[b]A Continental Shift for African Art





What Leaders Look Like: A Continental Shift

By HOLLAND COTTER


If you still think that African art is not your thing, there’s an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum that may change your mind. It’s called “Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures,” and it’s as beautiful to look at as a show can possibly be.

It’s a perception changer in other ways too, as it argues, through demonstration, against basic misunderstandings surrounding this art. African art has no history? No independent tradition of realism? No portraiture? All African sculpture looks basically alike, meaning “primitive”? African and Western art are fundamentally different in content and purpose? Wrong across the board.

Art from sub-Saharan Africa is some of the oldest known, dating back tens of thousands of years. In the exhibition the oldest pieces are naturalistic, portraitlike terra-cotta heads from southwestern Nigeria from the 12th century.

Before the modern era, ancient African chronicles were passed on by word of mouth, from storyteller to storyteller, and many sculptures, early and late, embody centuries-old accounts of real people and real lives. They compress them into a visual shorthand the way oral tradition compresses generations-long narratives.

Even a quick stroll through this exhibition’s eight sections, each devoted to a different West or Central African art tradition, confirms African art’s variety, in a stylistic spectrum stretching from detail-perfect representation to near-abstraction. And as to African art’s pertinence to Western concerns, suffice it to say that almost all the sculpture in this exhibition is asking a question that is foremost on the mind of many Americans in the early stages of the presidential campaign: what are the qualities we want and need in our political leaders?

To ease our way into all of this, the show begins with a comparative look at political power portraits from Africa and the West: a 17th-century brass head depicting a ruler of the kingdom of Benin, in what is now Nigeria, and a carved marble bust of the Roman emperor Octavian, who called himself Augustus, from around A.D. 5.

Augustus’ portrait is of a familiarly naturalistic type; we know his name because it was written down and is found on many identical portraits. The naturalism of the Benin head is highly stylized, and the name of the ruler unknown, lost with the spoken histories erased by colonialism.

Despite their differences, though, neither “portrait” is more or less realistic than the other. Augustus is depicted as a Greek Apollo with a Roman haircut. The Benin king, wide-eyed and plump, almost bursting with good health, conforms to an African ideal of regal well-being. Both portraits commemorate real people who lived and died, but are, before all else, abstract emblems of ethical standards to be emulated and political power to be revered.

And since political power was usually accompanied by wealth throughout Africa, as everywhere else, the ruling elite drew on top-rank talent and technology when commissioning art. This is evident in the Benin royal portraits and in the terra-cotta heads produced in the Yoruba capital, Ife, also in Nigeria, between the 12th and 15th centuries.

With their soft, grave naturalism, these heads have an automatic appeal to the Western eye, and the seven examples in the show are simply out of this world. All have similar sensuous features: full lips, almond eyes and all-over patterns of vertical striations, read by some experts as cosmetic scarring, by others as representing shadows cast by beaded veils attached to royal crowns.

Despite the similarities, each face is subtly particularized, suggesting that they were all inspired by living models, though exactly who they may have been and how these portraits — if they are portraits — were meant to function remain mysteries.

But one thing is sure: many of them predate colonial contact. This means that realism in art, which the West tends to view as its distinctive accomplishment, developed independently in Africa, though there, with so many other rich options available, it was only sporadically esteemed.

Terra-cotta sculpture also flourished among the Akan people of Ghana and Ivory Coast in the 17th and 18th centuries, but sometimes in semiabstract form. In memorial shrine effigies of honored individuals made in the Kwahu region of Ghana, for example, the head, balanced atop a long neck that is also a body, is as flat as a plate and tilted upward so that small, pinched facial features look to the sky.

These images, doll-like and audacious, probably correspond more closely than Ife work does to popular ideas of what “African art” is suppose to look like. But they depart from expectations in another way: like much Akan clay sculpture, they are believed to have been made by women, earth being a female element.

True or not, it’s nice to think that the two memorial sculptures in the show identified by name came from female hands: one is of an 18th-century queen called Nana Attabra, button-eyed, smiling, her hair in snail-shell curls; the other of her daughter Afukwa, a formidable, broad-browed presence with a no-nonsense stare.

Over all, there are almost as many heroines as heroes in the show, which has been assembled with scrupulous care by Alisa LaGamma, a curator in the museum’s department of the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, and set in one of the most ingenious installations I’ve seen at the Met in years. Designed by Michael Lapthorn, it’s a serpentine path of walls pierced by windows that give glimpses of what you’ve just seen and frame attractions ahead.

That said, no frame is large enough to contain the famous carved wood superheroine known as the “Bangwa Queen.” With her rocket-blast headpiece and loose-limbed, just-landed stance, this sculpture from the Grassfields region of Cameroon is the show’s Wonder Woman.

Her fame derives partly from the starry Western collections, including Helena Rubenstein’s, she has passed through since she left her Cameroonian royal shrine in the late 19th century. But of course her real story lies back there, where she was less an object than a living being, a priestess, with a name and a personality. The name and the shrine are long gone. The live-wire personality — explosive, ecstatic — sizzles on.

And I could go on and on about the other objects Ms. LaGamma has chosen, from Chokwe masks, mainly from Angola, proposing reality-based ideals of unearthly female beauty, to magnificent royal portraits, each of a specific monarch but all nearly identical in appearance, carved by Kuba sculptors in what is now Congo.

Anyone familiar with African art knows these Kuba images. But from a different cultural source in roughly the same region, the Hemba people, comes far less familiar material, and a lot of it: a group of 22 standing 19th-century wood figures that together end the show with a kind of hushed coup de théâtre.

They all depict venerated leaders who, after death, came to function, in sculptural guise, as interfaces between the material and spiritual realms. As if their new roles required undistracted concentration, the individual sculptures were kept in chapel-like huts accessible only to living leaders of exemplary character who would someday join their ranks.

The dynamic of Hemba art, like that of so much African memorial art, is one of variety within sameness. Beneath local differences of style, all the images have uniform elements, including an outsize head, a capacious container for both soul and mind, and an expression of stoically exalted calmness, which gains particular poignancy in the several sculptures that have been damaged — either broken or eaten away by moisture and insects — over time.

Hemba communities experienced an even more drastic degree of injury under colonialism. Families dispersed, heroic leaders disappeared, spiritual assurances shattered. Some commemorative sculptures survived in homes until the 1960s, when African poverty and a hot art market conspired to take them to Europe for sale.

The Hemba sculptures at the Met, arranged in two concentric circles, are one of the great sights in the museum these days. Together and separately they are, like so much else in the show, examples of objects as sophisticated in form as they are nuanced in meaning. Their beauties are tremendous, but so are their lessons on qualities that leaders who would be heroes must have: one being moral sobriety; two others, implicit in Mr. Lapthorn’s design, being transparency and a capacity for looking backward and forward from wherever you stand.


“Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures” remains through Jan. 29 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.


African Chronicles more photos

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/09/23/arts/design/20110923_AFRICA.html[/b]

The art needs to come back to Africa!!