Rich traditions of woodcarving among the Zulu, Shona, Sotho, and others have produced small figures as well as headrests, staffs, pipes, doors, and ceremonial vessels. Women made finely decorated pots, particularly pots for storing beer. Among several groups in Botswana and South Africa, women in the 20th century have used mural painting to express ideas about control over domestic space. Mural painting developed among the Ndebele in the 1930s and 1940s. It became a way of expressing ethnic identity on the isolated farmsteads where they lived after European colonists drove them out of their native homes. In the 20th century, African art has greatly influenced much Western art and the concepts of beauty that underlie it. For centuries, however, exposure to African art had little effect on European art. The concepts behind African art-its function in ritual and its emphasis on abstract patterning rather than representation-made it so foreign to European sensibilities that many Europeans did not consider it art at all. In the 20th century, a search for new artistic forms led European artists to look anew at the abstract forms of African art. Prior to the 20th century, anthropologists and others who were interested in African cultures viewed the objects these cultures produced as interesting cultural artifacts, but they did not consider them as art.
The earliest documented entry of a piece of African art into a European collection occurred around 1470, with a work that a Portuguese collector acquired from the kingdom of Kongo. By the late 19th century, many more Europeans were collecting objects from sub-Saharan Africa. They housed them in ethnographic museums, alongside examples of flora and fauna, as artifacts of exotic cultures. Wider recognition of the artistic value of African artifacts began in the early 20th century. Western artists at that time sought to break free from established artistic conventions, and in doing so they rediscovered African sculpture. Their enthusiasm for African art was based on form; Western artists had only vague and romanticized ideas about the cultures that had produced the art. Modern European art movements such as cubism, expressionism, and fauvism exploded with a new freedom of form that drew strongly on African art.
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