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The rebellion of Romanticism against classicism, and the resultant general enthusiasm for artworks that broke the classical mould, set the scene for the events that took place on the threshold between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Classical painting styles became obsolete: even its die-hard champions realised that classicism was in crisis. Historical and genre painting as featured in the Paris salons had taken to treating Leonardo’s dictum that ‘art should be a mirror-image of reality’ as an excuse for mere vulgarity in a way that the great Italian master had certainly never envisaged. Admiration for the ancient world had turned from slavish devotion to the works of Plutarch to the prurient sentimentality embodied in such works as Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Auction of a Female Slave. Similarly, the burgeoning interest in the attractions of the mysterious East had resulted in no more than a host of portrayals of nude beauties in tile-lined pools.

Henri Rousseau, also called the Douanier Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897.

Oil on canvas, 129.5 × 200.7 cm.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? Where Are We Going? 1897–1898.

Oil on canvas, 139.1 × 374.6 cm.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

At the same time, the quest for natural depiction, for reality of presentation, had stimulated the development of photography – which at one stage was a bitter rival of painting. After all, André Malraux quite rightly said that the one and only preoccupation of photography should be to imitate art. In an endeavour somehow to outdo photography on its own terms, painters resorted to copying three-dimensional nature in minutely refined detail, using myriad brushstrokes. This was in itself nothing less than an acknowledgement of painting’s incapacity and defeat. And such was the end of the Academy’s domination, which had lasted since the seventeenth century. The most liberated of the artists of the Romantic era no longer bothered much with reality of presentation: photography, by reproducing reality as an instant of three-dimensional history caught forever, caused the final departure from it.

The famous words of Maurice Denis, written when he was only twenty years old in 1890, take on a special significance in this respect. ‘Remember that a picture – before becoming a war-horse or a nude woman or a scene from a story – is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a particular order.’[4] It was the masters of the very early Renaissance years, already known customarily as ‘primitives’ in nineteenth-century Europe, whose work could be used to provide guidance in understanding the role of the flat surface as the basis for colour. And this heritage had the potential to lead to that new Renaissance which the future Impressionists dreamt of in their youth.

What the noted German philosopher Oswald Spengler called Der Untergang des Abendlandes, ‘the decline of the West’ (which was the title of his book), was also a powerful factor that increased the divide between artists who chose to look back to the system of the classical ancients and artists who had no truck with such criteria. Political Eurocentrism collapsed under the pressure of a complex multitude of pressures, and did so at precisely this time – the threshold between the two centuries. Yet by then European artists had already for some time been on the look-out to learn new things from other parts of the world. So, for instance, in their research into the ‘mysterious East’, the Romantic youth of the 1890s were also examining Japanese and Chinese art as part of a search for different approaches to the ‘flat surface’ about which Maurice Denis had written. Closer to home, Islamic art – ‘primitive’ in the most accomplished sense of the word – rose to considerable popularity during the first decade of the twentieth century, which increased following large exhibitions in Paris and in Germany.

Horace Pippin, Sunday Morning Breakfast, 1943.

Oil on canvas. Private collection.

Paul Gauguin, Eiaha Ohipa (Tahitians in a Bedroom), 1896.

Oil on canvas, 65 × 75 cm.

The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

John Bensted, The Rousseau Banquet.

Oil on canvas, 50.7 × 60 cm.

Private collection.

The biggest boost to the new form of Romantic art came in the form of a massive influx of works from the ‘primitive’ world – some from Central and South America, but most from Africa – that poured into Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, chiefly through colonial agents. Until this time, the only conceivable description of works of art from these areas was as ‘primitive’. The marvellous gold artefacts fashioned by native Peruvians and Mexicans, which flooded Europe following the discovery and colonisation of their lands, were regarded simply as precious metal to be melted down and reworked. Museums did keep and display items from Africa and the Pacific, but little interest was shown in obtaining them.

However, by the end of the nineteenth century, the territories of the world open to European exploration and trade had expanded so dramatically that far-off countries became objects not only of curiosity but also of study. A new science – anthropology – was born. In 1882 an anthropological museum opened in Paris. An Exhibition of Central America took place in Madrid in 1893. And in 1898 the French discovered a rich source of tribal art in their West African colony of Benin (called Dahomey from 1899 to 1975).

So it was that although the first Exhibition of African Art was mounted in Paris only in 1919, young artists had by then already been familiar with African artefacts for quite a while. According to one art-dealer, some of the Parisian artists had fair-sized personal collections from black Africa and Oceania. It is more than possible that the German Expressionist painter Karl Schmidt-Rottluff developed an interest in collecting such items even earlier. His fellow Expressionist Ernst Kirchner claimed that he had ‘discovered’ black African sculpture back in 1904, in the anthropological museum.

One event in particular marked a significant stage in the interface between European and African art, in that it presaged the rejuvenation of the former by the latter. The story was later narrated by the artist Maurice de Vlaminck and his friends.

Vlaminck was travelling back from doing some sketches up in Argenteuil, to the north-west of Paris, when he decided to stop at a bistro. There, he was surprised to espy – between the racked bottles of Pernod – wooden statuettes and masks, all of which had been brought from Africa by the bistro-proprietor’s son. Vlaminck purchased the lot there and then. Once he had got home he showed them to his studio-companion André Derain, who was so impressed that in turn he persuaded his friend to sell them all on to him. Presumably, Derain next took them over to Matisse’s studio to show him and the same thing happened yet again, because Picasso was amazed to be shown them when he was invited to dinner specially by Matisse. The story was concluded by Max Jacob, who recounted how he discovered Picasso the next morning poring over a stack of sketch-papers, on each one of which was an increasingly simplified head of a woman.

Vlaminck perceived what was the most valuable point of things ‘primitive’. ‘Black African art manages by the simplest of means to convey an impression of stateliness but also stillness.’[5] Nonetheless, having passed through the hands of Vlaminck, Derain and Matisse – all of them great artists – African sculpture directly affected only Pablo Picasso. Vlaminck dated this story to 1905, although most likely it actually happened a bit later. In any case, all the artists involved were by then in a mood to accept primitive art as a complete and entire phenomenon, not simply as a mass of individual and multifarious items.

Most significantly, Picasso gradually worked out how to reveal the primal nature of objects thanks to the expressivity of African sculpture. It was this discovery that provided the impetus for him to go on to develop Cubism.

Ivan Vecenaj, Dinner of the Night.

Gallery of Modern Art, Zagreb.

However primitive the sense of form presented by black African sculpture might seem to the European eye, it represented an aesthetic school that was centuries old and a tradition of craftsmanship inherited from remote ancestors. That a system exists means that it is possible to study it, to learn from it and to work to it. This is why the influence of African carving on European art has been so marked during the twentieth century.

Today, then, the art courses of many educational establishments focus on the interrelationship between twentieth-century painting and black African art, together with the influence of the art forms of native North America, Oceania and Arabic/Islamic Africa on European and North American artists from Gauguin up to the Surrealists. As art expert Jean Laude has said, the ‘discovery’ of black African art by Europeans ‘seems to be an integral part of the general process of renewing sources; it is certainly a contributory factor’.[6] It was at the peak of this wave of enthusiasm, at the very moment of ‘the decline of the West’, that the naive artists emerged. There was no need to go searching for them in Africa or in Oceania.