Mapping Modernisms Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism 9780822372615, 9780822368595, 9780822368717, 0822372614

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MAPPING MODERNISMS

MODERNIST EXCHANGES

General editors: Ruth B. Phillips and Nicholas Thomas

OBJECTS/HISTORIES: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ART, MATERIAL CULTURE, AND REPRESENTATION

A series edited by Nicholas Thomas

Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips  |  E D I T O R S

MAPPING

COLONIALISM

ART, INDIGENEITY,

MODERNISMS

Duke University Press | Durham and London | 2018

© 2018 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ∞ Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill Typeset in Minion Pro by BW&A Books, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Harney, Elizabeth, editor. | Phillips, Ruth B. (Ruth Bliss), [date] editor. Title: Mapping modernisms : art, indigeneity, colonialism / Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips, editors. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2018. | Series: Objects/histories: critical perspectives on art, material culture, and representation | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018013376 (print) lccn 2018015976 (ebook) isbn 9780822372615 (ebook) isbn 9780822368595 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9780822368717 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Indigenous art. | Modernism (Art) Classification: lcc N6351.2.I53 (ebook) | lcc n6351.2.i53 m37 2018 (print) | ddc 700/.4112—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018013376 Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Equity and Diversity in the Arts Fund within the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media; the Dean’s Contingency Fund; and the Research Impact Fund, all from the University of Toronto Scarborough, which provided funds toward the publication of this book. Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of Carleton University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, which provided funds toward the publication of this book. Frontispiece: Lukta Qiatsuk, Owl, 1959. Stone-cut print, 12 × 14 in. (30.6 × 35.9 cm). Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, Quebec. Copyright Dorset Fine Arts. Cover art: Paratene Matchitt, Te Kooti at Ruatahuna, 1967. Polyvinyl acetate on hardboard, 1208 mm × 1338 mm. Courtesy of the artist and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

IN MEMORY OF

Jonathan Mane-­Wheoki AND

Daphne Odjig

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations  ix General Editors’ Foreword | Ruth B. Phillips and Nicholas Thomas xiii Preface | Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips xv INTRODUCTION 

Inside Modernity: Indigeneity, Coloniality, Modernisms | Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips 1

PART I  MODERN VALUES ONE 

Reinventing Zulu Tradition: The Modernism of Zizwezenyanga Qwabe’s Figurative Relief Panels | Sandra Klopper 33 TWO 

“Hooked Forever on Primitive Peoples”: James Houston and the Transformation of “Eskimo Handicrafts” to Inuit Art | Heather Igloliorte 62 THREE 

Making Pictures on Baskets: Modern Indian Painting in an Expanded Field | Bill Anthes 91 FOUR 

An Intersection: Bill Reid, Henry Speck, and the Mapping of Modern Northwest Coast Art | Karen Duffek 110

FIVE 

Modernism on Display: Negotiating Value in Exhibitions of Māori Art, 1958–1973 | Damian Skinner 138

PART II  MODERN IDENTITIES SIX 

“Artist of PNG”: Mathias Kauage and Melanesian Modernism | Nicholas Thomas 163

SEVEN 

Modernism and the Art of Albert Namatjira | Ian McLean 187

EIGHT 

Cape Dorset Cosmopolitans: Making “Local” Prints in Global Modernity | Norman Vorano 209 NINE 

Natural Synthesis: Art, Theory, and the Politics of Decolonization in Mid-­Twentieth-­Century Nigeria | Chika Okeke-­Agulu 235 PART III  MODERN MOBILITIES TEN 

Being Modern, Becoming Native: George Morrison’s Surrealist Journey Home | W. Jackson Rushing III 259 ELEVEN 

Falling into the World: The Global Art World of Aloï Pilioko and Nicolaï Michoutouchkine | Peter Brunt 282

TWELVE 

Constellations and Coordinates: Repositioning Postwar Paris in Stories of African Modernisms | Elizabeth Harney 304 THIRTEEN 

Conditions of Engagement: Mobility, Modernism, and Modernity in the Art of Sydney Kumalo and Jackson Hlungwani | Anitra Nettleton 335

