Picaso and the Congo

If your brain would enjoy being tickled by a little art history, read on.

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 Pende and Songye peoples, who live int the basin of the Kasai River, one of the Congo's major tributaries.

It is easy to see the distinctive brilliance that so entranced Picasso and his collegues 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 enlongated; 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 the sight of traditional European realism.

















This is an excerpt from "King Leopold's Ghost" by Adam Hochschild. Hochschild is a professor at UC Berkley. His book is well researched, and, considered one of the authorititive texts on Congolese history.