The Africanization of the European Art: A Short History and Its Contemporary Evolution (19 th -21 st Centuries)

African art played a fundamental role in the development of European and international contemporary art. Nevertheless, its function is still scarcely ac-knowledged by critics, even if it has been crucial especially between the end of the 19 th and the beginning of the 20 th century. In this period, African art exerted an important influence on artists as Matisse, Modigliani, Brancusi as well as on Picasso and Braque, the fathers of Cubism. These artists, gathered under the “Parisian School”, drew largely from the African masks and sculptures, reshaping their style in original and revolutionary works. The research here presented aims at analyzing the history of this artistic influence, rebuild-ing the aesthetic, cultural and political environment of France in that period. Where this influence did not occur, as in Italy, due to the close relation between colonial experience and the advent of fascism, every form of metissage was hindered, and art was aligned with the regime’s aesthetics. The later artistic tendencies of the 20 th and 21 st centuries show that the influence of African art, transmitted through Cubism and other artistic avant-garde, became an international mark. Concurrently,, African artists created autonomous movements, in a path of interconnected autonomy in relation to Western art.


Advances in Historical Studies
Decadentism, officially started in France in 1883, with the publication of the sonnet Languer in Le Chat Noir by Verlaine. It marked the transition from an age of rational certainties to another characterized by irrationalism, return to spirituality, symbolism and all what the most profound and hidden the human soul had.
The group of poets gathered around the figure of Verlaine was called derogatorily "decadent", a definition which was assumed with a positive meaning by these artists, who founded in 1886 the magazine Le Décadent, a sort of official organ of the new movement (Mondet, 2006). In philosophy, figures like Bergson helped to provide a theoretical base for the new decadent movement: according to this French philosopher, the rational analysis would be only one of the forms of consciousness (and not even the deepest). It crystallizes and simplifies reality, whereas the intuition proceeding from the profound Egoallows a better knowledge of the man as well as the environment that surrounds him (Ribeiro, 2013).
In France, besides Bergson it is necessary to mention the work of Proust on the lost time. Here, once again, memory and search for a past time will characterize the interior path of the man.
Thanks to this aesthetic and philosophical context, French plastic and pictorial arts registered an interesting evolution between the end of the 19 th and the beginning of the 20 th century. Such process was due in large part to the contamination with a part of the art traditionally considered as exotic and inferior: the African art. As we try to show in this article, such encounter will cause an acceleration, in terms of innovation, inside the Paris School, whose consequences will last until today.

The European "Discovery" of the African Art
The first museum of exotic, or colonial art was opened in Paris in 1855 (Musée permanent des colonies), followed by the more famous Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadero (1878), frequented by artists as Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Brancusi and Modigliani. These museums represented a personification of the colonial vision of a vast and powerful empire as that of France in Africa. The opening of these museums was the climax of an attitude towards Africa and the Africans which had started and spread in France (and all over the Europe) since the conquests of Egypt by Napoleon, in 1798. For his expedition in the lands of pharaohs, Napoleon had taken with him 167 researchers, scientists and artists, who formed the Commission des Sciences et des Artes. It aimed to valorize the historical aspects of this military conquest. In 1809 24 volumes of the Description de l'Égypt written by Denon were published, in accordance with a plane, which associated the imperial megalomania of Napoleon with his cultural ambitions (Lechot, 2005 (Pellegrinelli, 2007). In the pictorial arts too, Egyptomania registered an exponential increase during the 20 th century, with representations of different artists on various subjects, but always in relation to Egypt and the Near East (Monneret, 1989).
Beyond the informative intentions of Volney and Denon, the Egyptian "myth"and thus the "African" myth-continued to nourish the artists' and poets' aspirations and the need of evasion from an oppressive reality, recovering another myth, that of the "good savage" of Rousseauian memory. Philosophers as Bergson and Proust contributed to rekindle this myth, although indirectly.

