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2. Heritage as Novelty: Revitalizing Yoruba Art in the Spirit of Modernism
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CHAPTER 2 Heritage as Novelty Revitalizing Yoruba Art in the Spirit of Modernism In his seminal book Contemporary African Art, Ulli Beier avers that what happened in Osogbo in the early 1960s was “not an experiment” but was driven by the effort to “provide the artists with a living” (Beier 1968: 176). Interestingly, Beier’s correction differs from the artists ’ own recollections. In my conversations with members of the first generation of Osogbo artists, the latter regularly invoked the image of an “experiment” when explaining the beginning of the “art school.” Muraina Oyelami, for instance, noted: “What happened back then was something like an experiment.”1 Likewise Jimoh Buraimoh stated: “What we did here was more or less an experiment.”2 The spirit of contingency and openness conjured up by the word “experiment” seems to ring true with the experience of those who participated in the workshops and summer schools Beier had organized. At the same time, though, the term also suggests those elements of design and conscious planning that Beier freely admitted to in an earlier publication (Beier 1965a). The fact that he later distanced himself from the idea of experimentalism does not discredit the artists’ experience but rather points to Beier’s insight into the problems of translating the spirit of European modernism into the Yoruba context. In the introduction I discussed this spirit with respect to the notions of loss, rupture, and decay that stood at the center of the concern with the presumed effects of colonial modernity. The general perception among Western scholars, based not a little on the novels of young African writers like Chinua Achebe (1958), was that African art and tradition was on the verge of collapse. “We are in the death of what is best in African art,” Beier (1968: 3) quoted the keeper of the British Museum, William Fagg, as saying. To actively counter this perceived situation, attempts emerged to “revitalize” the innate African artistic creativity which colonial modernity was thought to have paralyzed and suffocated. With the dawn of independence, European expatriates thus initiated workshops and art schools in practically all parts of the continent (Mount 1973). The subject mat- HERITAGE AS NOVELTY 33 ter was almost entirely “traditional culture,” which was believed to have gone away and which was now “rediscovered” and depicted in new forms and shapes. The Osogbo art movement was not only part of this complex, but very much representative of it. If in the following account I mainly leave aside the Nigerian actors to focus primarily on the European expatriates who designed and articulated the movement’s public rationale , the intention is to illuminate the specific modernist milieu which allowed for Osogbo’s first career in the Western art world. Susanne Wenger: From Vienna to Paris Born on July 4,1915 in the city of Graz, Austria, Susanne Wenger grew up in a bourgeois milieu (Eisenhut 2001; Probst 2009b). Her father taught English and French at a local high school; her mother was the daughter of a high-ranking army officer. In 1930, she attended the local School of Applied Arts where she took classes in ceramics. After having finished her studies in Graz, she moved to Vienna where she continued her art education, first at the School of Graphic Design and then from 1933 to 1935 at the Academy of Art. Like other students, Wenger’s interest was in contemporary post-secessionist movements. The few works remaining from Wenger’s Viennese phase exemplify various styles ranging from pencil studies of plants and animal bodies executed with an almost photographic precision, to expressionistic and cubist paintings, to surrealist crayon drawings. Taken together these works mark a phase of search and experimentation. Wenger’s reaction to the Nazi regime was an internal emigration. Though she joined the Communist party, hid befriended Jewish artists in her studio, and helped to organize political resistance, her most fundamental form of opposition was a spiritual one. With no exhibitions or buyers for her work, she spent many hours in bookshops and private reading circles. Like the works she created at that time, her intellectual interests were eclectic, ranging from traditional religion and shamanistic practices, especially Inuit and Tibetan, to psychoanalysis and surrealism—Freud and Breton, but also C.G. Jung.3 She had also experimented with automatic writing and painting, techniques developed by Breton and his collaborators as a means of expressing the subconscious.4 The French focus on the imaginary resonated with Wenger’s own interests. Yet unlike Breton...