Out Of Africa

Matilde de Chantrain describes how African artefacts that inspired modern European painters and sculptors were once categorised as ethnographic, but are now seen as an esteemed art genre valued by collectors worldwide – as shown in a new exhibition in the Archaeological Museum of Bologna

- Matilde De Chantrain

Ex Africa semper aliquid novi (‘Out of Africa, there is always something new’) wrote the Roman author and naturalist Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79) in his Naturalis Historia (VIII/42).

‘L’art nègre? Connais pas!’ (‘African art? Never heard of it!’) declared Pablo Picasso in 1907. He had just painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, his revolutionary and seminal proto-Cubist work in which he replaced the faces of two of the prostitutes depicted (on the right of the picture) with clearly recognizable African masks. And the German-born art dealer and long-time friend of Picasso, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884–1979) remembered ‘… seeing dusty stacks of canvases and African sculptures of majestic severity…’ when he first visited Picasso’s studio in 1907.

So, as Picasso (1881–1973), like many other artists working in Paris at the same time – Modigliani, Klee, Matisse, Man Ray among them – was known to collect African sculptures, what did he mean by his provocative statement?

What he seemed to be saying was that what interested him about African sculpture was its formal characteristics, which helped him to formulate his new aesthetic. For him, African masks ‘… were not sculptures like the others (…). They were magical, mysterious and esoteric objects…’ which he would neither copy nor imitate but which he would transmute. For him, these objects were eternal; they did not belong to a specific time or place and, therefore, they could not be cataloged according to the parameters of European art history.