I  1 IH I  I •I bAfrican Negro Art Its Influence on Modern ArtCopyright, 1916 BY M. de ZA.YASr 1 w' -"""y y r' % IAFRICAN NEGRO ART ITS INFLUENCE ON MODERN ART For some time sociologists have been studying the life of the savage in order to get at the character of the primitive mentality of mankind. They believe it logical that the rudimentary mental and social life of savages, must have, if not an identity, at least a similarity with the mental and social character of the man of the first ages. The psychology of the savage has thus been carefully analyzed: his customs and habits have been carefully observed, and from those observations one can have an almost accurate conception of primitive mentality. Lately European art has sought in the work of the savage new elements for the development of plastic expression, and through the discoveries made in the art of the savage we have acquired new knowledge concerning difference of representation in relation to the difference of mental states, and concerning the different degrees of development in the evolution of art. Of all the arts of the primitive races, the art of the African Negro savage is the one which has had a positive influence upon the art of our epoch. From its principles of plastic representation a new art movement has evolved. The point of departure and the resting point of our abstract representa- 0m 5African Negro Art tion are based on the art of that race, which can be considered as being in the most primitive state of the cerebral evolution of mankind. The psychology of the African Negro has been defined and classified in the most complete manner. The numerous tribes of that ethnological group, which comprises three quarters of the population of the African Continent have been studied in all their mental manifestations, so that one can have a clear idea of the conditional state of their brain. Unfortunately, those who have undertaken the study of the life of the African Negro have considered his art from the European point of view, qualifying it as being grotesque and rudimentary. I believe that to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion upon the intrinsic significance of the art of a race, one must consider the causes of its production and the place it occupies in relation to the significance of the other arts of the human family. Thus will be established, firstly the psychologic character of the producer as the cause of the production, and secondly, the character of the art itself as the effect of causes that determine the place it occupies in the logical, and not chronological evolution of the idea of representation. For the different states of the development of plastic representation does not follow a progressive order in relation to time. Plastic evolution is the result of intellectual evolution. The savage of to-day, for example, would be incapable of understanding the work of the Greeks done over two thousand years ago. Analyzing the art of the different human races, one can see that each race has a determined con- 6Its Influence on Modern Art n ception of representation, and that the degree of the development of their art toward naturalism is in direct relation to the intellectual development of the race that produces it. One can say the same of the plastic production of the individual : it follows an evolution in relation to the extent of his knowledge and the progression of his education. A comparative study of the art of the different human races shows that the art of the African Negro savage is less representative from the naturalistic point of view and most expressive from the point of view of pure form. The small amount of direct imitation—the almost abstract form of the plastic representation of the African Negro—is nothing more than the logical result of the conditional state of his brain. Of the five stocks of the population inhabiting Africa—Libyan, Elamite, Himyarite, Negro and Bushman—the Negro and the Bushman are aborigines. The Negro, undoubtedly the most ancient, can be divided into Negro proper and Bantu, the former being the parent stock. It seems likely that the cradle of the Negro, who is first and foremost an agriculturist, must have been somewhere in the neighborhood of the Great Lakes. The race expanded rapidly and without interference, until the advent into Somali-land of the Hamites, a purely pastoral people who crossed over from Arabia. In this way pressure was applied from the east, and the Negro stock was forced into the marshes of the Nile Valley, and along the open country, north of the forest, to the west coast, where Negroes of the primitive type are still to be found. 7African Negro Art The Negro group comprises the Nigritiens, Haoussaouas, Mandingues, and Sudan people, etc., who occupy the whole width of Africa south of the Sahara and almost down to the equator; and the Bantus, called also Bounda and Lounda, peoples and tribes designated under a multitude of different names, who cover almost the whole of Southern Africa. To specify accurately the parts of Africa inhabited by the pure blooded Negro, is very difficult, for it is daily discovered that those parts are more and more restricted and that the original geographical division, giving to the Negro all the central and southern Africa, is far from being exact. In the lands considered as being inhabited by the Negro proper, there is an enormous number of different tribes; and it has not yet been established clearly which are autochthons or which have immigrated, nor their provences or how they have intermingled. Speaking, then, of Negro art, I refer to the art of the tribes which are of pure negro blood, or of those which, by close mixtures, can be considered as having the same characteristics as the pure blooded ones. Among these tribes there are some which have suffered the influence of superior races, such as the Arab and the European, but nevertheless have kept all the peculiarities of the Negro character. For it is a curious fact, that the tribes / which are in contact with superior races take from ' those races their beliefs without ridding themselves of their own. “One does not see, in fact, an ascent from a more or less rude belief to a more elevated doctrine. OneIts Influence on Modern Art * sees, on the contrary, that beliefs of a very different value rule the spirit of the Negro, without his having the least care to correct the ones by the others. It is a fact that no theory could ever destroy the cult of the dead and the belief in spirits and in the sorcerer, which exist among the Malinkes (Sudan) ; yet, those men notwithstanding believe in a one God, creator and sovereign master of all things” (P. Brun). The English captain C. H. Stigand made the same observation among the Bantu tribes of East Africa: “A native can hold at the same time two absolutely opposite beliefs. He can believe in both of two conflicting statements. He does not compare or analyse them, he just believes in that uppermost in his mind at the time. A little later he will believe in the second, but his faith in the first remains unshaken.” The Negro art of which I make the present study, presented as an hypothesis, is the one which can be considered as the plastic expression of the characteristic mentality of the pure negro and which belongs to the tribes inhabiting Africa from French Guinea to the Bantu Tribes of Eastern Africa. All the negro continent, as it has been said by Cureau, constitutes an homogeneous psychological species, and represents the first step in the evolution of the intellectuality of man. Although the habits and customs of the tribes vary according to the land they inhabit and the contacts they may have had with other races, although there is a difference of culture between the Negro of the forest and the Negro of the plains, at bottom their mentality is identical. 