FOURTEEN 

The Modernist Lens of Lutterodt Studios | Erin Haney 357

Bibliography 377 Contributors 409 Index 415

ILLUSTRATIONS

PL ATES

1. Oscar Howe, Woman Buffalo Dreamer 2. Magdalena Augustine, Large Basket 3. Henry Speck, Moon Mask Dancers 4. Selwyn Muru, Kohatu 5. Rex Battarbee, Central Australian Landscape [Mt. Hermannsburg] 6. George Morrison, Cumulated Landscape 7. George Morrison, Untitled 8. Aloï Pilioko, Tattooed Women of Bellona, Solomon Isles 9. Aloï Pilioko, Self-­Portrait with Bracelets 10. Skunder Boghossian, Time Cycle III 11. Sydney Kumalo, Seated Woman 12. Unknown photographer, Portrait of Albert Lutterodt and His Wife 13. Unknown photographer, Gold Coast: Fort in Elmina FIGURES

1.1. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, pair of large vertical pokerwork panels  34 1.2. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, panel detail documenting racial discrimination 35 1.3. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, panel detail of King Cetshwayo  35 1.4. Mat rack decorated with geometric patterns  37 1.5. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, pair of vertical pokerwork panels  38 1.6. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, panel detail of Dinuzulu’s incarceration  38 1.7. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, panel detail of bride holding small ritual knife 38 1.8. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, panel detail of a man drawn behind a cow  39 1.9. Undated photograph of Zizwezenyanga Qwabe and another carver  46

1.10. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, pair of vertical pokerwork mat racks  49 1.11. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, horizontal pokerwork panel portraying an ox-­drawn wagon  51 1.12. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, horizontal pokerwork mat rack panel  51 1.13. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, horizontal figurative pokerwork panel  51 1.14. Rebecca Reyher photographing King Cyprian  54 1.15. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe at the Bantu Agricultural Show, Nongoma  55 1.16. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe at his homestead near the Qondo Trading Store  55 2.1. Cover, Sanajaksak: Eskimo Handicrafts 63 2.2. James Houston displaying carvings and crafts in Pangnirtung  68 2.3. Display shelf in Inukjuak, Quebec  70 2.4. Cribbage board, Sanajaksak 72 2.5. Bracelets, needle case, and matchstick holder, Sanajaksak 72 2.6. Totem pole, Sanajaksak 73 2.7. Detail of totem pole  74 2.8. Isa Oomayoualook, animal totem sculpture  74 2.9. Akeeaktashuk, Woman and Child 81 2.10. Amidilak, Bear Sculpture  81 3.1. Fred Kabotie, Two Bird Dancers with Costumed Audience 92 3.2. Unknown Chemehuevi artist, Basket 102 4.1. Eaton’s Salute to Indian Culture brochure  111 4.2. Bill Reid, hinged bracelet depicting the Raven  120 4.3. Bill Reid, earrings in abstract design  120 4.4. Bill Reid paints interior house post  122 4.5. Hawthorn, Reid, and Davidson present a totem pole to the City of Montreal 123 4.6. Henry Speck carves interior house posts  127 4.7. Henry Speck, Sea Monster 129 4.8. Henry Speck at opening of Henry Speck, Ozistalis 130 5.1. Māori Festival of the Arts  139 5.2. Contemporary Māori Painting and Sculpture exhibit  140 5.3. Viewing a sculpture at the Māori Festival of the Arts  146 5.4. John Miller, Evening Concert, Tūkākī wharenui 153 5.5. John Miller, Artists’ Exhibition Te Kaha-­nui-­a-­tiki District High School 154 5.6. Works by Arnold Wilson and Alison Duff at Recent New Zealand Sculpture exhibit 156 x 

