The significance of African art is incontestable; at this stage it needs no apologia. Indeed no genuine art ever does, except when it has become incumbered with false interpretations. Having passed, however, through a period of neglect and disesteem during which it was regarded as crude, bizarre, and primitive, African art is now in danger of another sort of misconstruction, that of being taken up as an exotic fad and a fashionable amateurish interest. Its chief need is to be allowed to speak for itself, to be studied and interpreted rather than to be praised or exploited. It is high time that it was understood, and not taken as a matter of oddness and curiosity, or of quaint primitiveness and fantastic charm.
This so-called “primitive” Negro art in the judgment of those who know it best is really a classic expression of its kind, entitled to be considered on a par with all other classic expressions of plastic art. It must be remembered that African art has two aspects which, for the present at least, must be kept rigidly apart. It has an aesthetic meaning and a cultural significance. What it is as a thing of beauty ranges it with the absolute standards of art and makes it a pure art form capable of universal appreciation and comparison; what it is as an expression of African life and thought makes it an equally precious cultural document, perhaps the ultimate key for the interpretation of the African mind. But no confusing of these values as is so prevalent in current discussions will contribute to a finally accurate or correct understanding of either of these. As Guillaume Apollinaire aptly says in Apropos de l’Arts des Noirs (Paris 1917), “In the present condition of anthropology one cannot without unwarranted temerity advance definite and final assertions, either from the point of view of archeology or that of aesthetics, concerning these African images that have aroused enthusiastic appreciation from their admirers in spite of a lack of definite information as to their origin and use and as to their definite authorship.”
It follows that this art must first be evaluated as a pure form of art and in terms of the marked influences upon modern art which it has already exerted, and then that it must be finally interpreted historically to explain its cultural meaning and derivation. What the cubists and post-expressionists have seen in it intuitively must be reinterpreted in scientific terms, for we realize now that the study of exotic art holds for us a serious and important message in aesthetics. Many problems, not only of the origin of art but of the function of art, wait for their final solution on the broad comparative study of the arts of diverse cultures. Comparative aesthetics is in its infancy, but the interpretation of exotic art is its scientific beginning. And we now realize at last that, scientifically speaking, European art can no more be self-explanatory than one organic species intensively known and studied could have evolved in the field of biology the doctrine of evolution.
The most influential exotic art of our era has been the African. The article of M. Paul Guillaume, its ardent pioneer and champion, is in itself sufficient witness and acknowledgment of this. But apart from its stimulating influence on the technique of many acknowledged modern masters, there is another service which it has yet to perform. It is one of the purposes and definite projects of the Barnes Foundation, which contains by far the most selected art-collection of Negro art in the world, to study this art organically, and to correlate it with the general body of human art. Thus African art will serve not merely the purpose of a strange new artistic ferment, but will also have its share in the construction of a new broadly comparative and scientific aesthetics.
Thus the African art object, a half a generation ago the most neglected of curios, has now become the corner-stone of a new and more universal aesthetic that has all but revolutionized the theory of art and considerably modified its practice. The movement has a history. Our museums were full of inferior and relatively late native copies of this material before we began to realize its art significance. Dumb, dusty trophies of imperialism, they had been assembled from the colonially exploited corners of Africa, first as curios then as prizes of comparative ethnology. Then suddenly there came to a few sensitive artistic minds realization that here was an art object, intrinsically interesting and fine. The pioneer of this art interest was Paul Guillaume, and there radiated from him into the circles of post-impressionist art in Paris that serious interest which subsequently became an important movement and in the success of which the art of African peoples has taken on fresh significance. This interest was first technical, then substantative, and finally, theoretical. “What formerly appeared meaningless took on meaning in the latest experimental strivings of plastic art. One came to realize that hardly anywhere else had certain problems of form and a certain manner of their technical solution presented itself in greater clarity than in the art of the Negro. It then became apparent that prior judgments about the Negro and his arts characterized the critic more than the object of criticism. The new appreciation developed instantly a new passion, we began to collect Negro art as art, became passionately interested in corrective re-appraisal of it, and made out of the old material a newly evaluated thing.”
