Even to those who have known and appreciated it, African art has been seen through a glass darkly—either as exotic and alien or as the inspiration and source of contemporary modernism. The current exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art, aside from being the finest American showing of African art, reveals it for the first time in its own right as a mature and classic expression. The obvious intent has been to show African art in its own context, and to document its great variety of styles by showing a few pure and classic specimens of each. The whole wide range of extant collections, European as well as American, has been combed for the best examples; of the well-known collections only those of Corail-Stop and the Barnes Foundation are missing, and this wide and highly selective culling has resulted in an exhibit which is a revelation even to the experts. Something like that change in evaluation which was made necessary when the art world first saw the Greek originals of the already familiar Roman copies, or discovered the firm strength and austerity of archaic and pure Greek art in contrast with the subtle delicacy of this art in its period of maturity and approaching decadence, must be the result of a showing such as this. Among other things, our notion of the exceptionally small scale of African sculpture must be abandoned since item after item proves the existence of a “grand style,” with corresponding heroic proportion and simplicity. Seventy-two collections have been the vast reservoir from which a selection of six hundred items has been chosen, and these range from small private collections of art amateurs to the great state collections at Leipzig, Munich, Berlin, Tervueren, the Paris Trocadéro Museum and our own collections at Chicago, Brooklyn, the University of Pennsylvania, and even Harlem. Mr. James Johnson Sweeney is the presiding genius who has gleaned this vast territory and pressed out the essence, giving America not only its greatest show of African art among the seven that have been held here since the memorable first one of 1914 at “Gallery 291,” but a master lesson in the classic idioms of at least fourteen of the great regional art styles of the African continent. Our title, then, is no exaggeration: this is a definitive exhibition of African classics.
Only such a weeding out could have re-revealed the classical maturity of this native art. As it stands out in a few specimens of pure style rather than the usual jumble of hybrids and second-rate examples, it is only too obvious that, instead of a heightened expression of this plastic idiom, we have in modernist art a dilution of its primitive strength and its classic simplicity. Mr. Sweeney goes further in his preface and argues that the new idiom of modern painting and sculpture was an independent development of European aesthetic that merely happened to be in the direction of the African idioms, and that the adoption of their characteristic Negroid form motives “appears today as having been more in the nature of attempts at interpretation, or expressions of critical appreciation, than true assimilations.” Out of this novel thesis that these two movements—the new appreciation of African art and of the Negro plastic tradition, and the working out of the new aesthetic in European art—were coincidental rather than cause and effect, Mr. Sweeney draws deductions leading to the glorification rather than the belittlement of African art. He believes that African art is best understood directly, and in terms of its own historical development and background, and that it should be recognized in its own idiom and right, rather than in terms of its correlation with modern art or its admitted influence upon modern art. The exhibition vindicates this thesis and the claim that “today the art of Negro Africa has its place of respect among the aesthetic traditions of the world.”
Having learned the similarities of African art and modernist art, we are at last prepared to see their differences. The secret of this difference would seem to be a simple but seldom recognized fact. The modern artist, as a sophisticate, was always working with the idea of authorship and a technically formal idea of expressing an aesthetic. The native African sculptor, forgetful of self and fully projected into the idea, was always working in a complete fusion with the art object. Sheldon Cheney is exactly right when he says: “These little idols, fetishes and masks are direct expressions of religious emotion. The sculptor approaches his work in humility, always feeling that he is less important than the figure he is carving. His carving is for itself, out of his emotion.” Although its vitality, its powerful simplification, “its unerring emphasis on the essential and its timelessness” were appreciated by the European modernist, and were technically and ideally inspiring, few or no modern artists could be at one and the same time naïve and masterful, primitive and mature. And so the enviable combination of naïveté and sophistication, of subtlety and strength could not be reachieved but only echoed. Few may be expected to agree until they have seen the exhibit, but few who have seen it may be expected to dissent.
The basis of the display, correctly enough, is regional. One by one the great regional styles are illustrated. However, the museum atmosphere is completely abolished by artful spacing and an effect of outdoor setting. In most instances the items can be examined, as they should be, from all points of view. African art, it must be remembered, is a sculptural art basically, and in addition—something which we have almost completely lost—a tactual art. Apart from texture and feel, I fancy there can be little appreciation of it in anything approaching native terms.
The French Sudan, never very well represented in American collections or exhibitions, has been aptly illustrated, principally from the great French collections; the Carrié, Guillaume, Tara, Chauvet, and Trocadéro collections have furnished the majority of the forty specimens of this little known style. Its rigid angular simplicity and almost inscrutable force show what powerful originality there was in a purely native idiom, for this Sudanese art has few analogies except with the oldest and earliest of Greek archaics by which no one presumes it to have been influenced. Its traditions of ancestor worship and phallic symbolism are stamped deeply upon it but it is just as obviously pure and not applied art.
