African Influences on Modern Artists.

During the early 1900s, the aesthetics of traditional African sculpture became a powerful influence among European artists who formed an avant-garde in the development of modern art. In France, 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. The resulting pictorial flatness, vivid color palette, and fragmented Cubist shapes helped to define early modernism. 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.

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/aima/hd_aima.htm

Kehinde Wiley (born in Los Angeles, California in 1977)is a New York based painter who is known for his paintings of contemporary urban African American men in poses taken from the annals of art history. He has created large, vibrant, highly patterned paintings of young African American men wearing the latest in hip hop street fashion. The theatrical poses and objects in the portraits are based on well-known images of powerful figures drawn from seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Western art.

"In Wiley’s hands, Ice T channels Napoleon"

Ice T
Kehinde Wiley, 2005
Oil on canvas


Napoleon on his Imperial throne
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres 1806.


Kehinde Wiley sends powerfull messeges through all of his paintings. He describes his approach as "interrogating the notion of the master painter, at once critical and complicit." Wiley’s figurative paintings "quote historical sources and position young black men within that field of power.” In this manner, Wiley’s paintings fuse history and style in a unique and contemporary manner.