Author: Francois Neyt
Publisher: 5 Continents Editions
ISBN: 9788874398317
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
"At the turn of the twentieth century, in particular Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse, and later the Surrealists, then others right up till the present day, Western artists have drawn on the arts of Africa for inspiration. How can this constant impact ever be measured? The same is true for the arts in Africa. Every sculpture carries within it the heritage of a people, culture, and artistic tradition in the originality of its forms. West Africa, Central Africa, and East Africa each has its own set of characteristics, within which the variety of the sculptures--always similar yet also always different--demonstrates the creativity of the ethnic group that created it. This book presents a remarkable collection amassed by a knowledgeable and impassioned art lover that combines sensitivity with quality--a quality of forms meticulously selected among different African cultures. It includes masks and reliquaries carved in Gabon, effigies and statuettes from Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa, and astonishing objects from West Africa, from Mali to Cameroon, the Koro and Mossi peoples, the Ejagham and Ekoi in Nigeria, and the Gouro in the Ivory Coast. An extraordinary collection of artistic forms that well merits its place in the universal patrimony of art."--Publisher's website.
African Sculptures and Forms
Author: Francois Neyt
Publisher: 5 Continents Editions
ISBN: 9788874398317
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
"At the turn of the twentieth century, in particular Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse, and later the Surrealists, then others right up till the present day, Western artists have drawn on the arts of Africa for inspiration. How can this constant impact ever be measured? The same is true for the arts in Africa. Every sculpture carries within it the heritage of a people, culture, and artistic tradition in the originality of its forms. West Africa, Central Africa, and East Africa each has its own set of characteristics, within which the variety of the sculptures--always similar yet also always different--demonstrates the creativity of the ethnic group that created it. This book presents a remarkable collection amassed by a knowledgeable and impassioned art lover that combines sensitivity with quality--a quality of forms meticulously selected among different African cultures. It includes masks and reliquaries carved in Gabon, effigies and statuettes from Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa, and astonishing objects from West Africa, from Mali to Cameroon, the Koro and Mossi peoples, the Ejagham and Ekoi in Nigeria, and the Gouro in the Ivory Coast. An extraordinary collection of artistic forms that well merits its place in the universal patrimony of art."--Publisher's website.
Publisher: 5 Continents Editions
ISBN: 9788874398317
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
"At the turn of the twentieth century, in particular Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse, and later the Surrealists, then others right up till the present day, Western artists have drawn on the arts of Africa for inspiration. How can this constant impact ever be measured? The same is true for the arts in Africa. Every sculpture carries within it the heritage of a people, culture, and artistic tradition in the originality of its forms. West Africa, Central Africa, and East Africa each has its own set of characteristics, within which the variety of the sculptures--always similar yet also always different--demonstrates the creativity of the ethnic group that created it. This book presents a remarkable collection amassed by a knowledgeable and impassioned art lover that combines sensitivity with quality--a quality of forms meticulously selected among different African cultures. It includes masks and reliquaries carved in Gabon, effigies and statuettes from Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa, and astonishing objects from West Africa, from Mali to Cameroon, the Koro and Mossi peoples, the Ejagham and Ekoi in Nigeria, and the Gouro in the Ivory Coast. An extraordinary collection of artistic forms that well merits its place in the universal patrimony of art."--Publisher's website.
Genesis
Author: Alisa LaGamma
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 1588390748
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 138
Book Description
The seventy-five masterpieces presented here, drawn from public and private American collections, are among the most celebrated icons of African art, works that are superb artistic creations as well as expressions of a society's most profound conceptions about its beginnings. All are reproduced in color and are accompanied by entries that illuminate the distinctive cultural contexts that inspired their creation and informed their appreciation."--BOOK JACKET.
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 1588390748
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 138
Book Description
The seventy-five masterpieces presented here, drawn from public and private American collections, are among the most celebrated icons of African art, works that are superb artistic creations as well as expressions of a society's most profound conceptions about its beginnings. All are reproduced in color and are accompanied by entries that illuminate the distinctive cultural contexts that inspired their creation and informed their appreciation."--BOOK JACKET.
