Critical Standards of African Art

Abstract

President Senghor sees the critical standards of African art as originating from the nature of the black soul, and the black soul as originating from the environment that gave it life. These standards, long unknown to the white world and now exerting influence in contemporary art, will henceforth play a more integral role in the art world.A country, like a continent, can be described in myriad ways. Manuals of all kinds can tell us, in color, about the relief of a place's landscape, the itineraries of its major passageways, its economy and history, its vision of God and the Universe, its understanding of time, and its desire to preserve, for its dead, timeless caverns nestled among the ages.But history, geography, ethnography, and anthropology all fall short in depicting, in all of its fullness and nuance, man's journey on this planet.Before it even occurred to man to arrange his screams into language, his hand weighed, measured, signaled, and thought.At play for art in any human agglomeration described by natural borders is the story of the close relationship between thought and hands. This is why art alone expresses the depths of human consciousness. It elucidates the nightmares that lurk in darker corners, gives worldly and otherworldly dimensions to dreams, and reinvents the colors of life with the inexhaustible resources of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms.Just as Surrealism was born out of the chaos of war's aftermath and amidst the schools of uprooted artists in search of new modes of life and expression, just as it was born of an interpretation of the world beyond a sclerotic formalism and offered “a complete revision of all values,” Negro Art, that sedentary product of peace, that illustration of an ancient culture, emerged with its clean lines from the hands of a man who faced the sky and attempted to make order of his internal chaos.Whereas even before the medieval period artistic movements melded and converged in subterraneous shifts toward the explosion of the Renaissance, Africa, for millenniums, remained within a sovereign solitude. Into that solitude it introduced cosmogonic obsessions in response to the vital Forces it attempted to define and tame.It is said of traditional African art that it is primitive. This is true in the sense of the Latin primitivus: “the first of its kind.” We are not afraid of words, even when, as in our time, their use can cause semantic wear and tear. It is primitive in that it is linked to the cosmos and has held tight to the vital sources of emotion, the psychic reserves of ancient cities. It has stayed close to the gods, then to God.One may reproach certain exegetes of Negro art, nonetheless full of good intentions if not merit, for lecturing at length or labeling it for the museum. To expound on this art some have used the refined tool of discursive logic, which sidesteps the emotional imbuement of a mask or a statuette. Others translate it through the conventional formulae of modern plastic surgery. But the Negro soul is a product of its environment. In this case the action is deeply steeped in its surroundings: in the primitively pure light that crosses the savanna, and in the far reaches of the forest, where civilizations are born. It is steeped in this raw and scrutinizing light that brings out the essential and the essence of things, or in this climate whose fierceness both exalts and subdues. In any case, the Negro soul, too, explains to us art, religion, and society.I acknowledge that it is no small task to achieve, without sacrilege, the state of grace required to be in communion with Negro art. One does not easily traverse this immeasurable gap that spiritually separates the contemporary civilized individual, fed on logic and reason, from his distant ancestor, who did not create his art but lived it, integrating it into his cave, hut, or sacred wood, and into the rituals of the family, clan, or tribe.So many points of contact have disappeared, so many sources run dry. So many treasures of the three kingdoms have been swallowed up by the sandy ocean of the Sahara. The researcher can only hope to weld the broken links of hypotheses, composing a total vision that is as close as possible to the historical truth. Here I will restate, more or less, what I wrote in 1939 in L'Homme de Couleur and, in 1956, in the review Diogène.One must first point out that opinions expressed on Negro Art have, more often than not, reflected a global view that the white man is superior to the Negro. How could one then attribute artistic value to African works? This would mean disassociating them from their assumed context of savagery and inferiority, what has been seen for centuries as the ghetto of the black continent. The discovery of Negro beauty would inevitably lead one to the cultural sources of this artistic production, to the ancient cultural tradition of black Africa.Last year I said that the First World Festival of Negro Arts was not “an antiquarian's empty display, but an articulate demonstration of our deepest, or our most genuine culture.” I added that, “partaking