African art's impact on Western art.

PAUL SOLMAN: Now for African art, as we know it, this is pretty naturalistic--as are this Yombe mask, worn by priests to connect with the spirits of the dead. In Yombe culture, masks were called "ngobudi," from the word that means "a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach." There's huge range to central African art styles, no surprise since the so-called Congo region, from which most of this comes, is home to more than 250 different cultures. But the African art that so affected the West is more abstract: simple and dramatic, startling and exaggerated. Above all, this African art packed an emotional wallop. In generalizing forms and emotions, its impact became more immediate, especially on the early masters of European modernism at the turn of the century; artists like Picasso.

RAMONA AUSTIN: What it did for the modernist was to allow them to get away from realistic representation, was to give them a visual vocabulary to use. It gave an idea about how to give a psychological truth to the human form or to any other figures or to a scene that they wished to depict.