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How a small African figurine changed art

(Epitome credit:

Wikipedia

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Folk art from Africa and the Pacific changed the modern world by pushing Western artists to be more than confrontational, writes Fisun Güner.

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A pocket-sized seated figurine from the Vili people of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo was instrumental in the lives of two of the greatest artists of the 20th Century. The carved figure in wood, with its large upturned face, long trunk, disproportionately short legs and tiny feet and hands, was purchased in a curio shop in Paris by Henri Matisse in 1906. The French creative person, who liked to fill his studio with exotic trinkets and objets d'art, objects that would so appear in his paintings, paid a pittance for it.

Henri Matisse bought this sculpted figurine created by the Vili people of the Congo – it had a huge impact on him and on his friend Pablo Picasso (Credit: Athenaeum Matisse, Paris)

Yet when he showed it to Pablo Picasso at the dwelling of the art patron and avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein, its impact on the young Spaniard was profound, simply as it was, though to an arguably lesser extent, on Matisse when the compact only powerful effigy had fortuitously defenseless his eye.

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For Picasso, his appetite whetted, visits to the African section of the ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadéro inevitably followed. And so precocious was the 24-twelvemonth-old artist that it seemed that he had already absorbed all that European art had to offer. Hungry for something radically unlike, something almost entirely new to the Western gaze that might provide fresh and dynamic impetus to his feverish creative energies, Picasso became absorbed by the dramatic masks, totems, fetishes and carved figures on display, merely as he had with the Iberian stone sculptures of ancient Spain which he likewise sourced equally material. Here, however, was something altogether different, altogether more than dynamic and visceral.

When, after hundreds of preparatory paintings and drawings, he finally unveiled his breakthrough proto-Cubist masterpiece, the 8 sq ft Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, fifty-fifty his most avant-garde friends were shocked. Surely he had gone too far. What confronted them in his Montmartre studio, in that late Summer of 1907 (though the painting wasn't exhibited publicly until 1916) was savage and disconcerting. V women, three of whom stare back at the viewer with huge, violent eyes, were arranged in various confrontational poses and aggressively sexualised attitudes. The three women to the correct have the shine, though now distorted, features he took from Iberian carved heads, while the ii 'Africanised' women to the left accept the dark facial markings that resemble scarified flesh, or peradventure the texture and hue of roughly hacked forest. Their faces are all somewhat mask-like.

Matisse painted Le Bonheur de Vivre, a fantasy of a back-to-nature milieu, the year he bought the Vili figurine (Credit: Alamy)

Just it wasn't but the small Congolese figure that had provided the spur and turning point for Picasso's piece of work – and y'all can see this figure currently in the Royal Academy'south exhibition Matisse in the Studio, along with other objects Matisse kept that informed his painting and sculpture. It was the companionable rivalry provided past this new relationship with the older French artist, for Matisse was, at that betoken, the far more than experimental and radical artist – the leading Fauve, or 'Wild Brute'.

Another Fauve, or 'Wild Beast', Henri Rousseau painted jungle fantasias, such as The Dream, which some criticised for beingness in poor gustatory modality (Credit: Wikipedia)

Matisse had painted his multi-coloured, dream-pastoral Le Bonheur de Vivre in 1906, the year he bought the African figurine and the year the ii artists met (and he was soon experimenting with his own 'Africanised' nudes), and Les Demoiselles was painted partly in answer to information technology. Picasso was intent on painting something fifty-fifty more radical and daring, a piece of work that would leave its mark, which, for the last 110 years it certainly has.

Picasso's Les Demoiselles des Avignon shows the influence of African art in the masks the prostitutes wear (Credit: Wikipedia)

Simply Matisse wasn't the first artist to appropriate non-Western fine art. Primitivism, as information technology came to be known, was outset to be embraced by artists in France at the end of the 19th Century, though some of its roots go back further, to the pastoral paintings of a golden age of the Neo-Classical period. And although fundamental to it, information technology wasn't only non-Western artefacts that were of interest. Children's fine art, and later the art of the mentally ill, so-called outsider art and folk fine art were significant contributions to the evolution of modernism, not just in visual art simply in music too.

Dorsum to basics

Matisse himself was ever fascinated by the drawings of his ain children and saw within them possibilities for the management of his ain work. That interest, too, was followed through by Picasso, who later famously remarked that, "Every childis an artist . The problem is how to remain an artistonce he grows up."

What was taken from each category of fine art produced from these non-conventional sources, was a sense of spontaneity, of innocence, of a creative impulse not suffocated by bookish fine fine art training or indeed past Western values, which were beginning to be seen in some intellectual and avant-garde circles every bit corrupt and decadent or as simply a spent force. The unmediated, the unspoiled and the accurate was what was at present prized, and that included fine art that expressed the creative person's inner earth, or what emerged in the 20th Century as the unconscious. Art, in other words, unfettered by the supposed artificial values of bourgeois club.

Paul Gauguin was inspired by elementary rustic settings throughout his career, including the Breton farm communities that inspired Vision after the Sermon (Credit: Wikipedia)

Though naivety and lack of sophistication was hardly truthful of either African art or art from other not-Western cultures, artists were struck past a directness, a pared-downwardly simplicity and a non-naturalism that they discovered in these objects. Just no thought was given to what these artefacts might actually mean, nor to any understanding of the unique cultures from which they derived. The politics of colonialism was not even in its infancy.

The Trocadéro museum, which had so impressed Picasso, had opened in 1878, with artefacts plundered from the French colonies. Today'due south curators, including those of the Royal University'south Matisse exhibition in which African masks and figures from the artist'south collection appear, at least seek to acknowledge and redress this to a modest extent. A similar effort was fabricated earlier this yr for Picasso Primitif at the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, an exhibition exploring Picasso's life-long human relationship to African art. The sculptures, from W and Central Africa, were given every bit much space and importance equally Picasso's ain work and ane could appreciate at kickoff paw the close correspondence betwixt the works.

Meanwhile, the Art Found of Chicago has an exhibition that looks at the creative process of an artist who was profoundly influenced by art from French Polynesia and who in turn was a particular influence on Matisse – those colour-saturated dream-like pastoral paintings again, including the early Le Bonheur de Vivre mentioned above. Paul Gauguin, perhaps the quintessential European creative person to 'become native', beginning in Martinique, and so in Tahiti, where he died in 1903 aged 54, had long felt a disgust at Western civilisation, its perceived inauthenticity and spiritual emptiness.

Many of Gauguin'southward nearly famous paintings, including Where Practice We Come From? What Are Nosotros? Where Are We Going?, were inspired by his fourth dimension living in Tahiti (Credit: Alamy)

Even before he left European shores for good he had lived in an artist's colony in Brittany, painting the deeply religious peasant women in traditional Breton dress. These paintings, such equally Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Affections), 1888, possess a rather unsettling and erotic sense of the numinous, equally do his Tahiti paintings, with their piquant mix of sexual practice and death. Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist shows united states an artist fully immersed in the life from which his art was born.

The significance of non-European art on the avant-garde and on 20th-Century art modernism can't be overestimated. It goes far beyond these three prominent artists, though all three were particularly instrumental in spreading its impact, from the Surrealists to Jackson Pollock. And fifty-fifty nearer our own time, seemingly long later on the fascination with the primitif had been exhausted, the ritualised performance-land fine art of Ana Mendieta and the energetic postmodern faux-tribal paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat saw that it certainly hadn't.

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