Triumph of First Congress
on African Culture
The London Times August 12, l962
It is desirable that such people should know something first hand of what African artists are doing today.
Between the desirable and
the possible a gap may yawn, however; and it may yawn all the wider
if it be decided that such a congress should do the logical thing and
conduct its deliberations on African soil. Conceivably one man and one
only could have pushed the idea through in today's conditions; and that
man is Mr. Frank McEwen, Director since l956 of the National Gallery
in Salisbury. Mr. McEwen first formed the idea of the congress before
ever he had set foot in Rhodesia — at the time in fact, when he
was best known for a decade of valiant activity as the British Council's
Fine Arts Officer in Paris; and the taste of Africa itself confirmed
him a hundred times over in his intentions. But, backed though he was
by sympathizers in three continents, by several of the governments concerned,
and by financial contributions from the Ford Foundation and from private
sources in Rhodesia, negotiations took several laborious years and the
opening date had more than once to be postponed
The congress as it finally came into being was a triumph on almost every count. Delegates were
drawn from three continents and many countries and included many of
those who have done most to present us with a scientific idea of African
art, music, and history. The upper galleries housed an exhibition of
masterpieces of African art that would have embellished any museum in
the world; museums and private collections had rallied unsparingly to
the task of assembling what was by a long way the finest and it
was always a part of Mr. McEwen's grand design that the non traditional
African art of the l960's should also have a place. Ten regions in all
contributed paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and textiles, and outstanding
among the artists involved was a member of the National Gallery staff,
Mr. Thomas Mukorombogwo.
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The Dark Gift
Time Magazine, September.28, l962
African art, admired in the US and Europe as a rich creative tradition, has always had to fight
for recognition in its own backyard. To the natives who practiced it,
it was less art for art's sake than a deadly serious business of magic,
medicine, fetish and religion. To most white colonizers, African art
has always been a mumbo-jumbo sort of thing, proofthat the native
African lacked cultural instincts.
Last month an exhibition of African Art opened at the Rhodes National Gallery in Salisbury, Southern
Rhodesia, that gives a new perspective to the neglected cultural contribution
of Africa to the rest of the world. More than 350 works-many borrowed
from museums and private collections in Britain, Europe, and the US
make up the show. Bronzes, wood carvings, ironwork, masks, dance instruments,
fragments of terra cotta are there and compared, when appropriate, with
photographs of examples from the modern movement in Western art.
Cradle of Expressionism
Says Rhodes Gallery Director Frank McEwen: "The great attribute
of African traditional art is expressionism and the Africans had it
centuries ago." As everyone knows, Picasso, Braque, Brancusi,
etc., admired and copied African art. "The entire modern
movement in Western art owes a debt to primitive Africa, and that is
the point we are trying to make with this exhibition," McEwen
says."It is a fact that very few artists of contemporary style
do not possess some well digested but evident influences of Africa."
The Salisbury show is the most comprehensive collection of African art ever assembled. It ranges
from the terra-cotta pieces of Nok culture, 2000 years ago, through
the supremely realistic life portrait heads of the 8th to the l4th century,
to the Benin empire bronzes that mark the turning point from realism
to expressionism between the 15th and the 19th centuries. The most recent
pieces of traditional art in the show are wood carvings 50 years old.
The older things have survived because they are made of terra cotta,
bronze, iron or brass; millions of wood sculptures have been destroyed
over the ages by fire, termites, jungle damp or the iconoclasm of Christian
missionaries.
The exhibition thus provides ample proof that Africa had many cultures predating by centuries the
arrival of European influence. This realization gave the show different
meanings to white and black viewers. To one white viewer, writing in
the Rhodesia Herald, the show offered "nothing but crudity,
primitiveness, and savagery ... we are used to a culture that produces
artists of the caliber of Michelangelo, sculptors of the caliber of
Rodin But a serious and elegant Negro was led
to wonder whether the local Europeans were able to understand
anything of all this."
The inroads of civilization have so squelched traditional art that
little of it has been created in Africian communities for the past twenty
years; the magical and ritual reasons for it are on the wane, and in
its place has come airpor art designed more to please tourists
than to appease terrible gods. The exhibition at Salisbury also devotes
some attention to contemporary nontraditional art - painting and sculpture
that seem to repay the compliment to Western art by espousing abstractionism
or Rousseau-like primitivism. It also seems to cancel out the debt,
with the result that African traditional art, after having helped shape
the pattern for the West, has become a lost and forgotten art in its
own land. |
