From the exaggerated lipstick used by topless models at London Fashion Week to the paintings of Picasso and Matisse, African artists have continually defined and redefined the trajectory of Western art since the Renaissance.

African Wooden Sculpture The Bridge MAG image

According to Denise Murrell, a PhD student and researcher at the Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University:

“In the contemporary postcolonial era, the influence of traditional African aesthetics and processes is so profoundly embedded in artistic practice that it is only rarely evoked as such. 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.”

The Renaissance also witnessed the discovery and exploration of new continents and historians consider it to have heralded the beginning of modern history – an age in which artistic, social, scientific and political thought turned in new directions.

The stylistic influences of African sculpture inspired some of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century – Matisse, Picasso and Gaugin, to name a few.

The Picasso (October 1881 – April 1973), African sculpture helped him…

Naked women oil painting by T. Savic The Bridge MAG image

In 1907, after hundreds of preparatory sketches, Picasso completed the seminal Les Demoiselles d’Avignon – the painting to whose multifaceted female bodies and mask-like faces the birth of Cubism is attributed.

Western artists have mimicked west and sub-Saharan African arts and sculpture in their form…

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Rachel Tcheungna, Author, Writer of 

The Bridge Books and 

The Bridge Magazine Editor.