Modern African art encompasses the diverse range of artistic expressions by Africans resulting from their encounter with modernity at the onset of the continent’s colonization during the late 19th century through to the decades of political emancipation in the 1960s. It is at once a product of and a response to the erroneous claim by colonialism’s European apologists, which was that African peoples, burdened by a primitive mentality, could not run their own affairs and lacked the intellectual sophistication necessary for the production and appreciation of high art. Thus the general absence of systematic modes of realistic representation in the sculpture of African peoples was usually cited as proof of African mental and cultural inferiority, despite the fact that European modernist artists looked to African sculpture as a source of inspiration for their own formal experimentation.
An important task the first generation of modern African artists set for themselves in the early decades of the 20th century, therefore, was to travel to Europe to study at art academies in order to dispel any doubts about their artistic competence. Familiarity with the academic tradition also provided the pioneer African modernists with the impetus to advocate for academic art instruction in opposition to the rudimentary arts and crafts training offered in the newly established colonial government schools. Moreover, this turn to rigorous realism at the moment it was being discarded by the European avant-garde in favour of symbolic colour and stylized and abstract forms, must be understood as the logical step for artists whose ancestors for the most part had mastered non-realistic modes on the basis of which the European avant-garde developed their own modernist styles. Realism, for the African modernists, constituted a true break from tradition, and thus an artistic equivalent to the aspiration for progressive modernity championed by the social and political élite....