Cubist artists were heavily influenced by African sculpture. However, Cubist works make significant departures from each of the African sculptures they are reputedly derived from, and as Robert Goldwater has observed, these differences are at least as significant as the parallels.4 To cite one of his examples, the Kota figure's symmetry and frontality imbue it with a static quality that is entirely antithetical to the movement and energy of the dancer in Picasso's Nude with Raised Arms.
I would argue that this example highlights an important condition of Picasso's primitivism. He does appropriate certain formal qualities, but never does so without comment. He combines them with his own devices and associations to produce a work that illustrates, not his dependence on African forms, but his essentially imaginative and romantic conception of African culture.
In the case of Nude with Raised Arms, the scimitar-like forms suggest the convulsive energy of tribal dances in which such statues were used. These qualities are foreign to the original object, but appropriately convey the associations Picasso brings to it. Of course, these may be entirely spurious, the results of viewing them from a naïve Western perspective.
