African Influences on modern artists

Today I will be talking about how african art influenced some the late and modern artists of today.

During the early 1900's, the aesthetics of the traditional african sculpture became a powerful influence among european artists who formed an avant-grade 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 Cezanne and Gauguin.

Here are some of Matisse works:

This Painting is called 'The Young Sailor", its an oil painting and as you can see matisse exadurated the eyes which african sculptures would have influenced him to do this.

This Painting is called "Snow Flowers" Matisse used watercolour and gouache on cut and pasted paper. As you can see this he may have tryed capturing the image of a snowflake.

Here are some of Pablo Picasso's works which where influenced by african art:

This painting is called "Gertrude Stein" Picasso started painting this in 1906 and as you can see from the eyes being dispropossioned he decided to paint the person as they where, so which ever angle he look at them from would be the angle he painted.

This painting is called "Bust Of A Man" Picasso worked on this from 1908, yet again you can se the resemblence from the african art works from the way he painted the eyes to mouth even the nose you could really sence the remblence in this piece of work.

Here we see another example of Picasso's attempts to capture in his own minds eye the african art form. as you see in the sculpture above Picasso chose to sculpt a woman from this wood. He named this piece "Womans Head".