Black art
J. B. DONNE
African A rt Michel Leiris and Jacqueline Delange (Thames and Hudson flO 10s)
That African sculpture had at the beginning of this century a decisive influence on the development of painting—notably through Picasso's Demoiselles (IA vignon—is a truism uncritically repeated in every handbook on the history of modern art. The earliest recorded admirers of African objects in ethnographic collections were Emil Nolde and Jacob Epstein in 1902. The earliest collectors include Vlaminck, Braque, Matisse, Apollinaire (who wrote inaccurately but enthusiastically about it), and Picasso himself. At the same time in Germany the painters of Die Briicke were
making a serious study of primitive" art in general. It is therefore astonishing that- the viewing public has never taken to African art, though private collectors have -found it a very shrewd investment, while the art critics write of it with that gush which is the sure sign of ignorance. - • It was, in fact, the 'scramble for Africa,' the rush by the European powers to partition Africa at the end of the last century, sparked off by King Leopold of the Belgians' personal colonisation of the Congo, that led . to the sudden accumulation of a vast quantity of African masks and figurines in European museums. It is upon these objects that the popular conception of African art is based—unpleasant, surreal, terrifying. _ugly masks; crude, disproportioned, exaggerated, ugly figures.
But this is only one aspect of African art, and a recent one, comparable with, say, Euro- pean painting from the Impressionists to the present day. Wood has a notoriously short life in Africa—due to the heat and humidity and the ravages of termites—and hardly any sur- viving examples of African sculpture in wood are over a hundred years old. Moreover, masks in particular are almost exclusively associated with the so-called secret societies. The art of the African kingdoms is completelf different.
In 1910. a German ethnographer, Leo Frobenius. discovered in a sacred grove at.Ife (the holy city of the Yoruba kingdom in western Nigeria) a number of stone heads of surprising naturalism. Coming only a little over a decade after the discovery and removal to Europe of some two thousand bronze castings —many of them also naturalistic and extremely beautiful by European standards—from the kingdom of Benin in. southern Nigeria, these were long assumed to be due-to foreign in- fluences, and sources were looked for in the Mediterranean world, particularly among the Etruscans. On one point, however, everyone was agreed: the sculptures were old, far older than the utterly different masks and figurines.
With the development of radiocarbon dating after the Second World War, it became pos- sible to evolve a chronology of African art. The technique was first applied to the terra- cotta heads discovered in the tin mines of the Bauchi plateau in central Nigeria. These extremely attractive little pieces, usually some six inches high, are typically negroid in feature, with thick everted lips, high cheek- bones and bulging foreheads. Stylistically, they appear to be obvious forerunners of the wood carvings of the modern Yoruba in western Nigeria. Radiocarbon dating has shown this Nok civilisation, as it is now called, to have flourished between 500 Etc and An 200, a period that encompasses the rise of Buddhism, the Roman conquest of Britain and the foundation of the early Christian Church. With the dis- covery of its antiquity, African art had achieved respectability.
Respectability, but not widespread approba- tion. Nevertheless, publishers find it worth their while to go on producing more and more pic- ture albums of African art, shuffling a pack of familiar photographs, and often tacking on a text that runs along the same old ruts whoever's name is attached to it. It is therefore a great and rare pleasure to find a new book on African art that is a new book indeed, both in text and illustration. Michel Leiris and Jacqueline Delange's African Art does for once what all coffee-table books claim to do— integrates the pictures with the text—and for
once- the text is worth even- more than the pictures, which in this case is high praise indeed.
The authors are the two leading French ex- perts on African art, and work together in the Muse de l'Homme. Michel .Leiris, who was a member of. the great Dakar-Djibouti ethnographic expedition of 1931-33, had already a considerable reputation. -as a surrealist writer. He is therefore in a unique position to begin this book with a discussion of the early impact of African art on artists and writers in Paris, for many of the participants, though of an earlier generation, he has known personally. But his real achievement here lies in his en- larging of the whole concept of African art. Going back further than the Nok civilisation, he finds it possible to include the famous rock paintings of Tassili in the Sahara, and then sweep south to the Bushmen paintings of the Kalahari. He has some very important things to say about African aesthetics, a field in which few scholars have worked, and one is happy to find that the African sense of beauty is similar to the European, if differently - ex- . pressed. He is able to consider a mud hut in terms of architecture, and body scarification in terms of art. By showing us what Africans . find beautiful he has enlarged our under-.. standing.
Delange to discuss tribal styles n one ex- . 11 ., This has left little enough room for Mme i
tended chapter. In fact, she has. already done this at considerable length in her. hook- Arts.: et potpies de l'Af rique noire, .published last year. But where M Leiris has extended Ale d study of African art in range, Mme has extended it in geographical area, for' she includes East Africa and South Africa. This is unusual, but it is a signpost to the direction in which African art studies will shortly be going. Mme Delange, however, deserves another commendation. Over many years she has been an indefatigable archivist of provincial and pri- vate French and Belgian collections, and this is revealed in the picture research, for which she is responsible. Many of the pieces shown have never before been published, and some 9f them are unique.
When the art of Benin and then Ife was fii-St disCovered, and scholars were trying to find' a European, possibly Portuguese, or a trans- Saha-ran, probably Etruscan, source, I feel this was not on stylistic grounds alone, but because subconsciously there was the feeling, 'This-is not what we expect of African art.' What they expected was an art sauvage, an exotische pins!. They often failed, on the one hand,-to distinguish between different kinds of art, and, on the other, to discriminate between the masterpieces and mediocrity. Africa. like Europe, has its Bosch, its Botticelli, and its Bernard Buffet.
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