Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. Very light tan to page edges. Images are bright and vivid. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The Portuguese navigators who first explored the West African coast in the late fifteenth century brought home finely-embroidered raffia cloths from the Kongo as prized examples of African design. Like the carpets and silks import- ed into Europe from Turkey and the Far East cloths and mats from equatorial Africa sometimes adorned the houses of wealthy nobles and merchants. Early in the twentieth century. abstractly ornamented raffia cloths from the Kuba kingdom in the interior of Zaire were to inspire artists such as Henri Matisse and Paul Klee as part of a wider European interest in the arts of Africa and other supposedly “primitive” areas of the world. However for much of this century African textiles have been neglected even by enthusiasts for African art and it is only very recently that interest has grown prompted to a large degree by the rediscovery of African designs inspired by the Pan-Africanist ideology of the 1960s. In the decades since then many more Africans have migrated to the cities of western Europe and America. These new diasporas have caused a blossoming of interest in clothing styles that have devel- oped out of ancestral traditions but embrace the fashions of the contemporary world. In addition to the raffia cloths of Zaire. The Art of African Textiles looks at Ghanaian kente cloths which have their roots in the unraveling of European silks to reweave elaborate royal cloths for Ashanti kings the black and white bogolanfini mud cloth of Mali. the Aso oke narrow-strip cloth that spread from the old Yoruba empire of Qyo and. finally at the wax-printed fabric that duminates African dress today. (MP)