The Parisian School
In Paris, a group of artists of multiple nationalities, but with an aesthetic and political common sensibility-the deepening of subjects coming from decadentism, symbolism and abstractionism, associated to political tendencies in favor of anarchism and anticolonialism-showed a certain interest for African culture, starting from two points of view: the first one centered on aesthetic, in the footsteps of the legacy left by Egyptomania; the second one of political kind. In France, besides the theories of the scientific racism, an anticolonial and antiracist movement was promoted by anarchists and socialists. Such movements gave an an-  (Leighten, 1990). In 1905, in France, a Comité de Protection et de Défense des Indigènes was founded, accompanied with the publication of various texts and pamphlet against colonialism and racist theories. Alfred Jarry, an anarchist friend of Picasso, represented colonialism Advances in Historical Studies through satire, sustaining that exactly the hypothetical irrationality, symbolism, fascination would make African culture something higher than the Western one.
These ideas surprised the European and French audience (Leighten, 2013).
On the contrary, in other European countries this anticolonial propension was not so accentuated. For instance, in Italy the colonial "enterprises" were characterized by episodes as the defeat of Adua (1896-96) or the Italian-Turkish conflict for the hegemony in Libia . So, colonialist (and anti-colonialist) propaganda was not as effective as in France. Nevertheless, in the liberal Italy some institutional initiatives were carried out to improve the colonialist spirit, as the foundation, in 1906, of the Istituto Coloniale Italiano and, in 1912, of the Ministry of Colonies. Some publications also came up in this period, as the Bollettino della Società Geografica Italiana, the Rivista Geografica Italiana (Genduso, 2016)  In Paris, African art contributed to a radical change, the overcoming of positivism and materialism. "Exoticism" and "Africanism" were promoted by the artists gathered around the Parisian School. African sculptures began to be treated as real works of art, and not anymore as works of colonized cultures.
Thus, if traditionally they were sold for little money at the flea fairs, the artists of the Paris School began to attribute importance to these artifacts. Such tendency went down in history as Primitivism. Such word denotes the interest towards non-Western cultures, including the African and Oceanic ones, as well as the pre-Colombian and those of the Native Americans (Borgogelli et al., 2015). This new interest made artists collectors of African artifacts, so that, at the beginning of the 20 th century, rich collections of African art were created.
The colours used by the artists of the Parisian School changed; since these artists did not know the actual meaning that the African artifacts expressed, they introduced something new. It represented an innovation if compared with the accepted aesthetic canons in vogue at the end of the 19 th century (Shezi, 2019). In such manner African art gave a fundamental contribution to the development of the artistic avant-garde which characterized the beginning of the 20 th century.
African sculptures were used and declined in accordance with the aesthetic sensibility of the artists of the Parisian School. They contributed to the foundation of new movements also out of French, as Die Brücke (The Bridge) in Germany, and Modernism in the United States. Initially, the Paris School was influenced by painters like Gaugin and Cezanne. Both began their artistic career under impressionistic tendencies (in particular in the case of Gaugin) which aimed to valorize exotic iconographies, taking inspiration directly from their travels to Tahiti and Martinique (Balbino & Fernandes, 2018 (Huffington, 1998: p. 90).
In the case of Picasso, his encounter with the African art, especially with the statuettes of Gabon and Ivory Coast, influenced the forms of his paintings stiffened, appearing flatterer and simple, and the lines sharper. The first example of this new style is the portrait of Gertrude Stein, a famous American writer and a Picasso patron and friend, together with her brother, Leo.
Pablo Picasso, Retreat of Getrude Stein (1905Stein ( -1906 According to the witness of Stein herself (Stein, 1973) Picasso reached the climax of his "African" period with "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", painted in 1907. The style hinted in the retreat of Gertrude Stein became deeper, and the influence of the African art appeared more explicit. Here, the background is blank, since the simplification must also concern space, with two women who wear masks on their faces. This painting is considered the first example of Cubism, showing in one only dimension-that bidimensional of the canvas-all six views of a subject through the fragmentation of space.
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d 'Avignon, 1906'Avignon, -1906 Les Demoiselles would be, "not only unsympathetic to the art and life of established European culture, but its enemy" (Bishop, 2002). Picasso primitivism, based on African influences, is the definitive assault to the culture and to the European aesthetic of that period, in the name of the principle of the authenticity" and against the soothing and complacent European beauty. This painting was defined as the "great manifesto of modernist painting" (Leighten, 2013). The attention and importance of African art in Picasso was confirmed by the fact that he became an avid African masks collector, as the other founder of Cubism, George Braque, witnessed in many circumstances (Pennisi, w.d.).
As Picasso, also Henri Matisse too was not Parisien. He moved to Paris from  (Murrell, 2008). The movement of the "beasts" never officially joined and never was formally organized. What was common to these artists were the following elements: one should not paint according to the impression, but according to one's own interiority; the painting must not be the result of studies or preparation, but it had to be immediate and instinctive, freeing the colour from the real material and emphasising the light (Cricco & Teodoro, 2015). The four artists here considered represent a part of the sculptors and painters who, at the beginning of the 20 th century, in Paris, were influenced by the African art. They are a paradigmatic example which shows how Africa, with its apparently anonymous art, could contribute to the evolution of the Western and international aesthetic. This encounter permitted to overcome models and artistic values at that time still based on positivism or impressionism, in favor of a form of art more abstract and symbolic. Paris was the center of this aesthetic and cultural revolution, which was also connected with the above-mentioned political aspects and culminated with the Cubism of Picasso and Braque.

