Defining African art: Primitive Negro Sculpture and the aesthetic philosophy of Albert Barnes.

Although I was never officially his student, Roy Sieber inspired my research on the history of African art collecting in the United States and was an important mentor to me. More than a decade ago, as a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, I read the quote (in Ross 1992) that serves here as an epigraph and was instantly captivated by the subject's potential. With the encouragement of my advisor, Ekpo Eyo, I approached Sieber about writing a dissertation on the history of taste. His response was immediate and enthusiastic. During my 1993-94 fellowship at the National Museum of African Art, he served as my advisor, generously sharing the copious notes and bibliographic material he had accumulated over many years. We soon concluded that a history of taste was perhaps too broad a subject; I subsequently narrowed my topic to a consideration of select collectors and critics of African art in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. Sieber, who participated in my doctoral exams, proposed that I write my qualifying paper on John Graham and the Crowninshield collection, which was published in 1996 in Winterthur Portfolio. This essay is drawn from my dissertation, "Defining Taste: Albert Barnes and the Promotion of African Art in the United States During the 1920s," which I am revising for publication.

Watching the collectors becomes a history of Western taste about African art, which itself hasn't been dealt with as a scholarly topic. We should really look much more closely at that, and some day there can be a dissertation on the history of taste.

Roy Sieber

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed, in the Western world, a growing appreciation for and attendant aestheticization of objects from sub-Saharan Africa, formerly perceived as either ethnographic curiosities or examples of material culture. Galleries and museums began to display these objects as "art," while institutions and private individuals formed major collections of African sculpture. Contemporaneous publications presented the works as artistic creations and, in some cases, sought to understand and interpret their meaning. Art dealers Paul Guillaume and Marius de Zayas, art critic Carl Einstein, philosopher Alain Locke, and anthropologists Emil Torday, Marcel Griaule, and Frans Olbrechts, among others, produced studies on African art that varied in both scope and depth. Published at a critical juncture in the nascent study of African art, their writings provided conceptual and aesthetic frameworks that influenced subsequent scholarship. Today, in this time of reevaluation and reflexivity in which the nature, goals, and underlying premises of the discipline are being questioned and critiqued, scholars are beginning to examine these studies closely and reassess their impact on the development of the field of African art history. (1)

One such work that merits closer scrutiny is the 1926 publication Primitive Negro Sculpture, by Paul Guillaume and Thomas Munro, one of the earliest texts to focus on the aesthetic merits of African sculpture. Employing a modernist framework, it closely examines specific works in an attempt to reach a formal classification. Interspersed throughout the 134-page text are 41 photographic illustrations of African sculpture (Fig. 1), all from the collection of the Barnes Foundation, an educational institution in Merion, Pennsylvania, founded in 1925 by the chemist and collector Dr. Albert C. Barnes. The two authors were intimately associated with the Foundation: Paul Guillaume was the influential Parisian dealer from whom Barnes purchased his entire collection of African art, and Thomas Munro was a member of the Foundation's educational staff. The audience for the book, however, extended well beyond the walls of that institution. During the early years of Western appreciation of African art, Primitive Negro Sculpture served as an important reference book for scholars, educators, and museum specialists, among others. By 1968, interest in the publication was sufficient to merit its reprinting by Hacker Art Books.

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While Primitive Negro Sculpture contributed to the legacy of aesthetic criteria that has been applied to African art, little attention has been paid to the underlying values, motivations, and aesthetic biases expressed in the text. Moreover, despite the unambiguous affiliation of the text with the Barnes Foundation, the role of Albert Barnes in the conception, development, and content of this influential publication has remained unexamined.

In this analysis, I advocate that the text be read as a codification of Barnes's aesthetic philosophy. Although its authorship has long been credited to Paul Guillaume and Thomas Munro, archival research reveals the influence of Barnes in its ideology and substance. Primitive Negro Sculpture, it will be shown, differs from earlier publications in providing clearly developed aesthetic criteria for an evaluation of African sculpture. The text not only makes distinctions between "art" and "artifact," but also specifies ideal formal properties and delineates cultural "style regions" based on shared stylistic characteristics. In doing so, it provides considerable insight into the modernist interest in objects from Africa and offers a serious, often innovative, attempt at stylistic classification that reflects Barnes's distinctive methodological viewpoint.

The Origins of Primitive Negro Sculpture

The book began as a request, in March of 1923, by Barnes to Guillaume to contribute to a planned catalogue on the Barnes Foundation collection of African art (letter, March 9, 1923). (2) At the time, construction was well underway on the twenty-four-room gallery and twelve-room administration building (Fig. 2). Barnes had already assembled more than one hundred African sculptures, purchased from Paul Guillaume's gallery in Paris, in addition to the celebrated Impressionist and post-Impressionist European and American paintings for which the Foundation is more widely known. Although the Foundation was built to house this extensive collection, it was designed not as a museum but as an educational institution. It would offer courses on art appreciation, employing a systematic method of formal analysis, developed by Barnes, that traced the essential continuity of all great art traditions. Barnes's aesthetic theory, influenced by the educational philosophy of John Dewey and the aesthetic philosophy of George Santayana, proposed that great art does not imitate nature but interprets the experience of seeing nature through "plastic means"--that is, through color, line, light, and space. (3) This exclusive focus on "plastic form" provided a critical framework that encompassed all visual material, regardless of cultural origin or subject matter. Barnes's aesthetic studies led him to consider African sculpture as the purest expression of three-dimensional form.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

The need for a text on African sculpture that would reflect this methodological approach and that could be used in conjunction with the collection prompted Barnes to approach Guillaume about developing a manuscript. Correspondence between the two men reveals the conceptual evolution of the book and Barnes's formative role in its final content. Initially, Barnes suggested that Guillaume contribute an existing, unpublished essay to the catalogue on the Foundation's collection of African art. (4) Later, however, he determined that the subject merited a lengthier manuscript, and he urged the dealer to write and publish in France a book on African art that could later be translated into English and used in the Foundation's courses (letter to Paul Guillaume, November 5, 1923).

