How the World Stole the Idea of Modern Art

African, Oceanic, and global indigenist art was a primary source for modern art’s radical new visual language. Catalog cover for the 1984 exhibition, Primitivism in 20th Century Modern Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, showing a Kwakiutl mask (Unknown artist, ca. 1880) and Pablo Picasso’s modernist Girl before a Mirror (detail), 1932

Paul Gauguin appropriated Japanese perspective, composition, and figurative invention. His signature use of outline was essentially authorized by Japanese art. Paul Gauguin, Vision After the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, oil on canvas, 1888 Hokusai, Sumo Wrestlers from the Hokusai Manga vol. III, 1815, color Woodblock, 7 x 4.5”

(left) Ando Hiroshige, Kameido Ume (Japanese apricot) Garden, woodcut, ink on paper, 1857, from the series, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (right) Vincent Van Gogh, Plum Tree in Bloom (after Hiroshige), oil on canvas,1887

Transformative influence of African tribal sculpture Picasso’s epiphany in June 1907 at the ethnographic museum in Paris “My first exorcism painting…. For me the masks were not just sculptures. They were magical objects...intercessors...against everything - against unknown threatening spirits....They were weapons . . . to keep people from being ruled by spirits. To help them free themselves. . . . If we give a form to these spirits, we become free."

Tokyo

(left, above) Unknown, Portrait of Perry, a North American, woodblock print, ca. 1854 (right) Mathew Brady, Commodore Matthew Perry, daguerreotype, c. 1856 (below) Utagawa (Gountei) Sadahide, Complete Picture of The Newly Opened Port of Yokohama, woodblock, 1863, c. 27 x 75“ (69 x 190 cm) In 1854 Commodore Perry of the US Navy forced Japan open to trade with the United States

Yoshikazu, Picture of Foreigners Enjoying a Banquet, December 1860, Yokohama, color woodblock Children dance at the May Festival Ball given in honor of the Japanese ambassadors Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 6, 1860

Utagawa Hiroshige, Picture of Prosperous America, 1861 Utagawa Hiroshige, Picture of Prosperous America, 1861. Color woodblock print, 15 in. x 10 in.

The Emperor Meiji, 1873, albumen silver print During the Meiji era (1868-1912) Japan modernized rapidly and rose to world power status equivalent to Western nations. Western military dress and photography signify modernity.

For the best artistic minds, Paris alone has the right feel, the proper atmosphere. Iwamura Toru The Art Students of Paris, 1902 Academic study by Henri Matisse, 1892 Academic studies by Japanese artists sent to study in Paris: (left) Kuroda Seiki,1889; (right) Kume Keiichiro, 1887. The nude was the foundation subject for academic students of Western art from all over the world.

Tokyo-Paris: Parallel Modernisms (left) Asai Chu (Japanese, 1856-1907), Fields in Spring , oil on canvas, 1888 (right) Camille Pissarro (Caribbean-born French, ca.1830-1903) Gleaners, oil on canvas,1889 Tokyo-Paris: Parallel Modernisms

(left) Yorozu Tetsugoro, Self Portrait with Red Eyes, oil on canvas, 1912 – Expressionist / Cubist / Futurist (right) Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (German Expressionist, 1880-1938), Self Portrait with Model, oil on canvas, 1910

São Paulo

Cover of exhibition catalogue for the Week of Modern Art, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1922, held during the celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of independence from Portugal.

(left) Tarsila do Amaral (Brazilian painter, 1886-1973), Self-Portrait, oil on paper, 15 in. H, 1924 (right) Tarsila do Amaral, 1922, Portrait of Oswald de Andrade (Brazilian poet and Tarsila’s partner, 1890-1954), author of the Pau-Brazil manifesto (1924) and the Anthropophagite manifesto (1928): assertions of Brazilianness against Eurocentric modernism

(left) Tarsila do Amaral, Central Railway of Brazil, 1924, oil, 56 in (left) Tarsila do Amaral, Central Railway of Brazil, 1924, oil, 56 in. H, Sâo Paulo, A Pau Brazil landscape (right) Fernand Léger (French Cubist, 1881-1955) The City, 1919

(left) Tarsila do Amaral, An Angler, c (left) Tarsila do Amaral, An Angler, c. 1925 (right) Carnival in Madureira, 1924, oil on canvas, 30 in. H Cubist influenced Pau-Brazil paintings inspired by 1924 travels in rural Brazil with Oswald de Andrade and French poet, Blaise Cendrars Tarsila do Amaral Palette signifies “Brazil” versus “Europe”: “…colors I had adored as a child. I was later taught they were ugly and unsophisticated.”

“Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu (“Man who eats” in Tupi-Guarani), 1928, oil, 33½”(84 cm) high. Inspired Andrade’s “Anthropophagite Manifesto” in which cannibalism becomes the metaphor for Brazil’s transformation of European culture. “Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. The world's only law. The masked expression of all individualisms, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties. Oswald de Andrade, 1928 Anthropophagite Manifesto Tarsila Do Amaral

Lagos

(left) Aina Onabolu (Nigerian, 1882-1963), Portrait of a Lawyer, oil, c. 1910 (right) Egungun Mask, Yoruba people, Nigeria, late 19th/early 20th century Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, icon of avant-garde painting

Shrine head, Yoruba. Ife, Nigeria. 12th-14th c., terracotta, 12 x 7 in. (31.1 x 18.4 cm). Minneapolis MA

British marines with loot from Punitive Exhibition of 1897, Benin, Nigeria

(left) Aina Onabolu, Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait (left) Aina Onabolu, Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?), watercolor on board, 1954 (right) Onabolu, Nude Study, drawing, 1920(?)

(left) Uche Okeke, Ana Mmuo (Land of the Spirits), 1961, oil on board, 36 x 48” (right) Members of the Zaria Art Society, came together as students at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology at Zaria in the northern region of Nigeria. Sitting from left to right: Bruce Onobrakpeya, Yusuf Grillo, Uche Okeke, and Demas Nwoko. Back Row: Oseloka Osadebe, Ogbonaya Nwagbara, and Okechukwu Odita. “Young artists in a new nation, that is what we are! We must grow with the new Nigeria and work to satisfy her traditional love for art or perish with our colonial past.” —Uche Okeke, from the “Zaria Art Society Manifesto,” Natural Synthesis, 1960

“Art, like language, lives by appropriation and assimilation “Art, like language, lives by appropriation and assimilation. Why then should this self-evidence be made a western monopoly, while we, the Others, when we take up, learn and appropriate are stamped as imitators and parrots?” Everlyn Nicodemus “The Centre of Otherness”