AA Unit 1: Who invented "African Art?"

Four Studies of a Head of a Moor|Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1614–1616

A European study of one African model. The sitter is seen through European eyes.

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907. Oil on canvas

The key example of PRIMITIVISM. Mask-like faces borrow from African (and Iberian) objects while framing them as “primitive.”

• African forms feed European modernism

Sapi-Portuguese Saltcellar, Bullom or Temne artist, Sierra Leone, c. 1490–1530. Carved elephant ivory, 23.5 × 14 × 15

Made by African carvers for Portugese buyers, so it’s export art mixing Sapi and European imagery. It ended up in European curosity cabinets and is hard to classify as only African or only European.

Power Figure (Nikisi N’Kondi Mangaaka), Kongo peoples, Cabinda or Republic of the Congo

Europeans called objects like this '“fetishes”, nails and baldes were driven in to seal oaths and agreements