I llustrations

5.7. Selwyn Muru in Wellington  158 6.1. Kuanimbandu, Tots  164 6.2. Timothy Akis, Untitled  168 6.3. Timothy Akis, Man i hait namil long tupela ston  169 6.4. Mathias Kauage, Magic Fish  170 6.5. Mathias Kauage, Pasindia trak 171 6.6. Mathias Kauage, Independence Celebration 4  173 6.7. Mathias Kauage, Okuk’s Son at Moresby Airport  175 6.8. Mathias Kauage, Buka War 177 6.9. Mathias Kauage, Biting the Doctor’s Arm  177 6.10. Mathias Kauage, Kauage Flies to Scotland for the Opening 178 6.11. Mathias Kauage, photograph by Ulli Beier  180 7.1. Albert Namatjira, Mt. Hermannsburg with Finke River  189 7.2. Albert Namatjira, Central Mt. Wedge 191 7.3. Collin, Untitled (Landscape with Two Snakes and a House) 201 7.4. Albert Namatjira, Whispering Hills 204 8.1. Aline B. Saarinen, “Canada: Contemporary Eskimo Stone Carvings” 210 8.2. Ellis Wilson, To Market, Haitian Peasants 215 8.3. Un’ichi Hiratsuka, Katsura Rikyu Amano Hashidate [Stone lantern]  219 8.4. Lukta Qiatsuk, Owl 219 8.5. Kellypalik Mungitok, Man Carried to the Moon 221 8.6. Shikō Munakata, The Sand Nest 221 8.7. Lukta Qiatsuk, Eskimo Whale Hunt  223 8.8. Josef Flejšar, Uméní Kānādských Eskymáků  229 8.9. Kellypalik Mungitok, Blue Geese on Snow 229 9.1. Aina Onabolu, Sisi Nurse 238 9.2. Demas Nwoko, Titled Woman 249 9.3. Demas Nwoko, Soldier (Soja) 251 10.1. George Morrison, Untitled 265 10.2. George Morrison, Black and White Patterned Forms 266 10.3. George Morrison, Grey, Black and White Lines 271 11.1. Nicolaï Michoutouchkine, Cockerel with Its Head Cut  283 11.2. Aloï Pilioko, Crucifixion of a Cockerel 284 11.3. Aloï Pilioko, Futunian Dancers 291 11.4. Pilioko with carvings, Santa Ana, Solomon Isles  292 11.5. Nicolaï Michoutouchkine and Aloï Pilioko  292 11.6. Snapshot from Michoutouchkine’s collecting expedition   293 I llustrations 

xi 

11.7. Exhibition of tapestries by Aloï Pilioko  297 11.8. Nicolaï Michoutouchkine and Aloï Pilioko in Red Square, Moscow 298 12.1. Gerard Sekoto, Street Scene  305 12.2. Alexander Boghossian and Gerard Sekoto in a Parisian café  307 12.3. Gerard Sekoto, poster for the Second Conference of Negro Writers and Artists  313 12.4. Gerard Sekoto, Senegalese Women  315 12.5. Gerard Sekoto, Untitled  316 12.6. Gerard Sekoto, Memories of Sharpeville 317 12.7. Skunder Boghossian, Spring Scrolls 320 12.8. Skunder Boghossian, Ju ju’s Wedding 321 12.9. Skunder Boghossian, Night Flight of Dread and Delight 322 13.1. Jackson Hlungwani, Altar for Christ 337 13.2. Sydney Kumalo in his studio  340 13.3. Sydney Kumalo, Killed Horse  341 13.4. Sydney Kumalo, Seated Figure 343 13.5. Jackson Hlungwani, Cain’s Aeroplane 349 13.6. Jackson Hlungwani, Lion 350 14.1. Carte de visite, two unidentified men, Ghana  358 14.2. [Gerhardt Lutterodt?], Slave Coast: Chief Ayevie of Little Popo with His People 362 14.3. [Gerhardt Lutterodt?], Gold Coast, Merry-­Go-Round, Accra, Christmas 1887 364 14.4. [Gerhardt Lutterodt?], Almeida Brothers, Little Popo, Republic of Benin 365 14.5. Frederick Lutterodt, The People of the Deceased King Tackie 367 14.6. Unknown photographer, Two Men Standing in a Field Cleared for Cocoa 369 14.7. Unknown photographer, Accra-­Mulattin 372

