African Art -- The World And The Spirits

The West African nations like Benin, modern-day Nigeria, Ivory Coast, etc were in contact with Portuguese and other Europeans from the 1500's onward. These wealthy kingdoms deeply impressed the first whites to reach them.  Their art was the first to reach Europe and accounts for much of our preconceived notions of what "African Art" looks like!

The legacy of the great kingdoms of Ife and Benin is a style of art that is close to Greek & Roman -- and for that reason, remains today very accessible to Western tastes. The same techniques of stone carving, bronze casting and terracotta modelling had evolved in West Africa as in the ancient Mediterranean.

More than that, art of the Ife period shared an aesthetic with Hellenistic art -- a striving for realism and humanism. It showed beautiful people and produced objects made to please the senses.  It was art created for a wealthy court where kings used it to enhance their status and adorn their persons.

This kind of art, refined and representational, is still found in many parts of West Africa, and is very popular with collectors.

Art of (for example) the Congo is very different. In the above sense, it is scarcely art at all -- it is too "primitive."  These are emanations of the spirit world, not the material world. These objects are not made to please the eye, but to penetrate, illuminate and influence the space where ancestors, gods and demons dwell. They speak of the uncertainty of life and of its sudden, terrible endings.

Where the art of West Africa is imbued with human dignity, art of Central Africa is shot through with yearning and tragedy. There is immense variety in the tribal traditions along the Congo River -- but nowhere do we find the serene humanism of those Yoruba faces.  We are looking into our own souls.

Yet this second kind of art is often closer to our modern spirit than the first.

When the first art from the Congo reached Europe in the late 19th and early 20th Century, it struck a chord with artists like Picasso, Modigliani and the Expressionists, who were already looking for new ways to interpret a world where uncertainty and terror would reign.

The mingling of animal and human, spirit and flesh, savagery and power, helped to create the great art of the 20th Century.

Those artists, indeed, predigested African art for us, helping us to understand it, to the extent that we are now able to "recognize" the features that they found so exciting and let them speak directly to us.

A good collection of African art should contain pieces from both streams.

So when you next look at an example of African art, you might ask yourself whether it is essentially materialistic or spiritual.

Does it speak to your eyes or to your soul?

Does it reflect the tension and uncertainty in your own life, or does it offer an ideal world where all is serene? How long do you think you will be happy with what it says to you?