Tribes and Forms in African Art
Author: William Buller Fagg
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art, African
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Book Description
Based on the exhibition Africa: 100 Stm̃me, 100 Meisterwerke, sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom at the Berlin Festival, 1964./ Includes bibliography.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art, African
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Book Description
Based on the exhibition Africa: 100 Stm̃me, 100 Meisterwerke, sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom at the Berlin Festival, 1964./ Includes bibliography.
African Forms
Author: Laure Meyer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Book Description
Illuminates an aspect of African art that has largely been neglected by other books. African sculptures and art can be difficult to decipher because they are more than tokens of "art for art's sake." African art is often based on religious and philosophical values. It is created not just for the patron but for the entire community, using a language of form to help the society to understand what cannot otherwise be put into words. Through an enlightening analysis of some continent's most emblematic artifacts, this book decodes African art by putting it in the context of the broader culture. It is thematically organized around key motifs to help you fully understand African art. 150 colour illustrations
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Book Description
Illuminates an aspect of African art that has largely been neglected by other books. African sculptures and art can be difficult to decipher because they are more than tokens of "art for art's sake." African art is often based on religious and philosophical values. It is created not just for the patron but for the entire community, using a language of form to help the society to understand what cannot otherwise be put into words. Through an enlightening analysis of some continent's most emblematic artifacts, this book decodes African art by putting it in the context of the broader culture. It is thematically organized around key motifs to help you fully understand African art. 150 colour illustrations
The Power of Form
Author: Ezio Bassani
Publisher: Skira
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
Many elements converge in the construction of a high-quality art collection, making it a fascinating, intellectual and emotional adventure, a journey of discovery and a labour of love. Formed over the course of thirty years by Udo Horstmann and his wife, the Horstmann collection is rather exceptional inasmuch as it offers a captivating vision of the variety of solutions adopted by black artists over the course of the centuries: nearly 120 extraordinary sculptures, figures, masks, household objects and weapons from Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Congo, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Swaziland, Mozambique, Kenya and Sudan. The origin of the artworks-- selected for their perfection transcending the mere utilitarian function-- touches all of the lands of the continent, including the southern and eastern lands rarely so authoritatively represented in other collections, and their execution covers an arc of time of several millennia. The presence of ancient works contributes to the demolition of the preconception that has weighed unfairly until recent years on African art, and that is the absence of evolution in the artistic creation of Black Africa, and therefore of any historic quality. This is a difficult negation to cancel if African sculpture is still often labeled as "primitive." Another meritorious quality of the Horstmanns lies in the fact that they chose the sculptures in their collection, not out of any generic passion for the exotic and neither for any abstract demand for representativity of ethnicity or significance or destination, but for their quality, for the enchantment of the "form," or better, ofthe "forms." Paging through the book, the reader will discover that the artistic creation, that is, the need to give "form" to the formless, is a common heritage of mankind, shared by the artists of Black Africa.
Publisher: Skira
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
Many elements converge in the construction of a high-quality art collection, making it a fascinating, intellectual and emotional adventure, a journey of discovery and a labour of love. Formed over the course of thirty years by Udo Horstmann and his wife, the Horstmann collection is rather exceptional inasmuch as it offers a captivating vision of the variety of solutions adopted by black artists over the course of the centuries: nearly 120 extraordinary sculptures, figures, masks, household objects and weapons from Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Congo, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Swaziland, Mozambique, Kenya and Sudan. The origin of the artworks-- selected for their perfection transcending the mere utilitarian function-- touches all of the lands of the continent, including the southern and eastern lands rarely so authoritatively represented in other collections, and their execution covers an arc of time of several millennia. The presence of ancient works contributes to the demolition of the preconception that has weighed unfairly until recent years on African art, and that is the absence of evolution in the artistic creation of Black Africa, and therefore of any historic quality. This is a difficult negation to cancel if African sculpture is still often labeled as "primitive." Another meritorious quality of the Horstmanns lies in the fact that they chose the sculptures in their collection, not out of any generic passion for the exotic and neither for any abstract demand for representativity of ethnicity or significance or destination, but for their quality, for the enchantment of the "form," or better, ofthe "forms." Paging through the book, the reader will discover that the artistic creation, that is, the need to give "form" to the formless, is a common heritage of mankind, shared by the artists of Black Africa.
