African Influences in Modern Art. During the early 1900s, the aesthetics of traditional African sculpture became a powerful influence among European artists who formed an avant-garde in the development of modern art. In France, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and their School of Paris friends blended the highly stylized treatment of the human figure in African sculptures with painting styles derived from the post-Impressionist works of Cézanne and Gauguin. The resulting pictorial flatness, vivid color palette, and fragmented Cubist shapes helped to define early modernism. While these artists knew nothing of the original meaning and function of the West and Central African sculptures they encountered, they instantly recognized the spiritual aspect of the composition and adapted these qualities to their own efforts to move beyond the naturalism that had defined Western art since the Renaissance.
In The Autobiography of Alice B. Cubism. Following their 1907 meeting in Paris, artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque pioneered the Cubist , a new vision for a new century that inspired that were initially ridiculed by critics for consisting of “little cubes.” Often painting side-by-side in their Montmartre, Paris, studios, the artists developed a visual language of geometric planes and compressed space that rejected the conventions of and . Cubist works challenged viewers to understand a subject broken down into its geometrical components and often represented from several angles at once. Traditional like nude, landscapes, and were reinvented as increasingly fragmented by Picasso, Braque, and other artists working in and around the French capital. Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Paris, June–July 1907 Georges Braque. Pablo Picasso. Cubists from real life to make their work, but most often maintained small identifiable clues to a realistic figure, whether a woman or a violin. 1.
Questions & Activities. David Hockney, interview. “If he did three things on one day,” he tells me, “they’re number one, two, three, so you know what he did in the morning and in the afternoon. It’s fantastic. I’ve sat down and looked through the whole thing from beginning to end three times. That takes some doing, but it’s a fantastic experience. It doesn’t bore you.”
This is one way in which Hockney has maintained a close, posthumous relationship with Picasso. Early on, the Spaniard’s abrupt changes of style had licensed Hockney to do the same. One of the aspects of both artists that confuses commentators is their stylistic shape-shifting. “When you stop doing something it doesn’t mean you are rejecting the previous work,” says Hockney. “Picasso is still influencing me. “When Picasso was 70 he had another 23 years of painting and smoking ahead of him,” he says. “A lot of his late pictures are about being an old man. Four decades ago in the early Seventies, Picasso was already on Hockney’s mind. READ: How to buy a Hockney drawing. Shock of the new video Instruction. Watch The Shock of The New Free Online. Pablo Picasso; Bottle and Wine Glass on a Table (49.70.33) Cubism | Thematic Essay. Task. African Influences in Modern Art | Thematic Essay. Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Paris, June-July 1907.
Publication Excerpt: The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 64 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is one of the most important works in the genesis of modern art. The painting depicts five naked prostitutes in a brothel; two of them push aside curtains around the space where the other women strike seductive and erotic poses—but their figures are composed of flat, splintered planes rather than rounded volumes, their eyes are lopsided or staring or asymmetrical, and the two women at the right have threatening masks for heads. The space, too, which should recede, comes forward in jagged shards, like broken glass. In the still life at the bottom, a piece of melon slices the air like a scythe.
The faces of the figures at the right are influenced by African masks, which Picasso assumed had functioned as magical protectors against dangerous spirits: this work, he said later, was his "first exorcism painting. "