xii 

I llustrations

RUTH B. PHILLIPS AND NICHOLAS THOMAS

GENERAL EDITORS’ FOREWORD

Within the larger Objects/Histories series, this smaller set of volumes addresses the diverse lives that artistic modernism has had beyond the West during the twentieth century. This book, one of three volumes, explores the fertile exchanges between local artists and those of European descent, among them radical expatriates, in colonial settings. A symptom of the complexity and heterogeneity of such settings is that some of those local artists are referred to, and refer to themselves, as indigenous; for others, that term is less appropriate. The focus on Africa, Oceania, and the Americas fills a gap in current scholarship that is a legacy of Western modernism’s much-­debated primitivism. In response to the striking absence of these art histories from global narratives, in 2010 we initiated a program of research and discussion that has resulted in these publications. From the outset, the agenda was not simply to pluralize a monolithic Western construct. We take it for granted, as many readers will, that the humanities and social sciences have moved in that direction. Yet this epistemological sea change does not in itself enable any genuine understanding of the diversity of modernist innovation beyond the West, the legacies of modernist primitivism, or the ambivalent exchanges between European cultural brokers and those they stimulated and mentored. Whereas globalization was already a cliché of the international art world by the late-­ twentieth century, the apparent inclusiveness of biennials had in no way been matched by an adequate account of the Native modernisms of the interwar years or those of the fifties and sixties. In part for telling reasons —these artists’ notions of self, history, and culture preceded and were somewhat incommensurable with the formations of identity politics that gained ascendancy in the seventies —​­the art world, and the critical writing around it, has suffered a kind of amnesia regarding these remarkable and formative histories.

Scholars have produced fine studies focused on artists in specific countries and regions, including books previously published in the Objects/Histories series, but the subject also demands a wider, comparative approach, which can reveal both the shared experiences engendered by colonial policies and the specificity of local responses. This set of volumes draws on the work of scholars from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere who collectively bring decades of research experience into the remarkable lives of indigenous artists and their strange and paradoxical dealings with Western mentors and institutions. The heterogeneity of milieux and artists’ trajectories, as well as the successes and failures of these artists’ work, are vital to the understanding we seek to achieve and convey. One aim is to tell some of their stories. Another is to exemplify, rather than merely declare the need for, a genuinely global art history. We wish to acknowledge the support of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute; Carleton University; Victoria University; the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge; and our major sponsor, the Leverhulme Trust. A Leverhulme international network award (2013–14) and the institutions mentioned supported workshops and public conferences at the Clark, in Williamstown, Massachusetts (2011); the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2012); Cambridge (2013 and 2017); the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington (2014); Wits University, Johannesburg (2016); and the University of Cape Town (2016). It is a pleasure also to thank Ken Wissoker of Duke University Press for his longstanding and continuing enthusiasm for this project.

xiv 

GENERAL EDITORS’ FOREWORD

ELIZABETH HARNEY AND RUTH B. PHILLIPS

PREFACE

The genesis of this book goes back to a colloquium entitled Global Indigenous Modernisms: Primitivism, Artists, Mentors, held in May 2010 at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The Clark’s generous support of Ruth Phillips’s proposal made possible a meeting of twelve scholars from the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. All study twentieth-­century modern arts created by indigenous artists subject to colonial rule. During two days of discussions, we explored the potential for using a comparative framework to reveal global modes of circulation, networks of communication, and common patterns of development to highlight the unique features that characterize different local iterations of modernism around the world. The research presentations led us all to decide unanimously to reconvene a year later, in Ottawa, for a public symposium, where we could pursue a broader project and generate wider discussion. The editors of this volume organized the symposium, entitled Multiple Modernisms: Transcultural Exchanges in Twentieth-­Century Global Art. The event began at the National Gallery of Canada then continued on the other side of the Ottawa River, at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now the Canadian Museum of History), where Indigenous artists and curators from the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective presented a lively set of talks on Canadian indigenous modernisms. Papers from the symposium form the core of this book, and although two original Clark participants —​­Kobena Mercer and Susan Vogel —​­unfortunately could not continue with the project, three additional authors — ​­Karen Duffek, Heather Igloliorte, and Erin Haney — ​­contributed chapters that have broadened our book’s scope in important ways. To reveal the shared as well as the distinctive aspects of indigenous modernisms, we sought geographic and cultural breadth,