Surfaces
Author: Leonard Kahan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 546
Book Description
Explores the power and potency of surfaces in African sculpture
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 546
Book Description
Explores the power and potency of surfaces in African sculpture
The Black Art Renaissance
Author: Joshua I. Cohen
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520309685
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 301
Book Description
Reading African art’s impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The “Black Art” Renaissance tracks a series of twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial period, the Paris avant-garde “discovery” of African sculpture—known then as art nègre, or “black art”—eventually came to affect nascent Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within this trajectory, “black art” evolved as a framework for asserting control over appropriative practices introduced by Europeans, and it helped forge alliances by redefining concepts of humanism, race, and civilization. From the Fauves and Picasso to the Harlem Renaissance, and from the work of South African artist Ernest Mancoba to the imagery of Negritude and the École de Dakar, African sculpture’s influence proved transcontinental in scope and significance. Through this extensively researched study, Joshua I. Cohen argues that art history’s alleged centers and margins must be conceived as interconnected and mutually informing. The “Black Art” Renaissance reveals just how much modern art has owed to African art on a global scale.
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520309685
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 301
Book Description
Reading African art’s impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The “Black Art” Renaissance tracks a series of twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial period, the Paris avant-garde “discovery” of African sculpture—known then as art nègre, or “black art”—eventually came to affect nascent Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within this trajectory, “black art” evolved as a framework for asserting control over appropriative practices introduced by Europeans, and it helped forge alliances by redefining concepts of humanism, race, and civilization. From the Fauves and Picasso to the Harlem Renaissance, and from the work of South African artist Ernest Mancoba to the imagery of Negritude and the École de Dakar, African sculpture’s influence proved transcontinental in scope and significance. Through this extensively researched study, Joshua I. Cohen argues that art history’s alleged centers and margins must be conceived as interconnected and mutually informing. The “Black Art” Renaissance reveals just how much modern art has owed to African art on a global scale.
African Art in Detail
Author: Christopher Spring
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674036222
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 152
Book Description
This book opens with the question, What is African art? The answer is a brilliantly colorful and detailed look at the myriad materials and genres, forms and meanings, cultural contexts and expressions that comprise artistic traditions across this vast and varied continent. Viewing artworks in their contexts--ancient and modern, urban and rural, western and eastern, decorative and functional--the book is nothing less than a virtual tour of African culture. Masks, textiles, royal art, sculpture, ceramics, tools and weapons--in each instance, the book features examples that reveal the most significant aspects of workmanship, materials, and design in objects of wood, stone, ivory, clay, metalwork, featherwork, leather, basketwork, and cloth. Photographs of each piece alongside close-ups of fine details afford new views of these works and allow for intriguing comparisons between seemingly unrelated objects and media. The featured details evoke the hand and eye of the most accomplished craftspeople across Africa, past and present. In sum, these photographs, along with Chris Spring's enlightening commentary, offer an experience of African art that is at once broad and deep, richly informed and intimately felt. They are, at the same time, a kaleidoscopic view of art from prehistory to gestures prefiguring the future.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674036222
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 152
Book Description
This book opens with the question, What is African art? The answer is a brilliantly colorful and detailed look at the myriad materials and genres, forms and meanings, cultural contexts and expressions that comprise artistic traditions across this vast and varied continent. Viewing artworks in their contexts--ancient and modern, urban and rural, western and eastern, decorative and functional--the book is nothing less than a virtual tour of African culture. Masks, textiles, royal art, sculpture, ceramics, tools and weapons--in each instance, the book features examples that reveal the most significant aspects of workmanship, materials, and design in objects of wood, stone, ivory, clay, metalwork, featherwork, leather, basketwork, and cloth. Photographs of each piece alongside close-ups of fine details afford new views of these works and allow for intriguing comparisons between seemingly unrelated objects and media. The featured details evoke the hand and eye of the most accomplished craftspeople across Africa, past and present. In sum, these photographs, along with Chris Spring's enlightening commentary, offer an experience of African art that is at once broad and deep, richly informed and intimately felt. They are, at the same time, a kaleidoscopic view of art from prehistory to gestures prefiguring the future.