Although Guillaume had been planning since at least 1920 to write a book on African art that would be more detailed than his 1917 collaboration with Apollinaire, (5) he apparently needed some coaxing to generate a manuscript. By February 1924, as construction of the Foundation building neared completion, an increasingly anxious Barnes sent an imploring letter to Guillaume (February 15, 1924):

   In about ten months the gallery of
   the Barnes Foundation will contain
   what is probably the most important
   collection of Negro Art in the world
   and we shall have no book descriptive
   of Negro Art to which we can
   refer people who wish to learn
   something about it ... since you were
   the man who did most to bring
   Negro Art to the attention of the
   public, nobody but Paul Guillaume
   should be the author of the book
   which we desire. If you write such a
   book I would go over it carefully
   and put in enough material about
   the psychological phases and art
   values of the subject to try to make
   your book the most important one
   of its kind that has ever been done.

Responding to Barnes's urgent tone, Guillaume replied that he would begin working at once on a more extensive manuscript (letter, February 23, 1924).

Barnes's reluctance to write the text himself may seem uncharacteristic, given his rather lengthy list of books and articles published both before and after Primitive Negro Sculpture (see, for example, Barnes 1915, 1923, 1924a, and 1924b). The collector, however, recognized the important role Guillaume had played in Europe in drawing public attention to the artistic properties of African sculpture. He reasoned that the book would augment the young dealer's growing reputation in the United States and, at the same time, fuel the market for African art. Barnes explained to Guillaume, "A book of that kind would give you first position in the world on negro art and would be a demonstration that ... you are only incidentally a dealer. It would also be of great help to spread your fame among collectors and would increase your sales of both paintings and negro art" (letter, November 5, 1923). Barnes's marketing savvy was, of course, not entirely altruistic; he is certain to have recognized that by promoting Guillaume's reputation in the United States, he could further the importance of his own collection of African art, which had been acquired entirely from Guillaume's gallery.

Ironically, it appears that little--if any--of the French dealer's writing is included in the final publication. The manuscript that Guillaume submitted in August of 1924 was, by his own admission, brief and conservative in its approach, in an accompanying letter to Barnes (August 29, 1924), he explained that he had avoided any references that might make easy targets for criticism and that he had been further constrained by the lack of documentation on the subject. Moreover, he stated that he welcomed Barnes's contributions, maintaining that the brevity of his essay was intentional in order to highlight the collector's aesthetic analyses, which he felt would be the most forceful statement of the book. Clearly disappointed, Barnes decided to expand on the manuscript by adding stylistic assessments and structural analyses of individual works. For this, he turned to a member of the Foundation's fledgling education department, Thomas Munro.

Munro, formerly on the faculty of the Philosophy Department at Columbia University, had been hired by Barnes in April 1924 to teach Foundation classes. Although he was contracted to work on Guillaume's manuscript, his contributions were fundamentally directed by his employer. As Barnes related to Guillaume in a letter dated September 30, 1924: "I gave your manuscript on negro art to Munro to work into a book illustrated with photographs from our collection. He is very intelligent, is greatly interested in negro art, and I am analyzing negro sculpture while Munro takes notes." Later, Barnes again describes how he has "gone over with [Munro] the plastic qualities of the objects with considerable care" (letter to Guillaume, November 14, 1924).

By November 1924, the proposed book on African sculpture included not only Barnes's formal analyses of individual objects but also a historical and ethnological account together with a chapter on the artistic qualities of African sculpture--all evidently written by Munro under his employer's supervision. (6) Barnes had decided by then that Guillaume's contributions to the text, while interesting, were neither comprehensive nor sufficiently "objective." However, he felt that Guillaume should still be credited as author, explaining that "the book is sure to get international attention because Paul's name is inseparably identified with the subject of negro art and he is in close touch with practically every museum and important collector in the whole civilized world--even in Japan" (letter, Barnes to Thomas Munro, November 14, 1924). In light of Munro's contributions and the expanded text, it was ultimately decided that his name should be added as co-author of the book. (7)

Primitive Negro Sculpture in Context

Though one of the earliest texts of its kind, Primitive Negro Sculpture was, in fact, not the first publication to discuss objects from Africa from an aesthetic viewpoint. Negerplastik (1915) by Carl Einstein, an influential writer and critic in the German Expressionist movement, is generally considered to have led the way in this regard. Einstein's short introductory essay discusses the influence of African art on painting, the relationship between religion and art in Africa, and the perception of volume in African sculpture; then it focuses on masks and other object types. Although the book advocates the artistic appreciation of the sculpture, the textual section is brief, and an emphasis on form is most evident in the 111 photographic reproductions that form the bulk of the publication.

British art critics were also writing about African sculpture. Inspired by a 1920 exhibition of thirty African objects at the Chelsea Book Club in London, Roger Fry published his widely read "Negro Sculpture" in Vision and Design. Fry had visited the exhibition with Virginia Woolf on April 15 of that year, and his review appeared in Athenaeum the following day. (8) His essay focuses on two specific aspects of African sculpture: its freedom from representational accuracy and its formal emphases highlighting three-dimensionality. Fry is enthusiastic, albeit grudgingly, in his praise:

   We have the habit of thinking that
   the power to create expressive plastic
   form is one of the greatest of human
   achievements, and the names
   of great sculptors are handed down
   from generation to generation, so
   that it seems unfair to be forced to
   admit that certain nameless savages
   have possessed this power not only
   in a higher degree than we at this
   moment, but than we as a nation
   have ever possessed it. And yet that
   is where I find myself. I have to
   admit that some of these things are
   great sculpture--greater, I think,
   than anything we produced even in
   the Middle Ages.

