African Images, Powers and Presences

A DIPLOMATIC as well as an artistic event, the exhibition of African sculpture that opens this week at Washington's National Gallery of Art is a striking display of international cooperation. Sponsored by the ambassadors of the 34 African countries, it is the most comprehensive show of the sculpture of Black Africa yet seen in the U.S. Four galleries have been cleared and special platforms, islands, and plinths built to display the artifacts to best advantage. The 194 objects selected by African scholar William Fagg, Keeper of Ethnography at the British Museum, include many works from the collections of African nations, as well as others from Western museums and collections. The National Gallery thus brings together a group of masterpieces and styles that not even the Africans ever saw assembled in one place.

Modest & Monumental. The show makes clear what many people overlook --that Black Africa developed highly organized cultures and a sophisticated naturalistic art long before the Europeans arrived. A few works survive from this era, among them the superb bronze head of a queen mother from 16th century Benin, whose kings ruled a large area of what is now southern Nigeria. There is also the portrait statue of King Bom Bosh, ruler of the Congolese kingdom of the Bakuba about 1650-1660. Most impressive of all is the famous Tada bronze from Nigeria, a relatively small (20 inches high) but monumental work that has never before been shown outside Nigeria. For several hundred years, it has sat overlooking a remote reach of the Niger, venerated by the Tada villagers who believe that the legendary hero Tsoede brought it to protect them from misfortune. African scholars consider it the finest surviving example of the Yoruba court art that flourished at the religious center of Ife 1,000 years ago, when Europe was still sunk in the darkness of the Middle Ages.

The court art of Ife and Benin demonstrates that the ancient Africans could achieve a naturalism comparable to that of Egypt, Greece and Renaissance Italy. But Africa's unique contribution to world art is the violently expressionistic wooden sculpture and highly stylized masks of tribal art--the art that impressed and excited Picasso and Matisse and strongly deflected the course of modern art. Oddly enough, this tribal art owes much of its vitality to the wood-eating white ant of Africa. Because of its depredations--and some help from natural decay--each generation of carvers had to create new images and new variations on traditional forms, constantly revitalizing an image that was lodged in the tribe's consciousness.

The bold, dramatic carving of these masks, their extraordinary variety of styles, and their mysterious and (to uninitiated outsiders) inscrutable expressions, set them apart from anything in the traditional arts of Europe, China or India. Even in the cloistered atmosphere of the museum, they have an inexplicable power, and when they are seen as they are meant to be seen, flashing in the sunlight, tossing, swaying and jerking with the motions of the dancers who wear them, they truly embody the presence of the sacred.

Though sometimes used in playful dances, these ritual masks are directed toward a world of spirits. Their closest Western equivalents are the miracle-working statues of Christian saints, holy objects that have supernatural powers. When the African dons a mask, he ceases to be himself and becomes the god or the force he seeks to please. "So powerful are the masks believed to be," says Keeper Fagg, "that special precautions are taken in handling them. Many Africans believe the mere sight of one can make a woman sterile--just like radioactivity."

Artistic Variety. These deep religious roots account for the extraordinarily varied styles of African art. In Christian Europe, explains Fagg, one religion meant one style of art with comparatively minor local variations. In Africa, however, each tribe had its own gods, and consequently each had its own style of art. At one end is the naturalism of the Bajokwe of Angola, whose delicately modeled masks might almost be portraits. At the other extreme are the circular abstractions of the Baluba of Congo-Kinshasa, the long, simple forms of the Ngumba, the horizontal striations of the Batetela, the elegant concavity of the Guro and the craggy boldness of the Bete.

The show will move on to the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art in Kansas City and later to the Brooklyn Museum. In a time when black pride is asserting itself, it will open many eyes. As National Gallery Director J. Carter Brown observes in his catalogue foreword: "We are what we have been. The great images of Africa's tribal past speak to us as part of the heritage of all mankind."

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