In the tradition opened since the implementation of the perspective in the Renaissance, the painter gave meaning to images similar. And now forms expressing the abstract structure and not the identity, simplified forms, distorted, created in primitive societies treated or wild, are carrying a much greater expressiveness, more responsive feel of the twentieth century that the waste from academic figures. These are the primitive arts, especially in Africa, who have thus revolutionized "the way of thinking" art !

The question touches the very meaning of painting and sculpture.

Matisse, Derain and Picasso saw these objects no longer curiosities like the settlers who brought in Europe and even "cannibalistic fetish" as it was then, but of art. And it was that the big news !

There are so negro art in the development of plastic signs that will ensure the development of the so-called "synthetic cubism". It is the negro sculpture which allowed Cubist painters to see through problems that the evolution of European art was confused and find a solution, avoiding illusion, led to the freedom they aspired.

Despised by Jules Verne who was telling the explorers of his first novel Five Weeks in a Balloon (1862), "they stumble in disgust, in a village of wooden posts that were meant to be carved," ignored the early the twentieth century, except the few visionaries that were Matisse, Derain and especially Picasso, African art has finally had the recognition he deserved in the second half of the twentieth century and particularly in the early twenty-first with the opening of the Museum of quai Branly.

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