9African Negro Art Among the numberless tribes which compose the negro race one finds more or less awakened intelligences, more or less savage sentiments, more or less rude habits, but their psychology is everywhere the same. If they are very capable of mental progress, the conditions of their life determine all their intellectual development. They remain in a mental state very similar to that of the children of the white race. Their life is purely sensorial. Like the white child they are egocentrists. The rigours of all sorts that they suffer from nature, the constant struggles with their fellowmen and with the supernatural beings created by their imagination, cause them to be preoccupied primarily with their material being, and to have no fHnits to their egoism. Le Tourneau has observed that “In comparing the European child to the Negro one finds a very similar cerebral formation. Both have an occipital dolichocephaly. In both the circumvolutions are less developed, the cortical grey matter less thick, the nerves more^Voluminous in relation to the nervous centers. But this formation which in the white child is transitory, persists in the Negro and even gets more pronounced with the growth of the individual. Thus, the new-born Negro is not yet prognathous.” It can be said that the cerebral condition of the Negro savage is particularly primitive, and that his brain keeps the conditional state of the first state of the evolution of the human brain. “There is hardly a traveller,” says Burton, “however unobservant, who has not remarked the peculiar and precocious intelligence of the African’s 10Its Influence on Modern Art » childhood, his “turning stupid” as the general phrase is, about the age of puberty, and the rapid declension of his mental powers in old age—a process reminding us of the simiad. It is interesting to find anatomically discovered facts harmonizing with and accounting for the provisionary theories of those who register merely what they have observed. M. Gratiolet’s Eureka, that in the occipital or lower breeds of mankind, the sutures of the cranium close at an earlier age than amongst the frontal races, admirably explains the phenomenon which has struck the herd of men, however incurious. It assigns a physical cause for the inferiority of the Negro, whose physical and mental powers become stationary at an age when, in nobler races, the perceptive and reflective principles begin to claim ascendancy.” “It is certain,” says H. Ward, “that the African Negroes have in their youth a very alive intelligence and a rare promptness. The atrophy of their intellectual faculties can be attributed to the premature junction and the subsequent ossification of the sutures of the cranium, which stop in that way the natural expansion of the brain.” Cureau makes an interesting comparison between the premature intellectual stand-still of the Negro and the continual development of the white man. He says: “There are two very distinct states in the intellectual life of the Negro.” When ja child, he is amiable, gentle, graceful. He is ready witted and docile and shows to be very precocious, more precocious indeed than the great majority of the European children. He understands and assimilates without any trouble all that is shown to him. 11African Negro Art He is active; he is not refractory to work. His elders abuse his good disposition by putting their work upon him. “From puberty, a radical metamorphosis befalls : a sudden arrest of development, and moreover a slight regression. The comparison of the intellectual evolution of the Negro and of that of the European is very interesting. To make it more immediately perceptible, I have represented the one and the other (fig. 1) by two curves, related to the same system of co-ordinate axes. The years of life are carried in abscissas; the ordinates represent the intellectual development, as if it were possible to assign them a numerical value. “The Negro has a rapid intellectual progress during his first ten or twelve years. It diminishes after and becomes stationary ; then slowly decreases during the following fifteen years after which follows a rapid decrepitude.” The reason of the stationary state of the mental faculties of the savage Negro is due to his natural 12Its Influence on Modern Art » and social milieu. The land he inhabits, the rigours of climate and its peculiar diseases, his perpetual war with the natural and the supernatural, make one realize that all intellectual development is impossible under the force of circumstances that compel him to occupy and preoccupy himself exclusively with his material life. The Negro, besides, does not receive any formal kind of mental education, either from his parents or from society. He grows without care or advice ; his character develops by itself; he receives from nature his notions of good and evil without having anybody to guide him in the development of his mental faculties. The Negro is therefore incapable of any intellectual sentiment properly speaking, and he looks but for the satisfaction of the physical needs. Indifferent to the social happenings to which he does not attach any importance, he does not try to commemorate them; he has no history. Nor has he a religion in the proper sense of the word. He has no cult for a divinity nor the sentiment to enter into communion with it. If the Negro creates some divinities, it is to have through them a greater personal power. He does not adore them, he has no cult for them ; they are to him but elements for his personal service. The religious spirit of the savage Negro has not arrived at having a definite form or a doctrine. Since he is incapable of explaining to himself the reason of things, every thing remains for him a mystery. He does not conceive the general cause of natural phenomena ; he is unable to establish the notion of cause and effect. His intellectual curiosity is very easily satisfied; he does not try to 13African Negro Art explain to himself the mechanism of things, and refers all happenings, all phenomena to spiritistic conclusions. The only conception he has been able to form of the manifestations of life, is that they come from the spirits. The African Negro is above all things, an ani-mist; having in this another point of mental resemblance to the child. “We can assert,” says S. Eeinach, “that the child and the savage are ani-mists; that is to say, they project themselves outside of the volition that is exerted in themselves; they endow the world, particularly the beings and the objects that surround them, with a life and sentiments similar to their own. The examples of this animistic tendency are innumerable; we do not need to find conclusive examples, but to awaken the earliest recollections of our childhood.” For the Negro there are good and evil spirits. The latter are his principal preoccupation, because he thinks they are the cause of sickness and all misadventures and that they always seek to harm him ; while the good spirits give joy and happiness to men. It is necessary for the Negro, therefore, to propitiate the kindness of the good spirits and to appease the fury of the evil ones. To attain this object, he created the fetish, which gives