at all times—but at a distance and through intermediaries—in the building of the universal civilization, united, reunited Africa offers the waiting world, not a gigantic tattoo, but the sense of her artistic creation. These works speak of our outlook, our obsession with mankind as with the invisible God: they also express our wish that the earth may alter to receive the light of heaven.”1I must point out, without false modesty, that the premises advanced nearly thirty years ago as part of the phenomenon of artistic creation in black Africa have contributed to a broader global discussion of which the review and movement Présence Africaine has proved a key locus if not a catalyzer.Researchers and scholars have been liberated, in their research, from the laboratory of cool reason and mathematical rules. They now strive to come into contact with a perceptible and complex geographical zone that was once an area of high spirituality, where superior Forces still mark the time of seasonal rhythms.We have not only been observed from afar and from across borders of indifference, but also from above, from the skyscrapers of Western civilization, cut off from nature and from God. They sought to gaze upon us, but not to understand us. They measured us without sympathetically seeking to plumb our hearts or our soul. It is perhaps our rites that most disoriented our visitors, who stood before the mask or the statuette as would a tourist seeking out the unusual or the unseen, not in order to learn, but to fill a travel diary. They approached us as one might a zoo, for amusement and relaxation, in the idleness of a Sunday afternoon.But already, fed by the Stoics' teaching, Porphyry affirmed that “primitive men were as averse to cutting down a plant or a tree as they were to killing an animal, since for them the plants were animate.” Captain Rattray picks up the same idea in his work entitled Religion and Art in Ashanti: “the wandering spirit [of the tree sacrificed to make a stool or drum] … is expected, and in fact is actually enticed, to enter once again the material substance where it dwelt when the tree was yet alive. This explains the subsequent rites of consecration of the completed stool or the completed drums.”2People ask, with skepticism, what we have contributed to the world. The Negro contribution to the world of the twentieth century can, above all, be felt in literature and in art more broadly. The separation of the plastic arts and music is merely a practical matter. One finds the same elements here and there between the African and the Afro-American, regardless of what the specialists say. The accomplishment of the American ordeal will have been to do away with all that was not permanent and human.But these contributions will only have been of use to the rare artist. They are generally transformed into fragmentary borrowings, emptied of their lifeblood, hallow in spirit. I feared that the Surrealists themselves might not have always harbored discreet, that is to say enlightened, sympathies for the Negro. However, since the newly revised and corrected edition of Surrealism and Painting (1928- persons 1965) by André Breton, it would be correct to acknowledge that a new light was shed on artistic expression in the utterance of two principles that revolutionized the idea of the artwork. They are as follows:Our world is still in the service of matter and, by extension, of reason. One denounces reason only to declare the primate of matter. Therein lies the cause of the decadence of twentieth-century art. The manifestos “for French Art” published by the review Les Beaux-Arts are telling. Realism and Impressionism are but two aspects of the same error. The adoration of the real leads to the photographic arts, where the mind may be content to analyze and combine elements of the real. This is the attitude of Théophile Gautier: “My protesting body refuses to acknowledge the supremacy of the soul and my flesh does not consent to be mortified … Three things I like: gold, marble, crimson; brilliance, solidity, color.”4 Preferences may change, but not spirit, by which I mean absence of spirit. This gives us Baudelaire's attacks on “The Pagan School,” or the attacks of Cezanne and Gauguin, whose research advances into the camp of Negro art to the point of encounter.For the virtue of Negro art is that it is neither a game, nor a pure aesthetic delight, but that it signifies.Here I will choose the most indicative of the arts, sculpture. Even the decoration of the most basic utensil of common use does not undermine its goal like a vain ornament, but rather highlights it. This is a tactile art, not a utilitarian one, and classical in this same sense. It is a spiritual art—incorrectly labeled “idealist” or “intellectual”—because of its religiosity. The essential function of sculpture is to represent the Ancestors and spirits with statues that are both symbolic and a receptacle. The idea is to capture, to feel their individual soul as a clear form of will, to reach the surreal through human representation, specifically through the representation of the human form, the most accurate reflection of