The Art of Africa, The Pacific Islands, And the Americas (Art eBook)

8/10/2019 The Art of Africa, The Pacific Islands, And the Americas (Art eBook)

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he Art of Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas


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THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ARTThe Michael C. Rockefeller Wing

The

Art of Africa,the Pacific Islands,

and

the Americas

Text by Douglas NewtonPhotographs by Lee Boltin


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Reprinted from The Metropolitan urn


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DIRECTOR'S NOTEPhilippe de Montebello

e opening of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing thisnter consHtutes a landmark for The Metropolitanuseum of Art, which, with this addition, rounds out

presentation of all areas of its encyclopedic collec-

s. The new wing makes available to the public thetic achievements of Africa, the Pacific Islands, and

Americas and fulfills the goal of the Museum's foun-s to exhibit objects illustrahve of all the history of

in all its branches from the earliest beginnings to the

sent time. The great strength of the Metropolitanuseum lies in its comprehensiveness; few museums

offer a complete cross section of art history in onehitectural entity.

Only recently have the arts of Africa, the Pacific Is-ds, and the Americas received the serious attention

they deserve, although the Metropolitan acquired

f ir st holdings in these fields, Aztec stone reliefs, in

late nineteenth century. Despite the fact that the

useum did not establish a separate department tody and exhibit this art until 1969, several generous

in the 1960s and 1970s greatly enriched the collec-

: Nathan Cummings's group of about 600 Peruvianamics; Mrs. Alice K. Bache's Pre-Columbian gold ob-

s, including some of the most important in the coun-and Lester Wunderman's outstanding collechon of

ogon art. In 1969 Nelson A. Rockefeller pledged thee Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection. Con-ng of the Governor's personal objects and those of

Museum of Primitive Art (which he founded in as-iation with Rene d'Harnoncourt in 1957), the collec-

n was given in memory of his son Michael, who wasduring an expedition in 1961 while gathering Asmat

in New Guinea for the Museum of Primitive Art. In69 the Metropolitan reached an agreement with that

useum to transfer to the Metropolitan both the smalleritution's collection and its library (now renamed Thebert Goldwater Library in honor of the first director

the Museum of Primitive Art) and to construct a spe-wing at the Metropolitan to house these new ac-

siHons Sadly Governor Rockefeller died in 1979 be

fore he could see his unrivaled collection installed in thnew wing.

The complex project of the construction and instal-lation of this new wing has finally drawn to a conclusion,aided by generous grants from the National Endowmentfor the Humanities, the Rockefeller family, and theVincent Astor Foundation.

The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, featuring a fifty-foot-high gallery with a glass facade looking out ontoCentral Park, has been organized according to three geo-graphic areas: Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Amer-icas. The display and installation of their arts will encourage further study of these objects on aesthetic

grounds, and the works themselves^ranging from siBamana figures mounted before a carved Bamana doorto huge Asmat bisj, or ancestor, poles to beautifullysculpted bronzes from the royal altars of Benin to a Pre-Columbian treasury of ornaments from the major gold-working centers form bridges to many other areasthe Museum's collections.

The Robert Goldwater Library is installed on the mezzanine of the new wing. Its extensive holdings of booksand photographs are an invaluable research facility thatwill serve the general public as well as scholars.

The Museum's new wing is the achievement of a num-ber of talented and dedicated individuals. The architec-tural scheme matching the breadth and magnificencethe wing for the Temple of Dendur is by Kevin Roche,John Dinkeloo and Associates. Working closely withDouglas Newton, chairman of the department, in threalization of the installation were Stuart Silver, projectdirector, and Clifford La Fontaine, design associate. Theywere aided by Julie Jones, curator, Susan Vogel, associatecurator, and Kate Ezra, research assistant. Special thanksare due to Nobuko Kajitani, conservator of textiles, anto her staff, to Catherine Sease, associate conservator,and to Kathleen Eilersten, senior installer. I also wantto thank other members of the Department of PrimitiveArt namely Robert W. Young, James Dowtin, DonaldRoberts and Francesca Fleming


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The Art of Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas

A NEWPERSPECTIVE

The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection is com-posed of works of art from non-Western cultures, workshat have often been collectively called primitive art. This

a compendious but somewhat misleading term; thert is not crude or rough, nor were the social or intel-ectual structures of the people who made it. What then

primitive art? Properly it is the art of those peoples

who have remained until recent times at an early tech-ological level, who have been oriented toward the usef tools but not machines. Immediately we can see thatrimitive culture encompasses an enormous proportionf the earth's surface and of its past and present pop-lations. Much of Africa, parts of Asia, the continent of

Australia, and all the islands of Melanesia, Polynesia,nd Micronesia must be included. The whole of the New

World, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, comes withins province. Primitive culture has been the major part

f human experience.The time spans involved are great. If a stumbling block

o the understanding of primitive art has been the idea

hat it has no history, that notion has begun to be dis-elled. Recent archaeological discoveries have disprovedhe long-held belief that the history of Oceania began

mere ten thousand years ago. Now we know thatAustralia was first inhabited at least forty to fifty thou-and years ago, and the earliest works of art so far dis-overed there rock engravings in Koonalda Cave in

western Australia are about twenty thousand yearsld. These were contemporary with the great Paleolithicave paintings of Western Europe but are of an entirelyifferent order. Naturalistic depiction of animal figures

nowhere to be seen; instead, there are groupings ofbstract lines that seem to be in strategically significantreas of the cave. In northern Australia, petroglyphs

mages pecked onto rock surfaces in a style named aftersite called Panaramittee depict bird and animal tracks

nd eggs, and are about seven thousand years old.As the islands of Oceania became inhabited over pe-

iods of thousands of years from about 50,000 B.C. to

The sixteenth-century saltcellar was discovered inEurope but carved in Africa to Portuguese

pecifications. The work reflects its origins, treatingEuropean subjects in a style related to Benin courtvories. The vessel is double-chambered and made in

A.D. 900 other art traditions were begun. Althoughcan take it for granted that most of this early materiahas disappeared, a certain amount that is highly signiicant remains. There is the Lapita ware, so called a

a site in New Caledonia where it was excavated, whicwith its elegant and sophisticated patterning, was widspread throughout Melanesia from about 1200 B.C.

AD. 650. Evidence of a complex social structure andritual beliefs is shown by the burial, at Retoka inNew Hebrides, of Roymata, a great chief who died aboA.D. 1200 and was accompanied to his grave by antourage of forty richly ornamented human sacrifices.Legends recalling the event guided archaeologists toactual site in 1967. In New Zealand, elaborate whaleboneand stone ornaments of the hunters of the moa, antrichlike bird now extinct, as well as fragments oftiles, weapons, and wood carvings that date from phaps the fourteenth century and that have been recoveredfrom swamps, bear witness to a long and changing seriof art styles. Perhaps the most famous, and amonglatest, pre-European art in the Pacific is the group ofteenth-century stone colossi on Easter Island.

Africa's oldest surviving works of art are probablyrock paintings at Tassili and other sites in the Saharathe dates of these are obscure. The paintings show masand details of costumes now found in West Africato the south, suggesting that the present styles mayancient in origin. In sub-Saharan Africa, the Iron Aculture of Nok in Nigeria, beginning around 900 Bleft a quantity of terracotta sculpture. A tradition oframics was established in what is now Ghana much latein the seventeenth century, and has remained anportant aspect of art in West Africa down to the presenday. Nigeria is particularly rich in memorials of Africaart of the past, partly because of the sophisricated

of enduring metals. Ninth-century bronzes of convoluted forms were excavated between 1958 and 1960Igbo-Ukwu in the Niger River delta; the brass headsthe rulers of Ife made in subsequent centuries andcavated between 1938 and 1957 are famous, as arebronze heads, figures, and plaques of Benin, which wfirst seen by Portuguese visitors in the sixteenth century

and looted from the city by the British in 1897. Maworks in these styles were recently shown at the Mropolitan in the Treasures from Ancient Nigeria exhibition.


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hrough the millennia, countless thousands were de-

troyed. The record is more of hiatus than of history, butnough fragments remain to show evidence of someontinuous stylistic traditions. We must abandon the

dea, accepted until the late nineteenth century, that the

rimitive arts existed in a limbo outside of change, de-

elopment, or decline. They were not static. No oneoday can think, as some nineteenth-century art histo-

ans seriously stated, that ancient Egyptian, Chinese,r Japanese art remained unchanged throughout their

ong histories. The same must be said of primitive arts.For example, the history of Mexico, before Cortez

anded in Veracruz in 1519, extended over nearly 3,300

ears. Its land area is the equivalent of most of Europe.

With monuments of stone, ceramic, and wood survivingrom innumerable cultures, not to mention the massive

rchitecture of the religious centers, the student of Mex-can art is faced with a task equivalent to a survey of

European art from Stonehenge to the present, and a

omparable wealth of artistic styles.

As far as the record shows, few cultures of the pastave shown any very lively appreciation of, or even mild

nterest in, the art of foreign peoples. The Portuguese,n the earlv years of contact with the Africans aroundheir trading posts on Sherbro Island and in Nigeria,ommissioned ivory objects from them spoons, forks,unting horns, and those astonishing lidded and footedontainers that may be saltcellars. The Europeans didot attempt to trade for the cast-brass sculptures they

aw in the palace of the Obas, the rulers of Benin; theyppreciated the African's craftsmanship but not his art.

The ivories show Portuguese grandees, horsemen, car-vels, and coats of arms but only an occasional Africanace, serpent, or crocodile. Nor do foreigners figureargely in the African arts of the time. When they do,

is in the context of their equipment and its uses, aoint made all the more explicit because of the strictlyepresentational mode of Benin art. The interest of the

Bini was in the arquebus and the mercenary, both usefulddihons to their technology, and went no further.