to its possessor the assistance of the spirit that is supposed to dwell in it. The statuette fetish, is not the representative image of the divinities. It is only a propitiatory instrument, considered the exclusive property of the individual, of the family or of the tribe, and is good only for them. The sorcerer is the intermediator between the 14Its Influence on Modern Art Negro and the fetish, and he is the great arbiter of the life of the Negro. To the sorcerer are attributed all natural happenings that are out of the ordinary. Every Negro tribe has its sorcerer, whose power varies according to the tribe. But all have in him an unlimited confidence which however turns into implacable hatred the day in which the Negro is persuaded of his impotence. “All the African forest is inhabited by fetishists,1” writes Lebonard, “and many of the religious customs, many of the social institutions are common to the different peoples from Casamance to the Congo. Must one see in this the source of their common origin? Must it be concluded that by inhabiting an identical land, they have had similar brains, capable of the same philosophical and social conceptions? That would imply a very rigorous determinism. . . . Here we must admit that all the African peoples have had from a common stock a very primitive theogony, which has developed in the same manner, under the influence of the same terrors and of the same enchantments, with which nature struck their simple souls. “In the Ivory Coast, the Negro believes in a good God, who has ministers who are genii ; and that he lays upon them the care of conducting the world and protecting it from the Devil, the spirit of evil. They do not take any care of the divinity : they do not have a cult, except for the fetishes. The Devil kills ; but the fetishes also kill : first, those who are possessed by the Devil, and, afterwards those who do not obey their prescriptions, those who have done harm to others. One could go very far in such a way. 15African Negro Art “The fetish is invisible, and manifests itself but very seldom to the priest, the sorcerer. But his representation of it, which is variously a tree, a mountain, a pond of water, a heap of earth, a wooden statue, is feared, and in practice confounded with the fetish itself. “The sorcerer, who has been prepared since his childhood for his redoubtable role by another renowned sorcerer, and has learnt from him his secrets, is at the same time a prestidigitator, a magnetizer, and a medicine man, who knows the curative virtues and also the toxic properties of plants. He exerts a terrible sovereignty over the spirits. He makes the fetish speak, because he is a ventriloquist; he cures and kills on his own account. He of course governs the temporal and inspires all the political acts of the chiefs. Before a war, he reads the presages in the entrails of chickens or oxen, and excites the people to fighting or preaches peacó.^ He judges conflicts through the proof of God, as it was practiced in the middle ages, by fire, poison or by the light of the Sun that fixes the patient.” In the upper Ivory Coast where the Negro believes only in a sort of genius of evil whose good graces one must be careful to propitiate, the sorcerers are the intermediators between that evil-doing God and his victims. He manifests himself to them alone which gives them the advantage of an incontestable caste. The holders of the position succeed themselves from father to son in the same village. Though natives who have a strong character do not believe in their absolute power, they do not dare to displease him but consult him before 16Its Influence on Modern Art each one of their enterprises, like all the rest of their fellow-citizens do (M. Van Cassel). There are tribes among which the sorcerer has far less power, with the Mangbetus (Belgian Congo), one of the rare tribes who are not fetishists, but who instead believe everybody in the tribe is a sorcerer as Christians affirms it, the sorcerer is usually an intelligent man. He is not held to vow, either of abstinence or chastity. While he is indeed a very considered personage, nothing in his costume distinguishes him from the other natives. One might affirm that he is charged to make the augurs say what the chief desires ; the chief naturally remunerates him for his good services; the political role of the sorcerer can be considerable if he has any ascendency with the chief, but this is usually the exception (Hanolet). Le Herisée in his study on the beliefs and fetishes of Dahomey says that “the Dahomians believe in a supreme Being whom they call Mahou (god) or Se (Principle, Intelligence). They have neither statutes nor symbols to represent him; nor do they render him any cult; his name being mentioned only in certain exclamations and invocations. “Mahou created the universe ; he created particularly the fetishes, Vôdoun, and has given them certain forces, certain powers, which they use at their will to preside over the destiny of human beings. The Vôdoun are not in reality the intermediators of Mahou, but rather his free and independent agents : “The fetish is a thing of God” Vôdoun e gni Mahounon; or “God possesses the fetish” Mahou ouê do Vôdoun.” 17African Negro Art “The Vôdoun are innumerable, because to the Dahomean every manifestation of a force which he cannot define, every prodigy or phenomenon which is beyond his imagination or intelligence, is a fetish —a thing of God which demands a cult. The thunder, the small pox, the sea, are fetishes; the telegraph and our railroads would be also fetishes, pi they were not “Machines of the white people.” “The fetish has become for him a religious system perfect^; anthropocentrist. Everything in the universe is occupied With man and acts for him; the earth shakes to wrarn of the displeasure of the ancestors ; the thunderbolt strikes him whose conscience reproaches itself for something done to the Vôdoun; the rain falls because of the prayers of the sorcerer; sickness and even death befall by the prestige of an amulette. “In fact, by living always in the same place, by ^feeing the same landscapes, without changing their occupations or enlarging the horizon of their (thoughts, the Dahomeans must have, through ages, identified all that surrounded them with their ideas leaving at the same time their spirit to be invaded by an unreasoned fear before nature, which is full of mysteries to them.’* $ At Sierra Leone, in the district of Sherbro, little idols in steatite are found buried about the origin of which nothing is known. “The natives regard them as altogether supernatural and the possession of one is a great object of ambition. They are consulted upon questions of wrar, the getting of wrealth, the procuring of good crops, and the success of proposed journeys. It is believed that if one of these images is secreted, say in rice fields, its presence 18Its Influence on Modern Art will secure a crop double iu quantity the ordinary yield. “Each of these steatite devils is thought to be attended by many satellites, who circle around him and carry out his commands. This devil is exceedingly sensitive, and if not treated with the utmost respect and propitiated by liberal offerings of palm wine, rice and fowls, which are placed along side of him, he will certainly bring trouble to those invoking his intervention. Every time he is consulted, rice-flour must be first offered.” The Negro believed, as Mgr. Le Roy lias proved by personal observations in the souls of the dead, in spirits and in a God, and keeps these beliefs distinct, not mixing one of these beliefs with the others. The conclusion of Mgr. Le Roy is that Darkest Africa is monotheist; but that to this belief is added the cult of the dead and a cult of spirits which is either fetishism or magic or both at the same time. We see indeed, that all the fetishistic tribes believe in one Being, creator of all existing things. But the Negro thinks it useless to give this Being an especial cult; they all have toward him the attitude of the Basonge or of the Mayombe of the Belgian Congo. Eoi* the former believe that there is an almighty God, but that as lie lives in the mysterious entrails of the earth, it is useless to worship him”; while the latter, “although they recognize his existence, do not invocate Zarnbi (god) because, to their eyes, he represents also an inexorable fatality. They prefer to deal with the fetishes.” In fact the Supreme Being does not take an active part in the mental life of the negro. 