April 2010

Art, Craft Or Curio: An Introduction To African Art

The beautiful weather and a combination of ignorance and uncertainty about the subject left many people a little reluctant to attend the April meeting of Farnham Nadfas at the Maltings on 20th April but how wrong they would have been to miss it. The topic was Art, Craft or Curio: an Introduction to African Art and the speaker was Nirvana Romell, a Croatian art historian with a wide knowledge of Mediterranean art as well as of African artefacts.

Mrs. Romell’s intention was to provide a framework for understanding sub-Saharan tribal traditional art and this she did with humour and eloquent English.  She described the development of her own interest in the subject, starting from a market in Johannesburg, and the difficulty of studying a subject where the paradigms of European art history have no parallel.  There were no pan-continental art movements in Africa, such as the Renaissance or Impressionism in Europe. Instead art-forms are local, often tribal, and closely linked to the available raw materials.  Thus the carved masks come from equatorial regions where wood is plentiful and not from the drier south.

The middle section of the lecture consisted of comparisons between African and European artefacts at various times in our histories.  The stone-carving on Chartres Cathedral, was produced at about the same time as the Ife culture in Nigeria was casting stunning bronze heads.  Perhaps the most striking of these comparisons was Picasso’s use of an African tribal mask, which he owned, to provide the face of one of the Demoiselles d’Avignon.  Traditional tribal art was a strong influence on Modernism, not least because in African art originality is all important, so if a mask resembles its wearer, it is a poor mask.  There is no need for a copy when the original exists.  This thought might be consoling to the vanity of some who have sat for modern artists.  Works by Matisse, Modigliani, and Giacometti also provided parallels.

The final section dealt with a theme which does unite sub-Saharan art, its functionalism.  Outside wealthy royal courts like Benin, artwork was not for decoration but for a purpose. It therefore falls into five main categories:- masks; totems and sacred figures; fetish figures; communication; and practical objects such as stools.  Mrs Romell showed many examples of each and used them to illuminate African traditional culture, often amusingly.  Lines around the neck of a human figure represent rolls of fat and indicate health and strength, i.e. well-fed.  Occupational groups, such as female teachers, might have their own style of mask and in general masks depict social organisation, including, of course, the continuing presence of the ancestors.  Animals were often regarded as sacred because of their duality, like the rooster linked to both night and day.

All in all it was a fascinating introduction to the subject, leaving even those who did not know they were interested with a desire to learn more. 

Copy by Jan Herbert