   (Fry 1920:70-71)

What Fry believes distinguishes African sculpture from Western traditions is "complete plastic freedom," or an ability to re-create form in three dimensions. Yet despite his recognition of the creative products of African artists, his approach is racist. He ultimately dismisses artistic intent, concluding that "for want of a conscious critical sense and the intellectual powers of comparison and classification ... the negro has failed to create one of the great cultures of the world" (Fry 1920:73).

Also in attendance at the Chelsea exhibition of 1920 was Clive Bell, who published an essay on African art that reveals a mentality similar to Fry's. Bell's "Negro Sculpture" relates the "discovery" of African art by the European vanguard and debates its relative aesthetic merits. In a tone skeptical of the general enthusiasm for art negre, Bell begins by conceding that African art may deserve a place among the great art traditions. He maintains, however, that it is "no match for the greatest," a category he defines as encompassing Chinese, archaic Greek, Byzantine, Romanesque, and early Italian Renaissance art (Bell 1922:114). Unlike Fry, Bell does not highlight specific formal characteristics of African sculpture, such as three-dimensionality. Instead he discusses the creative process, arguing that while these works may be aesthetically interesting, they cannot be considered great art, because their creators are purely instinctual. Revealing a racial bias all too common in his place and time, Bell writes that "at the root of this lack of artistic self-consciousness lies the defect which accounts for the essential inferiority of Negro sculpture to the very greatest art. Savages lack self-consciousness and the critical sense because they lack intelligence" (p. 116). Ultimately, Bell concludes, African sculpture is not the product of "creative imagination" but an instinctual form that only incidentally achieves aesthetic excellence (p. 120).

Barnes was familiar with all of these publications, considered at the time among the more prominent writings on African art. (9) However, he denounced both Clive Bell and Carl Einstein as "people who have no real knowledge of the subject and are merely exploiting it to their own egoistic ends" (letter to Guillaume, March 28, 1924). Roger Fry, on the other hand, elicited a modicum of respect. Barnes recalled meeting Fry at Guillaume's gallery, where the two men were discussing African art: "I listened for a while and then took possession of Roger Fry and had a talk on Renoir and Cezanne which I shall remember for the rest of my life" (Barnes 1924b:139). That Barnes would be drawn to Fry's criticism is certainly understandable. Fry's formalist approach to African sculpture was similar to that of Barnes, at least superficially, incorporating the same language of visual analysis. Looking at figural works from Africa, for instance, Fry would describe "the neck and the torso conceived as cylinders" and "the head conceived as a pear-shaped mass" (1920:71).

Yet by the summer of 1924, Barnes had grown dismissive of Fry's writings, possibly as a result of his own strengthened sense of aesthetics. After reading Fry's Vision and Design, Barnes wrote Munro that he was "more than ever convinced that Fry is an academician, and that much of his thinking is a mixture of mush and literature, only sparsely sprinkled with plastic essences" (letter, July 22, 1924). Absent from all of Fry's publications, Barnes felt, was a "scientific" perspective and an extensive discussion of the distinct stylistic properties of individual sculptures. He was therefore convinced that the book he had developed with Guillaume would be an important contribution, offering more fully developed analyses of African objects as works of art.

Defining African Art

Barnes promoted what he termed a "systematic" method of aesthetic analysis. This method, employed in Foundation classes, advocated the direct observation of individual works from which one could derive a clear and "objective" description of formal characteristics. When these observations and analyses were codified into a text, Barnes asserted, public enthusiasm for the art form would increase. In a letter to Guillaume (November 14, 1924), he maintained that applying this approach to African sculpture was a major contribution:

   ... the result is something which is
   entirely new, not only in the matter
   of negro art but in the study of
   sculpture in general. In other
   words, we have used the basic principle
   of scientific method which
   recognizes the fact that in dealing
   with an objective situation the facts
   of the particular objects are the
   most important ones; but that very
   important principle seems to have
   been overlooked heretofore by all
   the people who have written on
   negro art.

Significantly, the "particular objects" to which Barnes refers, and which display the ideal formal characteristics outlined in the book, are from his own collection. Thus, the "objective" method of artistic appreciation that Primitive Negro Sculpture promotes with regard to objects from Africa may be considered essentially a codification of Barnes's own aesthetic criteria. Though the book is intended as a general introduction to the subject, its definition of African "art" is clearly based on objects from the Barnes Foundation collection.

Antiquity, Authenticity, and "Pure" African Art

Among the contemporary debates that Primitive Negro Sculpture engages is that surrounding the purported antiquity of African artistic traditions. The publication clearly seeks to establish African sculpture as an ancient art form. Indeed, in a letter to Guillaume (September 30, 1924), Barnes indicates that the original title of the book was actually Ancient Negro Sculpture. Objects illustrated in the book are given dates that range from the fifth to the nineteenth century, as with the reliquary guardian figure from Gabon, possibly Ntumu, that is dated to the eighth to tenth century (Fig. 3). As also seen in earlier publications, the book additionally suggests that art production on the continent long since ceased (Guillaume & Munro 1926:2). African sculpture is therefore defined not only as an ancient tradition but a rare commodity.