The Spanish adventures in the New World, althoughhort-lived and violent, were a revelation. When Corteznd his entourage marched into Tenochtitlan, they were

ascinated by the markets, the architecture, and the cos-umes of the Aztecs and they were dazzled by the gold.When Pizarro's men, in the Inca capital at Cuzco, stoodefore the field of gold and silver maize with the life-ze golden llamas and herdsmen in the Temple of theun, they thought only of their own opulent futures.

Nothing in the conquistadors' training or backgroundsad prepared them for appreciation of Aztec and Incat. In Mexico, Cortez and his men saw the great stoneods in the temples only as images of horror, reeking

with blood from human sacrifices.By the end of the sixt'-enth century, the Spanish dream

f empire was over. Sf n sent expeditions into the Pa-fic in search of rich nt lands, but these travels came

o nothing It was not u il a century and a half later

between 1768 and 1779, that European presence inPacific became a reality. Knowledge, rather than a qfor wealth, was Cook's ostensible goal. It is true thatsecret orders from the British Admiralty enjoined onthe duty of raising the British flag wherever it seemfeasible, but the chief aim of the voyage was scientific.

The members of the Cook expeditions collectedfacts in the islands of the South Pacific, storing them

every cranny of their small ships, and the draftsmedrew the peoples they encountered as often assketched landscapes or kangaroos. Cook as commandkept voluminous diacies, and others on board recordetheir experiences. In these documents we find, forfirst time in the annals of European explorers, detaile

comments on native carving and craftsmanship. Onwhole, the art of the Maori aroused the greatest interes

Cook writes of the canoes that they were adornedas good a taste as any. But it was Joseph Banks, a yonaturalist and the leading scientific light of the firstage, who was the most perceptive and enthusiastic.Banks was impressed by the beauty of [the canoecarving in general, and, remarkably, distinguished

styles that the Maori habitually used. Unlike Cookthe others, he thought the execution of the canoe c

ings rough, so that the beauty of all their carvin

depended entirely on the design.The word in these statements that must engage

attention, even more than beauty, is taste, findicates that these men, some of them highly educateand among the best intellects of their time, were applyinin the remoteness of Polynesia pretty much the sstandards they would have back home in London.lies beyond Cook's ceaseless wonder that so muchcraftsmanship could be accomplished with meager Nlithic tools. Here was a genuine appreciation of aestheticqualities, and it was something new. In fact, it was befits time and was to have little effect in conservingobjects of its admiration.

The reports of the explorers were grist for theof eighteenth-century free thought. The Indians ofSouth Seas became the rage of London and Paris,subjects for sentimental operettas. At the same tthey seemed to be the embodiments of the natural m

proposed by Rousseau, and thus springboards forliberal fantasies of Diderot as well as for the nightmarsexuality of de Sade. This surge of interest was partthe rebellion against authority culminating in the Fre

Revolution of 1789.

Another manifestation of that rebellion was the

of fundamentalist Christian movements with their perful drive toward missionary work. Their energy

them to the South Seas, and they found there not

bright world described by the aristocratic intellectual

explorers but a dark morass of the most hopeless

ganism. Their duty, as they saw it, was to enlighte

pagan cultures, not understand them. The pagan g

and the arts that served them, were to disappear W

ever they could the missionaries had the islanders'


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erence to a myth or legend. He stopped there, withoutasking about the significance of the myth itself, buthe did maintain that the assembly of these designs

was a highly conscious and artful process. It is strikingthat Boas said little about Northwest Coast three-dimensional sculpture; when he did, it was mainly interms of the two-dimensional design applied to it. Evenso, there is no doubt that he made a vital contributionto anthropology and art history: he established once andfor all that there is nothing simple about the works hediscussed. His understanding of symbolism's role waslimited, but he initiated a more profound comprehensionof the significance of primitive art. Finally, he evokedthe word beauty, so rarely used before in this context,and insisted on its existence among all peoples:

We have seen that the desire for artisticexpression is universal. We may even say thatthe mass of the population in primitive societyfeels the need of beautifying their lives

more keenly than civilized man. . . . Do theythen possess the same keenness of aestheticappreciation that is found a t least in part in ourpopulation? I believe that in the narrow fieldof art that is characteristic of each people the

enjoyment of beauty is quite the same asamong ourselves. ... It is the quality of theirexperience, not a difference in mental make-up, that determines the difference betweenmodern and primitive art production andart appreciation.

Boas broadened this declaration in expressing his fun-damental view of humanity: Some theorists assume amental equipment of primitive man distinct from thatof civilized man. I have never seen a person in primitivelife to whom this theory would apply. This statementis perhaps a greater contribution to the understanding

of primitive art than any of his detailed analyses of

Northwest Coast two-dimensional designs or Eskimoneedlecases, for after Boas it was impossible to view theartists of primitive cultures as anything but conscious,

functioning persons in complex and rich societies.

