Light on Dark

EUROPE has patched its maps of Africa with the colors of conquering nations, yet the conquered remain as populous and dark-hued as ever. Dark too, for white men, is the art of native Africans. Next week London's British Museum will open an impressive show designed to illuminate it.

The exhibition comprises the 166-piece collection of a wealthy Philadelphia engineer named Webster Plass (who died last year) and his widow Margaret. Africanist William Fagg supplied a foreword to the exhibition catalogue that could also be taken as a friendly warning to visitors. To see the show clearly, said Fagg, it is necessary to forget all about naturalism, which sprang from Greek art and survived in the photographic age. "African art is an art not of analysis but of synthesis: the artist does not begin from the natural form of, say, the human body ... He begins from a germinal concept which grows into the finished work, developing, so to speak, from the inside out and not from the outside in."

Seen in that way, carvings such as those shown opposite and on the following page are not distortions of heads and bodies but expressions of ideas. They are meant not so much to please the eye as to imitate, placate and cajole the gods and ghosts of Africa's numberless tribes. Many of the sculptors underwent long apprenticeships, were often members of an elite in their tribes. Today, too many of them have turned to spiritless apings of their own traditions for the sake of a burgeoning export trade.

The Africans' extraordinary freedom in making shapes was what appealed most to the modern artists who first put African sculpture on the map. Painters Braque and Picasso and Sculptors Brancusi and Epstein were inspired to savage experimentation by African art. But moderns, for the most part, have imitated the forms of African sculpture, divorced from the spirit inside them. By civilized standards, that spirit is nightmarishly superstitious. Harmony and order--as much a part of the classical art heritage as realism--are sacrificed to demoniac fervor. But African sculpture has an intensity greater than any that modern art has yet achieved.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.