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Ironically, the great majority of the objects, such as the Baule male figure from Cote d'Ivoire (Fig. 4), were likely created no earlier than the late nineteenth century. Though Paul Guillaume did not adopt a forceful stance in his essay for the book, he was very influential in this aspect. He is specifically credited with providing attributions and dates for all the works illustrated in the text. Guillaume had realized, early on, the importance of "antiquity" to collectors of African art. The Barnes Foundation collection, Guillaume proposed, presented a specific chronology for African art in which "the epochs have been for the first time definitely fixed" (Guillaume 1924:141) (10)

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

The book did not suggest, as had earlier writers, that African forms represented the origins of humankind's artistic traditions. (11) Instead, it offers a fairly radical reinterpretation of the place of African sculpture within the evolution of form. Despite its title, the book tacitly proposes that African art is not "primitive" but forward-thinking:

   Where they seemed to be misshapen,
   badly proportioned, they
   were really fashioned with consummate
   skill to achieve effects that
   Europeans had not been able to see
   or appreciate. Instead of the beginnings
   of art, valuable only as historical
   relics, they were perhaps a stage
   in advance of European evolution,
   and valuable as ideals.

   (Guillaume & Munro 1926:1)

Most significantly, Primitive Negro Sculpture accords the African artist creative agency, thereby refuting the criticism of Fry and Bell, who proposed African art as a product of instinct. Throughout, the text repeatedly refers to the artist as a deliberate and skilled professional, one who approaches the challenges of working in three dimensions in a serious and thoughtful manner. Though perhaps unremarkable from the perspective of scholars today, this emphasis on the artist's critical consciousness was, for its time, a significant step forward in the evaluation of African aesthetics.

Still, in determining what constitutes African art, Primitive Negro Sculpture advocates a restrictive, racially based definition that was in accordance with the ideology of the day. The text limits "negro sculpture" to west and central Africa, excluding the rest of the continent. A map, "The Country of Negro Art" (Fig. 5), illustrates this point. A distinct boundary is drawn around that area, defining African art as sculpture produced by "the black race," that is, the Bantu population. "Negro sculpture" is further defined in the text as "pure," meaning that a work should exhibit no Western influences: the "art-producing negro was the negro untouched by foreign influences" (Guillaume & Munro 1926:13). The notion of racial and cultural purity as applied to African artifacts was, of course, largely a product of Western categorization rather than a reality. (12) Most objects collected during the early twentieth century were probably created nearly a generation after the advent of European colonialism.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

The Aesthetics of African Sculpture

Beyond considering questions of antiquity and authenticity, the primary purpose of Primitive Negro Sculpture was to analyze the formal properties of African sculpture from an aesthetic viewpoint. Einstein had proposed earlier, in Negerplastik, that an understanding of content and context was unnecessary for an artistic appreciation of this work. Primitive Negro Sculpture advocated a similar approach, arguing that such knowledge would hamper appreciation of the "plastic" qualities of African sculpture. It did, however, concede that cultural factors influenced a work's form. For that reason the book included a first chapter called "Its Relation to African Life" that sketched the racial, geographic, social, and religious backgrounds of African artistry. The next two chapters, however, are devoted to formal analysis: "Its Artistic Qualities" and "Its Chief Traditions."

The book distinguishes first between aesthetics and art. The "aesthetic impulses" of the African artist, the book contends, may be seen not only in sculpture but also in song, dance, and storytelling. Utilitarian objects may also be "treated with surface ornament or shaped into structures which are pleasing by their basic form" (Guillaume & Munro 1926:20). Yet the book separates art from artifact, maintaining that "by far the most important as art of all the objects of negro manufacture are the masks and fetishes" (p. 23). This aesthetic bias is reflected in the composition of the Barnes Foundation's collection: approximately two-thirds of the works are either masks or figural works (Fig. 6). The remaining objects include heddle pulleys, cups, utensils, staff tops, whistles, and musical instruments, most of which also have a figural element. The overtly utilitarian function of these works, however, contributes to their classification as "artifact," as illustrated in an image labeled "Carved Utensils" (Fig. 7).

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Primitive Negro Sculpture maintains that African art most significantly differs from other forms of artistic expression in its sculptural qualities or "three-dimensionality," as Fry noted earlier. Barnes observed in his 1925 publication, The Art in Painting, that the aesthetic interest of African art lay in its successful execution of three dimensions:

   In architecture and sculpture, where
   space is actually present, there is the
   same distinction between a vital,
   personal arrangement of spaces
   which gives the feeling of depth or
   extensity, and the inability really to
   conceive the object in three-dimensional
   terms. Primitive Negro art
   shows this power of conception in
   three dimensions, while in much of
   Greek sculpture it is comparatively
   lacking.

   (Barnes 1925:106)

While Fry merely observed the sculptural force of African art in general terms, Primitive Negro Sculpture advances the formalist approach by considering how the artist explores three-dimensional form in two specific sculptural genres: figures and masks.

With this focus, the book emphasizes the restructuring of the human body in the interest of design. The distorted proportions had been noted as early as 1894 with the second edition of Friedrich Ratzel's Volkerkunde (first edition published 1887-88). Roger Fry, too, had observed that the African artist's "plastic sense leads him to give its utmost amplitude and relief to all the protuberant parts of the body, and to get thereby an extraordinarily emphatic and impressive sequence of planes" (Fry 1920:72). (13) Reflecting this perspective, Primitive Negro Sculpture discusses the exaggeration and distortion of form. Yet, it goes further, proposing as an important characteristic of African figural works the division of the body into distinct units of sculptural design. These units, the text maintains, establish a formal theme that unites the whole through the repetition of similar lines, planes, and masses punctuated by contrast and variation: (14)

   So distinguished and usually marked
   off by a surrounding groove or hollow,
   each part can be moulded into a
   variation of some chosen theme--a
   sharp, slender projection, or perhaps
   a smooth, bulbous swelling--never
   exactly the same as its neighbors,
   for that would be monotonous;
   never too far from nature, or completely
   abstract, for that would
   destroy its interest as representation.... In
   the same figure an artist
   may introduce two or more radically
   different shapes, perhaps repeating
   and slightly varying each one.