While archaeologists and anthropologists debated

their problems, artists were looking at primitive art withfascination. The lonely f igure of Gauguin may be takenas a starting point. Contemptuous of the classical canonsof art as exemplified by Greek sculpture, he approvedof the art of the Persians, the Cambodians, and a little

of the Egyptian, as he told a correspondent in 1897

choices as radical as could be made by anyone who had

The incised and painted design on the upper third ofthese large Peruvian storage jars, dating from between300 and 100 B.C., is principally one of fantastic demonswith attached trophy heads. The design is typical ofthe late Paracas style. Open-winged falcons, theraised heads of which form nubbins, appear also; the

falcon heads face in a different direction on each jar

frequented the Louvre during that period. He hadbeen impressed by Aztec sculpture at the Paris Esition of 1889, and he admired Japanese art, as did mof his fellow artists. When he reached the South SGauguin recognized the merits of Marquesan design;wrote enthusiastically of its unparalleled sense of

oration and copied some of its details directly intoown paintings, sculptures, and woodcuts.

Outside the ethnographic museums, primitive artto be found in the few shops and dealers' establishmentsthat specialized in curiosities, weapons, and coins.could also be found in unexpected places, such asbar in Paris that the Fauvist painter Vlaminck enterone day in 1903 or 1904. There, among the bottles, sa couple of African figures, which Vlaminck acquiredthe price of drinks all around. He seems to havethem for their humanity and perhaps what he sawtheir quaintness. His friend Derain must also havethem, and indeed in 1905 bought a now well-knowFang mask that Vlaminck owned. The two paintersbecame the first private collectors of primitive armodern times or such is the story. Other young artfollowed their lead among them Matisse and Picasswho, beginning in 1906, formed significant collections.

Picasso was profoundly influenced by the sculpturof the Ivory Coast and Gabon. In 1907 he embarkupon the extraordinary paintings that include almdirect renderings of African sculptures. The faces onright side of Les Demoiselles d'Avig7wn can only be

casso's own disturbing vision of Senufo or Bakotaures. By 1908, as he moved toward Cubism, Picassobehind the grotesque and exotic qualities he saw in

rican sculpture and developed a purer sense opowerful volumes.

African sculpture had, naturally enough, a strong

fect on modern Western sculpture. If this influencenot to be found in Brancusi's works though Thewould suggest most explicitly that it is the art offollower Modigliani shows it clearly. The stone hethat Modigliani carved after 1909 when Picassoalready changed his style have as their forebears themasks of the Guro and Baule tribes of the Ivory CoJacques Lipchitz, at about the same Hme, was collectinprimiHve art and antiquities; critics discerned in

sculpture an African influence that he himselfgrudgingly acknowledged. The American sculptor JEpstein, living in England, began early to accumulatprimitive art and eventually owned one of the greprivate collections. Some of Epstein's highly stylizcarvings, especially those of about 1912, are startlingly

direct renderings of African sculpture.

In Germany, the artists of the Expressionist grouthe Blaue Reiter and the Briicke discovered primitivein circumstances different from those in France. WErnst Ludwig Kirchner first saw African and Oceaart, it was in the ethnographic museum in DresdenOceanic art, richly represented in German museumhad perhaps an even stronger impact there than AfricaThe painters Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein actual


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ourneyed to New Guinea and Micronesia, whereas noFrenchman had dreamed of traveling to the Ivory Coast.Their works, accordingly, include not only renderings

of masks and other carvings, but also genre studies ofnative and colonial life in the islands.

At about the same time, American interest in the prim-tive arts was stirring. The painter Marsden Hartleywrote from Europe to Alfred Stieglitz in 1912 about thenterest of German artists in the art of primitives, andn 1914 Stieglitz mounted the first American exhibition

of African sculpture at his New York gallery, 291. Theworks were drawn largely from the tribes of the Frencholonies, as were others he showed in company with

works by Picasso and Braque in 1915. A year later, Mariusde Zayas, who had assisted Stieglitz with the 1914 show,published his study African Negro Art: Its Influence on

Modem Art; in 1918 he wrote an introduction for analbum of magnificent photographs of African sculptureby Charles Sheeler.

By 1917 the younger generation of poets and artists

n Europe was alive to the primitive arts. The Dadaists,ebelling against Braque, Picasso, and Matisse, whomhey considered already old masters, looked at primitive

rt in a different light. They found a reflection of theiraims not in its formal qualities, but in what they thoughtof as its spontaneity. The Surrealists, a few years later,hifted their interest decisively from the art of Africa to

hat of Oceania, particularly Melanesia, which they saw,quite wrongly, as the unhindered reflections of the sub-conscious mind they themselves sought in their work.The accumulative techniques of primitive artists hadalready been noted by the poet Apollinaire, himself aollector of African sculptures, who wrote of its charms,

great plumes, peOets of resin, collars, pendants, ironinklers, lianas, shells. ... These conjunctions ap-pealed to some Surrealists as much as did the mergingand crowded figures on New Ireland funerary carvingsand Northwest Coast totem poles.

Pre-Columbian American sculpture was less felt as aninfluence on artists. Its impact is seen most notably inthe work of the young Henry Moore, who almost directlycopied the reclining figures of Mayan gods.

