African Art Influence

Essay of Influence All artists, be they painters, musicians, sculptors, or any other type of artist, all are influenced by the things around them. Some place, some thing, or even some person influences every stroke of the brush, every pluck of the chord, and every crash of the chisel. One such influence was the influence of traditional African art on Modernist artists, Expressionist architects, and many other artists. In fact, traditional African sculpture was a powerful influence on modernist artists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, and Expressionist architects such as Bruno Taut, Erich Mendelsohn, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Hans Poelzig all of whom reflect the core of traditional African art During the early 1900s, many

Picasso’s painting of a man’s head takes many aspects of African art. Picasso had reduced the bust to a few simple shapes and large masses, with the head having an African mask-like appearance. The highly stylized lozenge-shaped eyes and mouth are dark, open voids and were inspired by wooden African masks that the natives of Africa wore in their spiritual rituals. The piece is reminiscent of the same forms that Africans used in their art, using only simple shapes with dark, wide eyes and mouths, and visual abstraction rather than naturalistic representation. Moreover, the influences of African art are not entirely limited to paintings. Expressionist Architecture draws a great deal from African art, especially in the visual sense. Expressionists discovered in Africa a new repertoire of proto-symbols. With this discovery the space is now composed by single forms that refer to human proportions and its

Seemingly non-artistic creations such as shovels, or things that others might not see as having true artistic merit like finger paintings can yield powerful emotional and spiritual reactions. Such reactions are the core of traditional African art. The study of and response to African Art by artists at the beginning of the twentieth century created an explosion of interest in the abstraction, organization and reorganization of forms and the exploration of emotional and psychological areas unseen by Western Renaissance art. With the influence of traditional African art, art in the west ceased to be merely and primarily aesthetic, but became a true medium for philosophic and intellectual discourse. Overall, thanks to the discovery and influence of African art on such prominent figures as Pablo Picasso, Jørn Utzon, and Paul Rudolph, art in the west has become more truly and profoundly aesthetic than ever before, and continues to inspire and give people profound emotional and spiritual