   (Guillaume & Munro 1926:37)

This idea could be exemplified by a Senufo seated female figure (Fig. 8) from northern Cote d'Ivoire (attributed to "Sudan" in the text). A conical motif repeats in the coiffure, head, and breasts, but shifts in size and shape. An additional theme, a series of "slashing horizontal curves" throughout the length of the figure, appears in the line of the chin, the arms, and the thighs, and contrasts with the "vertical rods" of the neck, torso, and chair legs.

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

The language of formal analysis employed in Primitive Negro Sculpture deliberately evokes comparisons with music. The success of sculptural design, and therefore the aesthetic pleasure derived from its contemplation, is to be found in the rhythmic repetition and variation of these distinct units:

   To the eye, to the hand, to both together
   moving over the surface, the
   statue is like music in its succession
   of repeated and contrasting sensuous
   forms, its continuities and subtle
   alterations of a theme. Or rather
   it is the material for music that one
   may compose at will, proceeding
   always in a new order from line to
   line and mass to mass, singling out
   and reorganizing the elements,
   perceiving always some new relationship
   that had never presented
   itself before.

   (Guillaume & Munro 1926:33)

Using musical analogies to discuss visual art traditions was not new. Indeed, as Judith Zilczer has demonstrated, this synaesthetic comparison had emerged as a central theme in progressive American criticism since at least 1913 (Zilczer 1975:53). Barnes, however, would extend the analogy presented in the text. He proposed an aesthetic relationship between African-American spirituals and African sculpture, which he demonstrated by offering Sunday afternoon concerts of "negro spirituals" in the galleries of the Barnes Foundation, followed by a lecture on the aesthetics of African sculpture. Barnes contended that the musical traditions of African Americans, such as spirituals and work songs, revealed an aesthetic of theme and variation similar to that found visually in African sculpture. (15)

Masks, according to Primitive Negro Sculpture, offered a particular challenge to the African artist because there are inherent limitations to their form. The mask must use only the face for its "theme," needs to be close to natural size in order to be worn, and cannot be fully realized sculpturally in three dimensions. Therefore, the artist's "plastic problem is to produce, within these limitations, a design out of a few given elements" (Guillaume & Munro 1926:41). The numerous masks collected and displayed by Barnes provide a sense of the variety of formal solutions the African artist can achieve. An image of a Punu mukudj (Fig. 9), for example, emphasizes that a mask is not necessarily flat and two dimensional but rather can be sculptural in its high relief.

[FIGURE 9 OMITTED]

The book outlines a method to distinguish between successful and unsuccessful sculptural form. As an example, it considers two works that, in their formal design, embody the essential characteristics of African sculpture as defined by Primitive Negro Sculpture: dissociation of the body into units, rhythmic repetition, and contrasting themes. The figures, referred to in the book as "Guinea," are more likely from the Lagoon region of southern Cote d'Ivoire. The first figure (Fig. 10), smoothly finished and displaying greater technical skill, is considered to be uninspired, carrying "the principle of repetition almost to the point where it becomes monotonous and uninteresting" (Guillaume & Munro 1926:126). In contrast, the other work (Fig. 11), of less refined workmanship, is characterized as "ungainly, but full of life; its rhythms are direct, impulsive, irregular and strong." Neither work represents sculptural excellence but rather are "at opposite poles of negro sculpture, and indeed of all art" (p. 128).

[FIGURES 10-11 OMITTED]

The Stylistic Characteristics of Regional Traditions

The general discussion of African aesthetics in Primitive Negro Sculpture is followed by a consideration of regional styles. In this regard, the text anticipated works by Eckart von Sydow and Carl Kjersmeier in the 1930s, which are generally credited with introducing the concept of African "style regions." The regional traditions proposed earlier in Primitive Negro Sculpture are geographically contained units in which the artworks exhibit shared formal attributes. Of course, the view that particular styles correspond to fixed cultural or ethnic borders has long been contested (see, for example, Kasfir 1984). More recently, scholars have drawn attention to the fact that such a system neglects works that do not correspond to such categories (Okoye 1996). Still it continues to be seen as a useful framework for discussing style, as may be shown by the number of textbooks and catalogues that describe characteristics of regional sculptural traditions (among them, Roy 1987; Perani & Smith 1998).

The stylistic classifications proposed in the text are quite restrictive, given that the corpus of works upon which they are based is limited to the Barnes Foundation collection. The "major" sculptural traditions of Africa derive from four regions: the [Western] Sudan, Ivory Coast, Gabon, and the Congo. More than 100 of the approximately 120 works in the collection come from these four regions. "Minor" traditions are classified as Benin (Nigeria), Dahomey and Guinea, of which there are six examples in the collection. The discussion excludes works from other regions of Africa typically represented in Western collections of the time, including those from Ghana, Nigeria (other than Benin), and Cameroon, as these are absent from the Barnes collection.