The interest among artists in the primitive arts en-

gendered a general appreciation of these works, at firstthrough the critics. By 1920, Roger Fry was able to writeof African art: 1 have to admit that some of these thingsare great sculpture greater, I think, than anything weproduced in the middle ages. Certainly they have thespecial qualiHes of sculpture in a higher degree. . . .

These African artists really conceive form in three di-mensions. He could hardly have said more, but hadhis eye not been trained by Cezanne, Braque, and Pi-casso, would he not h.ive said much less? Indeed, bythe time of his death in 1939, he had found little tointerest him in Oceanic ( Pre-Columbian Art.

By such means the pubL almost without being awareof the process, began to be climatized to the primitivearts: the admiration that Pio- ^o and Modigliani aroused

transferred to primitive art itself. To this day, manus have in fact come to it by this route.

The work of anthropologists, the establishment ofseums, and the enthusiasm of modern artists havecontributed to the assimilation of primitive art by a pu

far wider than could have been envisaged a merecentury ago. A series of illuminating exhibitions atMuseum of Modern Art in the thirties, forties, and fwas significant for exposing the public eye to primitiart. The Museum of Primitive Art, founded in 1957,unique in its commitment to integrating primitiveinto those of the great civilizations, and its influence

the ethnographic and art museums of the United Swas salutary. Before long museums were institutingseparate departments of primitive art or displaying

a more prominent or privileged position.The sporadic fads of the eighteenth and nineteent

centuries for the exotic the passion for ChinoiseriePompeian decoration have been superseded, then,something more sophisticated and apparently mmore stable. Today, attention is paid to the work ofrom another tradition for its own sake, its own identieven when it comes from so remote a source as onthe world's primitive cultures. Early art is becomingmiliar to the public directly, rather than filtered thro

Western artists, and has taken an equal footing inmajor museums with other great art.

At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a promisibeginning was made during the last decade of the niteenth century by the acquisition of Pre-Columbianworks. This course was not pursued, and indeed mof the collection was exiled to sister institutions inYork, although occasionally a significant object waschased or given to the Museum. In 1969, howevNelson A. Rockefeller offered the Metropolitan the

nowned collection he formed for his Museum of PrimitArt an enormous gift composed of several thousaworks of superb quality. The Michael C. RockefellWing, built to house and display it, is now compleWith the opening of these galleries, the equal of mindependent museums, the art of Africa, the Pacificlands, and the Americas takes its place among the

great traditions of the world so richh' repri'smtedMuseum's collections.

It is likely that this bronze figure, shown with theaccouterments and costume seen on figures ofwarriors in Benin art, was made at a provincial cenunder the influence of Benin, perhaps at the court

Owo or of Ida. Dated within the early and middleperiods of Benin art (1455 1640), it has a spontaneous,

somewhat rushc quality and a vigor that distinguishfrom the objects produced then for the court of Ben

The warrior carries a shield and a sword (with b

missing). The necklace of leopard's teeth and glabeads was traditionally filled with protectivemedicines and worn into battle. The welts on the


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FACES

ven more than the human body, the face has been theat subject for the artist. It is, significantly, the site not

y of the conjunction of the organs by which we senseexternal world, but also of the small variations in

m that distinguish and identify each of us. In a way

face is reassuring, no matter what its expressionidea of a faceless man is a source of nightmaresit is also awe-inspiring. Artists, particularly those

primitive cultures, have always seen it through a lensfeeling, which distorts it in myriad ways.On the whole, the rulers of this world have looked

th favor upon representations of themselves that wereore naturalistic rather than less. Rulers have alwaysd the insignia that are emblems of power, but theyve rarely wished that power to be represented merely

outward signs. They saw themselves as embodimentsstrength and authority in their own physical forms,

d they wished to be portrayed accordingly: the rulerght be a god (there are innumerable cases of rulersiming divinity), but he was a god in human shape.e heads of the Obas of Benin (p. 18), some of the most

uralistic sculptures from the African continent, areely direct portraits but always clearly representations

men who rule.In the artistic realm of the supernatural, as well, the

the Torres Strait Islands off southern Papua Newinea, a unique material was used for masks: thintes of turtle shell, pierced and tied together. This, representing a human head on which a frigate

d perches, is from Mabuiag. Although a few otherh masks exist their use and intention are unknown

primitive artist felt the need to follow the contoursthe human face, though he usually threw something obalance. The distortion of a single feature can do thvery effectively, and the one most commonly usedthis way is the eye, proverbially the most expressiveall the features. The mouth is capable of impressive gmaces, of humor or terror, and can appear as an entry-way to unknown and dreadful regions caves, tunderworld, the grave. The protruding tongue in Mexicor New Zealand suggests aggression. The nose canelongated into a powerful weaponlike extension. But teyes are almost infinite in the messages, sometimes ambiguous, they convey. The lowered lids of a Tlingit mas(p. 14) suggest tranquillity or rest, certainly, but alsobrooding, leashed energy. It is the full glare of the ein, for instance, carvings on Sepik River shields thleaves no doubt of a determination to intimidate tviewer. Almost more alarming are the circular aperturesof some Dan masks especially since the real humaeyes could once be seen, mobile and incongruous, lurking behind them.