19African Negro Art To them death is not a natural fact; they see it as a migration. The Evil Spirit is its cause. Men continue to live in their souls a life identical with the material one. Thus the Mandja (French Congo) believes that the soul of those who die go to live in the mountain; they call them “Corro-cumbos” (Men of the mountain) and one can ask of them services. For example, if the cure of a sick person is wanted one takes a white chicken and goes with it to the mountain whispering in ones hands very low: “Youvrou, sui ui,” “Come God.” After some minutes when one thinks that the men from the mountain have had time to approach, one throws out the chicken and runs away. If the offering pleases the “Corrocumbos”, they cure the sick person” (Toque). But the belief in ghosts has a particular character in the majority of the tribes. The existence of the spirits of the dead is connected with the amount of time the living remember them. The cult is continued and nourishment taken to the tombs as the physical image of those who have disappeared remains in the memory of the living. Afterwards, they do not have any notion that these beings have ever existed. The spirits, the genii, are supposed to be the active force of everything, and accordingly are the great preoccupation of the Negro, since all happenings of life depend on them. They are the foundation of the Negro's philosophy of life, his explanation of nature. All the missionaries and explorers who have studied the character of the African Negro agree that they are totally devoid of reasoning and the 20Its Influence on Modern Art faculty of analysis; that their intellectuality is nill; that the fundamental principle of all their actions is /ear,**«the primitive element of the religious idea. Savages of the most inferior class, says L. Errera, speaking of the African Negro, have neither general ideas nor intellectual curiosity. Since they are unable to explain anything to themselves, everything remains a mystery, and they believe only in witchcraft—they are fetishists. The fetishist, says Captain C. Meynier, of the African Negro, has no other moral basis than his instinct, no other rule than the right of the stronger, no other arbiter than the fetish maker, magicians, casters of bad luck. The pagan Negro lives continually in an atmosphere of terror, terror of everything that surrounds him, of his fellowmen, of the obscure divinities who speak to him through the fetish. “Superstition", says H. Ward, “is a very important element in the life of the natiy^tribes. The object of their preoccupation is to appease and propitiate the Evil Spirit. Ignoring the laws of nature which remain for him a constant source of mystery, the Congolian attributes to the influence of the Evil Spirit diseases and misadventure of all kinds. His life is a perpetual fear. All that which is to him inexplicable, is given immediately magic properties, and all evils and misfortunes come from the Evil Spirit. . . . The beliefs of the native are in harmony with his intelligence, troubled by the mysteries of life : He accepts without hesitation the most fantastic theories to explain natural happenings.” 21African Negro Art Parker, questioning the Negroes on the subject of the Sun, says: “Self-defence and their nourishment are their two preoccupations almost exclusively. From that point of view it is of great importance to them to distinguish that which lives from that which does not live. The Negro’s first criterion is spontaneous movement—movement, that is to say, whose immediate cause escaped him.^jp? T. A. Joyce of the British Museum, writing about the mentality of the primitive man makes observations which can be thoroughly applied to the African Negro savage: “The mind of the primitive man'fttie says “is wayward and seldom capable of continuous attention. His thoughts are not quickly collected, so that he is bewildered in an emergency ; and he is so much the creature of habit that unfamiliar influences such as those which white men introduce into his country disturb his mental balance. His powers of discrimination and analysis are undeveloped so that distinctions which to us are fundamental, need not be obvious to him. He does not distinguish between similarity and identity, between names and things, between the events which occur in dreams and real events, between the sequence of ideas in his mind and of things ÿÿ the outer world to which they correspond. His ideas are grouped by chance impressions, and his conclusions often based on superficial analogies which have no weight with us. . . . Vaguely conscious of the will-power which controls his own actions, uncivilized man attributes a similar power not only to all that lives or moves, such as animals, trees, clouds, and rivers, but also to objects less 22Its Influence on Modern Art suggestive of animation. Out of his notions of life and breath, shadows and reflections in water, and the visions seen in dreams, he builds up a composite idea of a soul, the vital essence of a man. The theory by which the child of nature endows all things with such a soul has been named by Professor Taylor, Animism} and its general prevalence illustrates the uniformity of the primitive mind, for in one form or another it is found all over the primitive world. A striking illustration of the superstitious character of the Negro and of his fear of the supernatural that he believes to exist in everything with which lie is not familiar, is given by Stanley when he was among the Bad wende at Mowa: “On the third day of our stay at Mowa, feeling quite comfortable amongst the people, on account of their friendly bearing, I began to write down in my note book the terms for articles in order to improve my already copious vocabulary of native words. I had proceeded only a few minutes when I observed a strange commotion amongst the people who had been flocking about me, and presently they ran away. In a short time we heard war-cries ringing loudly and shrilly over the table-land. Two hours afterwards, a long line of warriors, armed with muskets, were seen descending the table-land and advancing towards our camp. There may have been between five hundred and six hundred of them. We on the other hand, had made but few prepftÇft-tions except such as would justify us replying to them in the event of the actual commencement of hostilities. But I had made many friends amongst 23African Negro Art them, and I firmly believed that I would be able to avert an open rupture. “When they bad assembled at about a hundred