Volume 13, Number 11 · December 18, 1969
Black is Beautiful
By Robert Goldwater
African Art, Its Background and Traditions
by René S. Wassing
Abrams, 300, 254 illustrations, 24 color plates pp., $25.00
African Art
by Michel Leiris, by Jacqueline Delange, translated by Michael Ross
Braziller, 462 pp., $30.00
Since the beginning of this century the arts of Black Africa and of other 'primitive' cultures have attracted the attention of two different but equally specialized audiences: anthropologists studying the evolution of material culture or its rituals, magic, and belief; and artists and collectors, whose taste and interest had been formed by modern art, and who, unlike the anthropologists, were primarily attracted by artistic qualities. What the artists and collectors saw in African sculpture was a power of formal design, and of emotion concentrated in that design. The specific conditions of a work's creation, whether a figure was ancestral or a mask the portrayal of a certain spirit, mattered little to them. They were concerned primarily with the discovery of non-imitative forms expressive in their own right. Engaged in denying Western naturalism, they found in the rhythmically stylized forms of African art, which by generalizing the human figure through geometric simplification seemed never to copy nature but to create imaginative parallels to it, those qualities of symbolic form they were themselves seeking. Thus the art communicated to them directly and there was no question of checking its correctness; while for the anthropologists African art was simply the illustration of fundamental social and religious ideas.
Review, 3564 words
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