Paul Guillaume had, in fact, introduced ethnic classifications for African art slightly earlier, in his 1924 article "African Art at the Barnes Foundation." Guillaume proposes that the art-producing peoples of Africa derive from three main "stocks." In the northwest there are the "Nigers, Bobos, the Baoules, the Agni, the Agui, the Gouros and the Dan"; to the southwest, the Fang ("the most beautiful of the Pahouins"); and inland on the equator, the "Bushongos" with their subgroups (Guillaume 1924:141). His regional distinctions correlate, in general, with those in Primitive Negro Sculpture, with the northwest comprising both "Sudan" and "Ivory Coast," the Fang situated in Gabon, and the "Bushongos" in the Congo. Yet Guillaume does not specify formal characteristics for these classifications. He comments only that "the collection of Negro art in the Barnes Foundation is rich in works coming from races of these different sources" (1924:142).

Primitive Negro Sculpture, in contrast, does define stylistic characteristics of "major" and "minor" traditions. The descriptions of "typical" works from each of these regions are, not surprisingly, quite restrictive. The typical Sudan work is, for example, "slender, elongated, angular, making frequent use of straight lines, pointed projections, flat planes and sharp edges. Its frequent awkwardness of attitude and crudity of surface tend to augment the total effect of sharp staccato force or wiry suppleness" (Guillaume & Munro 1926:74). In the Barnes collection, the Sudan "style" is represented primarily by selected sculptural works by Bamana, Dogon, and Senufo artists. One of the best-known examples that falls into this classification is a Dogon seated couple (Fig. 12). The text compares the work to a Gothic cathedral, describing its complex network of angular, slender rods that "give a sense of airy dispersion and delicately articulated structure" (Guillaume & Munro 1926:82).

[FIGURE 12 OMITTED]

In contrast to the flat planes and angularity of the art of the Western Sudan, the art of Ivory Coast is "characterized by a tendency to surface ornament and richness of detail, rather than by a rigorous paring down to structural essentials. Yet its ornamentation is not merely superficial, since the structural basis is itself strongly conceived in terms of design, and the ornamental elements intimately correlated with it" (Guillaume & Munro 1926:88). Nearly one-third of the Barnes Foundation collection falls into this category. The works derive primarily from the Dan and the Baule-Guro-Yaure regions. In one Yaure mask (Fig. 13), for example, attention is drawn to elements of surface ornament that connect the face of the mask to the smaller face on its crest; the cluster of triangles at the top reverses the ridges of the hairline below, which are seen as curved for variety.

[FIGURE 13 OMITTED]

Stylistically, the most restrictive category proposed in the text is art from Gabon. It is defined as having a tendency "toward a bulbous or pear-like shape, or a repetition of such shapes, with a flow of curving planes that rise from hollows into smooth swelling surfaces. It is comparatively plain and simple, lacking in accessory ornament, depending for its effect on the rhythm and contrast of the masses composing its basic structure" (Guillaume & Munro 1926:63). Applicable primarily to Fang statuary, the description does not fit other works from Gabon in the collection, including Kota reliquary figures and work by Punu artists. Approximately sixteen sculptures in the collection are from Gabon, though only seven of these are of Fang origin. A Fang reliquary guardian head (Fig. 14) is described with stark intensity as presenting the "swelling bulbousness" characteristic of art from Gabon: "in and out, up, down and around the structure the lines and surfaces swell and recede with one perpetual, smooth, restrained and even rhythm" (Guillaume & Munro 1926:64).

[FIGURE 14 OMITTED]

The book maintains that the broadest aesthetic variety may be found in the art of the Congo, although works from this region are described as exhibiting artistic excellence only infrequently:

   Pieces of considerable force and
   fine draftsmanship are occasionally
   found, in which faces often have a
   portrait-like naturalism, along with
   distortion in other parts, and a thoroughly
   worked out total design.
   But there is sufficient variety in the
   designs to point to the existence of
   many different traditions, rather
   than a single prevailing one.

   (Guillaume & Munro 1926:108)

This variety is reflected in the works Barnes collected for the Foundation, which include Luba caryatid stools, Kuba cups, Kongo figures, a number of small Bembe works, and a Lulua figure. One of the few works that Primitive Negro Sculpture describes as achieving mastery over sculptural means is a Luba caryatid stool (Fig. 15). The work is heralded for the "complex unity of its architecture, dispersed yet controlled in three-dimensional space" and "the voluptuous animation of its surfaces and their sure adaptation to the masses beneath" (Guillaume & Munro 1926:112).

[FIGURE 15 OMITTED]

Some of the examples in the Barnes Foundation collection that fall into the category of "minor traditions," being works from Benin, Dahomey, or Guinea, appear to have been selected by Barnes because of unique characteristics that distinguish them artistically. As discussed earlier, Benin is problematic because "it is a hybrid art, weak but yet a distinctive form, combining both African and European elements" (Guillaume & Munro 1926:13). The sixteenth-century cast-bronze messenger figure (Fig. 16) in the collection, with its cross pendant and helmet of possible European derivation, was very likely selected as an example of this hybridity.

[FIGURE 16 OMITTED]

That the proposed regional traditions represent the codification of Barnes's aesthetic philosophy may be demonstrated most powerfully in his design for the entrance to the Foundation (Fig. 2), built one year prior to the publication of the text. The vestibule features low-relief ceramic tiles with motifs representing African sculpture. The design for the entrance was planned entirely by Barnes, who specified individual objects, mostly from his collection, that were to be replicated in the tile mosaic. His design was executed by a Mr. Allen from the Enfield Tile and Pottery Company, whom Barnes considered a true artist. Working closely with Allen in 1923, Barnes described his plans: "The walls of the vestibule in the Gallery are to be of especially made multi-colored tiles of which Negro art will be the motif. That shows how much I esteem negro art" (letter to Paul Guillaume, March 1, 1923).