There is a curious reason why this meeting of the primitive with the most sophisticated has been so stimulating and productive. The discovery of African art happened to come at a time when there was a marked sterility in certain forms of expression in European plastic art, due to generations of the inbreeding of idiom and style. Restless experimentation was dominant. African images had been previously dismissed as crude attempts at realistic representation. Then out of the desperate exhaustion of the exploiting of all the technical possibilities of color by the Impressionists, the problem of form and decorative design became emphasized in one of those natural reactions which occur so repeatedly in art. And suddenly with the substitution in European art of a new emphasis and technical interest, the African representation of form, previously regarded as ridiculously crude, suddenly appeared cunningly sophisticated. Strong stylistic associations had stood between us and its correct interpretation, and their breaking down had the effect of a great discovery, a fresh revelation. Negro art was instantly seen as a “notable instance of plastic representation.” … “For western art the problem of representation of form had become a secondary and even mishandled problem, sacrificed to the effect of movement. The three-dimensional interpretation of space, the ground basis of all plastic art, was itself a lost art, and when, with considerable pains, artists began to explore afresh the elements of form perception, fortunately at that time African plastic art was discovered and it was recognized that it had successfully cultivated and mastered the expression of pure plastic form.”
It was by such a series of discoveries and revaluations that African art came into its present prominence and significance. Other articles in this issue trace more authoritatively than the present writer can the attested influence of Negro art upon the work of Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani, and Soutine among the French painters, upon Max Pechstein, Elaine Stern among German painters, upon Modigliani, Archipenko, Epstein, Lipschitz and Lembruch among sculptors. This much may be regarded, on the best authority, as incontestable. The less direct influence in music and poetry must be considered separately, for it rests upon a different line both of influence and of evidence. But in plastic art the influence is evident upon direct comparison of the work of these artists with the African sculptures, though in almost everyone of the above mentioned cases there is additionally available information as to a direct contact with Negro art and the acknowledgement of its inspiration.
The verdict of criticism was bound to follow the verdict of the creative artists. A whole literature of comment and interpretation of “exotic art” in general, and Negro art in particular has sprung up, especially in Germany. Most diverse interpretations, from both the ethnographic and the aesthetic points of view, have been given. On good authority much of this is considered premature and fantastic, but this much at least has definitely developed as a result,—that the problems raised by African art are now recognized as at the very core of art theory and art history. Ethnographically the most promising lines of interpretation are those laid down in Joyce and Torday’s treatise on the Bushongo and by A. A. Goldenweiser in the chapter on Art in his book entitled “Early Civilization.” Aesthetically, the most authentic interpretations are those of Paul Guillaume, who from his long familiarity with this art is selecting the classical examples and working out a tentative stylistic and period classification, and that of the accomplished critic, Roger E. Fry, from whose chapter on Negro Sculpture, (Vision and Design, 1920) the following is quoted: “We have the habit of thinking that the power to create expressive plastic form is one of the greatest of human achievements, and the names of great sculptors are handed down from generation to generation, so that it seems unfair to be forced to admit that certain nameless savages have possessed this power not only in a higher degree than we at this moment, but than we as a nation have ever possessed it. And yet that is where I find myself. I have to admit that some of these things are great sculpture,—greater, I think, than anything we produced even in the Middle Ages. Certainly they have the special qualities of sculpture in a higher degree. They have indeed complete plastic freedom, that is to say, these African artists really can see form in three dimensions. Now this is rare in sculpture. All archaic European sculpture, Greek and Romanesque, for instance—approaches plasticity from the point of view of bas-relief. The statue bears traces of having been conceived as the combination of back, front, and side bas-reliefs. And this continues to make itself felt almost until the final development of the tradition. Complete plastic freedom with us seems only to have come at the end of a long period, when the art has attained a high degree of representational skill and when it is generally already decadent from the point of view of imaginative significance. Now the strange thing about these African sculptures is that they bear, as far as I can see, no trace of this process…. So,—far from clinging to two dimensions, as we tend to do, he (the Negro artist) actually underlines, as it were, the three-dimensionalness of his forms. It is in some such way that he manages to give to his forms their disconcerting vitality, the suggestion that they make of being not mere echoes of actual figures, but of possessing an inner life of their own…. Besides the logical comprehension of plastic form which the Negro shows, he has also an exquisite taste in his handling of material.”