The depiction of the face can be entirely metamor-phosed into a new image by various forms of distortionused as powerful tools by the primitive artists: stylizationinto geometric forms in which only the faintest tracesof the original features can still be discerned, througha veil of pattern (p. 25) or even blank space; the usematerials foreign to the human body, such as turtle shel(pp. 12 and 17), bark cloth, or fiber; and the usebrilliant color overlaying the features (pp. 14-15). It

a testimony to the strength of the human face that despitesuch di t ti i i bl d


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The famous mid-sixteenth-century ivory maskfrom the Bini of Nigeria wasworn on the belt of aruler as part of his regi&.The iron inlays on the :forehead represent trib

scarifications, and arounthe hair is a frieze of

d heads of-

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^ own foruralistic masks like thise from Erub Island in therres Strait south of Pa* ~ew Guinea; on otherands they were worn

nerary ceremonies by iho mimed the course ofsun as a symbol of the


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Heads in dark brass (usually calledbronze) were kept on the royal altars of

Benin City in Nigeria as memorials to

ancestors: in the one below, dating from

the mid-sixteenth century, the subject

is shown wearing regalia cap andchoker of coral beads, as the king

does to this day. The jar in the form of aone-eyed man's head, upper right, is

typical of the naturalistic ceramics of the

Mochica of Peru (A.D. 500-700). A maskin the Mixteca style (A.D. 1250-1500) of

Mexico shows the rain god Tlaloc.

III l 11

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This Nigerian headdress is

ah unusually sophishcated

Yoruba sculpture built from

geometric shapes. Two disc-haped faces carved of one

piece of wood stand on aneck attached to a woodenap. Overlying each is the

ong-nosed visage of a

horned animal, whicheuses elements of the

arger face. This headdress

was apparently worn by adancer whose body wasoncealed by a costumettached over the woodenap, but its use remains

bscure. The Ekoi headpiecerom Nigeria (right) is

haracteristically naturalistic.

The two faces are male

and female.

^,^Mf-


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Funerary masks like 0lis Peruvian Chimu example(1200-1400) were elaboptely painted and ornamented.Almost the entire gol(l|n surface would be hidden,with perhaps only the e and the outline of the

Europeans experienced b* rbaric treasures of anc

' tppd by looking at ti

the golden and; America can be


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>>*;:

f

V.

A mask from theKongo of Zaire, above,is naturalistic, like most oftheir sculpture, but here

a certain degree ofstylization gives addedexpressiveness. The Songemask from Zaire, right,is strongly stylized,

on the other hand, andis given a rich, almost

sparkling surface through

the use of indsed pattern.This type of mask is saidto be worn at ceremoniesfor the death or

installation of a king.

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poons, unlike knives andrks, are universal tools for

ting and serving food. Thestures of taking up and

ouring out that can be madeith them are expressions ofbundance and generosity: therge ceremonial spoon, at the

ht, of the Dan tribe ofberia is carried in danced

xpressions of pride by wives

important men and used tostribute ri ce at feasts. Theangwa of Cameroon were

ne of the few Africaneoples to attack the problem

movement in sculpture.heir pieces included paired

gures of kings and queenserforming dance steps.

hown singing and executingrhythmical turning-and- i

ouching movement, the kii^gure at the far right carried/

pipe in the left hand and \(lonking gt>urd in the righl

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The ceramic vessel, left, made bythe Huastec people of northern

Veracruz about AD. 1400-1500, is anoddly infantile, obese form tha t, l ike

the fat babyish figures of the Olmecpeople, suggests a strange divinity.

The figure is ornamented withbeads between the brows and on

the lower lip and covered withbody-painting designs. Figure

sculptures are rare in Micronesia.

The one below from the PalauIslands, originally set in the gable of

a men's gathering house,

represents a woman named Dilukaiwho was strapped into this

position, according to legend, as

punishment for spreading disease.


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A man or spirit riding a dois the subject of the Kongofetish from Zaire on the left.

The mirror set in thefigure's belly seals in magic

substances and deflects

malign influences. Theupraised hand probablyheld a weapon to fightenemies. The brass (orbronze) plaque from Benin

City at right adorned a pillar

of the palace in the

sixteenth to seventeenth

century. The ruler ridesside-saddle, supported by

the hands of two retainers

while being protected from

the sun's glare by the

shields of two others.


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This massive Benin bronze staff (left) was made foran eighteenth-century oba (king) after a period whenthe king's authority was challenged. Probably held onstate occasions as an emblem of the oba's legitimatepower, the staff has a hollow chamber with a clapper in

it. The oba is shown standing on an elephant, a clearstatement about who is literally and figuratively on top.