The plaque above the entrance is flanked by two Senufo figures (Fig. 17), based on the seated female figure illustrated in Figure 8. Below are ceramic reliefs of complete figures representing the four "major" regional traditions that Barnes found most important artistically: Sudan (Fig. 18), represented by a Bamana figure from the collection; Ivory Coast (Fig. 19), featuring a Baule figure also from the collection (see Fig. 4); Gabon (Fig. 20), illustrating a Fang reliquary figure from Guillaume's personal collection; and Congo (Fig. 21), presenting a Bembe female figure (see Fig. 1, second from the left), from the Barnes collection. A lower frieze represents African masks in the collection from these four regional traditions, while a Baule door from the collection is portrayed in multihued tiles (Fig. 22). Sited in a classical vestibule with imposing Doric columns, the presence of these African figures reveals a basic tenet of Barnes's aesthetic beliefs: that through the restructuring of the human form in the interest of design, African sculpture--the greatest example of three-dimensional form--has liberated the Western tradition of art from the constraint of classicism.

[FIGURES 17-22 OMITTED]

As we reevaluate the foundations of the artistic appreciation of African art, texts such as Primitive Negro Sculpture offer insights into the ideological positions and aesthetic preferences that influenced the development of private and public collections. Although the methodological approach advocated in the text, with its Western, modernist perspective and restrictive definition of African artistry, may be anachronistic, the book is important in ways that are often overlooked in the historiography of African studies. Part of its historical relevance lies in its development of regional classifications of African sculpture a decade prior to the more widely known contributions of von Sydow and Olbrechts. Just as significantly, Primitive Negro Sculpture accords the African artists creative agency, thereby refuting modernist criticism of its time, which saw this work as a product of pure instinct. A reconsideration of this historic text in light of archival evidence makes it clear that these contributions are properly understood as representing the methodological approach to African artistry advocated by Albert Barnes and the Barnes Foundation.

[This article was accepted for publication in November 2002.]

(1.) In 2001 I co-chaired, with Constantine Petridis, a two-part panel, "Reevaluating the Canon: African Art Studies in Historical Perspective," for the ACASA Triennial Symposium of African Arts in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. The panel sought to shed new light on the historiography of African art through a critical analysis of landmark publications. In, addition to Petridis's research on Frans Olbrechts and mine on Primitive Negro Sculpture, Wendy Grossman and Uwe Fleckner discussed different aspects of the work of Carl Einstein, Helen Shannon presented on the writings of Main Locke, Mary McInnes examined the publications of Georges Bataille, Kate Ezra focused on the catalogues of Robert Goldwater, and Monica Visona explored the contributions of a recent survey textbook. Petridis and I envision ultimately compiling these and other case studies in a larger publication on the historiography of African art.

(2.) This letter, and all subsequent correspondence cited in this article, is courtesy of The Barnes Foundation Archives, The Barnes Foundation. I am very grateful to Kimberly Camp, Executive Director and CEO of the Barnes Foundation, for making this material available to me and for her continued support of my research on Barnes and African art, and to Katy Rawdon-Faucett, Archivist at the Foundation, for her willing assistance with archival permission.

(3.) Although the subject of art is only briefly addressed in Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916), the text inspired Barnes to explore art education's potential for social reform. Dewey's later book, Experience and Nature (1925), which was written during a period at close friendship between the two men, directly impacted Barnes's interest in arts education. The text considers the instrumental value of art and aesthetics, proposing that arts appreciation encourages an individual to both value (appreciate the intrinsic qualities of art) and evaluate (make distinctions and judge). In developing his aesthetic theory, Barnes turned to the writing of naturalist philosopher George Santayana. Santayana's The Sense of Beauty (1896) and The Life of Reason: Reason in Art (1905) explored moral and aesthetic judgments as phenomena of the mind and products of mental evolution. These texts provided a philosophic basis for Barnes's theory of ideal form. For an in-depth consideration of the development of Barnes's theory of art within the context of American philosophy, see an important study by Meson Grands Bahr (1998).

(4.) In January 192B Guillaume had written, at Barnes's request, an article on African art for the American periodical The Arts. Ultimately, however, The Arts instead published an article on African art by Marius de Zayas. Barnes was determined to see Guillaume's article, in print; thus his proposal of March 9, 1923.

(5.) Guillaume revealed plans for an "important" book on African art in a commentary published in the December 15, 1920, issue of Bulletin de la vie artistique (Guillaume 1920:693) He was among twenty notables, including artists, ethnographers, dealers, critics, and collectors, invited to comment on whether African, Oceanic, and Native American art should be included in the Louvre. The responses, compiled under the heading "Enquete sur des arts lointains; Seront-ils admis au Louvre?," were published in three successive issues of the periodical: November 15, December 1 and December 15, 1920.

(6.) Barnes summarized Munro's contributions in a letter to Guillaume dated November 6, 1924: "Munro and I have been working on the book on Negro Art two days every week for the last month. Munro has made a very good job of the part which he has done himself and I have analyzed a number of the figures in plastic terms. I believe that the book will be a sensation because it is the first time that a really scientific method has been applied to the study of negro art. Most of the credit is due to Munro who is extraordinarily intelligent, has learned very quickly the real feeling of negro art, and has presented his ideas in a very clear and logical manner. The book will include a brief historical and ethnological account." The sections likely written by Munro, to which Barnes refers in the letter, are "Chapter I: Its Relation to African Life" and "Chapter II: Its Artistic Qualities."