Equally important with this newer aesthetic appreciation is the newer archeological revaluation. Negro art is no longer taken as the expression of a uniformly primitive and prematurely arrested stage of culture. It is now seen as having passed through many diverse-phases, as having undergone several classical developments, and as illustrating several divergent types of art evolution. The theory of evolution has put art into a scientific straight-jacket, and African art has had to fit in with its rigid preconceptions. It is most encouraging therefore to sec an emancipated type of scientific treatment appearing, with Torday and Joyce’s historical interpretation of art in terms of its corresponding culture values, and in Goldenweiser’s rejection of the evolutionary formula which would make all African art originate from crude representationalism, that is to say, naive and non-aesthetic realism. For Goldenweiser,1 primitive art has in it both the decorative and the realistic motives, and often as not it is the abstract principles of design and aesthetic form which are the determinants of its stylistic technique and conventions. Of course this is only another way of saying that art is after all art, but such scientific vindication of the efficacy of pure art motives in primitive art is welcome, especially as it frees the interpretation of African art from the prevailing scientific formulae. Thus both the latest aesthetic and scientific interpretations agree on a new value and complexity in the art we are considering.
Perhaps the most important effect of interpretations like these is to break down the invidious distinction between art with a capital A for European forms of expression and “exotic” and “primitive” art for the art expressions of other peoples. Technically speaking an art is primitive in any phase before it has mastered its idiom of expression, and classic when it has arrived at maturity and before it has begun to decline. Similarly art is exotic with relation only to its relative incommensurability with other cultures, in influencing them at all vitally it ceases to be exotic. From this we can see what misnomers these terms really are when applied to all phases of African art. Eventually we will come to realize that art is universally organic, and then for the first time scientifically absolute principles of art appreciation will have been achieved.
Meanwhile as a product of African civilization, Negro art is a peculiarly precious thing, not only for the foregoing reasons, but for the additional reason that it is one of the few common elements between such highly divergent types of culture as the African and the European, and offers a rare medium for their fair comparison. Culture and civilization are regarded too synonymously: a high-grade civilization may have a low-grade culture, and a relatively feeble civilization may have disproportionately high culture elements. We should not judge art too rigidly by civilization, or vice versa. Certainly African peoples have had the serious disadvantage of an environment in which the results of civilization do not accumulatively survive, so that their non-material culture elements are in many instances very much more mature and advanced than the material civilization which surrounds them. It follows then that the evidence of such elements ought to be seriously taken as factors for fair and proper interpretation.
Indeed the comparative study of such culture elements as art, folk-lore and language will eventually supply the most reliable clues and tests for African values. And also, we may warrantably claim, for the tracing of historical contacts and influences, since the archeological accuracy of art is admitted. Comparative art and design have much to add therefore in clearing up the riddles of African periods and movements. Although there are at present no reliable conclusions or even hypotheses, one can judge of the possibilities of this method by a glance at studies like Flinders-Petrie’s “Africa in Egypt” (Ancient Egypt, 1916) or G. A. Wainwright’s “Ancient Survivals in Modern Africa,” (Bulletin de la Societé de Geographie, Cairo, 1919—20.) Stated more popularly, but with the intuition of the artist, we have the gist of such important art clues in the statement of Guillaume Apollinaire to the effect that African sculptures “attest through their characteristic style an incontestable relationship to Egyptian art, and contrary to current opinion, it seems rather more true that instead of being a derivative of Egyptian art, they, (2or rather we would prefer to say, their prototypes) have on the contrary exerted on the artists of Egypt an influence which amply justifies the interest with which we today regard them.”
