ARTKids - ARTAges Oriental Art in Summary

ARTAges- African Art in Summary

"The African continent has produced a great diversity of art from prehistoric times to the present day. In many instances, art production has been related to ritual or tribal ceremonies, as well as serving more secular decorative functions, but it is not always easy to determine the function of a particular work.

Zaire, Luama River, Zimba, Bango Bango,
or Hemba people
Mask
Late 19th-early 20th century
Ivory
8 7/8 x 4 1/8 x 2 7/8 in.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas

It is also problematic to label as 'art' the productions of African craftspeople who frequently considered their work as an essential part of secular or religious life. In many tribes, the artist had a high status, but the artist would not necessarily have been the equivalent of the western fine artist who relied on patronage or the marketplace to regulate his or her production. With these strictures in mind, it is possible to isolate different areas and different practices of African art. From c 7000 BC rock drawings include representations of animals and hunters. From the beginning of tribal differentiation, tribal art has become a way of isolating one tribe from another, and tribal art can take the form of scarification, body painting or sculptural masks used in religious ceremonies.

FANG
Mask
Gabon
Painted wood
18 7/8 in. (48 cm) high
Musee National d'Art Moderne,
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

"Such diversity also appears in separate geographical regions, where natural resources dictated the materials used, while tribal power, wealth or sophistication was responsible for the type of objects produced. The Ashanti of Ghana used gold and bronze which were readily accessible in their territory, whereas the Baluba, a tribal people in the Congo, specialized in carved images of women holding bowls. The Fang group of tribes produced high-quality funerary sculptures which were dominated by geometric patterns. The Bambara of west Africa were known for their elaborate head-dresses, which were used during ceremonies, in contrast to the simple wooden masks of the Dogon people of west Africa. The art of Ife and Benin - both cities in western Nigeria - was lavish and naturalistic during the 12th - 17th centuries when those areas were infiltrated by European influences, and the Bakuba tribe was known for its royal portrait carvings. The dark wood of the Ivory Coast was the basis for sculptural figurines of the Baule people, who produced classically naturalistic masks, and terra cotta was the material used for heads produced by the Nok peoples of central and north Nigeria. Nigeria was also the home of the Yoruba, one of the most prolific tribes in African art.

"In the 19th and 20th centuries, African art was 'discovered' by Western colonizers and embraced by modernist artists for its lack of pretension and exciting formal qualities. With the Westernization of much African society, 'traditional' art has become commercialized and sold as souvenirs, while from the 1920s, the growth of African art colleges in more modernized sections of Africa has led a number of African artists to adopt western influences in their work."

- From "The Bullfinch Guide to Art History"

One artistic activity common to all African cultures consists of crafts or cottage industries, where specialists make objects needed by other members of the society. In the case of textiles, these specialists include spinners, weavers, dyers of cloth, tailors, and seamstresses. Others work in leather, wood, clay, or metal. Another branch of art consists of wood and metal sculpture used in religious and cultural ceremonies. Craftsmen and craftswomen are called upon to fashion objects to be worn as part of a costume at a New Year festival, a dance in hope of the first rains, or a harvest ceremony where the guardian spirits are thanked for providing food. Many of these objects have found their way into art exhibitions and museums in Europe and North America, where they have influenced Western arts and crafts.

Kente cloth was originally made only for Ashanti leaders.

Another branch of the arts can be called court art. This consists of objects made at the courts of the kingdoms that dominated many parts of Africa before colonial rule. The artists were full-time professionals maintained at the court, where they fashioned clay, wood, and metal sculptures in honor of the king, the queen mother, and various officials. Often they produced naturalistic or realistic art as they tried to capture the expression of a person. The bronze and terra-cotta sculptures of Ife and Benin City, two very old cities in Nigeria, are the best-known objects in this category. Power and authority were expressed through other arts, as well. Kente cloth, for example, was only made for the political leaders of the Ashanti state (now southern Ghana). This brightly colored cloth includes threads laced with gold.