(7.) At the time, Guillaume apparently supported this decision to credit Thomas Munro as the co-author of the book. Tellingly he does not distinguish between Barnes and Munro in terms of the additions to his text, observing merely that "it would be more accurate if your signature or his would appear alongside mine (letter to Albert Barnes, October 8, 1924; my translation). It should be noted that the later text by Guillaume, La sculpture negre primitive (1929), which he describes as a French translation of the 1926 book and which credits Guillaume and Munro as co-authors, is actually a significantly different publication. Among other revisions, the book omitted all the stylistic analyses and replaced the illustrations of Barnes Foundation objects with those from Guillaume's own collection. The changes incensed Barnes, who wrote a scathing letter to Guillaume and "deposed" him of his position at the Foundation. In it he angrily states that "the truth about the book 'Primitive Negro Sculpture' is that you never wrote a single word of it, and you never contributed one idea to its contents. The first page of that book acknowledges that I inspired, guided and controlled it" (letter to Guillaume, June 21, 1929). Barnes's claims were, almost certainly true, and the altercation led to the severance of Barnes and Guillaume's long-standing friendship.

(8.) Fry's review was reprinted in his Vision and Design, a compilation of essays, which was published in 1920. A decade earlier, Fry had first written about African art--again, quite positively--in "The Art of the Bushmen," a review of Bushman Drawings, an illustrated book on southern African rock paintings. This article was first published in March 1910 in Burlington Magazine and later included in Vision and Design The political implications of Fry's criticism and its relation ship to the colonialist enterprise are discussed at length by Marianna Torgovnick (1990:85-104).

(9.) In addition to the works by Einstein, Bell, and Fry discussed here, Barnes was also familiar with other contemporary publications that addressed the formal aspects of African sculpture. They included those by Apollinaire and Guillaume (1917), Clouzot and Level (1919, 1925), van Sydow (1921), and de Zayas (1916). All of these publications are dismissed in the introductory chapter of Primitive Negro Sculpture, where they are described as "brochures of photographic reproductions; each has a short text with a few miscellaneous facts and comments.... But no effort is made to describe the characteristics of these various localities. Few writers, in fact, seem to have any idea that there" exist several well-marked varieties and traditions of negro sculpture" (Guillaume & Munro 1926:4).

(10.) Barnes questioned the accuracy of Guillaume's dating of the works prior to the book's publication. In formed by Munro that current archaeological research placed the earliest date for African art at around 1600, Barnes asked Guillaume to secure the accuracy of the dates he had proposed for objects in the Foundation's collection (letter to Guillaume, October 23, 1924). The intense correspondence between the two regarding the issue of dating reveals a rarely seen side of Guillaume. The French dealer vigorously defends his dating of the works, asserting that only the cowardice of archaeologists prevented them from designating African art prior to 1600 (letter to Barnes, November 6, 1924). Distinguishing between style and era, he argues for at least the possibility of African art's existence before the sixteenth century. While Guillaume concedes that conserving wooden sculpture in a tropical climate was extremely difficult, he nevertheless staunchly defends his chronology. Surprisingly, given his proclivity toward objective and scientific reasoning, Barnes readily accepted Guillaume's explanation, writing to Munro: "I have more respect for Paul's knowledge than I have for the ethnologists and I am willing not only to let the dates stand as he gave them, but to take a crack at the 'savants' on the basis of what Paul cites in the letter" (letter. November 17, 1924).

(11.) Many critics, following the nineteenth-century theorist Gottfried Semper, saw African art in evolutionary terms, maintaining that the abstraction of African artistry reflected the beginnings of art, or the "primitive" (i.e., the arts of non-Western peoples), that eventually evolved into naturalism, or the "civilized" (i.e., Western arts from the Renaissance on). This perspective is firmly articulated in the criticism of Marius de Zayas. Writing in The Arts in 1923, for example, Marius de Zayas proclaims: "African negro sculpture can be considered as being one of the first styles of art that man ever created ... because it belongs to a people whose mentality is taken as corresponding to the primary state of man's intellect" (de Zayas 1923:199)

(12.) Interest in racial purity, however, was not ,an exclusively Western preoccupation. Annie Coombes has observed that around the turn of the nineteenth century, West Africans also stressed that the adoption of European culture had led to racial deterioration and degeneration (Coombes 1994:39).

(13.) Of course, the assumption that African figural sculpture distorts natural proportions belies a Western aesthetic bias, for as Susan Vogel has observed, "because it does not seek to duplicate nature, African art does not distort the forms of nature. On its own terms, African art never exaggerates" (Vogel 1993:72).

(14.) Vestiges of this formalist approach, focusing on theme and variation, may be seen in the discussion of "parallel asymmetries" offered as a general characteristic of African art in a recent major survey textbook on African art (Blier 2001:16-17).

(15.) This is explored in greater depth in Chapter 5, "Albert Barnes, African Art and the 'New Negro,'" in Clarke 1998.

References Cited

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Bahr, Megan Granda. 1998. "Transferring Values: Albert C. Barnes, Work and the Work of Art." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.

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Blier, Suzanne. 2001. "Africa, Art and History: An Introduction," in A History of Art in Africa, eds. Monica Blackmun Visona, et al. New York: Harry N. Abrams

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Kjersmeier, Carl 1935-38. Centres de style de la sculpture negre africaine. Paris: A. Morance.

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Christa Clarke is curator of Africa, the Americas and the Pacific at the Newark Museum. She is currently working on a publication, to be co-edited with Kathleen Bickford Berzock, that explores the role of American art museums in defining, collecting and displaying African objects as "fine art." Clarke is also a consulting editor and exhibition review editor (North America) of African Arts.