yet this collection pretends neither to be comprehensive within the multiple modernisms framework, nor to represent all modernisms created by peoples identified as indigenous in colonial and neocolonial contexts. (We address the complexities of this designation in our introduction.) Rather, we have adopted a case study approach, which invites considerations of the complex webs of interaction among artists, intermediaries, objects, images, and texts produced by conditions of modernity and coloniality. In George Kubler’s book The Shape of Time, first published in 1962, he wrote of Western art that “the last cupboards and closets of the history of art have now been turned out and catalogued.” 1 For the modernisms we explore here, however, art historians are only just beginning to open the doors to the cupboards. While the need for this book and its timeliness will, of course, be judged by its readers, two deaths that occurred during its preparation underscore the urgent need to document art histories, which are retained as much in the memories of the participants and the ephemeral traces left by their artistic projects as in any set of formally organized archives. Toward the beginning of this project, we lost Jonathan Mane-­Wheoki, eminent Maori art historian, curator, and teacher, who contributed deeply to our knowledge of Maori modernists. Early on, he had encouraged Phillips to pursue the comparative project, and we had hoped to engage him as a contributor. Then, as the book was going to press, pioneering Anishinaabe artist Daphne Odjig passed away; her work, discussed at the Ottawa conference by contemporary Anishinaabe artist and curator Bonnie Devine, is only now receiving the broader attention it deserves. If, as many art historians today argue, a globalized world requires wide-­ranging narratives of human cultural history, the assembly of the archive cannot be divorced from the work of reconceptualization and analysis, as each chapter of this book demonstrates. This volume also has deeper roots in the two coeditors’ career-­long engagements with the modernisms created by indigenous and colonized peoples in Africa, North America, and elsewhere. Both have worked in museums initially founded to rectify the neglect of non-­Western arts and cultures (Harney at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art and Phillips at the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology), and both have pursued teaching careers in Canadian universities during a period when First Nations and Inuit arts have steadily grown in prominence — ​­not only affirming the vitality of Indigenous cultures but also countering the settler nation’s own modernist appropriations. It would have been hard for either of us, trained in African art history and immersed in art worlds that were regularly electrixvi 

PREFACE

fied by the politics of Indigenous art production, not to be intrigued by the parallel challenges of conceptualization, inclusivity, and canonicity that have characterized African and Indigenous North American modernisms — ​­first silenced and marginalized, then primitivized and appropriated, then celebrated (albeit lost in a space between anthropology and art museums), and, finally, hailed as the global “contemporary.” That our intellectual trajectories belong to different generations — ​­Phillips received her PhD in 1979 and Harney in 1996 — ​­indicates the persistence of problems of reception, periodization, and classification this book explores. This collaborative project has forced us each to confront the overdetermined and overburdened intellectual categories we take to be natural in our respective subfields. In particular, it has both loosened and deepened our understandings of the metahistorical concepts of modernity, indigeneity, and primitivism. And though working together has brought forth many useful and telling comparisons and recognizable patterns of colonial-­modern practices in the arts and in their systems of patronage, it has also demanded that we recognize these experiences of the modern era as contingent and volatile, produced through specific historical encounters, and in constant need of rereading. The goals of the collaborative research project we formulated at the Ottawa meeting, Multiple Modernisms: Transcultural Exchanges in Twentieth-­ Century Global Art, were thus twofold: we aimed to begin the essential work of scholarly documentation of artists’ works and lives by assembling the research already done and by initiating new studies. Through our comparative framework, we also sought to enhance critical analysis of the cultural collisions and conceptual confusions that have informed the reception of these arts. Many of the contributors to this volume have built on the research presented here in three subsequent symposia focused on particular themes — ​­Modernists and Mentors: Indigenous and Colonial Artistic Exchanges, in Cambridge, England, in 2013; Indigenous Modernisms: Histories of the Contemporary, in Wellington, New Zealand, in 2014; and Gendered Making / Unmanned Modernisms: Gender and Genre in Indigenous and Colonial Modernisms, in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa, in 2016. This first of several planned publications is designed to introduce the scope and richness of the project while instantiating its potential to amplify the breadth of a discipline striving to reinvent itself on global terms. Without the generosity of several funding agencies, the conferences described above — ​­and this book — ​­could not have come into being. At the Clark Art Institute, scholars Michael Holly, Mark Ledbury, Natasha Becker, Aruna P reface 