African American Culture and the Harlem Renaissance
1920-1940

The flowering of African American creative talent in literature, music, and the arts in the 1920s was centered in New York and became known as the Harlem Renaissance. Like the Garvey movement, it was based on a rise in race consciousness among blacks. The principal contributors to the Harlem Renaissance included not only well-established literary figures such as Du Bois and the poet James Weldon Johnson, but also new young writers such as Claude McKay, whose militant poem 'If We Must Die' is perhaps the most-quoted black literary work of this period. Other outstanding writers of the Harlem Renaissance were the novelist Jean Toomer and the poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. During the 1920s the artists Henry Ossawa Tanner and Aaron Douglass and the performers Paul Robeson, Florence Mills, Ethel Waters, and Roland Hayes were also becoming prominent. The black cultural movement of the 1920s was greatly stimulated by black journals, which published short pieces by promising writers. These journals included the NAACP's Crisis and the National Urban League's Opportunity. The movement was popularized by black philosopher Alain Locke in 'The New Negro', published in 1925, and by the black historian Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Association for the Study of Negro (now Afro-American) Life and History and editor of the Journal of Negro History.

LOCKE, Alain (1886-1954). As a writer and teacher, Alain Locke promoted recognition of the contributions of other blacks to American music, art, and literature. He was equally influential in encouraging black Americans to explore their heritage and expand their cultural accomplishments. Born in Philadelphia, Pa., on Sept. 13, 1886. Both his parents were schoolteachers. They wanted their son to enter one of the professions, perhaps medicine, as a means of rising above some of the restrictions that were placed upon his race. But sickness made a career as a doctor impossible, and the parents helped young Locke to prepare himself as a teacher.

"Lois Mailou Jones is a pioneering and masterful twentieth-century American artist who has surmounted prejudices and roadblocks without losing the vitality, warmth, and color that earmark her brilliant work. Every lover of the creative spirit in the visual arts should know her oeuvre, as well as the sweep of her triumphant life, stretching over virtually the whole of this century.

Loïs Mailou Jones
Les Pommes Vertes, 1938
Oil on canvas, 36 x 28 1/4 in.
Exhibited at the Société des Artistes Français, Paris, 1938

"Jones began her career, after excellent preparation at the School of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, at a time when racial prejudice and discrimination were omnipresent features of American life. Although she was born in new England, her life was not free of subtle color barriers, which sometimes expressed themselves in more muted tones. And the Washington, D.C., in which she settled in 1930 was a bastion of Jim Crow practice. Except for France, where she enjoyed freedom from U.S. racial attitudes, and some fortunate experiences with particularly fair-minded arts figures such as the Vose family, Jones engineered her professional place in spite of barriers. Sometimes she entered works in exhibitions that did not recognize African-American artists by having white friends deliver the paintings. In other cases, prizes initially awarded to her on merit were subsequently taken away and given to white competitors. And she often found herself well received abroad. Despite these trials, Jones prevailed on the basis of her talent, energy, and persistence. She refused to be discouraged."

"William H. Johnson arrived in Harlem when the Renaissance was in the making. He had come to New York in 1918 from Florence, South Carolina, and became a student at the national Academy of Design. He remained there for five years, absorbing the teachings of George Luks and Charles Hawthorne, and readying himself for a career in art that would take him to places in North Africa and Europe in search of a permanent residence. It was through the influence of Hawthorne that Johnson traveled first to Paris in 1926, where he settled, painted, and studied the works of modern European masters."

- from "Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America" . The Studio Museum in Harlem. Abradale Press, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers.

William H. Johnson
Street Life -- Harlem, ca. 1939-40
Oil on wood, 45 3/4 x 38 5/8 in.

"Palmer Hayden, a name given to the World War I veteran by his White commanding sergeant who could not pronounce his real name (Peyton Hedgeman), was born in Wide Water, Virginia. He is often referred to as a self-trained artist. However, the record reveals he was a student at Cooper Union in New York and pursued independent studies at Boothbay Art Colony in Maine. He studied and pained independently in France, where he lived from 1927 to 1932. Hayden's reputation emanates from his realistic depictions of folklore and Black historical events. He, like Douglas, was also among the first Black American artists to use African subjects and designs in his painting (which helped, in fact, to distinguish between ethnic stylistic differences in the art of Black Africa). His Fetiche et Fleurs, a composition of 1926, highlights a Fang mask from Gabon and Bakuba raffia cloth from the Congo (now Zaire), which have been placed in a traditional still-life setting. Locke praised the artist for his modernist approach to painting. But Hayden was not a modernist in his stylistic approach. Instead, he broke with tradition by depicting African art in his paintings."

- from "Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America" . The Studio Museum in Harlem. Abradale Press, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers.

Palmer Hayden
The Janitor who Paints
Oil on canvas
The National Museum of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.