Kumasi Realism 1951–2007: An African Modernism by Atta Kwami (review)

Artist, curator, and art historian Atta Kwami defines “Kumasi Realism” as a kind of representational painting inspired by a plurality of sources. Distinctly local, it is drawn equally from Ghanaian and European art histories, mass-produced advertising and photography, as well as from Ghanaian history, culture, and current events. In Kumasi Realism 1951–2007: An African Modernism, Kwami argues that in Kumasi, Ghana, both college-educated artists and those trained in the city’s hundred-plus sign shops draw from this shared visual vocabulary. Exploding the categorical divisions between academically trained and “street” painters often present in the West—launched nearly three decades ago by the exhibitions “Magiciens de la Terre” and “Africa Explores”—Kwami argues for the simultaneous contemporaneity of both groups of painters by claiming each as practitioners of Kumasi Realism.

Declaring that “in Kumasi painting is unavoidable,” Kwami claims his book to be the first to systematically document the medium of painting in a single location (p. 338). While city-based studies of painting abound for European locales like Paris and Rome (see for example, Georges Duby’s 2009 The History of Paris in Painting or Patricia Leighten’s 2013 The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris), none exist for any African city. Indeed, the closest urban art historical portraits on the continent are Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin’s 2003 Rorke’s Drift: Empowering Prints and Joanna Grabski’s 2012 film Market Imaginary. Like Kumasi Realism, each examines modern art in a single locale: however, Hobbs and Rankin focus on the relationship between style, social engagement, and politics at a Lutheran-linked South African art school, while Grabski charts artists’ engagement with the multiplicity of commercial and visual networks in Dakar’s Colobane Market. Building upon previous unpublished studies of Kumasi’s painting (Sarah Brown, SOAS, 1994; Yoshimi Kanazawa, SOAS, 2000; Margaret Hunt de Bona, School of International Training, 2005), Kwami offers new insights based on his own primary research and successfully records the symbiotic relationship between artists trained in Kumasi’s two instructional modes.

Kumasi Realism opens with a history of art education in Ghana (Chapter 1), from its inception as a British colonial institution in the 1920s, to the gradual introduction of Ghanaian methods in the 1950s and 1960s, to the decolonization-inspired artistic pluralism in practice through the present day. In 1952, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST, then known as the Kumasi College of Technology) opened as one of the West African colonial colleges established in response to Britain’s 1945 Elliot Commission report. Kwami cites January of that year—when the School of Arts and Crafts (art department) became KCT’s first Faculty—as the moment when the parallel traditions of street art workshops and college-trained artists first intersected. With that, Kumasi Realism was born “from the fusion of photographic naturalism, and the demands of advertising, shop front decor and commercial portraiture” (p. 63). Chapter 2 continues by examining each artistic track’s training methods, expansively considering the teaching methods espoused by influential instructors. He recounts the underlying push-pull between African and European teaching methods from 1900–1950, the transformation of the School of Arts and Crafts into KNUST’s College of Art (COA) in 1965 as a theory-driven institution linked to Nkrumah’s Sankofa movement, and the increasing experimentalism present at KNUST-COA in the following decades. In what is the book’s greatest contribution, he considers the training curriculum in sign workshops from 1999–2005, as well as some sign painters’ education at the College of Art and Industry (CAI, founded 1973), breaking apart the myth of the autodidact advertising painter.

Chapters 3 through 5 present twelve case studies of “college” (KNUST-COA trained), “city” (workshop apprenticeship trained), and “hybrid” (college and workshop trained) artists. Many, such as Ato Delaquis and Alex Amofa, later became influential instructors or...