African Sculpture
The terracottas of Nigeria's Nok culture reach back before the common era. The intricate bronze casting of Igbo-Ukwu dates to around the 9th century. The lifelike bronze heads of Ife were made in the 12th to 15th centuries. The brass reliefs of the Benin Kingdom span the late 13th century to today, still carried forward by a hereditary guild of casters, the Igun Eronmwon. What matters here is the order of events. These were complete systems, fully functioning within their own societies, centuries before the European avant-garde "discovered" them. It was the Western eye that arrived late, and the route it took to get here was not a gentle one. In 1897, British forces attacked Benin City and carried off roughly five thousand brass plaques and ivory carvings. Within months they were on display in London. Around 1905 in Paris, Vlaminck and Derain acquired masks, and Matisse and Picasso saw them. In 1907, Picasso visited the Trocadero's "ethnographic" museum, not an art museum. At the time, these objects were classified not as art but as anthropological specimens. Soon after, the faces in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon were repainted, though Picasso himself denied the influence, and which mask corresponds to what remains unsettled. Not until 1984 did New York's Museum of Modern Art place modern art and African art side by side, and even that show drew sharp criticism for hanging the works with no names and no context, as if proximity alone were enough. Eighty-seven years after the looting, an encounter between equals still had not arrived. So on this map, Africa is not placed at the edge as a point of origin. It is placed as a current still running. One more word, on naming. The term "primitive art" extends the vocabulary missionaries once used to call the non-Western world "savage," and it is no longer used. The individual names, Yoruba, Fang, belong to the people who carry them. The category that lumped them together was given from the outside.