The African Art as an Absence: Notes on the Italian Case
Differently from what occurred in Paris, in Italy the fruitful encounter between local art and African art did not take place. This is due to cultural as well as to political reasons. Cases as that of Modigliani, illustrated above, or of the Florentin Alberto Magnelli, born in 1888, confirm this scenario. Magnelli, who became an abstractionist and cubist in France, explained the importance of the influence of African art on his works: "What attracts me most in black art is, first of all, its plastic force and the in-Advances in Historical Studies vention of the forms. Clearly, the meaning of these masks, of these fetiches, of these objects, their use and their charm interest me, but after the sculptural fact itself. As a painter, it is especially the 'way' in which these African or Oceanian sculptures have posted or solved powerfully their plastic problems, their expressive mean and the extraordinary richness of invention that they used to work and realize their artifacts, with an illimited time available, without any worries for the hours, the days or the months which they needed" (Revera, 2019).

The Leap towards Artistic Subjectivity
The Parisian School and Cubism received and elaborated the influences deriving from African art, which have contributed to the developments of the contemporary aesthetic in various parts of the world, inside and outside Europe. Nevertheless, from the Eighties this scenario changed. The artists of African, Oceanian, Latino-American origins became the front-runners of a new conception and perception of the art. Today, African artists are no longer anonymous, because they express their own, authentic art. From objects molded by diverse movements or artists, African art has become a subject, and the African artists its protagonists.
As a matter of fact, various artistic schools were founded in Africa or in other regions outside Europe.
In particular, in Africa, from the Nineties a new generation of artists has been growing. Their path was smoothed by the Paris exposition of 1989, at the museum of the Centre Pompidou. These artists gained fame all over the world. Here is some of them: Rafiy Okefolahan, who paints through tribal symbols for honouring his own origins; Ntombephi Ntobela, the woman leader of the group Ubuhle; Chèri Samba, who has exposed at MOMA, painting scenes of the daily Congolese life, with a good dose of irony; William Kentridge and his charcoal drawings which tell the history of apartheid and of the problematic political situation in South Africa, whereas his compatriot Feni painted the classic African Guernica, with the purpose to represent the violence and the atrocities of apartheid (Callerame, 2021).
Dumile Feni, African Guernica, 1967 The redemption of an endogenous African art is also taking place in other forms, besides those relative to artistic expressions of very high level: the request, by the African countries, of the artworks stolen by the colonizer countries and yet exposed in Western museums. Some European countries (particularly France and Germany) began the process of restitution of the African artworks in their possession. France returned Benin 27 artworks and others, even if fewer in number, arrived from Germany (Steffes-Halmer, 2021). Belgium returned some important artworks to its former colony, the Democratic Republic of Congo, as Germany made with Namibia (Bussotti, 2021). Despite a new attitude towards African artworks in the hands of the former colonizers, some important sculptures remain in Europe, as the Benin bronzes, statues of enormous dimensions and the symbol of the British colonization in Africa, yet conserved at the British Museum of London. Great Britain declined the request advanced by Benin government to have these bronzes back. This position was justified by UK deeming Benin unsuitable to keep such artworks. This shows a colonial attitude after more than 50 years that colonialism ended. Inside the African continent too some agreements were signed in order to return stolen artworks, as in the case of Benin and Nigeria.

Conclusion
This research aimed at analyzing how African art exerted a lasting and visible influence in the European and in the international art, starting from the Parisian School and from the new aesthetic and revolutionary canons of Cubism. The cultural and political milieu in France at the turn of the 19 th and the 20 th century favored the evolution of vanguards which absorbed, through an original elaboration, the African art. On the contrary, in a country like Italy, the cultural and political conditions did not permit to have a meaningful consideration of the African art. Thus, those contaminations which played a decisive role in the Parisian School did not take place.
The importance of the Parisian School was decisive; nonetheless, its artists, Picasso firstly-who when old denied the influence of the African art on his artistic work-manipulated the aesthetic canons expressed by African statues and mask to found new artistic conceptions and styles. In the United States the process of comprehension of African art was evident since the Harlem Renaissance, but it became more conspicuous with Pollock in relation to the indigenous American cultures and, later on, with the Black Abstract Expressionism. In this last instance the Afro-Americans gave voice to their art.
As a matter of fact, the deep comprehension of the art and its transformation from object of study and reflection of the "others" to a new, autonomous subjectivity occurred in the Eighties, when African artists became advocates of their own art. Furthermore, an African artist does not need to move to Europe or the United States to seek recognition or to learn the profession. Today, it is from Africa that these new artists work in accordance with their traditions and their aesthetic sense, proposing artworks and new aesthetic canons, able to interpret a reality, that of Africa, extremely globalized, but also culturally and socially far away from Western world.

Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper.