african sculpture:

carving wood

In almost all African societies, the most important role of women is to bear children. Whatever else – farming, cooking, or their role in women’s associations – their primary responsibility is to produce and nurture children. It is, as Cole puts it, a “biological imperative” or, as Dennis Warren states, a “cultural duty" (1974, 2.37). Indeed, certain groups, such as the !Kung, "do not consider a marriage consummated until the birth of a child"

This is the rule that children are not given a personality or character of their own, but are treated as extensions of their mother's personality"
Infants, in contrast, often appear in a secondary role, representing the productivity of the mother. To cite a parallel from life, one often sees a woman dressed up and carrying a child (not necessarily her own) as a sort of costume accessory. A woman looks better with a baby
no tendressness.

when the child is carried on the back, a woman's menstruation is suppressed and she practices sexual abstinence. . . . Thus images of women in ritual contexts and mother and child figures represent much more than symbols of fertility. They communicate sexual abstinence, inner cleanliness, ritual purity, female forces and spirituality

african sculpture and cubism

Picasso's African Period, which lasted from 1907 to 1909, was the period when Pablo Picasso painted in a style which was strongly influenced by African sculpture.

Starting in the 1870s, thousands of African sculptures arrived in Europe in the aftermath of colonial conquest and exploratory expeditions.

They were placed on view in museums such as the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris, and its counterparts in cities including Berlin, Munich, and London.

At the time, these objects were treated as artifacts of colonized cultures rather than as artworks, and held so little economic value that they were displayed in pawnshop windows and flea markets.

In France, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and their School of Paris friends blended the highly stylized treatment of the human figure in African sculptures with painting styles derived from the post-Impressionist works of Cézanne and Gauguin.

While these artists knew nothing of the original meaning and function of the West and Central African sculptures they encountered, they instantly recognized the spiritual aspect of the composition and adapted these qualities to their own efforts to move beyond the naturalism that had defined Western art since the Renaissance.

Modernist artists were drawn to African sculpture because: of its sophisticated approach to the abstraction of the human figur

The African sculptures, he said, had helped him to understand his purpose as a painter, which was not to entertain with decorative images, but to mediate between perceived reality and the creativity of the human mind—to be freed, or "exorcised," from fear of the unknown by giving form to it.

In 1907, after hundreds of preparatory sketches, Picasso completed the seminal Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the painting to whose faceted female bodies and masklike faces some attribute the birth of Cubism and a defining role in the course of modern art throughout the twentieth century.

He continued to make major paintings, sculptures, and sketches of mask-faced figures composed of fragmented geometric volumes.