the soul. It is a striking aspect of anthropomorphic statues, and masks most of all, this constant concern for the intermediary-man.This spirituality is expressed through the most concrete elements of the real. The Negro artist is less a painter than a sculptor, less a drawer than a molder, working with his hands with solid, three-dimensional material, like the Creator. He chooses the most concrete matter. Rather than bronze, ivory, or gold, he prefers wood, which is widely found and lends itself to both the broadest effects and the most delicate nuances. He uses few colors, or uses them to the point of saturation: white, black, and red, the colors of Africa. Above all he uses lines, surface, and volume: the most material properties of matter.But because this art tends toward the essential expression of the object, it is the opposite of subjective realism. The artist arranges the details within a hierarchy that is spiritual and, therefore, technical. Where many could only see clumsy hands or a failure of observation, there is, in fact, a view for order or, rather, for subordination. I have already stated the importance the artist attributes to the human face.This organizing force that composes the Negro style is rhythm. It is the most perceptible and least material element. It is the vital element par excellence. It is the first condition and the sign of art, as respiration is of life, accelerating or slowing down, becoming regular or fitful according to the person's strain, or the degree and nature of the emotion. So it goes with rhythm, primitively, in its pure state, as in the masterworks of Negro art and especially in sculpture. It is composed of a theme—sculptural form—which opposes a related theme, like inspiration to respiration, and then it repeats. The symmetry does not lead to monotony. Rhythm is alive and free. Reprisals are neither recapitulation nor repetition. The theme is taken up again from a different angle, within another scheme or combination, with variation. It gives a different intonation, timbre, and accent, and the overall effect is intensified with nuance. This is how rhythm acts on that which is the least intellectual in us. It does so despotically, to pull us into the spirituality of the object. And this attitude of release within us is, itself, rhythmic.This is classical art in the most human sense, that of “controlled romanticism,” because the artist, controlling his emotive bounty, kindles and guides our emotion to the state of idea, with the simplest, most direct and definitive of means. All converges toward the goal. Here, there is no anecdote, embellishment, or flourish, nothing to distract. By refraining from seducing us, the artist conquers us. This is classical art as defined by Maritain: “a subordination of the matter to the light of the form … that no material element issuing from things or from the subject is admitted into the work which is not strictly required as support for or vehicle of this light, and which would dull or ‘debauch’ the eye, ear, or spirit.”5What was lacking in the music of the late nineteenth century was not ideas or spiritual authenticity—in France we only need mention César Franck and Gabriel Fauré—but rather a youthful lifeblood and new ways of doing. God, like the mind, is invisible to scholars. Those like Claude Debussy, Darius Milhaud, and Igor Stravinsky yearned to free themselves from conventional rules that had become fruitless. They embarked in search of new fertile soil and “invisible seedlings.”Negro music, which they have begun to study in earnest in Europe, responds to these needs. Though one may feel its effects, its techniques remain elusive. No more than sculpture does it constitute, in Negro-African society, an art that exists merely for itself. Primitively, it accompanies dances and ritual songs. Making it profane does not render it independent. Its natural place is in the collective acts of theatre, agricultural work, or gymnastic competitions. Even in the case of nightly tam-tams it is not a purely aesthetic performance, but more intimately serves to gather its flock to the rhythm of the dancing community, the dancing World. Much of this has remained with Americanized, Westernized Negros, who instinctively dance their music and their lives.In 1966, Jacques Bernolles wrote in Permanence de la Parure et du Masque Africain:Finally, Etienne Souriau points out that, “thanks to the body, the limit of one's self is anchored to the world, as the body is solidly embedded as a physical thing within the cosmos of things.”This is to say that Negro music, like sculpture and dance, is enrooted in the nourishing soil. It is filled with rhythms, sounds and noises of the earth. is not to say that it is or It also it is not It brings the lifeblood to a Western music that is by its and its on rules that are and often will not speak about the which are This area has been the most more so than the This is, in because the have the of a Negro the of like who point out that in most of which are in in are in I can how the good who our to us in without or variation. 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