But for the present all this is merest conjecture, though we do know that in many cases the tradition of style of these African sculptures is much older than the actual age of the exemplars we possess. Paul Guillaume, who has been the first to attempt period classification of this art, has conjecturally traced an Early Sudan art as far back as the Vth or VIth century, and has placed what seems to be its classic periods of expression as between the XIIth and the XIVth centuries for Gabon and Ivory Coast art, the XIth and XIIth for one phase of Sudan art, with another high period of the same between the XIVth and the XVth centuries. There are yet many problems to be worked out in this line—more definite period classification, more exact ethnic classification, especially with reference to the grouping of the arts of related tribes, and perhaps most important of all, the determination of their various genres.
A new movement in one of the arts in most cases communicates itself to the others, and after the influence in plastic art, the flare for things African began shortly to express itself in poetry and music. Roughly speaking, one may say that the French have been pioneers in the appreciation of the aesthetic values of African languages, their poetry, idiom and rhythm. Of course the bulk of the scientific and purely philological interpretation is to the credit of German and English scholarship. There were several decades of this, before scholars like Rene Basset and Maurice Delafosse began to point out in addition the subtlety of the expressive technique of these languages. Attracted finally by the appeal of Negro plastic art to the studies of these men, poets like Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars brought the creative mind to the artistic re-expression of African idiom in poetic symbols and verse forms. So that what is a recognized school of modern French poetry professes the inspiration of African sources,—Apollinaire, Reverdy, Salmon, Fargue and others. The bible of this school has been Cendrars’ “Anthologie Negre,” now in its sixth edition.
The starting point of an aesthetic interest in Negro musical idiom seems to have been H. A. Junod’s work,—“Les Chants et les Contes des Barongas” (1897). From the double source of African folk-song and the quite serious study of American Negro musical rhythms, many of the leading modernists of French music have derived much inspiration. Berard, Satie, Poulenc, Auric, Honegger, are all in diverse ways affected, but the most explicit influence is upon the work of Darius Milhaud, who is an avowed propagandist of the possibilities of Negro musical idiom. The importance of the absorption of this material by all of the major forms of art, some of them relatively independently of the others, is striking and ought really be considered as a quite unanimous verdict of the creative mind upon the values, actual and potential, in this yet unexhausted reservoir of art material.
Since African art has had such a vitalizing influence in modern European painting, sculpture, poetry and music, it becomes finally a natural and important question as to what artistic and cultural effect it can or will have upon the life of the American Negro. It does not necessarily follow that it should have any such influence. Today even in its own homeland it is a stagnant and decadent tradition, almost a lost art, certainly as far as technical mastery goes. The sensitive artistic minds among us have just begun to be attracted toward it, but with an intimate and ardent concern. Because of our Europeanized conventions, the key to the proper understanding and appreciation of it will in all probability first come from an appreciation of its influence upon contemporary French art, but we must believe that there still slumbers in the blood something which once stirred will react with peculiar emotional intensity toward it. If by nothing more mystical than the sense of being ethnically related, some of us will feel its influence at least as keenly as those who have already made it recognized and famous. Nothing is more galvanizing than the sense of a cultural past. This at least the intelligent presentation of African art will supply to us. Without other more direct influence even, a great cultural impetus would thus be given. But surely also in the struggle for a racial idiom of expression, there would come to some creative minds among us, from a closer knowledge of it, hints of a new technique, enlightening and interpretative revelations of the mysterious substrata of feeling under our characteristically intense emotionality, or at the very least, incentives toward fresher and bolder forms of artistic expression and a lessening of that timid imitativeness which at present hampers all but our very best artists.
1. See Goldenweiser: Early Civilization, pp. 25, 172–173, 180–183.
2. Phrase inserted.