Pablo Picasso was an artistic, revolutionary mastermind, which has impacted the development of modern and contemporary art during the cubist’s art movement. Picasso is a Spanish painter born in Malaga, Spain in 1881 and studied art under his father before moving to Paris, France. While studying in Paris, Picasso found new ideas to practice new styles and experimented with a variety of different art forms. He updated his style with each further experimentation, leading up to his distinct movements: the blue period, the rose period, African influenced style, to cubism, surrealism, and realism.
During the time Picasso created his African-influenced Period (1907-1909), “…the aesthetics of traditional African sculpture became a powerful influence among European artists who formed an avant-garde in the development of modern art [ during the early 1900s]”
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He incorporated the non-Western elements of Iberian and African sculptures displayed in the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris. In his oil painting, “…Picasso uses a deep orange, rust, and brown color palette common to African wood masks. The simplified yet haunting forms of the figure’s face, with its long nose and large lozenge-shaped eyes and mouth, recall those of the Dan mask photographed by Charles Sheeler” (Murrell). African Dan masks are characterized by high foreheads, a pouting mouth, and a pointed chin. They are sacred objects used for protection and as a means of communication with the spirit world. The Dan people are from the western side of the Ivory Coast into Liberia. The painting has a pink, rustic tone to it which traces back to Picasso’s rose period. The abstraction and naturalistic, figural distortion functions from the African influences pave Picasso’s path to his future cubists work. After this, he went on to create significant works of distorted figural compositions of fragmented geometric