yards in front of our camp, Safeni and I walked up towards them, and sat down midway. Some half-dozen of the Mowa people came near, and the Shauri began : “What is the matter, my friends?” I asked, “Why do you come with guns in your hands in such numbers, as though you were coming to fight? Fight! Fight! us your friends! Tut! this is some great misunderstanding surely.” “Mundelé,” replied one of them, “our people saw you yesterday make marks on some tara-tara” (paper) “This is very bad. Our country will waste, our goats will die, our bananas will rot, and our women will dry up. What have we done to you, that you should wish to kill us? We have sold you food, and we have brought you wine, each day. Your people are allowed to wander where they please, without trouble. Why is Mundelé so wicked? We have gathered together to fight you if you do not burn that tara-tara now before our eyes. If you burn it we go away, and shall be friends as heretofore.” “I told them to rest there, and left Safani in their hands as a pledge that I should return. My tent was not fifty yards from the spot but while going towards it, my brain was busy in devising some plan to foil this superstitious madness. My note-book contained a vast number of valuable notes; plans of falls, creeks, villages, sketches of localities, ethnological and philological details, sufficient to fill two octavo volumes—everything was of general 24Its Influence on Modern Art interest to the public. I could not sacrifice it to the childish caprice of savages. As I was rummaging my book box, I came across a volume of Shakespeare (Chandos edition), much worn and well thumbed, which was of the same size as my field note-book; its cover was similar also, and it might be passed for the note-book provided that no one remembered its appearance too well. I took it to them. “Is this the tara-tara, friends, that you wish to burn?” “Yes, yes, that is it.” “Well, take it, and burn it or keep it.” “M-m, No, no, no? We will not touch it. It is fetish. You must burn it.” “I. Well, let it be so. I will do anything to please my good friends of Mowa.” “We walked to the nearest fire. I breathed a regretful farewell to my genial companion, which during many weary hours of night had assisted to relieve my mind when oppressed by almost intolerable woes, and gravely consigned the innocent Shakespeare to the flames, heaping the brush-fuel over it with ceremonious care. “Ah-h-h,” breathed the poor deluded natives, sighing with relief. “The Mundelé is good—very good. He loves his Mowa friends. There is no trouble now, Mundelé. The Mowa people are not bad. And something like a cheer was shouted among them, which terminated the episode of the Burning of Shakespeare.” The animistic beliefs of the Negro are well characterized by the following observations on their cult for physical phenomena: 25African Negro Art The Bangala believe that “the stars are the slaves of the Moon. The Sun is in love with the Moon. Full of love and passion, he pursues incessantly his beloved, yet it is but rarely that he succeeds in having his ardent flame calmed by her attentions. When the Moon receives the Sun, and the two lovers forget themselves in their devotion, the sky be-comes somber, and obscurity hides their love (Evidently they mean to speak of an eclipse)” (De-ligne). The Warega believe that the stars are pieces of „the Moon. The Natlas explain the phases of the Moon by saying that she gets fat through eating too much. The Malinga say that she gets swollen to please his first wife. “When the Bangala prepare a long expedition and the clouds begin to gather in the horizon, they blow with all their might into a kind of whistle which they carry hanging from their neck, and cry to the storm: ‘What do you want? Don't you see that we must part? Follow your way and come back when we have time to receive you.’ Sometimes the clouds, swept toward another current, seem to obey their injunctions, and then there are endless cries and joyful demonstrations” (La-motte). The Mangbetu see in some physical phenomena the materialization of their God, Kilina. “The thunder is Kilina speaking when he is angry. The thunderbolts are the stones that he throws down. By a charming poetical fiction, the rainbow is the actual body of Kilina. If you ask them to describe him, they will tell you that he is “a great animal with a red curved back.” The shadows are Kilina, 26Its Influence on Modern Art the reflection in the water is Ivilina, all that he does not understand is Ivilina.” (Burrows). The rites which the Negro performs to the fetish vary, naturally, according to the fetish and according to the tribe. I will only speak of some of the rites accorded the statuette-fetish, which among certain tribes, like the Warega (Belgian Congo), have different properties : Some protect the plantations against the devastation of animals; others preside over death or procure game for the hunter, while among other tribes such as the Lobi (Sudan), the power of the fetish is rather general. They are invoked for all sorts of reasons ; to make abundant crops, cure sickness, protect from enemies, and to put a spell on somebody. The Mayombe (Belgian Congo) “to obtain from the fetish what they wish give it a whipping, make it take baths, and then put nails in its body.” The Basonge ( Belgian Congo ) have good and bad fetishes. The latter, which are invoked to obtain the death of an enemy or something similar, do not reside in the same village in which they are supposed to bring misfortune: A little hut is constructed for them in the nearest forest. I have sometimes seen, says Michaux, natives rub their chest when they passed in front of the fetish of their village, or spread some mamiou all around it. All the fetishes of the Bantu people of the Congo have the abdomen perforated with a cavity of some cubic centimetres in which they put a “medicament”, like salve, which has the effect of communicating to the fetish the special virtue that is sought. “Amongst the Warega, the fetishes are kept by the Kindi (sorcerer) who, very often delegates the 27African Negro Art care to his wife. They are kept in special huts whither nobody penetrates. “When an individual is raised in the social hierarchy, they proceed to a ceremony in honor of the fetishes, called mpara. The mpara—which is identical for all the degrees—consists in a series of fourteen symbolical dances, which are more or less all the same. They take part in them the hindi and the bulonda. The music is of an exasperating monotony : during three long hours one hears the following motive repeated to infinity : I will quote some of these fourteen dances described by Cap. Delhaise. Dance of the Wild Pig. (The wild-pig is the great plague of the plantations of the Warega.) A hindi goes into the temple to come back quickly hiding an object under the skin of an animal. He goes into the centre of the circle of dancers and discloses what he had hidden. It is a wooden fetish, representing a woman. It is covered with pemba (white argile). The hindi takes part in the dance, carrying the statuette before him. He lays it down on the floor and says: “You the wild-pigs! Why do you go from one place to another and not stay in your house? One day you will be trapped.” They put back the fetish in the temple. The dance is finished. 