The Influence and Appropriation of African Art in European Modernism

Formal Similarities: When juxtaposing process images from African masks with early 20th-century modernist paintings, several shared stylistic interests emerge:
- Elongation: A visual preference for stretched or extended forms.
- Geometric Shapes: The reduction of features into stylized, non-organic geometry.
- Non-Naturalism: A deliberate move away from realistic or mimetic portrayal.
- Flat Affect: The conveyance of a specific, stylized emotional neutrality through paint, mirroring the fixed expression of the mask.
Specific Objects of Influence:
- Fang Face Mask: Originating from Gabon, these masks were owned by French artists such as André Matisse.
- Dan Face Mask: These objects were influential on the work of Pablo Picasso.
- Matisse’s Application: The portrait of his wife, Jean Matisse, shows a direct influence from the Fang mask, particularly in the facial structure and the way the features are rendered.

Galleries and Registries:
- Akrapi Gallery: A key site for the display of African collections, preserved in 20th-century silent black and white film stills.
- Private Collections: Artists like Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso assembled eclectic private collections in their studios during the early years of the twentieth century.
- Eclecticism: These collections were not limited to African artifacts; they included musical instruments, oceanic art, and the artists' own modernist canvases.
Key Intermediary Figures:
- Art Dealers and Critics: These figures procured art, promoted it, and published reviews to create a market for non-Western objects.
- Paul Guillaume: A highly influential art dealer who networked with artists and intellectuals.
  - Background: Before becoming a dealer, he worked as a clerk in an upscale car garage in Paris.
  - Colonial Link: The garage received shipments from the French Congo, a colonial territory in Central Africa. This region was a major site for rubber production in the late $19^{th}$ and early $20^{th}$ centuries to support the burgeoning car industry.
  - Market Building: Guillaume actively solicited objects by placing advertisements in colonial publications like Les Arts à Paris, stating he was in the market for African objects from those traveling to the colonies.

The Shift in Perception: During this period, objects previously dismissed as "primitive fetishes" or evidence of "uncivilized society" were rebranded as "African Art" (with a capital "A").
Exhibition Conventions and "The White Cube":
- Aesthetic Impact: Galleries began to emphasize immediate emotional and aesthetic impact over educational context.
- The Lack of Text: A hallmark of this era's display strategy was the absence of explanatory text, operating under the theory that the object should "speak for itself."
- Strategic Lighting: Modernist museums used spotlighting to allow objects to "emerge" from the shadows, emphasizing form over function.
- 1935 Exhibition: The New Museum of Art in New York held the first exhibition of so-called "African Negro Art," utilizing the "white cube" logic: high separation of objects and strategic lighting.
- 1936 Exhibition: Titled "Cubism and Abstract Art," this exhibition made an explicit argument that African sculptural traditions (then termed "Negro sculpture") transitionally influenced European modernist art.

Black Deco: A subset of the Art Deco craze in France influenced by African aesthetics following French colonial associations.
- Characteristics: Included repeating geometric patterns and an "African idiom" or "affect" applied to furniture, ceramics, and household objects.
- Fashion: Models at fashion studios would pose against "Black Deco screens" to exhibit the up-to-date modernist style.
- Josephine Baker: An iconic figure of the era who posed on magazine covers in leopard skin, playing on European tropes of the "African wild."

Antiquity Bias: European artists and collectors often falsely inflated the age of African objects. They viewed antiquity as a "claim to fame" and an indicator of value.
Magical Misreadings: European observers often interpreted African artistic production through the lens of "primitivism," viewing the works as "forms of magic" or "sacred magical acts" rather than deliberate artistic choice.
The Problem of Context: A reviewer of a major exhibition noted that curators often omitted dates, functions, and religious connotations. This was called a "demonstration of Western egotism" and a "repression of primitive context."

Anonymity of the Artist: A student pointed out that while collectors like Paul Guillaume are celebrated, the actual African creators are rarely named. The transcript notes that while some objects are attributed to the "greatest Kuta artists," individual names were mostly unrecorded during collection.
Sonic Framing: The discussion noted the use of dramatic Western classical music (such as Vivaldi) in films about African art. This suggests the art is being viewed entirely through a Western lens, whereas films like You Hide Me used African music to emphasize original culture.
Value and Power: The current market sees a massive surge in the pricing of these objects, which often remain named after the European collectors who acquired them rather than the cultures that produced them.

Fred Wilson (b. $1954$ ):
- Installation: In his piece Mask, he superimposed an African mask (traditionally worn by the Lula people of the Congo) over the faces in a classical painting.
- Video Element: Behind the eyes of the mask, a video on loop features Wilson and Senegalese friends asking the viewer: "Whose rules decided what is great?" and "If your modern art is our traditional art, does that make our contemporary art your cliche?"
Yinka Shonibare (b. $1962$ ):
- Fabric and Identity: Shonibare uses African batik fabric (often associated with African identity but with a complex global history) to dress mannequins in $19^{th}$ -century European styles.
- Appropriation in Reverse: Recent exhibitions involve taking Western classical sculptures (like the Sphinx or Pan) and "appropriating" them back, mirroring the way Picasso once appropriated African art.
Technological Integration: The use of digital design and quilts is mentioned as a way to connect ancestry to contemporary culture, particularly in the context of movements like Black Lives Matter and the legacy of African aesthetics.