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Such ornaments as the Mochica ear spools(a.D. 200-500) are great treasures of ancient

Peruvian art. Biid-headed messengers dash acrossface of these clutching bags in outstretched hands


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The small, pugnacious figuresthat appear as pendantsamong the Tairona of Colombia(1200-1500) are mostextraordinary when the figureswear enormous headdressesthat intricately combine birdand animal heads and multiplespiral elements. This figure

from the Sierra Nevada regionis particularly elaborate. The

staff at the right, of forged ironsurmounted by a solid cast-bronze seated figure, is one oftwo similar staffs found inMali. It is a far larger andmore elaborate casting thanother bronzes known from theDogon-Bozo area and may be


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ANIMALS

is not without significance that the Bible describes the

nesis of the bircis, sea creatures, and animals as takingace before the creation of mankind. The story can cer-nly be read as describing the preparation of the worldr Adam, who then establishes his dominion by givinge other creatures names. To name something, or to bele to call it by a name, often represents a claim to

ower over it. In many cultures names have been pow-ul magic spells.The animal kingdom is perhaps even more central toconception of the world order that is older than thatthe Bible. Before the tiniv^ came when humans turned

em into pets and beasts of bu^. n or funneled themo controlled preserves and lab I them endangeredecies, the animals were the true rulers of the world.

When the puny population of the human race couldave been trampled out of existence under the advance

a single great herd of bison or reindeer, it was cleardeed who were the masters. Mankind knew well

nough that the animals were stronger, fiercer, cleverer,d certainly more beautiful than themselves. Theyould have understood by instinct, even by conviction,e poet Paul Eluard's phrase the animals and theiren.

It is with eyes attuned as much as possible to this viewat we should look at the animals as they are shown

he eighteenth-century bronze leopard, left , fromenin City was a royal beast; kept in the palace asmbols of the ruler's power, leopards were led on

ashes before him during processions. This sculptureas also used as a vessel for liquids and was filled

by the artists of the primitive world. Many of them shothe animals as ancestors of man. The species vary froone part of the world to another, but generally they anot the milder sort.

The jaguar, one of the great feline predators, prowlsthrough all the ancient art of the Americas, a fanged anclawed image of terror. He occurs in a hundred guises,

some of which he seems to share with the coyote, asbeing of water and the sky. In Central America he mergeswith a water monster, the crocodile, a beast that makemany appearances in its own right. In many partsMiddle and South America the jaguar was seen as tbegetter of mankind.

Indeed it is a measure of their power that animals havoften been seen as man's true ancestors, our fathers anmothers of long ago. Consequently, hunting was oftenforbidden to the animals' putative descendants; in somcultures, men were obliged to ask the animal's permis-sion for the hunt in advance and to apologize to itits loss of life afterwards.

Masks in animal form often express this kinship; theman becomes his ancestral beast and reenacts its deeds.Sometimes he impersonates animals or animallike he-roes who taught humanity essential skills. The famousantelope headdresses of the Bambara of Mali (p. 4represent Tyi Wara, a being who taught mankind thsecrets of agriculture. Very often in Africa the mask represents not so much the animal itself as qualities asso-ciated with it that are in turn associated with gods: th

wildness of the gorilla, the power of the buffalo. Emblematic features are combined to represent the totalityof a god's attributes. They also represent the humanbeing's haunting discontent with his own powers, hl i k h


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wide on a silver-sheet base is from LornPeru (Mochica period, 200 B.c.-A.D. 500)^attachments, fastened by small flanges ^pair of crayfish. J


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ABSTRACTIONS

Broadly speaking, the art of the primitive world is rep-

esentational. The vision animating it may differ verygreatly from that of art in the West, but a t tha t. Western

concepts of visual verisimilitude have themselves varied

widely from period to period. Even more marked is the

divergence of any representational work of art whethern two or three dimensions from the natural phenom-enon it purports to portray. Each of us sees what ourociety and our time tell us that we see, and each artist

portrays a personal version of what society tells him.The sixteenth-century bronze head of a Nigerian rulers no less true to nature than a photographic portrait by

ulia Margaret Cameron. Even in many of the distortionsof primitive art, the artist has not invented or gone far

beyond nature, but, rather, he has either relied upon it,or, as we have learned, he has faithfully recreated visionsfrom his dreams.

Beyond representations of animals, men, and godsoften interchangeable as they are there lies yet anotherrealm, less immediately accessible in its meaning andless commonly encountered. It includes works of art instyles akin to those we call abstract.

The primirive artist moves from naturalism to ab-straction without embarrassment, even in the samework. One of the most famous examples of this is to befound in the art of the Massim area of New Guinea,where there is an extraordinary range of gradations from

This miniature poncho from Peru was apparentlymade as an Inca funerary offering. The use of feathersfrom tropical birds found only far to the east is an

one mode to the other based on a single theme, suas the head of a frigate bird. They span the possibilities

between naturalism, on the one hand, and reduction

the form to a simple scroll, on the other. Some suworks, like the geometric engravings made by soAustralian aboriginal groups consisting of arrangements

of concentric circles linked by straight lines, do indee

bear a strong resemblance to styles that have appeared

only recently in the Western world. The Australian

gravings, on slabs of stone or wood, are in fact emblem

atic illustrations of sacred myths. Again, the apparently

totally abstract designs of New Ireland breast ornamentsare superb examples of intricate pattern constructed fr

repetition of the simplest elements. These designs mbe stylized human or bird figures.

