The Blondiau-Theatre Arts Collection of Primitive African Art, assembled as a private collection by a Belgian connoisseur, M. Raoul Blondiau, during a period of twenty-five years, was acquired last summer by Theatre Arts Monthly and is being exhibited not only to bring to America a fine representation of this increasingly prized primitive art, but also to promote the contribution which it can make to contemporary art and life. There are other notable branches of African art besides that of the Congo, which this collection chiefly represents. Each region has some outstanding superiority of form and pattern. But Congo art is varied and typical, and the Blondiau-Theatre Arts Collection represents a range of objects, types and materials, unusual in its scope.
The entire collection, of which approximately half is being exhibited, comprises nearly a thousand items from all branches of Congo arts and crafts,—the famous Bushongo wood sculpture, ivory and horn carving, applied decoration, metal work, weaving and pottery. It presents a particularly representative view of the best work of the most artistic tribes,—the Bakuba, Bakongo, and Bangongo subdivisions of the Bushongo nation. Their work reflects a tradition of style and an accumulated technique stretching back through hundreds of generations. Their art in sculpture and metal work reached a classic stage from two hundred and fifty to three hundred years ago. From this period and its reflection in subsequent work, the best examples of Congo art come. It is, in fact, only recently that the primitive art crafts have broken down under the competition of imported machine products and the forced imitation of European standards and ideas.
During the very decades when it has been in process of dying out in its homeland, African Art has been exerting a vigorous and fruitful influence on European art. Through many of its greatest masters, modern art has registered its indebtedness to African art—Picasso, Braque, Modigliani, Lipchitz, Archipenko, Lehmbruck, Brancusi and others. Their employment of its idioms have rediscovered it to us as one of the notable phases of human art expression. Guillaume and Munro credit African art, especially “its way of building up a design from the dissociated parts of a natural object, and the array of designs it achieved by this method,” with having thrown into modern plastic art a “ferment that must inevitably go on working. After catching the spell of its vigorous and seductive rhythms, no artist can return” they rightly say, “to academic banalities.” Appreciation of the forms and qualities of African art will thus always be an element in the intelligent interpretation and criticism of modern art.
In the primitive originals of African art, we see even more clearly why it has been such a technical revelation to the modernists who rediscovered it and why it has become through them an influential factor in the modernist revolt against representation and literalism in art. In the strange but impressive figures, faces and abstract patterns of the African masks, statuettes, and applied decoration, conventionalized beyond any suggestion of realistic representation, the mid-African artist indicates his method of working by decorative instinct and free imaginative treatment. Nevertheless there is always an element of artistic control, and a sense of what is appropriate to the medium and what is balanced in plastic or ornamental qualities. So when a modern critic, Paul Mondrain, says “The new plastic has abandoned imitation for the sake of creative freedom, and likewise the lordly isolation of the fine arts from the practical arts,” he is rationalizing the instinctive formula and practice of the primitive Negro artist. Thus there is a startling fundamental agreement between the most recent modern aesthetic and the art creed of the Congo, until recently so little known and so generally under-rated.
In connection with this revival of the pagan African past, it is curious to note that the American descendants of these African craftsmen have a strange deficiency in the arts of their ancestors. They have been known favorably for their skill in music, song, dance and story, but have scarcely touched the pictorial and plastic arts or even the decorative crafts, and where they have done it at all, have done so imitatively and not creatively. Toward changing this, no stronger influence could possibly come than that which comes with the force of a rediscovered cultural heritage and with the appeal of a tradition worthy of emulation. African art, therefore, presents to the Negro in the New World a challenge to recapture this heritage of creative originality and to carry it to distinctive new achievement in the plastic arts.
The coming of African art to America has this significance added to that of our general appreciation of it as a notable phase of the art development of the past or our understanding of its technical influences upon modernist art.