28Its Influence on Modern Art Dance of the Fetish of Death. Three kindi appear, carrying in the manner described above, three fetishes. The largest of these statuettes is a kind of monster with an enormous head upon very small legs. It has no body. The hair is figured by a monkey skin. They stand up the fetishes in the middle of the square. They dance the same as before. The assistants sing: “These are the ones who make men die. Why do you make men die?” After this dance an old man comes out from the circle and makes a speech. Dance of the Masks. The kindi carry before them big wooden masks, representing the human face. Song. For the mpara the mirami only must be present. All our rites are secret. The profane have nothing to do with what is going on here. Discourse. “We dance today because we are happy. We work our fields part of the month. The other part is reserved to our pleasures.” Throughout Darkest Africa the statuette-fetish is the object of similar cults, up to the day that the believers find out the inefficacy of the fetish, when it is immediately destroyed and cast aside as a useless thing. The Negro savage, the child of the human race, being incapable of searching for the natural rea- 29African Negro Art son of tlie phenomena of life, and being very sensitive to material suffering, sees nothing in nature but its evil side ; he only sees the nature that harms. The good side of nature, the happy events, do not occupy his mind; he profits by them without minding from what source they come. Evil is to him the positive principle. The Evil Spirit is his great divinity. Hence his perpetual terror, his superstitious life, his belief in the supernatural and his mentality in which imaginary beings are more real than the actual existing ones. To protect himself from the material world that tortures him, and from the spiritual world that seeks to do him harm, to conquer the evil-doing spirits and to tame the supernatural forces, he conceived magic, sorcery and fetishism. The statuette-fetish is the expression of the predominant feeling of the community: Fear. The artist works at the demand of the victims of the Evil Spirit. The statuette-fetish is made to protect its owner from all evil, and the Negro sees in iÿ a practical use not giving it an esthetic value. The esthetic pleasure of the Negro lies principally in decorating it, as is always done with geometrical combinations of lines. We have seen that the first criterion of the Negro is spontaneous movement in which he sees the manifestation of life. It is known that in the evolution of the faculties of observation man first notices the effect, the action, the movement of things, and not the things themselves. The infant of the civilized races, who is indifferent at the beginning of his life to static objects, fixes his attention on anything that moves. 30Its Influence on Modern Art It is logical to believe that since the Negro discovers his first criterion in movement and is an animist, it will be movement and not objects that he tries to represent primarily. But movement cannot be represented except through the trajectories of the thing that moves. And these trajectories can only be represented by geometrical combinations of lines. Hence, in my opinion, the geometrical structure of the negro sculpture. The African Negro has an unlimited desire to decorate everything, from his own body to the less significant objects of his daily life, with those geometrical combinations of lines that represent movement and therefore life to him. The Negro tribes who practice drawing and painting express themselves only with geometrical figures. The Mangbetu, for example ‘‘make do-signs on their houses, shields, potteries, weapons and on their bodies. They are, in fact, lines forming rectangles, triangles, circles.” Bobert Normard says, that among the natives of French Guinea, “fantasy is very rare and the arabesque does not exist. The geometrical ornament is the only one known.” Though the form of Negro sculpture involves a considerable amount of natural representation, its whole structure is geometrical. Objective representation is limited to that which concerns expression: the auto-movement of the form. The Negro does not represent a concrete remembrance of form, because he does not know form from that point of view, he only represents the abstract image with which movement impresses him. The Negro, being purely emotional, everything 31African Negro Art he conceives lacks objective or intellectual reality, but expresses in its highest degree the sensorial reality. The two constituent motives of Negro sculpture are: Fear, the primitive feeling of the idea of religion, which creates in the Negro the necessity to produce; and movement, the primitive sensation of the cognition of form; the visual element on which the Negro bases the actual representation. It is unquestionable that the negro sees form naturalistically, that the organs of his sight receive the image of form under its natural aspect as does the lens of a camera. But, as it happens in photography that the image transmitted by the lens is modified by the chemical condition of the plate that receives it, so the image transmitted by the eye of man is modified by the conditional state of his brain. Though the eye of the Negro sees form in its natural aspect, the state of his brain is unable to understand it and retain it in his memory under that aspect. He does not have a concrete remembrance of form; he has only a mental image. He does not have the idea of form; he has only the sensation of it. His brain cannot carry any further the effect of perception, because he does not co-ordinate his sensations to reach a conclusion. He does not reason; and does not make comparisons to obtain, relative values, because he does not possess the faculty of analysis. Unable therefore to represent the form seen by his eye, he represents only the form suggested by his mental condition. 32Its Influence on Modern Art The expressive quality of Negro sculpture is due in great part to the manner in which the artist handles his material. The Negro is naturally iden-titied with the plastic resources of wood. He seems to let his work be guided by the material, and instead of putting his feelings into wood, seems rather to draw them out of it. Negro sculpture is as natural to wood as Mexican sculpture is to stone or Greek sculpture to marble. Ivory, stone and iron are also sculptured by the African Negro, but in those materials he is unable to render his peculiar sense of plasticity and the expression of his sensibility. Within the general geometric character of Negro sculpture, one finds differences of construction peculiar to the different tribes. Negro sculpture could be divided into seven groups having each one of them its own characteristics. These groups would be formed by the work of the natives of French Guinea, Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Sudan, Nigeria, French Congo, Belgian Congo, and the Bantu tribes of Eastern Africa. There is in French Guinea a type of sculpture that repeats itself with little variation. This type is characterized by the fetishes of Bio Nuîïez and Rivières du Sud. There are also in French Guinea a variety of styles that are very similar to those of the Ivory Coast, where one finds unquestionably thfe* best specimens of negro mentality. In Liberia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast and Togo Land the statuette-fetishes are very similar to the Ivory Coast type. The sculptures of Dahomey present the double 33African Negro Art peculiarity of being, most of them, polychromes, and of exhibiting a more pronounced naturalism than those of the other Negro tribes. Their sense of color seems