Dark Mirrors

Aside from astronomers and geologists, who pay mankind little regard, anthropologists have perhaps the longest view of human history. For many a modern artist and thinker, anthropological researches into primitive cultures have refreshed the past, illuminated the present, enriched Man's theory of himself. This week one of the most brilliant living anthropologists, London's Bronislaw Malinowski, introduced to U. S. readers an emigre German professor's study of primitive art as "one of the first contributions to real anthropology . . . the only objective, clear and telling documentation of native opinion on Europeans."

Professor Julius Lips started work on The Savage Hits Back* in 1929 in Cologne, where he was the curator-in-chief of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum. After studying savages for years it occurred to him that the savages were also capable of studying him, whereupon he set out to collect all the native representations of white men he could find. By 1933 he was ready to put his notes together. In that year, however, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and preoccupation with other cultures than the "Aryan" became dangerous. Forced to resign, Professor Lips was finally driven to Paris, whence Columbia University invited him to finish his work in New York.

Neither an exotic nor a professional prophet, 42-year-old Professor Lips does not go off the deep end with his late eminent countryman, Oswald Spengler, who prophesied an onslaught on Europe by a black horde led by white adventurers. But he does not present savages as the pitiably naive creatures they are in most white imaginations. In fact, Professor Lips points out, North America and Australia have been the only continents actually wrested from savages by the white race, which in South America has been mostly absorbed and in India and China repelled from all but a few footholds. Most of Africa is virtually uninhabitable by whites. "Whilst the white man keeps on thinking that his civilization is slowly conquering peoples and countries for him, and actually, even quite recently, new blobs of color on the political map do signify that new colonial empires are being founded in Africa, the real truth is that the chain of the colored world has for the past hundred years been visibly closing in."

To artists who have been aware for twenty years of the vigor of African Negro sculpture--so aware that their camp followers have made fetish figures fashionable and thereby encouraged Paris ateliers to fake them by the carload--the Lips book will have value in clarifying the historical background of an unassimilated artistic influence and indicating the future possibilities of its assimilation. Professor Lios insists that all analogies between genuine primitive art and the drawings or modelings of children are unsuccessful. Savage kingdoms in Africa and the South Seas, for example, developed through settled centuries a mastery of their native materials and deep traditions of style. Natives in New Ireland did carving with mussel shells which no 20th Century artist could imitate with his tools. African tribes smelted alloys of metal in blast furnaces before white men knew of such processes, made adzes, chisels and gouges for their skilled carvers, cast fine bronzes at Benin.

Early primitive people had little use for portraiture but an analogy to it exists in the art of mask making. Early native masks were usually intended to express the magic power of the individual after death. Portrait carvings and casts of specific individuals, however, were later done in Africa by people who saw or heard of such things among Europeans. And when these and other savage artists went in for observation their maturity in their own genre became evident.

Because it is confined to instances in which these dark mirrors were held up to whites, The Savage Hits Back gives Western painters and sculptors a more immediate basis for understanding native art than any similar work to date. With his white master as his subject, the native carver or mask maker saw most often something of a tenderfoot buffoon, a character he was sometimes able to render with deadly emphasis. "What [I] saw," says Professor Lips, "was unexpected, full of knavery and genius, and inexorable."

Readers will find that many of the specimens collected by Anthropologist Lips do not quite come up to this estimate but that when they do they are extraordinary. Judged by Western standards, most delicate and realistic work illustrated is a number of 18th Century carvings of European sailors by the Indians of North-west America. Most irrepressible creations are those of African natives. A "bogy" statue in wood and shells of an Englishman (complete with topee) from the Nicobar Islands concentrates a "tremendous characterization of racial traits" and a mask of a missionary, done in light bark and grasses by a native of the Solomon Islands, achieves something uncanny and memorable. From the Guinea Coast there is a figurine of Queen Victoria, carved in wood, magnificently dumpy, anxious and refined.

*Yale University Press ($5).

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