Approaching Africa : the reception of African visual culture in Germany, 1894-1915 (original) (raw)
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Advances in Historical Studies, 2022
African art played a fundamental role in the development of European and international contemporary art. Nevertheless, its function is still scarcely acknowledged by critics, even if it has been crucial especially between the end of the 19 th and the beginning of the 20 th century. In this period, African art exerted an important influence on artists as Matisse, Modigliani, Brancusi as well as on Picasso and Braque, the fathers of Cubism. These artists, gathered under the "Parisian School", drew largely from the African masks and sculptures, reshaping their style in original and revolutionary works. The research here presented aims at analyzing the history of this artistic influence, rebuilding the aesthetic, cultural and political environment of France in that period. Where this influence did not occur, as in Italy, due to the close relation between colonial experience and the advent of fascism, every form of metissage was hindered, and art was aligned with the regime's aesthetics. The later artistic tendencies of the 20 th and 21 st centuries show that the influence of African art, transmitted through Cubism and other artistic avant-garde, became an international mark. Concurrently,, African artists created autonomous movements, in a path of interconnected autonomy in relation to Western art.
Supplements to the Study of African Works of Art
Mediterranean journal of social sciences, 2022
For many years, the history of the arts, crafts and connoisseurship has been determined using the sensory organs; with the introduction of technology, researches in the sciences have found their ways into the study of humanities and the arts. There exists recently additional modern, genuine and acceptable ways of assessing art historical studies other than the traditional sensory means-sight and touch. There is the need for art historical studies now to be more advanced, viewed from a global standard. Apart from formal, iconographic and iconological analyses, art historical studies of the 21st century attends to other pressing evidence and developments with the use of hi-tech and the embrace of scientific approach to studying works of art. Qualitative and evaluative modes of research have been employed for this discourse; it concludes with recommendations to research institutes and African governments to show interest in material compositional information of African art objects for their scientific and historical significance.
Perspectives: Angles on African Art
African Arts, 1987
... Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Baldwin, James (b. 1924, d. ----. Author: Weber, Michael John. PUBLISHER: Center for African Art (New York). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1987. PUB TYPE: Book (ISBN 0961458747 ). VOLUME/EDITION: PAGES (INTRO/BODY): 195 p. ...
In search for a philosophy of African art
This article examines the obstacles and possibilities of a philosophy of African art. It addresses the problem that the words 'philosophy' and 'art' have a Greco-Roman origin. For a long time philosophy was understood as rational argumentation and art as an aesthetic object. This was a determining factor for the rise of a Eurocentric orientation of Western philosophy and art history. If we want to reflect on (traditional) African philosophy and art we might have to look for a broader concept of philosophy and make a distinction between art as an aesthetic object and art as a cult object. From this point of view I will reflect on the question if-and in what sense-we can find in the Ifá divination of the Yoruba in Nigeria a philosophy that can help us to understand the traditional artworks of the Yoruba.
The Challenge of the Object – Die Herausforderung des Objekts, Congress Proceedings, (Eds) G. Ulrich Großmann/Petra Krutisch, 2013
Since their arrival en masse in Europe during the nineteenth century, the reception of statuary and cultic utensils from African and other, then colonised cultures has continued to provoke debate on what is, and what is not art. The paper examines the context and methods of visual representation of African and Oceanic art objects in a number of publications that between 1915 and 1935 participated in transforming the perception of such objects from ‘savage idols’, or remnants of the so-called ‘primitive races’ to attaining the status as works of art coveted for their formal rigour and inventiveness. The paper contends that the role of Carl Einstein (1885-1940) and his book Negerplastik (1915) was central to this transformation. Following the ‘discovery’ of such objects by the artistic avant-garde, Einstein pioneered a format of visual representation that raised their status from ethnographic record to art object on a par with the western artistic canon. Like art history, which since its inception as an academic discipline has relied on deriving meaning from the analysis of photographically reproduced works of art, Negerplastik made productive use of the photographic image as simulacrum for the authentic work. Combining methodologies hitherto applied to theorize European sculpture with visual strategies akin to those representing classical sculpture as advocated by Heinrich Wölfflin, Einstein, as it were, ‘invented’ the category of African art. The paper assesses how Einstein’s book functioned as the model for subsequent representations of African sculpture, and how Negerplastik can be seen to resonate in the photographic albums of Charles Sheeler (1918) and Walker Evans (1935) as they in turn generated their own rhetoric of intervention into the discourse on modernist representation.
The Observer and the Observed: The Dynamics of Representation in African Art
Representation has always been two-way between Europe and Africa. Through the concentration on artwork from the colonial encounter until post-colonial times, this paper seeks to highlight both the agency and different forms of resistance from the side of Africans, which have responded to the forms of representations that have been created by the West. These responses by African artists demonstrate how there has always been a process of Africa "observing the other" while at the same time inverting the images of Africa that have been created by foreigners.
African works: anxious encounters in the visual arts
Introduces a special issue of Res: journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics devoted to methodology in the study of African works of art. The essay picks up Olu Oguibe’s challenge to ask if African artists get asked the same questions as European or American artists. It queries how interviews are used and how they are represented by both anthropologists and art historians. It culminates in a close analysis of Johannes Fabian’s Remembering the Present (1996), which experimented with a number of different strategies for presenting the anthropologist’s exchanges with Congolese painter Tshibumba Kanda Matulu.
Categories and contemporaries: African artists at the Slade School of Fine Art (c.1945-65)
Burlington Contemporary, 2022
Artists from all over the world studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, but the categories of art history and the organisation of museums have rarely allowed them to be studied, taught or exhibited alongside each other. Their separation and dissociation can be attributed to art history’s strong attachment to national narratives. The nation state has operated as the epistemological framework through which artists are grouped and works of art are examined. Even as the ‘global turn’ has sought to combat the Eurocentric assumptions of modernism, it has often perpetuated the discipline’s methodological nationalism, obscuring the cosmopolitan networks to which artists belonged. These national narratives contribute to larger continental frameworks that exacerbate divisions between artists who often sat side by side together in the same classroom. Bringing together unpublished archival material from UCL Special Collections, London, and works of art from the UCL Art Museum, London, and other collections based in the United Kingdom and abroad, this article proposes a new methodological framework that situates the selected artists alongside their contemporaries, challenging the categories and interpretative frames that have been imposed onto their work. It seeks to demonstrate the entanglement of modern art movements globally by examining the works of art and correspondence of such artists as Ben Enwonwu, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Sam Joseph Ntiro, Paula Rego, Patricia Gerrard, Margaret J. Rees Menhat Helmy, Michael Tyzack and Amir Nour.