Traditional African masks in the context of "Picasso's African Period"

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon, originally titled The Brothel of Avignon) is a large oil painting created in 1907 by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. Part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it portrays five nude female prostitutes in a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó, a street in Barcelona, Spain. The figures are confrontational and not conventionally feminine, being rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes, some to a menacing degree. The far left figure exhibits facial features and dress of Egyptian or southern Asian style. The two adjacent figures are in an Iberian style of Picasso's Spain, while the two on the right have African mask-like features. Picasso said the ethnic primitivism evoked in these masks moved him to "liberate an utterly original artistic style of compelling, even savage force" leading him to add a shamanistic aspect to his project.

Drawing from tribal primitivism while eschewing central dictates of Renaissance perspective and verisimilitude for a compressed picture plane using a Baroque composition while employing Velazquez's confrontational approach seen in Las Meninas, Picasso sought to take the lead of the avant-garde from Henri Matisse. John Richardson said Demoiselles made Picasso the most pivotal artist in Western painting since Giotto and laid a path forward for Picasso and Georges Braque to follow in their joint development of cubism, the effects of which on modern art were profound and unsurpassed in the 20th century.

Most African sculpture from regions south of the Sahara was historically made of wood and other organic materials that have not survived from earlier than a few centuries ago, while older pottery figures are found from a number of areas. Masks have been important elements in the cultural traditions of many peoples, along with human figures, often highly stylized. There is a vast variety of styles, often varying within the same context of origin and depending on the use of the object. Wider regional trends are apparent, and sculpture is most common among "groups of settled cultivators in the areas drained by the Niger and Congo rivers" in West Africa.

Direct images of African deities are relatively infrequent, but masks in particular are or were often made for traditional African religious ceremonies. Since the latter half of the 20th century, there are also several styles of modern African sculpture, while many sculptures are made for tourists. African masks were an influence on European Modernist art, which was inspired by their lack of concern for naturalistic depiction.