Picasso: African Art Influence

African art has touched and inspired not only artists around the world, but every day people throughout history. African art has been interpreted by different artists and used in many different time periods. One of these periods that was highly recognized is during the Cubist period. Many if not all cubist artists are credited with getting their ideas from that of African art. One of these artists is Pablo Picasso who is not only credited with being influenced by this art, but also being the founder of Cubism.

Cubism consisted of three phases. The first phase, also known as Analytic Cubism, was the phase where there became a simplification, distortion and emphasis of the forms of objects. It is said that this first stage of Cubism was brought on by the ideas of Impressionalism. During this phase the artist created symbolic forms to preserver the ideas of something instead of the true form of something, which is often short-lived. Through their ability to look past the material views of an object the artists were able to display ideas that did not depend on actual worldly truth.

At the beginning of this phase it was merely an experiment in color and lines, but later on there would be a complete change in the form. Cubism analyzes a subject in basic geometry and elementary signs. Many of these early paintings and sculptures were of stationary objects like tabletops, bottles, and musical instruments.

The second phase also known as Hermetic Cubism is where there is

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an absence of the representation of objects. The use of overlapping planes where their positions in space were not accented. Picasso started to show the characteristics of this

second phase around 1910. The third phase, Synthetic Cubism, was marked by a drastic change in the artistic point of view. The artists tried to "improve reality" by creating new objects.

Cubists studied objects such as cartoons and advertisements as well as placing number and parts of word in their works.

Picasso's work was greatly influenced and inspired by tribal, African art. Before Picasso though, Cezanne and Matisse were also heavily influenced by African art in the early 1900's. These two artists were inspirations to not only