Modern artists admired African sculpture for its formal qualities, but a new exhibition aims to recapture its moral and spiritual meaning.
For Pablo Picasso and other 20th-century European masters, African art was a revelation—innovative, sophisticated and to their eyes strikingly modern. They insisted that the continent’s creative output be regarded not as mere ethnographic material, but as art in its own right. That understanding of African art, based almost entirely on its formal qualities, is still current in much of the art world today. But modernist criteria don’t take into account the cultures that made these works, or how the people who used them assessed beauty and utility.
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