There are instances, however, in which flat pattern

can be abstract at least as far as we know. Among thare

thosein

whichpattern seems to have been used

purely decorative purposes, including the brilliant

feather-decked ponchos of the Inca aristocracy (p.Even these, however, may have been keyed towearer's family or rank.

Command of three-dimensional form is especiallyclear when the images or forms are the least immediatelyrecognizable. A Peruvian stirrup- spout pot of the Pacas Necropolis period, with its modeling in clay o

faceted shape, perhaps a fruit, can be compared

a great Mochica gold necklace with multiple, bre^ ..li

units, made several centuries later. Clay and gold m

be at opposite ends of the scale in terms of ' lue,the same rigorous control of form and the ? . degre

of sophistication are to be found in objects r > f cith


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x

The pair drear spools sho vv'there was worn by somegrandee of the Coastal Huari

people living in the Nazca

Vallev of Peru about A.D.

600-ioOO. The support is ofbone; the elaborate mosaic i

shell and stones inlaid on thdiscs is at first glance abstract,

yet it actually includes not

only geometric elements but

also the heads of felines.


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CREDITSCover: Figure. Kongo, Zaire. 19th-20thcentury. Wood, cloth, beads, shells, horns.H. liVs in. The Michael C. RockefellerMemorial Collection, Bequest of Nelson A.Rockefeller, 1979. 1979.206.127

Inside front and back covers: Mantle.Coastal Huari (Tiahuanaco), Peru, CentralCoast, area of Patvilica (?). ad 600-1000.Cotton, Vfciool. 72 X 64 in. The Michael

C.Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Gift ofArthur M. Bullowa, 1973. 1978.412.257Back cover: Shield. Ysabel, SolomonIslands. Basketry, clay, shell inlay. H. SS'Ain. The Michael C. Rockefeller MemorialCollection, Purchase, Nelson A. RockefellerGift, 1972. 1978.412.730

4 Saltcellar. Bini-Portuguese. Early 16thcentury. Ivory. H. IVb in. Louis V. Bell andRogers Funds. 1972.63

8 Pair of Storage Jars. Late Paracas, Palpa

Valley Peru. 300-100 B C Grayware,postfired paint. H. 17V4, 17V2 in. Gift of

Nathan Cummings. 1974.123.1,211 Warrior. Yoruba, Nigeria. 1455-1640. Bronze.

H. 12% in. Purchase, Edith Perry ChapmanFund, Rogers, Pfeiffer, Fletcher, and DodgeFunds, Mrs. Donald M. Oenslager Gift, inmemory of her husband, Geert C. E. Prinz Gift,and Funds from Various Donors, 1977. 1977.17312 Mask. Mabuiag Island, Torres Strait,Papua New Guinea. Turtle shell, othermaterials. W. 25 in. The Michael C.Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Purchase,Nelson A. Rockefeller Gift, 1967.1978.412.1510

14 Mask. Tlingit, Alaska. 19th-20thcentury. Wood, paint, hide, metal. H. 13%in. The Michael C. Rockefeller MemorialCollection, Bequest of Nelson A.Rockefeller, 1979. 1979.206.440

15 Figure for Yam Cult. Yau, East SepikProvince, Papua New Guinea. Wood,paint. H. 48 in. The Michael C. RockefellerMemorial Collection, Purchase, Mrs.Wallace K. Harrison Gift, 1974.1978.412.1700

16 Belt Mask. Court of Benin, Nigeria. 16thcentury. Ivory. H. 9% in. The Michael C.Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Gift ofNelson A. Rockefeller, 1972. 1978.412.32317 Mask. Erub Island, Torres Strait, PapuaNew Guinea. Turtle shell, hair. H. 16V8 in.The Michael C. Rockefeller MemorialCollection, Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller,1972. 1978.412.729

18 Head. Court of Benin, Nigeria. 16thcentury. Bronze. H. 9'/4 in. The Michael C.Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Bequest ofNelson A. Rockefeller, 1979. 1979.206.8619 Above: Effigy Jar. Mochica, Peru, NorthCoast . A .D 500-700 , Ceramic, sUp. H. 4yin. The Michael C. Rockefeller MemorialCollection, Purchase, Nelson A. RockefellerGift, 1972. 1978.412.72

19 Below: Tlaloc Mask (God of Rain).Mixteca-PuebU. Mexico, ad 1250-1500.Stone. H. 5'/2 in. The Michael C.Rockefellir Memorial Collection, Bequest ofNelson A R


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Documents

The Art of Africa, The Pacific Islands, And the Americas (Art eBook)