African Crafts and Craftsmen by René Gardi, and: Afro-American Art and Craft by Judith Wragg Chase (review)

Books African Crafts and Craftsmen. Rene Gardi. Van Nostrand Reinhold, London, 1970. 245 pp., illus,£8.95. Afro-American Art and Craft. Judith Wragg Chase. Van Nostrand Reinhold, London, 1971. 142 pp., illus. £6.50. Reviewed by: Carson I. A. Ritchie* Although both books are by the same publisher and about African art, they are otherwise as different as they possibly could be. Gardi gives essentially a personal account of his journeys up and down the African continent in search of a vanishing species, for whom no game reserve offers asylum, the craftsman. His art safari takes him to the weavers and iron-workers of the Cameroons, the brass founders, goldsmiths and fabric painters of the Ivory Coast, the glass-makers of Nigeria, the wood carvers of the Congo, the tapestry-makers, dyers and calabash decorators of Dahomey and the leather workers, saddle-makers and stone carvers of the Sahara. These are just the highlights of the trip. They are interspersed with particular case studies about an individual or a group ofindividuals carrying out their art at one specific spot and general studies of many of the arts of Africa, treated as a whole. For Gardi this was his sixteenth African journey. He has travelled a lot farther than Livingstone but for the same reason, he likes the African and his ways. Unfortunately, as far as the craftsman is concerned, this has been a death-bed visit. Everywhere the author went it was the same story. Sons refused to follow in their fathers' footsteps, they had got enough education to move on to some perhaps less exacting but better rewarded calling. While remaining craftsmen carried on bravely, the economic props of their being were pulled from below them by an unstemmable flood of cheap competitive goods, coming in some cases from industrial centres of Africa itself. Two poignant examples underline the author's comments on the vanishing crafts, one of beautifully decorated calabashes from Wangai, the other of cheap enamel basins with horribly garish stencilled patterns from Birmingham. Gardi arrived, not a minute too soon, to record several crafts that had received only the most perfunctory notice so far-such as Tuareg parchment box making and Bida glass blowing. The fine photographs and the step by step descriptions make the reader feel he might like to try some of these crafts for himself. A splendidly large type fount, a pop-out picture caption sheet and a well designed map enhance this beautiful book. Chase's book is the story of another loving journey, back in time to the African past from which emerged the skills of urban or plantation slave craftsmen, through the pioneer artists of the Negro renaissance (who are given very able biographical treatment) and the following depression, to the Afro-American art and craft of today. A slave found it very difficult to become an artist in America, for he had left behind him the tribal and religious background that had inspired most of his art. That any African crafts survived at all in the new homeland is something of a miracle, but they did. The best productions of Negro artists and craftsmen, many of which will be completely new to the reader, are ably presented by the author. Beautiful photographs, most of them by the author, accompany this scholarly account. She does not shrink from the very many controversial topics that a discussion of Afro-American art poses. Is Negro art, whetherin America or elsewhere, different because of the African's quality of negritude? * Meridian Manor, 6 Lee Terrace, Blackheath, London, SE3 9TZ, England. 87 Ought the African artist reject white culture or assimilate the parts of it that are most relevant to him? Will the best efforts of the Black artist receive less than their due need of recognition by galleries, critics and Caucasian fellow artists just because he is black? In spite of the promise implicit in the ever-growing numbers of Black artists and sculptors, this book has its nostalgic side too. As in Africa, so in America, the old crafts are dying out; no one makes woven com-shuck furniture any longer and the old weaving patterns, 'Catalpa Flower', 'Sea Star', 'Pine...