to be in accordance with their primitive conception of form; and their drawings and bas-reliefs resemble the work of the primitives of the white races or the drawings of white children. In Sudan, the statuettes-fetislies have a structure similar to that of the sculpture of the primitive Egyptians, but involving just the same, the geometrical construction proper to the Negro. In Northern and Southern Nigeria, the native work has a very pronounced geometrical construction and a great variety of forms. In Kamerun, the sculptures are more of the type of the Congo than of the type of their northern neighbors. They have, like the statuettes of the Bantu more of a naturalistic representation than pure geometrical expression. Among the tribes of French Congo, however, one finds specimens of great expressive power. The fetishes of the tribes of Ogooué are possibly the most abstract Negro sculpture. In the Belgian Congo, outside of very ancient statuettes, one finds resemblance of form and expression in the work of almost all the tribes. Yet the representative side is more evident than the expressive. The statuette-fetishes are less numerous among the Bantu tribes of Eastern Africa. They are also, generally, less expressive than those of the western natives, but have all the characteristics of the Negro conception of form and its particular expressive quality. 34Its Influence on Modern Art The custom among tribes at war, that the victorious ones shall take from the other their fetishes, makes it a very difficult task to determine the exact provenance of the statuette-fetish. To establish in an accurate manner the different epochs in which these statuettes have been manufactured, is almost impossible. Nothing among the Negroes can give the slightest clue to decipher the enigma of their history. Nevertheless there are amateurs who assert that the most glorious epoch of Negro statuary was in the XVII century. In my opinion nothing can give us any information in this respect except the age of the material of which they are made. I believe that all art, in its idea as well as in its practice, is the result of an intercrossing of social phenomena. I believe with G. Seailles that we do not only take from those who have preceded us, but that we are bound to those who surround us; that in society the volition of one influences that of another, ideas propagate themselves, consciousness is interpenetrating. Even among the most savage of men, originality and liberty of plastic production do not exist in an absolute manner. The manufacture of the statuette-fetish among the Negroes is a matter which is subject to social influence, in its idea as well as in the actual manufacture. Although by his lack of observation and analysis the Negro is ignorant of the anatomy of the human body, he knows, by having learnt it, the plastic anatomy of the feelings he expresses. In the great majority of Negro statuettes there is 35African Negro Art a relative amount of direct imitation of the human form, and also certain marks peculiar to each tribe, such as hair-dressings, scars, etc. . It is to be noted that these elements of direct imitation are either the salient points of the human form which strike the primitive visualization of the Negro, or the artificial decorations of the body, decorations which he has the habit of making on himself, and which he knows objectively. There is no evolution in Negro art. The Negro has not produced plastic states that would be the manifestation of a higher degree of mental development. When he comes into contact with the white man, his art degenerates. Through the introduction of conscious imitation, brought by the white man, the art of the Negro loses its expressive quality. Symbolism does not exist in the art of the Negro. Though his imagination is awakened by the most insignificant motive, “though he accepts without hesitation the most fantastic theories to explain natural happenings/’ his brain is in too primitive a condition to attribute to a thing the significance of an idea. He gives a form only to a feeling. Nothing seems to me more absurd than the long accepted theory that the procedure of the savage in his art has been inductive; that its forms have been arrived at by analysis. In other words, it has been assumed not only that the savage has been capable of seeing form naturalistically and of copying it objectively, but also that he has been capable of analyzing it, and of arriving, by elimination and simplification, at the reducing of form to geometrical designs. 36Its Influence on Modern Art The characteristic feature of decorative art among primitive people says Deniker, is this : “All artistic designs are inspired by real objects; there is no feeling for what is purely and voluntarily ornamental, nor, for still more forcible reasons are there any geometrical figures, as was believed till recently. All figures which appear to be of this nature are simplified drawings of animals, objects, etc. Often the entire object is transformed into an ornament and becomes wholly unsuited for the purpose for which it was destined.” After this statement Mr. Deniker observes that: “It is interesting to notice that the more a people love decoration the less is it able to draw a design, properly so called.” It is a natural law that man in all his mental manifestations proceeds from the simple to the complex, therefore the theory that primitive people can follow exactly the opposite process is unreasonable. “Let us see”, writes Jean Capart, “how a graphic representation of an animal can be transformed into a geometric design. This will enable us to discover the laws which govern the treatment of natural models.” “One of the most interesting examples from this point of view is furnished by Holmes’ important book on the ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Columbia. The principal motive is an alligator, which passing from degradation to degradation, from simplification to simplification, ends by becoming transformed into a series of absolutely regular geometrical designs.” Mr. Capart to prove his case shows an illustra- 37African Negro Art tion by which he pretends that procedure is performed, and adds: “The figure shows more clearly than any explanation can do the successive phases of this transformation, which is logically accounted for by the two great principles which dominate the whole question. The first is the principle of simplification, by virtue of which primitive man, like the child, attempts to give to animals and objects which he represents a form which is fixed and easily recognizable, and which he simplifies more and more—this can only be owing to idleness—until it diverges, in consequence, more and more widely from the original model.” Even supposing that Mr. Capart’s illustration be correct, one could hardly take the Indian of Columbia as the type of primitive man. Haddon is of the same opinion and commits the same mistake, when he says that “the tortoise-shell ornaments from the Torres Straits, which by diverging from the copy of the simple fish-hook through successive modifications and symmetrical development acquire ornamental forms, recall the original model only in the most distant manner.” All these authors agree that the infancy of art must be found among the savages, yet, they attribute to the savage the same attitude toward nature and the same mode of observation as to the civilized man, and in no way do they consider the different psychological states of man, due to the development of his