xvii 

D’Souza, and the Clark’s wonderful staff made our initial meeting not only intellectually stimulating but also hugely pleasurable. Funding for the Ottawa conference was provided by the 2010 Premier’s Discovery Award in the Humanities made to Phillips by the province of Ontario; further generous support was provided by the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Carleton University, and the University of Toronto. The able organizing team was headed by Kate Higginson and assisted by Crystal Migwans, Annette De Stecher, Stacy Ernst, Alexandra Nahwegahbow, Miriam Aronowicz, and Akshaya Tankha. Profound thanks go to Nicholas Thomas, who from the beginning has shared with Phillips the overall intellectual direction of the Multiple Modernisms project and who procured grant funding from the Leverhulme Trust to support the second, third, and fourth conferences. Chika Okeke-­Agulu and the Program in African Studies at Princeton University made possible an additional workshop in December 2015. We are very grateful for the invaluable help of our research assistant Lisa Truong, who communicated with the authors and assembled the manuscript with such efficiency, tact, and skill. Thanks also go to the Equity and Diversity Fund, the Dean’s Contingency Fund, and the Vice Principal of Research Impact Fund at the University of Toronto Scarborough and to Dean John Osborne at Carleton for generous subsidies in support of publishing costs. We warmly thank Ken Wissoker for his encouragement and support of the project from its inception as well as the three anonymous reviewers for Duke University Press, whose rigorous feedback helped us to refine our introductory framing and sharpen the individual case studies. Jade Brooks and Olivia Polk have ably guided the book along its path to publication. We offer our sincerest gratitude to our contributors for the penetrating insights at that initial workshop and those that followed each of our conferences. They patiently and positively responded to several rounds of editorial comments, and their input has continued to sharpen the focus of the project. Of course, we could not have pursued the research, travel, and writing required for this work without the loving support of our families. As always, we owe you a great thanks. Finally, the transcontinental friendships and collegiality, generated by our meetings, is one of this project’s most precious legacies. Note 1. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 12.

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PREFACE

ELIZABETH HARNEY AND RUTH B. PHILLIPS INTRODUCTION 

INSIDE MODERNITY

Indigeneity, Coloniality, Modernisms

This book addresses the silence surrounding indigeneity in established narratives of modernism and the continuing marginalization of Indigenous arts in the growing literature on global modernist histories. It brings together studies that assess the linkages between wide-­ranging imperial histories and the variegated processes that have linked local visual and material forms with emerging modernist subjectivities. As such, it aims to augment important scholarly efforts to decenter art history’s Eurocentric accounting of twentieth-­century artistic modernisms and to expose persistent ghettoizing attitudes within the art world toward those formerly regarded as “primitive” artists.1 The essays assembled here intervene in two important and interrelated revisionist projects: first, the search for new theories and methods to address world art history, and second, the active retheorization of modernism and modernity and their historical relationship to contemporary art practices.2 The authors propose different understandings of the relationship between the modern and the contemporary than, for example, Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg do when theorizing the “new world map of art” in their introduction to The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds after 1989: Today’s contemporary art presents itself not only as new art but as a new kind of art, an art that is expanding all over the globe. . . . One element of its newness is that it is no longer synonymous with modern art. Rather it sees itself as contemporary: not only in a chronological sense, but also in a symbolic and even ideological sense. In many developing countries, art can only be contemporary because locally it has no

modern history. Thus the twenty-­first century is seeing the worldwide emergence of an art that lays claim to contemporaneity without limits and without history.3 Belting and Buddensieg are not alone in their desire to distinguish the contours of global contemporary art from the entangled hegemonic histories of modernity. Rather, their observations are part of a rapid rise of interest in and embrace of these new coordinates for an art of the present. To cite another influential example, in the 2009 Tate Modern Triennial, curator Nicolas Bourriaud asked us to think through what he termed the “altermodern,” the global art practices of our “heterochronical” era in which “the historical counters . . . [could] be reset to zero.” 4 In the time of the altermodern, he argued, “works of art trace lines in a globalised space that now extends to time: history, the last continent to be explored, can be traversed like a territory.” These analyses are heavily invested in revising how we write art histories. They reconfigure established understandings of the role that art and artists can and should play within contemporary society. Focusing on questions of historicity from a position of the now, presumed to be unencumbered by the burden of history, they seek to reposition and retell the temporal and spatial narratives of modernity and modernism at large.5 While modernity is increasingly understood today as a global phenomenon, the canon of art history, as a product of Enlightenment epistemology, has operated as “self-­evidently universal,” silencing the histories of the non-­West.6 The contention that art (anywhere) “can only be contemporary because locally it has no modern history” is, to our thinking, deeply problematic and profoundly out of step with revisionist agendas that now seek polyphonic voices to reconceptualize the narratives of modernity and artistic modernism. Scholars pursuing workable paradigms for the comparative, cross-­cultural study of art aim to do so without recourse to outmoded and potentially neocolonial paradigms. They question art history’s provincialism and seek to broaden its scope.7 We build on these approaches, training the reader’s eye on lesser-­ known modernist practices. The project of world art history is loosely defined, diverse, and emergent. We position our work as one possible engagement with the many potentialities of art history as a “global discipline.” While a certain bursting of the canon is at work in all chapters, we do not believe there can be a singular response to the challenges of comparative art historical work. Rather, our central concern is the troubling inconsistency embedded in the renewed search for a global 2 

