Some brief and scattered notes on European attitudes towards African Art

Africa has a rich and variegated artistic tradition: It constitutes one of the richest legacies on earth. Therefore, when talking about the different arts of Africa, it is difficult and dangerous to neatly and conclusively make geographical, thematic or historical divisions (even though such an approach is somewhat unavoidable).

The dawn of art in Africa is often traced back some two thousand years, when hunters and pastoralists in the Sahara were engraving and painting on rock. These activities are typical of nomadic people, and were probably practised all over the continent before the spread of settled life.

The looting of Benin by a British expedition in 1897 led to the realization by colonialists and other Europeans that there was art in Africa. The “Benin Boom” led to A. Pitt-River's descriptive book of 1900, Ancient Works of Art From Benin, and the first proper—if egregiously thin—historical study of the aesthetic tradition of this continent, F. Von Luschan's Benin Antiquities of 1919.

A greater acknowledgement of African arts started in 1905 when European avant-garde artists in France and, later, in Germany publicly acknowledged the richness and uniqueness of this tradition. According to Jan Vansinna, “a wave of almost delirious enthusiasm followed”, which encouraged the first private collections. However, at this stage excessive emphasis was placed on artistic form—social context and meaning were waved off with glacial indifference and elitism.

Anthropologists tried to take some steps towards the correction of this imbalance after 1925. The first field trip specifically ventured upon for the examination of arts dates back from 1933. By 1945, 'African art' constituted a small but vibrant sub-field in anthropology.

Today, scholars have increasingly recognized that such Western aesthetic criticism of African art is somewhat irrelevant because it is an expression of Western culture more than anything else. Greater emphasis is placed on trying to understand the complexities of visual cultures in Africa by drawing linkages with the social and cultural circumstances within which certain aesthetic representations are created.

One of the most familiar and, indeed, iconic visual traditions is The Art of Masquerade. This is an art of transformation. Masked performers assume a different identity, and masquerades often occur at the changes of the seasons and during rites of passage, including initiations, and ,of course, death. Such art was, for much of the 20^th century, referred to by Europeans as “Primitive art”, and, later, in very much the same tone of pitying condescension, as “Tribal art”. It is increasingly accepted, however, that these representations do in fact possess both intricacy and sophistication. Accordingly, many renowned international galleries have in the past few years displayed such masks, including the Horniman Museum in London, which famously included them in a 2009 exhibition on the cultural riches of Benin.