mental organs. The procedure they attribute to the savage may seem logical to a civilized man to whom analysis has become an intellectual characteristic. But it has been demonstrated by observation and experience, that in the 38Its Influence on Modern Art primitive races analytical discriminations do not exist. A procedure of elimination and simplification in the drawing of a savage would naturally imply that he is able to do a photographic drawing, and that he has perfect power of discrimination and analysis to do it. Nothing could be more absurd. Experiments made with Negro savages show that they are not able even to recognize in a photograph the image of their most intimate persons. Besides, explorers who have tested the experiment of making the African Negro savage copy the figure of a person, say that they do it in the manner of the civilized child; one circle for the head, another for the body and straight lines for the arms and legs, and that they put outside of that figure, in a geometrical combination of lines, the ornaments that the persons wears, such as buttons, watch-chains, etc. In my opinion, the error of those who have undertaken the elucidation of the history of the evolution of art, lies in their considering the methods of civilized man as the only ones for the execution of plastic works, and also in their taking as principal guide the epoch in which the work is done. They forget that art is an effect which has for cause the conditional state of the mental organs which produce it, and that in the history of man it is the development and the evolution of his mental organs, of his brain, which determines the development and evolution of his art. Time, in fact, has nothing to do with the problem. An ethnological group can exist to-day whose brain is in a very primitive state and which, therefore, produce a very primitive art. 39African Negro Art In the plastic arts form is the vehicle in which man couches his feelings or his ideas in order to express himself. The art of the different races of the world, from the lowest class of savages to the most civilized men, shows that for a different state of mental development there is a particular form of representation^ This proves that the conception of form is not, and cannot be, arbitrary, but is subjected to previous causal condition; that it is a phenomenon, an effect of an organic cause, and that it goes through its evolution hand in hand with the evolution of the brain. Ì Therefore, in order to identify the primitive conception of represented form, the primitive brain must be determined, it must be discovered that is to say, to what ethnological group belongs the most rudimentary state of mental condition. All seems to indicate that the African Negro savage has the most rudimentary cerebral condition. His brain can be considered as being in the first state of the evolution of the brain of man. To him, therefore, must belong the first state of the evolution of the conception of form. . Comparing the psychology of the different ethnological groups of the human race from the negro to the white man, and taking as intermediaries the yellow races, one notes that, as soon as there is a mental evolution, there is also an evolution in the representation of form, and that this evolution is toward naturalism. From the Negro to the white man the representation of form follows an uninterrupted chain, beginning with the geometrical construction of the Negro art and ending in the naturalistic art of the 40Its Influence on Modern Art European.^ A glance at the artistic production of all the human races, starting from the African Negro, and continuing through the Pacific Islanders, the American Indians, the yellow races of Asia and the white races of Europe, would prove my assertion. I believe that the actual beginnings of the representation of form are those geometrical drawings of which Mr. Deniker denies the existence, They are indeed copies, for nothing is absolutely esoteric or of spontaneous generation; but they are copies not of objects, animals, etc., but of their movement. In all the flat representations of the African Negro only such geometrical drawings are found; they represent movement and have therefore an abstract expression. And the geometrical structure of these drawings has been maintained in the construction of the statuary. Its plastic spirit is still movement. It is certain that before the introduction of the plastic principles of Negro art, abstract representations did not exist among Europeans. Negro art has re-awakened in us the feeling for abstract form, it has brought into our art the means to express our purely sensorial feelings in regard to form, or to find new form in our ideas. The abstract representation of modern art is unquestionably the offspring of the Negro Art, which has made us conscious of a subjective state, obliterated by objective education. And, while in science the objective truths are the only ones that can give the reality of the outer world, in art it is the subjective truths that give us the reality of ourselves. 41African Negro Art Bibliography. Alldridge—A transformed Colony, Sierra Leone. Arem—Histoire de la Guinée Française. Rivières du Sud. Arcin—La Guinée Française. Races, Religions. Costumes. Blyden—African Life and Customs. Burton—A Mission to Gelele King of Dahome. Berthelot de Chesnay—A travers les peuplades sauvages du Ilaut-Niari. (Mem. de la Soc. d’émulation des Côtes du Nord) V. 41. Capart—Les débuts d’art en Egypte. Cassel—Haute Côte d’Ivoire. (Bull. Soc. Geo. De Lion) v. 17. Clogel—La Côte d’ivoire. (Revue Coloniale) 1916. Cooksonr—The Gold Coast. Hinterland and the Negroid Race. (African Soc. Jour.) y. 14. Cureaur—Les sociétés primitives de l’Afrique Equatoriale. Deniker—Les Races et les Peuples de la Terre. Delhais&~~Les Warega. Delhaise—Les Bapopoie. Deligne—Les Bangala. Dennett—Laws and customs of the Fjort or Bavili family. Kingdom of Loango. (Jour. African Soc.) V. I. Eschavannes—Niger et Nigeria. (Nouvelle Revue) V. 15. 42Its Influence on Modern Art Bibliography.—(Continued. ) Foà—Resultats Scientifiques des Voyages en Afrique. Foà—Le Dahomeh. G a nd—Les Mandja. Haddon—Evolution in Art. Halkin—Quelques peuplade du district de l’Uelé. James—The Wild Tribes of the Soudan. Kingaley—Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco, and Cameroun. Kollman—The Victoria Nyanza. Leonard—The Lower Niger and its Tribes. Lambert—La Côte d’Ivoire. (Bull. Soc. Geo. de Lion.) V. 17. Lemon—Les Coutumes Indigènes de la Côte d’Ivoire. (Nou. Rev.) V. 138. Le Herisée—L’Ancien Royaume du Dahomey. Le Roy—Les Religious Primitives. Meynier—L’Afrique Equatoriale. Mandrolle—En Guinée. Normand—L’Art et l’Habitation en Guinée Française. (L’Ami des Monuments et des Arts. ) V. 16. Ollone—Mission Hostein-Ollone de la Côte d’ivoire au Soudan et à la Guinée. Overbergh—Les Basonge. Overbergh et Jonghe—Les Mangbetu. Overbergh et Jonghe—Les Mayombe. 43African Negro Art Bibliography.—( Continued. ) Raphael—Through Unknown Nigeria. Reinach—Orpheus—Histoire Générale des Religions. Shieffelin—The People of Africa. Steel—Exploration in Southern Nigeria (Geog. Jour.) V. 32. Stanley—Through the Dark Continent. S tig and—The Land of Zing. Talbot—The Land of the Tbibios Southern Nigeria (Geog. Jour.) V. 44. Toutée—Du Dahome au Sahara, La Nature l’Homme. 44Musée cl‘Ethnograph i e Palais du Trooadéro Paris “NJ MBA®* J (loi of Maternity FEEN® OrjKEA Musée d'Ethnographie Palais du Trocadéro Paris WAR TOM-TOM FEKKC'II CTI XK A Musée (1 'Etlinogra]