E lizabeth H arney and R uth B . P hillips

art historical scope. With very few exceptions, world art history has not yet fully considered the modernisms created by peoples historically defined as “indigenous” or “native” by colonial regimes.8 In contrast to projects that seek to mount an inclusive and revisionist “story of art” by insisting on a single response to the challenge of comparative work (such as John Onians’s “neuro-­ art history”), this book contributes a diverse and cosmopolitan set of histories of modernist experience and art practices that have been systematically overlooked.9 We are not interested in producing a global art history that simply replaces one normative story with another. Rather, we write in opposition both to an established canon and to the universalizing tendencies that are resurfacing in world art studies. As the essays herein show, the lack of integration of modern indigenous art histories into larger narratives is owed not to a dearth of research but to its limited circulation within national and settler art historical communities as they come to terms with their colonial pasts. In other words, although Australians and New Zealanders come to know Aboriginal and Māori arts through dedicated wings in their national museums, and Canadians, Americans, and South Africans have regular opportunities to view Inuit, Pueblo, or Zulu modernisms, these arts have yet to find their rightful place within broader art historical narratives.10 In contrast to other recent volumes that foster the comparison of urban, national, or regional histories of modernism, the contributors to this book work through the thorny legacies of modernist primitivism in areas historically grouped together as the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas — ​­or aoa, in the shorthand of several generations of students and museum professionals.11 The comparative framework we introduce reveals the pervasiveness of primitivism and its charged legacies. In case studies, the authors address the contemporary valences of indigeneity in the emergent discourse of multiple modernisms and ask how artists living under varying structures of colonial rule often engaged with primitivism through creative practice and philosophical debate. The modern period covered in our volume stretches roughly from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Cold War, coinciding with the spread of colonialism, the rise of industrialization and urbanization, and the flourishing of vanguardist activities — ​­developments that define the era that modernity, modernism, and primitivism cohabit. Throughout this modern era, and despite the constraints imposed by imperialist structures, artists, artworks, and art patrons moved within and across borders, carrying, appropriating, and I ntroduction 

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translating objects, images, and ideas. Their itineraries made up the dense networks of modern life and contributed not only to the shaping of local, transnationally inflected modernisms, but also to the making of modern subjectivities. Against this backdrop of movement, we emphasize the important connections to place and claims to territory (and anteriority) that have dictated how modernisms developed and intervened effectively in differing colonial and postcolonial frameworks. Art world denials of long-­standing modern practices in places outside the West, of cosmopolitanism within the West, and of the many movements within and between them have relied on a deliberate misunderstanding of the inherent spatial and temporal politics of the modern world. In this context, the book also examines the journeys through time inevitably required of artists who made visual claims to the modern while living under colonial rule. The chapters encourage readings of modernity not as a phenomenon of diffusionism but as one that arose through encounter and exchange.12 Artists remapped existing practices, rejecting, reinvigorating, and reimagining inherited forms to meet the needs of the present and the future. This rereading of modernist histories is particularly important in an era in which the failed promises of decolonization and the rapid spread of neoliberalism have laid bare the unevenness of globalization. The modernist experiences and accompanying artistic forms we emphasize here are entangled, mutually constitutive, and culturally situated. The contributing authors are all committed to what Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel have called a “locational” approach — ​­one informed by a “self-­consciousness about positionality.” 13 Some authors speak from positions of indigeneity; all grapple with the ongoing legacies of colonialism. We strive to engage purposively and sensitively with differing forms of decolonial thinking and writing, in response to prevalent hegemonic forces of neoliberalism.14 Although geographically dispersed, these local art histories are transnationally linked by the artists’ exposure and contributions to modernist discourses and exemplars. They demonstrate entrepreneurial engagements with commodity culture and art markets, the invention of new genres and formats, and translations of primitivism and existing visual traditions. These histories are also connected by the artists’ shared need to combat the racialized, romanticized, and exoticized stereotypes that have defined the authenticity of African, Oceanic, and Native American arts, and to counter allegations of their incompatibility with modernity.