French Guinea, the Upper Volta, and Sierra Leone are also represented by a few choice examples. Distinctive though they are, they are obviously intermediate between the Sudanese and the French Ivory Coast idioms. They are seldom seen in the pure forms and older styles, as in this case, and are perhaps least familiar to American eyes. On the whole, we have by accident become familiar primarily with the art forms of the Congo—French and Belgian. We do know the Ivory Coast styles, but usually neither in pure form nor in their rich variety. It was the Barnes Collection that familiarized us with those curiously powerful “Dan” masks, a number of which in this exhibit are included from the collections of Paul Guillaume and Charles Ration. Beside the more delicate and placid style of the surrounding Ivory Coast types, and the similarly graceful Baoulé style, they suggest some particularly strong ritualistic tradition separate from these. And yet a specimen like No. 101 in the catalogue illustrates not only that these styles are of the same region, but that they can be combined in something both beautiful and congruous. Here again no finer collection of Ivory Coast specimens has ever been displayed in America, whether of the large-scale carvings or of the inimitable miniature carving for which the Gold and Ivory Coast is famous.
Naturally no exhibition emphasizing classical African styles would be complete without a good showing of Benin—represented here by well-selected examples of the early and classical bronzes of the non-Europeanized type and period. Side by side are picked specimens of Ifa and Yoruba sculptures; no doubt, to illustrate Mr. Sweeney’s challenging and probably correct hypothesis that the Benin art is a derivative of the classical Yoruban, because Ifa has been indicated as the ancestral source of the Benin religion. Surely the striking similarity of the art motifs seems to substantiate this, and the Ifa style is closest to the oldest and purest specimens of the Benin bronzes.
Dahomey, Ashanti, and the Gold Coast are richly represented in wood, ivory and metal media, and in a variety calculated to show the great technical proficiency of this region. Its stylistic relation to classic Benin and Ifa art is that of a later and somewhat decadent version in which technique has been overemphasized with the original significance apparently lapsing. The Ratton Collection has furnished some massive antique Dahomey metal sculptures, one instance a five-foot statue of the “God of War;” but no less striking and certainly more fascinating is the collection of ivory and metal miniatures. Even if we consider the well-known virtuosity of Oriental art in this field, with these Gold Coast miniature gold masks, ivory talismans, and small brass weights of every conceivable variety and technical versatility, Africa enters the lists as a respectable contender in a field that until recently was thought to be an Oriental monopoly.
In the Cameroon section, plastic strength and simplicity have been emphasized rather than the usual grotesqueness or wealth of polychrome surface decoration. One mask (No. 326) from the von der Heydt Collection is exceedingly unusual, and a Cameroon seat with carved pendant figures (No. 336) is particularly fine. This region has been documented in a revealing way.
Similarly, the Gabun, Pahouin, and Mpongwe traditions are splendidly illustrated, the Guillaume Collection carrying most of the burden here. However, one of the most appealing specimens of Bieri (Gabun) head comes from the collection of Madame Helena Rubinstein. There are also three of the rare four-faced moon ritual masks of this district. The art of this region is a mystical art, with a baffling refinement and sophistication which we will not know how to account for until we know more about the religious thought in which it had its roots.
One would naturally expect a heavy representation of the French and Belgian Congo, and we have it in all its dazzling variety from the pure geometric pattern art of the Bakubas—carving and weaving—to the curiously characteristic Congo figure carving. Beautiful specimens of every well-known type have been selected, but attention must be called to such unusual types as Nos. 465 and 452, and the amazingly delicate calabash fetish with carved female figure (No. 489).
Of the rare art of the Angola district (Portuguese East Africa), and of the famous Vatchivokoe figures, there is a respectable display. But not even this extraordinary collection has been able to get the very best specimens. This is an art idiom with which we have as yet very little acquaintance; it is so profound and strange even among the general profundity of African equatorial art that we may suspect one of the ultimate secrets of African art to lie in this tradition.
This exhibit will probably provoke no new furor of decorative mode or faddist wave of imitation as have previous shows. It presents African art as really too great for imitation or superficial transcription. Its result must surely be to engender respect for the native insight and amazement for the native technique. It even explains that trite commonplace about the decadence of native art in Africa; for although the intrusion of Western civilization did break down the life upon which this art flourished, no art can be expected to retain its classic period indefinitely. Even without external influences, a natural decadence would have set in; and the only reason that it was so long avoided was the simplicity of an art that was essentially anonymous and the profundity of a nature-philosophy that could be maintained almost without change for generations. So we have to deal with a phase of African art that has become classic in this final sense. The Museum of Modern Art has thus rendered again a great service to the contemporary understanding of great art.