Art and Form by Sam Rose;

Author:Sam Rose;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

What the Artist Should Do: Aesthetic Education and Early Modernism in Nigeria

Thinking of things as formed, I have stressed throughout this book, promises a way to understand the activities and even people that made those things. How easy, then, to slip almost imperceptibly from sympathetic attempts to engage with others into overconfident pronouncements about the way that others make and see. Writing in 1949 on 40,000 Years of Modern Art, Read suggested that we look beyond the “obvious” fact that “certain modern artists have at certain periods of their development been influenced by primitive art” to the less obvious “universality of art.”4 Looking back in time and across cultures, for Read, we could clearly see the “eternal recurrence” in art of the features now labeled “modern.”5 There were nonetheless limits to the artistic universality that Read could accept. Inspecting examples of twentieth-century Chinese painting ten years later in his preface to Sullivan’s Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century, Read wrote that “too many” of the pictures reproduced in the book in question showed “an uneasy compromise” between “the East and the West.”6 (Read was here referring to reproductions of works such as Pan Yuliang’s Pears and Floral Cloth, 1943, Anhui Provincial Museum, Hefei.) The lesson here was not art’s universality but instead the fact that the “currency of art is debased if it is robbed of its native core.” Despite the apparent influence of Japanese prints, Western art, for Read, had “evolved from naturalism to abstraction . . . without interference from an alien culture.” In modern China the reverse was true, with a sad attempt made “to see the world with Western eyes.” In as much as the aim “leads to an imitative art (with only a slight difference of accent),” Read wrote, “the Western critic will be inclined to deplore it as one more example of the general leveling and lowering of taste and sensibility due to the efficiency of modern methods of communication.”

Read’s words demonstrate a fairly typical imbalance that arises in modernist art writing, especially when the universal and primitive are invoked together.7 Cultural products from outside the West are appropriated by Western artists in pursuit of an especially direct, authentic or primitive means of expression. But while artists in the West can freely appropriate from others outside the West, those outside the West are in turn cast as “belated” or “inauthentic” as soon as they attempt the reverse.

Here I examine this issue alongside both formalist aesthetic education and the early history of modernism in Nigeria. Doing so shows first of all one basis for the high formalist claim that art really should be a certain way: concerned with authentic personal expression and to this end stressing form rather than mere reproduction of natural appearances. It also shows how toxic that apparently liberatory view can be. Looking back from the present, it is clear that there really is no single route to authenticity and certainly not one that could ever, on the back of form, float free of historical circumstance.

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