Page 63 - Studio International - July 1966

Illustrations are of scenes and exhibits
at the Dakar First World Festival of Negro Art

Etienne Martin, themselves influenced by 'primitive' tives. Art cannot be commanded; it expresses contem-
art. There was nothing of value among these derivative porary society in the most unexpected ways. Behind the
works. present weakness of modern art in Africa is the extra-
In painting, however, though the young artists repre- ordinary speed-up to which this society has been sub-
sented are still strongly influenced by early twentieth- jected. So many cultural patterns clash: the radar age is
century European art, particularly by those artists upon indiscriminately superimposed upon the stone age, the
whom the impact of Negro art has left its mark (notably transistor radio is neighbour to the wooden plough. In
the Expressionism of Kirchner and Schmidt-Rottluff), one this continent, overwhelmed by so much political,
felt that some of them are willing to accept equally the technological, scientific, and commercial changes, often
main streams of contemporary art. The prize, awarded contradictory and quite foreign to the ancient wisdom of
to 30-year-old Frank Bowling of British Guiana, now the village elders, the artist has difficulty in finding his
living in London, for his diptych The Big Bird, paid tri- feet and seeing clearly ahead. Although it will take a few
bute to an artist still very much influenced by Francis years, there is no doubt whatever that modern Africa
Bacon and Graham Sutherland but whose qualities are will soon be making its own vital contribution to world
already such that one can hope for individual develop- culture.
ment. What is significant here is not so much the actual One cannot stand aside: it is as a citizen of the world
work produced as the acceptance of the wider world of that the artist will henceforth hammer out the art of our
art and the refusal to become isolated or satisfied by epoch. Van Gogh drew on the work of Utamaro, Gauguin
exclusively African plastic values already on their way on ancient Egypt; Negro art has affected Lipchitz and
out. All the more important, then, to keep these young Laurence; Mexican art has influenced Moore; the
people thoroughly up to date on the progress and current dances of the world adopt the rhythms born in the Congo
trends of modern art so that they are not condemned to a and Dahomey. When he wrote his West Indian plays the
solitary step-by-step re-creation of them (as is happening Negro poet Césaire thought of Aeschylus and Shake-
in a number of east European countries where only now speare, and Negro novelists, before they write, study
are the artists discovering Malevich, Mondrian, and Flaubert and Faulkner. Culture has become 'mongrel-
Gabo) before adopting a mode of expression suited to a ized', we are all 'mongrels', there is no longer a Negro art,
technological society in the machine age. a white art, a yellow art. We are approaching a world
The devotees of negritude-at-any-price, those dogged society, and one hopes that the next Dakar festival will
source-seekers, make one realize the stupidity of direc- be universal, merging the cultures of the world. q