Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [16]
Much Native American art was inspired by visions. The shaman (priest-healer) would reproduce objects the gods communicated to him during a trance. Among the results of drawing on such subconscious impulses were extremely distorted Eskimo masks, among the most original art ever seen.
20TH-CENTURY “TRIBAL” ART
Among the many modern painters influenced by Native American art were Diego Rivera and Jackson Pollock, whose 20th-century works grew out of centuries-old practices.
Rivera, “The Liberation of the Peon,” 1931, Philadelphia Museum of Art. The part-Spanish, part-Indian Diego Rivera based his style on Mayan murals, even experimenting with cactus juice as a medium.
Pollock, “Bird,” 1941, MoMA, NY. After seeing Navaho shamans making sand paintings, Pollock began to use tinted sand and to paint with his canvas on the floor, saying, “On the floor I ... feel nearer, more a port of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides, and literally be in the painting [like] the Indian sand painters of the West ”
AFRICAN ART: THE FIRST CUBISTS
The main artistic products of tropical Africa were wood carvings, both masks and sculpture in-the-round. In form these objects were angular, off-balance, and distorted. For members of African society, they were sacred objects harboring the life force of an ancestor or nature spirit and had power to cure illnesses or harm enemies. On special occasions the figures and masks were removed from their shrines, washed, anointed with palm oil, and decorated with beads and cloth. In between rituals, the figures were considered so infused with supernatural power they were hidden, and women and children were forbidden to look at them. Although the moist jungle climate rotted many of these wooden objects, those that remain express the emotional intensity their society invested in them.
MASKS. Wooden masks were used in ritual performances with complex musical rhythms, dances, and costumes. For their full impact, they should be thought of in motion, surrounded by colorful garments and the rapid swaying and rustling of raffia skirts and arm fringes.
Masks were intentionally unrealistic: when confronting a supernatural power, the idea was for the performer to conceal his true identity behind this artificial face. For dramatic effect, carvers simplified human features in a series of sharply cut advancing and receding planes.
This freedom from European tradition is what appealed to Pablo Picasso — who became aware of African art around 1905 — and inspired the Cubist movement. Picasso described his reaction to African fetish masks this way: “It came to me that this was very important.... These masks were not just pieces of sculpture like the rest....They were magic.”
Their influence is evident in Picasso’s landmark painting, “Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon.” (Avignon was the name of a street in Barcelona’s red-light district, and the women were intended to depict prostitutes.) The painting was a transition point between Picasso’s African-influenced period and pure Cubism. Inspired by the distortions of African carving and in order to show multiple aspects of an object at the same time, Picasso painted the figures in jagged planes.
“Kagle” (mask), c. 1775-1825, Don, Rietberg Museum, Zürich. African masks were typically lozenge-shaped, with wedge noses and almondlike eyes.
Picasso, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” 1907, MoMA, NY. After seeing African masks, Picasso raced back to his studio to repaint the faces in this picture.
AFRICAN SCULPTURE. African carvers consistently rejected real-life appearance in favor of vertical forms, tubular shapes, and stretched-out body parts derived from the cylindrical form of trees. Since sculptures were believed to house powerful spirits, these wooden figures could wreak havoc or bestow blessings among the living.
THE FAR-FLUNG INFLUENCE OF TRIBAL