The challenge of the modern: an introduction.

The evolution of modern African art history has been steady and incremental, and arguably matches the growing global audience for contemporary African art, particularly in the past decade. New journals focusing on the subject have come on stream, and a significant number of doctoral dissertations have been written, a few becoming published scholarly monographs. From its very beginning in the late 1960s during Africa's "independence decade," when many modernist art movements and trends became clearly defined, African Arts devoted significant attention to new art and artists from Africa. By the middle of the 1970s, however, artists of the independence generation, many of whom had attained considerable stature within their own countries and more modest success overseas, began to lose much of the critical attention they had been accorded in the earlier period. Several years later, it seemed as though pre-1970s work of African artists had disappeared from the horizon of art historical scholarship, except for relatively compendious texts that, by their very nature, lacked deep critical engagement with the work of individual artists or groups. Despite the usefulness of these kinds of texts, or rather because a serious art history scholarship could not depend on such studies, Simon Ottenberg (Okeke 1997), among many voices, called for more substantial and focused examination of work by the largely forgotten precursors of Africa's contemporary artists who, by the late 1990s, were celebrated as the "newest avant-garde" in file international art scene (Pollack 2001:124-9).

The period between the late 1950s and 1970, arguably the most crucial in the political history of modern Africa, was also a time of great ferment in the art of the continent, and it is to this era that this special issue, African Arts' first to focus solely on the modern art of the continent, is dedicated. As the essays included here attest, with the decolonization of vast areas of the continent complete or underway, a generation of artists trained in local and overseas schools developed new practices and, in some cases, matching critical discourses in response to emergent existential and political experiences and contemporary ideological, aesthetic, and philosophical motivations. That generation of artists, many inspired as well by the terrain of optimism and effervescence resulting from the establishment of national political, cultural, and educational institutions, confronted the challenge of inventing or rethinking ways of making art that reflected upon contemporary realities or ideas but also, in today's rearview mirror, anticipated future trajectories.

One of the critical questions modern African artists in this period faced was their relationship with ideas, ideals, and materials from indigenous African cultures as well as those associated with Islam, colonialism, and the West. While their literary colleagues debated the relevance or otherwise of indigenous and European languages and narrative structures in new African writing, visual artists sought for solutions to formal and conceptual problems by invoking and appropriating materials from single or diverse local and foreign, old and new sources. (1) But rather than resolve the dilemma of what Mazrui (1986) called Africa's triple heritage--referring to the influence of indigenous, Islamic, and Western traditions on postcolonial Africa--the work of that generation of artists laid the grounds for continuing debates over contemporary art, Africa, and the West. One thing is clear: the very fact that the challenges faced by African artists were not monolithic, but instead depended on the specific histories of their countries, as well as on the intellectual, political, and artistic philosophies and ideologies to which they were exposed. As such, despite discernible, even obvious, commonalities-such as the overwhelming disposition to inventing new forms expressive of the spirit of political and artistic freedom--it is reductive to speak about an African modernism; indeed we see diverse, contemporaneous modernisms in Africa.

Which brings us back to the question of the discipline of modern African art history. The undeniably vigorous growth of this field in recent years, while testifying to its richness and potentialities, belies the profound and unique difficulties facing its scholarship. Many of the earlier generations of artists, largely ignored by the international art world, were usually poorly documented, their works--with few exceptions, such as in Senghor's Senegal--barely collected or properly archived by local public or private museums. The consequent lack of access to and information about the work of these artists has thus resulted in a dearth of meaningful engagement with this material in contemporary art historical discourse. Already, with the passage of time, the task of reconstructing the history of significant episodes in twentieth century African modernisms becomes more precarious and therefore all the more important for the discipline. As the following essays demonstrate, much as the difficulty of accessing materials resident mostly in private holdings and obscure repositories cannot be understated, early African modernist art and visual culture presents considerable research possibilities and revelatory sources for mapping the art history of twentieth century Africa.

One of the most compelling reasons to return to, as it were to begin the process of critical recovery of, the work of previous generations of African artists, is the opportunity to expose the insensitivity of William Fagg and Margaret Plass's influential claim that modern African art is "an extension of European art by a kind of involuntary cultural colonialism" (1964:6, emphasis mine). By extension it makes us aware that the usual dismissal of contemporary African artists, inside and outside the continent, as un-African, (2) points to a deep and unfortunate misunderstanding of these artists and also an unwillingness, on the part of some Western scholars and critics, to engage modernist art and visual cultures on their own terms. As many of these essays show, these questions of (dis)connection between modern and contemporary African art on the one hand, and African indigenous traditions on the other requires a far greater critical examination of what Mudimbe has called the "multifaceted 'idea' of Africa" (1994:xi). It is clear enough that the ignored modernist era, with all its debates, confusions, and vigor, represents a crucial juncture that can help us put the more contemporary art, with its insistent hybridization, its stylistic and conceptual complexities, but also its origins and trajectories, in proper perspective.

It is imperative to broach the question of African modernism--or, as already mentioned, African modernisms--not only to clarify its use here but also to comment on its relationship with that other or, as some want to insist, "mainstream" European historical modernism that began in the nineteenth century, reaching its zenith in early twentieth century Paris and later New York. Modernism, in its fundamental sense, is constituted by its Parisian manifestation at the beginning of the twentieth century and modernist art from other parts of the world. More than just a quest for a particular formal style or aesthetic, modernism was the expressive form of the political, ideological, and socioeconomic processes associated with modernity; local historical and cultural conditions and intellectual traditions therefore determined the specific form of its constituent parts. Modernism in Africa thus refers not to a set of formal conventions but to sets of critical practices championed by artists confronting or responding to Africa's modernity during the colonial and immediate postindependence eras. In the hands of these artists, modernism insinuates the visual expression of the real experiences, illusory visions, and critical imagination of Africa's modernity. It is in this sense that one might see modernist art from Africa not as mimicry of its Euro-American counterparts, but as the outcome of a conscious examination and questioning of, rather than an easy answer to, issues arising from the implications of the continent's triple heritage.

There has been in recent scholarship the now-fashionable tendency to theorize non-European modernist art--or actually those modernist practices that fell outside the concerns of Paris-New York's will-to-abstraction--as alternative, vernacular, parallel, or cosmopolitan modernism. (3) The problem with these propositions, however, is that they invariably insinuate Paris-New York as the site of modernism, while the others represent, at best, the other, and in some sense not-quite-the-real modernism. Rather than propose modernist art from outside of Paris-New York as alternative or parallel modernism, it is more meaningful to see modernism not as a closed, historically and geographically situated phenomenon, but as a constellation of formal and conceptual strategies adopted by artists everywhere who, exploiting ideas and expressive forms from within and outside of their cultural contexts, fashioned new ways of seeing and experiencing the modern through art. In other words, the relationship between African and Western modernism is at once fraught and complex no less because of the instability of the ideas of "Africa" and the "West," as for the deep historical interconnections that began with the arrival of the Portuguese on the west coast of the continent in the late fifteenth century.

It becomes quite obvious, therefore, that the exponential growth in international critical reception of contemporary African art, especially since the 1990s--exemplified emphatically by the space given to several contemporary African artists in the Museum of Modern Art, New York's new installation of contemporary art from its permanent collection--inevitably exposes the discursive lacunae or a space of silence that preceded this period. (4) The essays in this volume broach questions--about identity, spectatorship, patronage, and more--crucial to the work of the previous generation of artists who are now largely ignored or mythologized in contemporary critical discourse. These same questions remain relevant to the discourse of recent work by African artists. The tenor and rigor of these essays, it seems to me, suggest a coming of age of modern African art history, but also demonstrate a clear determination on the part of emerging scholars in this field to take seriously the challenges of a defining period in the twentieth century (art) history of the continent.

References cited

Anonymous. 1962. "African Writers Meet." West African Review 33 (417):17-19.

Cuauhtemoc, Medina. 2003. "Gerzso and the indo-American Gothic: from Eccentric Surrealism to Parallel Modernism." In Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerzso, ed. Diana C. du Pont, pp. 195-213. Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Fagg, William, and Margaret Plass. 1964. African Sculpture. London: Studio Vista Limited.

Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, ed. 2001. Alternative Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Mazrui, Ali. 1986. The Africans: A Triple Heritage. Boston: Little, Brown.

Mercer, Kobena, ed. 2005. Cosmopolitan Modernisms. London: InIVA and The MIT Press.

Mudimbe, V.Y. 1994. The Idea of Africa. London: James Currey.

Okeke, Chika. 1997. "We now need specific detailed studies of groups of artists." Interview with Simon Ottenberg. Position: International Quarterly on the Arts (Lagos) 2 (2):106-14.

Pollack, Barbara. 2001. "The Newest Avant-Garde." ARTnews 100 (4):124-9.

Sewell, Brian. 2005. "Out of Africa but Rooted in the West." (London) Evening Standard, February 18.

(1.) For a report on the 1962 African Writers' conference at Makerere College, Kampala, see Anonymous 1962. See also Sanyal's essay in this volume.

(2.) Reviewing Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (2005), at the Hayward Gallery, London, a British critic confidently asserts: "The contemporary pan-African exhibition at the Hayward reveals that the continent's artists have abandoned their powerful ancestral crafts in favour of copycat European art" (sowell 2005).

(3.) See for instance essays on these concepts in Gaonkar (2001), Cuauhtemoc (2003), and Mercer (2005).

(4.) Work by African artists, such as Ibrahim El Salahi and Thomas Mukarobgwa, collected in the 1960s have remained in storage since their arrival in the museum's collection. This fact, in some sense, reflects the general fate of this earlier material.