African Art

NNeeggrroo TTaalleennttss

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 every-
where 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.

HHuummaann FFiigguurreess aanndd GGooddss

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, compa-

rable 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

Artistic and Intellectual Expression

Instrument (Zande), 19thcentury.

Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Wood, 61 cm.

Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium.