a good time for art @agoodtimeforart - Tumblr Blog

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dappledwithshadow

Autumn Landscape in Mendrisiotto, Paul Camenisch

1925

#paul camenisch

jonathanbogart

French cartoonist Jean Ache, “Little Red Riding Hood” after seven different painters, from Pilote, 1974.

loumargi

Pierrot et Colombine- Pablo Picasso 1900

#pablo picasso

fleurdulys

In the Salon of the Rue des Moulins - Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

1894

#henri de toulouse-lautrec #my favorite

evokesart

Henri Matisse - ‘La Danse’, 1948

#henri matisse

vintagecongo

D.R. Congo’s Influence on Cubism

first image: Mbuya (sickness) Mask: This mask falls into the category of mbuya masks, which are used to represent different characters. This one, mbangu, represents a cursed man, someone who has been struck by sickness or has had deformities cast upon him by sorcerers. Although his face shows signs of nerve paralysis, features characteristic of the katundu style in the Pende region are still apparent: note the eyebrow line in the shape of an inverted “W”; the triangular nose and pointed chin. second image: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso, 1907

The mask worn by the woman in the bottom right corner of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is based on the Mbuya (sickness) Mask, created by the Pende of the D.R Congo, as revealed by art experts. It is noticeable that Picasso painted an unadulterated reflexion of this mask. All facial distortions and expressions created by the Congolese artist have been retained and faithfully reproduced. Interestingly, facial distortions and emotional expressions are what constitute the quintessential elements in both Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and the Mbuya Mask.

New form of art stimulated a great interest in him since it was different from what he was exposed to in the West. He was particularly fascinated with “African Masks”. After the great discovery he wrote:

“I have experienced my greatest artistic emotions, when I suddenly discovered the sublime beauty of sculptures executed by the anonymous artists from Africa. These passionate and rigorously logical religious works are what the human imagination has produced as most potent and most beautiful…” At that moment, I realized what painting was all about!

Picasso was above all taken by the elements and principles of design applied on the masks in addition to the emotions that they transmitted. Captured by the power of these new forms, he begins to apply them into the preliminary sketches for Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon, from which originated Modern Art and the Cubist Movement.

In Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa he states that “Most striking about the traditional societies of the Congo was their remarkable artwork: baskets, mats, pottery, copper and ironwork, and, above all, woodcarving. It would be two decades before Europeans really noticed this art. Its discovery then had a strong influence on Braque, Matisse, and Picasso – who subsequently kept African art objects in his studio until his death. Cubism was new only for Europeans, for it was partly inspired by specific pieces of African art, some of them from the Pende and Songye peoples, who live in the basin of the Kasai River, one of the Congo’s major tributaries.It was easy to see the distinctive brilliance that so entranced Picasso and his colleagues at their first encounter with this art at an exhibit in Paris in 1907. In these central African sculptures some body parts are exaggerated, some shrunken; eyes project, cheeks sink, mouths disappear, torsos become elongated; eye sockets expand to cover almost the entire face; the human face and figure are broken apart and formed again in new ways and proportions that had previously lain beyond sight of traditional European realism.”

sources: 1, 2, 3

anondo-deactivated20240630

I really find myself struck by how white the narrative of art history is. I graduated with a degree in art, took 5 art history classes, and never heard about this. Yes, please. Disrupt the narrative.

vintagecongo

Art history is really white washed especially when you look at the different art movements like Cubism. I think it also has something to do with where you study art/art history because I remembered I wanted to do art history for my undergraduate degree but couldn’t because of reasons and I knew that hardly any universities looked at the African continent but some did like University of London: School of Oriental and African Studies and if I did do arr history and has gone to SOAS I probably would have learnt this. It’s not like this isn’t being taught, the problem is that not enough institutions are teaching it. There are so many problems in the art world, don’t even know where to begin. There are resources out their if you look but I wouldn’t recommend blogs like medievalpoc because they’re a white person who pretended to be non white and is antisemitic and anti-romani they also don’t understand the fact that people living in the African and Asian continent are not poc because its a western racial construct which shouldn’t be applied to them and its a modern one so labelling them poc would make no sense (they need to stop applying modern constructs to non modern people) you can find a post with receipts if you check the tag. Anways, I also think if its something you specialised in then you would have known about it and understood it, if you’re focus is on particular types of art movements like Tonalism or Realism then you probably wouldn’t have come across it. But I do think things like this need to be taught in intro classes because it’s pretty damn lazy and wrong to ignore the impact colonialism (and different African arts and in this case Congolese arts) had on art in Europe

rgr-pop

Those male artists were simply imitating my illness.

Yayoi Kusama on Warhol, Samaras, and Oldenburg (among others) From this interview:

Grady Turner: The serial imagery seems similar to what Andy Warhol was beginning to do with his Flowers series, covering walls with an image repeated over and over.

Yayoi Kusama: Andy was a person who incorporated everything indiscriminately in his art as if he were running a wholesale business of imitations. Before he started doing his Flowers, he came to the opening of my One Thousand Boats Show and said with a stunned look on his face what a wonderful show it was.

GT: Involving the gallery walls in a sculpture exhibition was not very different from the installation art you would come to make. In 1965, you built a mirrored room and filled it with stuffed fabric shapes covered in polka dots, entitled Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field, orFloor Show. That made actual the implied infinity of your drawings and paintings.

YK: The original idea for this work dates back to my childhood. I was making paintings in small, medium, and large sizes then, without sleeping at night sometimes. Those paintings, 2 or 3,000 in total, were rapidly sublimated within myself and developed into sculptures. In other words, underlying the mirror room were my early paintings. To create an endless mirror room had been my long-cherished dream.

GT: What did you think of Lucas Samaras’s mirrored rooms when you saw them two years later?

YK: My reaction was, “He did it again.” I hope Lucas pursues the path of creativity and pain inherent in artists from now on, instead of following what Kusama has done.

GT: For your retrospective, the Museum of Modern Art recreated examples of your art that are no longer extant, such as the mirror room. What was it like to see your lost art after three decades?

YK: I am disappointed that more than half my artwork is no longer. Now I want to create greater artwork to leave behind for future generations.

GT: You’ve been compared to Pop artists by those who detect a Pop Art sensibility in pieces like Airmail Stickers, in which you covered a large canvas with hundreds of red, white and blue airmail stickers. Did you feel any affinity with Pop?

YK: Yes, I was in the vanguard of Pop Art, and regarded as a Pop artist by the people around me. I felt that America’s energy was trying to change its history. I was part of the movement.

GT: While you did reasonably well as a young artist in New York, you were eclipsed by male artists whose work was similar—one thinks immediately of Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures and Samaras’s mirrored environments, not to mention Warhol’s serial images. How did their success affect you?

YK: Those male artists were simply imitating my illness. I participated in a group show held at the Green Gallery in June 1962 with Robert Morris, Warhol, George Segal, James Rosenquist, and Oldenburg who I hold in high regard. Oldenburg showed a papier-maché sculpture then. The Green Gallery offered me a chance to hold a solo show in September of the same year, but unfortunately I had to decline due to lack of money. During that summer, Oldenburg was working fast to create soft sculptures similar to mine using machine-sewn forms. When I went to the opening of his solo show held at the Green Gallery the same year, his wife led me to his piece Calendar and said to the effect, “Yayoi, I am sorry we took your idea.” I was surprised to see the work almost identical to my sculpture.

(via thesacredarch)