Page 54 - Studio Internationa - March 1971

with many of the earlier works. movement stimulated activities in other fields. avoid the bogus metaphysics and other
At least with Anatomy of Pop there is no It relates German Romanticism, on which it irrelevant nonsense which fills up many of the
ambiguity of subject. The book is a BBC concentrates, to its more important foreign books on African and 'primitive' art, and he
publication accompanying a series of parallels and predecessors, and it rightly gives us instead page after page of fact and
programmes about pop music. It is written in emphasizes its political implications and commonsense drawn from his own research
the now familiar chatty and unpretentious style achievements as well as its aesthetic innovations. and the research of others in Africa. For, as he
that serves as a way of saying things about Much of what Eckart Klessmann has to say says, 'it is important for us not to deceive
popular culture without sounding absurdly was new to me, at least; especially descriptions ourselves into believing that we can understand
pompous and academic —a style of criticism of the apparently indirect effects of the artistic the intention of an African sculptor simply by
used most successfully by Rolling Stone movement on other areas. The new interest in looking at his work. For a true understanding
magazine. Anatomy of Pop attempts nothing the Orient and in India was one of the results of we have to study African art and artists on the
serious, though Jeff Nuttall manages to include romantic interests in the exotic and the national, soil of Africa... studies in the field have
Géricault, Rosetti, Swinburne, Lautréamont and the development of philology as a science frequently disproved generalizations formulated
and Verlaine in one sentence, but the book is was virtually begun because of stimuli which by scholars in their museums and studies ... '
easy and fun to read : a kind of yesterday's came from romantic poetry. (page 161). Not the least of the services
`All Our Yesterdays'. q Although Eckart Klessmann is not very provided by Willett in this book, therefore, is
ANDREW HIGGENS concerned with the ways in which the German the careful demolition of many misconceptions
Romantics anticipated later movements, his about African art.
book makes it clear that the Romantics share Willett also avoids the pattern common to
Klessmann's Erzaehlungen
much with the Expressionists. Both movements most other books on African and 'primitive' art,
Die Welt der Romantik by Eckart Klessmann. were revolts of youth and had political with their catalogues, area by area, tribe by
368 pp, 28o monochrome and 24 colour ambitions. Both were concerned with a tribe, as inaccurate as they are brief. (There are
illustrations. Verlag Kurt Desch, Munich. re-evaluation of the Gothic and with the exceptions, of course, such as William Fagg's
DM 67. discovery of exotic and primitive art. Both excellent African Tribal Images, published in
revived the concept of the artist as genius-figure, 1968 by the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio,
There are few books on German romantic as protagonist of the good in a hostile world. where the catalogue form is appropriate and
painting even in German. Even the German Both believed in ecstasy as a path to spiritual where the information provided, though brief,
studies of individual artists like Runge or enlightenment, and both were profoundly is reliable and refreshingly informative.)
Caspar David Friedrich are typically more nationalist in outlook. Willett's African Art is instead composed of a
concerned with metaphysics and meaning than Unfortunately the book's production does series of essays each complete in itself, yet all
with the paintings as such, and until the not live up to its text. Although the temptation together providing a thorough survey of the
publication of this book there was nothing at all to turn the whole thing into an unwieldly and subject and a firm background for further study—
which dealt with the way in which painting gaudy spectacular was mercifully resisted, the and enjoyment.
related to the other arts and in which it quality of the illustrations is very bad indeed. The first chapter is concerned with 'the
informed, and was informed by, philosophy The black-and-white reproductions suffer from influence of the environment and the way of life
and the natural sciences. The lack of such a the fuzz of poor off-set lithography and the upon the potential capacity of the people to
study was remarkable, for it was the German colour plates appear as if they had been produce sculpture or painting' (page 25). The
Romantics in particular who tried to establish registered by a drunken or perhaps an second is about the discovery of African art by
new links between all the arts and who, in this astigmatic process worker. In view of the the artists, art historians and anthropologists of
and other ways, anticipated a great deal of excellence of the text this is a minor grudge. It the West.
modern thinking. The more one reads the makes me want to read other volumes in the Chapter Three, 'Towards a History of
German romantic authors, E.T.A. Hoffmann, series of which Eckart Klessmann's volume is African Art', is in four sections : the rock
Tieck, or Achim von Arnim, for example, the a part. q paintings and engravings of the Sahara, south
more one is astonished by the apparently FRANK WHITFORD and east Africa; the earliest sculpture in Negro
modern obsession with the subconscious and the Africa, namely that of the Nok Culture,
supernatural. We have long since forgotten that African arts Igbo-Ukwu and ancient Ife; European sources
Romanticism, and particularly its German of African art history, the collections of the
version, far from being anti-intellect and African Art: an Introduction, by Frank Willett. seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth
anti-logic, was a great catalyst for the Natural 288 pp, 261 monochrome and 61 colour centuries, and travellers' records and their
Sciences and also led to the foundation of illustrations. Thames and Hudson. £2.10 relationship with known works of the places
several new academic disciplines, notably hardback, £I.25 paper. they describe, such as Benin; and the
philology and the study of national literatures as Miniature Wood Carvings of Africa by William relationship between ancient Egypt and Negro
national phenomena. Goethe's work in physics Fagg. 104 pp, 102 monochrome and 8 colour Africa.
and botany is a notable example of this, as are plates. Adams and Dart. £4.20. One point of interpretation in the section
the activities of the painter Carl Gustav Carus dealing with the earliest sculpture is
who was also a physician and naturalist and In Frank Willett's latest book, African Art, we unacceptable, however. A modern Guro carver
coined the word 'unconscious' in his Psyche, have at last a reliable yet inexpensive publication said he never carved a human face to resemble
written as early as 1840. Fifty years before which can be thoroughly recommended to anyone for fear of being accused of witchcraft,
Freud, Carstens wrote in this book: 'The key anyone interested in the subject. Willett writes and Willett writes 'very possibly a similar idea
to the recognition of the nature of the conscious with an authority based on first-hand field accounts for the stylized treatment of human
life of the soul lies in the region of the experience; from 1957 to 1963 he lived at Ife beings by the Nok Sculptors, for they were
unconscious. Psychology, therefore, is the in Nigeria and was responsible for a series of clearly capable of naturalistic sculpture as the
history of the development of the soul from excavations there of major importance; he was animal figures show' (page 72). The Guro are
unconsciousness to consciousness.' Astonishingly intimately involved in the traditional life of the far away from the Nok Culture in space and in
modern, indeed. Eckart Klessmann's study of town as well as carrying out archaeological and time, and they do not make naturalistic
Romanticism in painting and literature pays ethnographic research in surrounding areas of representations of animals, so their sculpture is
careful attention to the way in which the artistic the country. This experience enables Willett to in no way comparable. Moreover, ideas about
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