Before Picasso, There Was Africa

With the rise of a new wave of African abstract artists, the rigid definitions that have traditionally framed African art are being challenged. Yet abstraction has always belonged on the continent and has long played a central role in shaping the global art narrative.

Before Picasso, Matisse, and Modigliani, there was a vibrant continent already exploring surrealism, symbolism, and non-literal form. The characteristics of classical African art helped shape some of the most recognisable Western movements, including Cubism, Fauvism, and Expressionism. So why isn’t this influence more commonly recognised?

In this article, we’ll explore how abstraction in African art laid the groundwork for Western innovation and how today’s artists continue to evolve this tradition on their own terms, reframing global narratives in the process.

From Masks to Modernism: Africa’s Mark on Western Art

 

Abstraction, as a visual language, has existed in traditional African art for generations, long before it was defined and named in the West. Across regions and cultures, African artists have long used distortion, geometry, and symbolic form to communicate ancestral presence, spiritual authority, and social meaning. These techniques were never decorative but purposeful, culturally embedded choices that shaped how stories were told and identities expressed.

Masks, sculptures, and textiles created within these traditions were rich in stylised features, repetition, and asymmetry. Traditional crafts, such as the Kanaga mask of the Dogon people or the Pwo mask of the Chokwe, weren't created for display but for ritual, movement and spiritual embodiment. Their abstraction was a way of bridging the visible and invisible worlds, a form of expression that resonated deeply.

When these objects appeared in European museums in the early 20th century, they were often stripped of context, displayed as curiosities rather than living expressions of culture.  Yet for artists like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Amedeo Modigliani, these works sparked an artistic awakening. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), for example, began as a study of Iberian sculpture but took a radical turn after he visited the ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadéro. He repainted two of the faces, drawing directly from African masks he had seen there, marking the beginning of what art historians now call his African Period (1907–1909). The painting’s initial reception was one of shock, with Matisse himself reportedly calling it a hoax. It wasn’t exhibited publicly until 1916.

Matisse, meanwhile, was collecting African sculpture and had travelled to Algeria, Morocco, and Spain to study Islamic and Moorish art. His 1908 piece Seated Figure reflects a flattening of form and elongation of limbs that mirrors West and Central African carvings. And for Modigliani, the influence was even more direct. His stylised portraits with elongated necks, simplified facial features, and almond-shaped eyes drew inspiration from mask designs found among the Fang, Baule, and other groups.

 

Amedeo Modigliani, Portrait of a Polish Woman (1919)

  

 

Traditional Dan carving, Feast Ladle (Wunkermian), Brooklyn Museum, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

These artists may not have fully understood the spiritual or cultural significance behind what they saw, but the visual language left a mark. African abstract art, arguably, gave Western modernists permission to break away from realism; to distort, to reduce, to explore.

Tradition in Transition: Where Contemporary African Abstract Artists Draw Inspiration

While traditional African abstraction often served ceremonial, spiritual, or communal purposes, today’s artists are reimagining those visual languages through new contexts. The visual codes, such as symmetry, distortion, repetition, and symbolic colour, remain, but their meaning evolves with the artist’s experience. Modern African abstract art is not an echo of the past, but a continuation of it, shaped by memory, migration, and the need to express complex realities.

Many contemporary artists draw from cultural heritage while responding to current conditions. This intersection gives rise to a layered, living practice. Their work may not serve ritual or ancestral obligation in the traditional sense, but it still engages with the unseen, the emotional, and the symbolic.

Major Themes in Contemporary African Abstract Art

1. Sociopolitical Realities

Contemporary African abstract artists often use abstraction to address postcolonial legacies, national identity, and questions of visibility. Abstraction allows space to speak without speaking to embed tension, resistance, or vulnerability into texture, rhythm, and colour. While the work may not be overtly political, it often carries subtle commentary on land, power, dislocation, and cultural erasure.

2. Cultural Heritage and Visual Memory

Traditional African motifs, such as woven patterns, scarification marks, and symbolic geometries, are frequently reinterpreted in modern abstract works. Artists may reference these forms directly or allow them to surface intuitively through the process. Materials and techniques also serve as a connection point: the use of raw canvas, natural pigments, or layered textures can reflect a dialogue between inherited and invented forms.

Take Babatunde Kesa, for instance. His abstract compositions are shaped by the pulse of Lagos, layered, fragmented, and expressive, but the presence of rhythm, repetition, and emotional weight connects his work to something far older. His process feels spontaneous, but it speaks to deeper cultural memory.

3. Spirituality and the Natural World

The relationship between the physical and spiritual remains a strong undercurrent in African abstract art. Many artists, even when working in urban or diasporic settings, create works that gesture toward intangible forces: breath, presence, ancestry, or cosmology. There’s a quiet reverence that runs through the work, not always religious, but often deeply connected to a way of seeing the world that embraces mystery and energy.

Helen Zeray, for example, blends a Western visual style with deeply personal reflections on displacement, belonging, and emotional terrain. Her compositions, though abstract in form, are rooted in feeling, navigating identity through intuitive movement and layered surface. The result is a visual language that feels diasporic but spiritually tethered.

What distinguishes today’s artists from their predecessors is not the language they use, but how and why they use it. In their hands, abstraction becomes a tool of reflection, reclamation, and renewal. The tradition has not been broken. It has shifted, reinterpreted by each artist who chooses to speak through it.

Resetting the Frame: Not New, Always Been

 

When we consider the long influence of African abstraction on Western art movements, perhaps we need to rethink how we frame its presence on the global stage. Because it’s not a novelty but a new generation continuing a visual tradition. The increasing global presence of African abstract art isn’t the arrival of something new, but a reclamation of a visual language the continent has long practised and shaped.

As interest and demand for African art continue to grow, it becomes even more important to educate audiences about where these visual languages originate, what they carry, and why they matter. The dialogue needs to shift: African artists are not simply fitting into existing frameworks; they’ve always helped shape them.

If you’re looking to engage with this tradition thoughtfully and authentically, Artamine offers a curated collection of contemporary African abstract art from emerging and established artists across the continent. Every piece tells a story rooted in heritage, expression, and vision. Own a piece of legacy today.

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