Nok
Author: Peter Breunig
Publisher: Africa Magna Verlag
ISBN: 3937248463
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 103
Book Description
This book provides insights into the archaeological context of the Nok Culture in Nigeria (West Africa). It was first published in German accompanying the same-titled exhibition “Nok – Ein Ursprung afrikanischer Skulptur” at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt (30th October 2013 – 23rd March 2014) and has now been translated into English. A team of archaeologists from the Goethe University Frankfurt/Main has been researching the Nok Culture since 2005. The results are now presented to the public. The Nok Culture existed for about 1500 years – from around the mid-second millennium BCE to the turn of the Common Era. It is mainly known by the elaborate terracotta sculptures which were likewise the focus of the exhibition. The research of the archaeologists from Frankfurt, however, not only concerns the terracotta figures. They investigate the Nok Culture from a holistic perspective and put it into the larger context of the search for universal developments in the history of mankind. Such a development – important because it initiated a new era of the past – is the transition from small groups of hunters and gatherers to large communities with complex forms of human co-existence. This process took place almost everywhere in the world in the last 10,000 years, although in very different ways. The Nok Culture represents an African variant of that process. It belongs to a group of archaeological cultures or human groups, who in part subsisted on the crops they were growing and lived in mostly small but permanent settlements in the savanna regions south of the Sahara from the second millennium BCE onwards. The discovery of metallurgy is the next turning point in the development of the first farming cultures. In Africa the first metal used was not copper or bronze as in the Near East and Europe, but iron. The people of the Nok Culture were among the first that produced iron south of the Sahara. This happened in the first millennium BCE – about 1000 years after the agricultural beginning. While iron metallurgy spread rapidly across sub-Saharan Africa, the terracotta sculptures remained a cultural monopoly of the Nok Culture. Nothing comparable existed in Africa outside of Ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean coast. The oldest, securely dated clay figures date back to the early first millennium BCE. Currently, it seems as if they appeared in the Nok Culture before iron metallurgy, reaching their peak in the following centuries. At the end of the first millennium BCE they disappeared from the scene. There is hardly any doubt about the ritual character of the Nok sculptures. Yet, central questions remain unanswered: Why did such an apparently complex world of ritual practices develop in an early farming culture just before or at the beginning of the momentous invention of iron production? Why were the elaborate sculptures – as excavations show – intentionally destroyed? And why did they disappear as suddenly as they emerged?
Publisher: Africa Magna Verlag
ISBN: 3937248463
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 103
Book Description
This book provides insights into the archaeological context of the Nok Culture in Nigeria (West Africa). It was first published in German accompanying the same-titled exhibition “Nok – Ein Ursprung afrikanischer Skulptur” at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt (30th October 2013 – 23rd March 2014) and has now been translated into English. A team of archaeologists from the Goethe University Frankfurt/Main has been researching the Nok Culture since 2005. The results are now presented to the public. The Nok Culture existed for about 1500 years – from around the mid-second millennium BCE to the turn of the Common Era. It is mainly known by the elaborate terracotta sculptures which were likewise the focus of the exhibition. The research of the archaeologists from Frankfurt, however, not only concerns the terracotta figures. They investigate the Nok Culture from a holistic perspective and put it into the larger context of the search for universal developments in the history of mankind. Such a development – important because it initiated a new era of the past – is the transition from small groups of hunters and gatherers to large communities with complex forms of human co-existence. This process took place almost everywhere in the world in the last 10,000 years, although in very different ways. The Nok Culture represents an African variant of that process. It belongs to a group of archaeological cultures or human groups, who in part subsisted on the crops they were growing and lived in mostly small but permanent settlements in the savanna regions south of the Sahara from the second millennium BCE onwards. The discovery of metallurgy is the next turning point in the development of the first farming cultures. In Africa the first metal used was not copper or bronze as in the Near East and Europe, but iron. The people of the Nok Culture were among the first that produced iron south of the Sahara. This happened in the first millennium BCE – about 1000 years after the agricultural beginning. While iron metallurgy spread rapidly across sub-Saharan Africa, the terracotta sculptures remained a cultural monopoly of the Nok Culture. Nothing comparable existed in Africa outside of Ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean coast. The oldest, securely dated clay figures date back to the early first millennium BCE. Currently, it seems as if they appeared in the Nok Culture before iron metallurgy, reaching their peak in the following centuries. At the end of the first millennium BCE they disappeared from the scene. There is hardly any doubt about the ritual character of the Nok sculptures. Yet, central questions remain unanswered: Why did such an apparently complex world of ritual practices develop in an early farming culture just before or at the beginning of the momentous invention of iron production? Why were the elaborate sculptures – as excavations show – intentionally destroyed? And why did they disappear as suddenly as they emerged?
