L'Art Nègre et L'Art Océanien

In the early 1900s, wood sculptures from Africa (long regarded as curios in the West) suddenly caught the attention of Picasso and other artists who were intrigued by the stylized treatment—simple yet powerful—of human and animal figures. Their experiments with this “new aesthetic” announced the beginning of Modernism, the shift from realism to increasing abstraction. L'Art Nègre et L'Art Océanien is one of the earliest publications designed to introduce African wood carving as fine art to the public. The Smithsonian copy of this book has been bound to protect the original paper cover, a reproduction of an Oceanic tapa (bark cloth). The objects shown in the forty photographic plates are from public and private collections, notably the collection of co-author, André Level.