Works of Fear

In the lobby stood a huge wrought-iron war god. Elsewhere in the galleries were war masks, chieftains' stools, wooden idols, ivory headrests, bowls, swords, fly whisks, amulets, statues and fertility fetishes belonging to Frank Crowninshield, Henri Matisse, A. Conger Goodyear, Helena Rubinstein, Paul Guillaume, Sir Michael Sadler, and 65 other collectors. Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art was last week opening the largest, most carefully chosen and most important loan exhibition of African Negro sculpture the U. S. has ever seen.

Ever since the Portuguese, Dutch and British first started raiding the jungles of West Africa for slaves to work their new colonies, the hideous gods and little demons of primitive Africa have been turning up as curios in the homelands of the traders. Not until shortly after the turn of the Century, when the founders of modern art loudly proclaimed their independence, was the artistic merit of these mementos of the slave trade generally appreciated. Young modernists like Jacob Epstein, Pablo Picasso, Amadeo Modigliani, were profoundly affected by West African sculpture. Today an African mask or two is as necessary for the apartment of a young-man-about-Paris as lounging pajamas and a bottle of port.

After 30 years, it is easier for the normally intelligent man to understand the interest that these gruesome figures have for artists, even though he may not be able to comprehend the technical skill, the shrewd relation of form to material that these savage artists used. Their work was not idly decorative but deeply purposeful. They were making religious symbols just as earnestly as the romanesque stone carvers of the 9th Century in Europe. Fear of angry gods and strong enemies was their dominant emotion as they fashioned their fetishes to win divine favor and victory on the battlefield. Wrote famed Critic Sheldon Cheney of this African art:

"These little idols, fetishes and masks are direct expressions of religious emotion. The sculptor approaches his work in humility, always feeling that he is less important than the figure he is carving. His carving is for itself, out of his emotion. Is it any wonder that European modernists, rebelling from a current mode of art, should have hailed ecstatically such simple expressive beauty?"

Out of more than 600 specimens which Collector James Johnson Sweeney assembled last week, critics picked three as particularly noteworthy 1) Bieri, a stolid engaging head of a young girl from French Gabun, with long formalized curls; 2) a witch doctor's Konde figure, dumpy, menacing and studded with nails representing curses against an enemy; 3) a squatting Venus, also from French Gabun. From Dahomey came one of the largest exhibits, the iron war god in the lobby, nearly life-size and wearing a strange spiked hat and a garment like a pleated nightshirt. His raised left arm looked as if he were signaling over his shoulder with his thumb, like any hitchhiker.

There was not a single lion in the show. The hunting, fighting tribesmen of the open plains of East Africa, though black as coal, are racially not pure-blooded Negroes. Nor are they prey to the jungle fears that are the basis of west coast Negro sculpture. It is Director Sweeney's shrewd guess that with a few exceptions none of his Negro statues are more than 150 years old. Carved from soft woods, most of them show the ravages of white ants and tropical rains.

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