The Traditional Artist in African Societies ed. by Warren L. d’Azevedo, African Art: The Years Since 1920 by Marshall Ward Mount (review)

Books 77 The Traditional Artist in African Societies. Warren L. d’Azevedo, ed. Indiana Univ. Press, London, 1974. 454 pp., illus. E8.00. African Art: The Years Since 1920. Marshall Ward Mount. David & Charles, Newton Abbot, Devon, England, 1974. 236 pp., illus. E6.95. Reviewed by John F. Povey* Europeans find that they can approach the interpretation of the art of Africa in one of two ways and neither seems entirely defensible. They can judge it by concepts derived from Western art criticism. Then they will be condemned for separating art from its primal social context. They can agree that this art can be understood only when there is a knowledge of the society in which it is made. This drives them into the clutches of anthropologists. Both sides have begun to recognize the limitations inherent in either extreme of these approaches. A conference focussing on this problem occasioned the papers that appear in the book edited by Warren d‘Azevedo. Most of the participants were anthropologists, though in this context the more enlightened ones. Roy Sieber and Robert Farris Thompson represented the new art historians striving to establish new and valid aesthetics for the comprehension of this unfamiliar art. As d’Azevedo comments in his introduction, the danger is that, even with the best of intentions, we are ‘guilty of ethnocentrism by the tacit application of Western concepts of art, artist and aesthetics to non-Western cultures. . . . We share the normative predeliction in Euro-American culture for thinking of art as things.’ From the view of the social scientist, ‘as long as art is conceived only in terms of its results no social theory of artistry is possible’. Yet this view is challenged. If at present ‘the art historian has emerged as the major arbiter of ethnological materials concerning art and is producing significant writings to which social scientists must eventually turn’, there is also the counter from the social scientist against the inspiration mystique. Daniel Crowley observes that ‘we accept as a basic premise that art activities are not some unknowable divine fire beyond the understanding of mortal man’. The new interaction between the two fields of study, art and anthropology, is beginning to forge a more adequate methodology for the understanding of African art. The speakers addressed themselves precisely to the complex issues implicit in such an intellectual synthesis. Each took a group of African people that they knew well and focussed on the role of the artist, carver or musician in that society. The original material in this book consists of the detailed firsthand observations of specific artistic situations, yet some contributions attempted substantial generalizations. Robert Thompson’s report on the Yoruba moves far beyond Bascom’s more factual report on the Yoruba carver, Duga of Meko. Thompson has tried to elicit the nature of the Yoruba critical aesthetic. His determination receives support from Roy Sieber’s insistence that it is essential to find some way of eliminating the inaccuracies that follow when our understanding of these Sub-Saharan arts has been warped by ‘definitions of art and aesthetics which have developed in the Western world’. This is the task that is begun in these pages. In this regard some dates are important. The book was published nearly 10 years after the conference presentations at Lake Tahoe, California, in 1965. Much has happened since then. Displays of African art in several major international exhibitions have removed a substantial part of the unfamiliarity and neglect. Already it is taken for granted that an anthropologist must be an aesthetician, and an art critic an anthropologist, if there is to be adequate interpretation. Much can be taken for granted now that had to be argued out so forcefully a decade ago. It is not certain whether our attitudes have been advanced by an increasing awareness of contemporary African art. The work of these artists seems more readily assimilable through a Western aesthetic, since they employ the familiar materials and techniques of Western art. For a Nigerian artist to choose to paint on canvas with oils is a sophisticated declaration of artistic cosmopolitanism. Yet.even here there can be dangerous oversimplifications if one ignores the African tradition that is involved...