Instrument (Zande), 19th century.

Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Wood, height: 61 cm. Royal Museum for

Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium.

 

 

Artistic and Intellectual Expression

 

 

Negro Talents

 

It is indisputable that the artistic sense is highly developed in the black race. This is a truth that Count Gobineau himself did not hesitate to recognise. Nevertheless, this gift does not show to the same degree of perfection in all the arts and, almost everywhere that it is to be seen, it is especially found in the sense of the decorative effect or of the impression produced rather than in the sense of plastic beauty, of gracefulness, or of the perfection of the whole composition. The African Negroes have given us almost nothing in the field of painting or monumental statues. None of the colourings that are to be observed on certain of their walls recall, either by the subject or the execution, anything that could evoke an idea of what we call a picture. The few life-size statues in clay or wood that are sometimes met with in the sacred woods or in the funeral chapels are generally very crude and one would doubt, to look at them, that they were fashioned by the same artists who have made so many delightful trinkets from the same materials.

 

It is quite the contrary with regard to small sculptures in stone, wood, ivory, or modelling in wax, clay, or metals. In these arts, often called minor ones, the Negroes have shown themselves and still show themselves to be ingenious workers, powerfully helped by a high inspiration, a sharp sense of detail and a very profound conception of the form to be given to their ideas. It is to be remarked that their productions in this domain are generally so much the more original and of surer taste the more we have to do with populations that have been little influenced by exterior forces, whether of Oriental or European origin. In this category, Negro art appears the more perfect in the measure that it is more purely Negro. Of course, it cannot be contested that the funeral statuettes, the sacred masks, the carved seats, the vases, the knick-knacks of bronze or copper, the gold and silver jewellery made in the northern region of Sudan, and in the Europeanised centres are very inferior to the productions of the same order of the tribes of Guinea, Dahomey, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and of the Great Lakes.

 

 

Human Figures and Gods

 

In order to appreciate properly the artistic value of the various objects above mentioned, it is indispensable to distinguish from the others those having human figures, that is to say, the statuettes and masks, as well as ivory tusks, metal plates, wooden coffers or coffins representing scenes with human beings. When we are in the presence of those men or women on bended knees, whose limbs are singularly short with respect to the length of the trunk, and with enormous heads, or those masks with terrifying or hideous expressions, we can hardly prevent the impression that these representations are grotesque and have no artistic character.

 

It is evident that this impression would be justified if these objects were the work of Europeans of modern times, for there would be too violent an antithesis between the normal conceptions of the artist and the style of the object produced by his hands. Art is not really art unless it corresponds, in its expression as in its inspiration, to the civilisation of which it is, so to say, the sublimated product. But we should recall that the artisan who has sculpted these statuettes had in view the representation not of living beings but of the deified dead; that the one who imagined these masks thought to express by them the symbol of a redoubtable divinity to those who are not initiated into its mysteries: both are believers, comparable to the anonymous artists to whom our old Gothic cathedrals owe those extraordinary gargoyles, those grimacing heads of demons, those statues of saints or the dead conventionalised in hieratical and formal attitudes. Neither one nor the other have worked to reproduce, with the utmost flattery, the traits of a human model: they have sculpted gods – or devils – and not men, and they have sculpted these gods as they have been represented to their minds by the traditions of their times.

 

In this respect, the point has sometimes been made – M.M. Clouzot and Level have alluded to it – that the general aspect of the Negro statuettes, if it corresponds badly enough to the anatomy of a normal Negro, singularly recalls that of the Negrillos, specimens of whom are still to be found, more or less sparsely scattered about in several regions of central and southern Africa, and who probably may have one time inhabited the whole of what today constitutes Negro Africa before its settlement by the Negroes properly speaking. The relative length of the trunk and the excessive dimensions of the head, in particular, are characteristic of this race once very numerous and far-spread but today on the road to extinction. In many regions of Africa where Negrillos are now no longer found, the memory of them has persisted among the Negroes, who claim that before their own arrival the occupants of the country were little men with large heads and reddish skin, as mentioned in our first chapter. The Negroes often considered these little men as the first holders of the ground which they themselves exploit today, making of them sort of distant ancestors, deified like their own forbearers.

 

It would not be surprising that the first Negro artists, needing to figure their deified ancestors, adopted as the representative symbol the approximate type of these Negrillos, living samples of whom they had known or that a still recent tradition might faithfully enough retrace for them. This type, as adopted, has been transmitted down to our time, the religious character of its origin especially helping to keep it from being transformed during the course of centuries.