A History of Art in Africa
Author: Monica Blackmun Visonà
Publisher: Prentice Hall
ISBN: 9780136128724
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 560
Book Description
"Informed by the latest scholarship yet written for the general reader, this has been the first comprehensive study to present the arts of Africa in art historical terms. A History of Art in Africa covers all parts of the continent, including Egypt, from prehistory to the present day and includes the art of the African Diaspora. Many aspects of visual culture are given detailed consideration, including sculpture, architecture, and such quintessentially African forms as masquerades, festivals, and personal adornment. The arts of daily life, of royal ceremony, and of state cosmology receive compelling discussions. Throughout, the authors emphasize the cultural contexts in which art is produced and imbued with meanings." "Among the ancient works illustrated are masterpieces in brass, gold, ivory, stone and terracotta. Religious arts serving Islamic and Christian communities are presented, as are fascinating hybrid arts that periodically arose from African interactions with Europe, Asia and the Americas. Twentieth-century arts are explored as part of the vibrancy of modern Africa and as ingenious responses to historical change. 'Twenty-first-century African artists, and artists of the African Diaspora, are presented in the context of changing global economies and new theoretical positions." "This expanded and revised second edition provides a new chapter on African artists working abroad, and five new short essays on cross-cultural topics such as tourist arts, dating methods, and the illicit trade in archaeological artifacts. The illustrations - featuring a vast and rich array of images of artworks, archival and contemporary field photographs, explanatory drawings and plans, and individual objects displayed in museums and in use - have likewise been greatly extended, with many more pictures now shown in color."--BOOK JACKET.
Publisher: Prentice Hall
ISBN: 9780136128724
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 560
Book Description
"Informed by the latest scholarship yet written for the general reader, this has been the first comprehensive study to present the arts of Africa in art historical terms. A History of Art in Africa covers all parts of the continent, including Egypt, from prehistory to the present day and includes the art of the African Diaspora. Many aspects of visual culture are given detailed consideration, including sculpture, architecture, and such quintessentially African forms as masquerades, festivals, and personal adornment. The arts of daily life, of royal ceremony, and of state cosmology receive compelling discussions. Throughout, the authors emphasize the cultural contexts in which art is produced and imbued with meanings." "Among the ancient works illustrated are masterpieces in brass, gold, ivory, stone and terracotta. Religious arts serving Islamic and Christian communities are presented, as are fascinating hybrid arts that periodically arose from African interactions with Europe, Asia and the Americas. Twentieth-century arts are explored as part of the vibrancy of modern Africa and as ingenious responses to historical change. 'Twenty-first-century African artists, and artists of the African Diaspora, are presented in the context of changing global economies and new theoretical positions." "This expanded and revised second edition provides a new chapter on African artists working abroad, and five new short essays on cross-cultural topics such as tourist arts, dating methods, and the illicit trade in archaeological artifacts. The illustrations - featuring a vast and rich array of images of artworks, archival and contemporary field photographs, explanatory drawings and plans, and individual objects displayed in museums and in use - have likewise been greatly extended, with many more pictures now shown in color."--BOOK JACKET.