III.

Europe and the Art of Africa

Western engagement with the rich variety of African artistic creativity has inevitably been selective, and conditioned by troubled episodes in African history, notably slavery and colonialism. Scholarship dealing with art and artefacts in Africa has often struggled to move beyond the legacy of outdated stereotypes that position Africa as a region of unchanging tradition in contrast to the dynamic modernity of Europe or America.

The appreciation of African sculpture by European artists in the early decades of the 20th century, part of the wider phenomenon of “primitivism” in Western art, led to a reappraisal of selected African artefacts as inherently aesthetic rather than as ethnographic objects. In Paris, artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Amedeo Modigliani saw the formal solutions to the representation of the human face and figure in certain African masks and sculptures as a means of breaking away from the constraints of European classicism. In Berlin and Munich, Emil Nolde, Néstor Kirchner, and other Expressionists were interested less in African forms than in the romantic idealization of the “primitive” that they read into them. In most cases this interest did not extend to any consideration of local meanings, still less to the artists who had created the works. Nevertheless, the fashion for collecting and displaying African art set at this period continues to influence the activities of collectors, dealers, and to a lesser extent scholars, today.