African Art Essay

Africa is home to a great and thriving art culture. Until recently, African art hasn’t had enough attention, due to scholars’ and art collectors’ emphasis on traditional art, while being part of the most diverse legacies on Earth. Although some people consider African art ‘traditional’, the art actually consists of hundreds of different people groups, cultures, and civilizations. The artwork favors abstraction rather than naturalistic representation because the artwork represents objects or ideas rather than depict them. Each part of Africa had their own unique style. In Botswana, the tribal women has excellent weaving basket skills. In Cote D’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) the Senufo and Dan peoples were skilled at carving wooden masks with a wide variety. Enormous

The study of African Art, by artists at the beginning of the 20th century helped the explosion of interest in the abstraction, organization, and reorganization of forms. During the 1900’s aesthetics of traditional African sculpture had a powerful influence on European artists such as, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and their School of Paris friends. They blended together the highly stylized treatment of the human figure with painting styles derived from the post-Impressionist works of Cezanne and Gauguin. Artists in Germany between the two world wars, worked widely with African devices that represented their anxiety, dislocation, and utopian fantasies of interwar German society. Art in Ancient Africa used a wide variety of materials (mediums) including sculpting, pottery, painting, rock art, textiles, masks, jewelry, and personal decoration. Sculpting was a very important medium and was sculpted with many different materials including bronze, terracotta, and ivory. Masks held religious importance and used in dance to create performance art. Masks were made from wood and decorated with ivory, gems, paint, and animal