perfect example of Hermetic Cubism. It depicts a woman holding a guitar, though we often do not see this at first glance. That is because he incorporated so many planes, lines, and symbols that it completely abstracted the subject. Analytical cubism was considered to be a more structured and monochromatic approach than that of Synthetic cubism. Synthetic cubism developed later between 1912 and 1919; when the artists started adding textures and patterns to their paintings, experimenting with collage using newspaper print and patterned paper. During this stage of cubism, there was generally no reference to African sculpture as the cubists were more concerned about flattening out the image and sweeping away the last traces of allusion to three-dimensional space. A good example of synthetic cubism is by Juan Gris in his painting The Package of Coffee, 1914. In this painting Gris uses pasted paper and trompe l'oeil textures and lettering to assert flatness. The picture's sharp prisms are partly conceived in olive greys, pale greens and russet browns. Although there are no elements that suggest an African influence, the neutral colour palette with a hint of a brighter orange are in keeping with primitive artworks.

In conclusion, through Picasso being the first cubist artist to make visual reference to the stylistic and simplistic qualities in African art, after having being inspired by artists such as Cezanne, Matisse and Gauguin. Whilst the other cubist artists, such as Braque use African art not so obviously, he did however, take on board, the natural colours and stuck to a narrow colour spectrum. Therefore, primitive art, though not the only source of inspiration, nevertheless had a vital influence on the foundations of cubism. Finally, as Picasso said, I paint object a I think them, not as I see them," and was thus as much a reflection of contemporary idealist thinking based on higher, unseen dimension as upon the conclusions he himself had drawn about the conceptual basis of African art.