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To position these studies individually and as a linked set, we need to unpack three interrelated and contested constructs: primitivism, understood both as a key generator of value and authenticity and — ​­even within the constraints of colonial systems — ​­an available vehicle for the articulation of usable or reclaimed “pasts”; indigeneity, defined as a colonial and contemporary category of identity that is historically contingent and encompasses larger questions of emplacement and belonging; and mobility, mappable as a shared experience of modern life that made possible the cartographies of modernism and produced key artistic and critical networks of exchange. Each construct, forged over hundreds of years of imperial encounters, is overdetermined, and each, as a building block of modern consciousness, carries a heavy freight of historical signification and deconstruction. Yet for that very reason, each needs to be examined and reassessed as a necessary parameter for investigating the multiple modernisms that make up this book. For clarity and effect, we have organized the case studies loosely around these sites of negotiation, but with full awareness that modernist histories operated in complex, complementary, and contradictory manners. Each study could be viewed through any and all of the lenses we provide.

Modernity, Modernization, Modernism We use the term “modernity” to identify a shared set of economic, social, and political conditions that characterized the lives of peoples around the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — ​­one whose mechanisms continue to reverberate in our present moment.15 Modernization refers to the processes, systems, and ideologies that beget modernity, such as new divisions of labor through industrialization, urbanization, capitalism, nationalism, and the redefinition of the public sphere. The development of print culture and increased speeds of communication and transportation enabled the rapid dissemination of these modernizing forces. As we argue in the following pages, the time, space, and pace of modernity have varied widely, and the forces of modernization have produced different effects in varying economic, cultural, and political circumstances. Modernism is, of course, a notoriously slippery and contingent term. It describes a range of cultural inventions through which people express their experiences of living in modernity. But for many years it has operated in the art world as an exclusionary discourse and canon. Most major museums and art historical publications continue to define

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modernism in European terms, while acknowledging exceptions and additions to a primary model. Take, for example, a standard definition provided today by the Tate Modern: Although many different styles are encompassed by the term, there are certain underlying principles that define modernist art: A rejection of history and conservative values (such as realistic depiction of subjects); innovation and experimentation with form (the shapes, colours and lines that make up the work) with a tendency to abstraction; and an emphasis on materials, techniques and processes. Modernism has also been driven by various social and political agendas. These were often utopian, and modernism was in general associated with ideal visions of human life and society and a belief in progress.16 While this list certainly addresses some concerns of the modernist artists featured in our volume, it lacks the nuance required to address the diversity of experience and artistic engagement evident within our comparative framework. As we argue below, artists operating within empire often sought to reengage with “traditions” that had been distorted, disfigured, or destroyed by the colonial project; to be modern might mean a return to or a continuation of realist/naturalist modes of expression, rather than a turn toward abstraction.17 Furthermore, the imbrication of local and global ideas often meant artists had to confront notions of “progress” and “utopia” tied to systems that did not accord with their goals and aspirations as colonized peoples. As “unfinished business,” the specter of modernity lingers in its global inflections and remains in play with “practices that cannot be considered modern at all.” 18 Writing for the Grove Dictionary of Art in the late 1990s, Terry Smith defined modernity as a “term applied to the cultural condition in which the seemingly absolute necessity of innovation becomes a primary fact of life, work and thought” and identifies it as “the first truly ‘world’ culture, universalizing in its ambitions and impact.” 19 Smith’s classic understanding positions modernity and its “world culture” in terms of changes occurring in Europe that radiated outward. His more recent work, along with that of other scholars, attends more closely to the non-­West and to the questions of appropriation, translation, and transnational exchanges of ideas, images, and material culture addressed in the chapters of this book. Modernity and modernism were always already syncretic in practice, while in discourse they have remained normatively Eurocentric until quite recently. Difference, in other words, was always “inside” modernity, as is evident in a mounting body of compelling 6 

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arguments to this effect. Nonetheless the arts produced in modernist styles, materials, and genres during the twentieth century by formerly colonized and indigenous artists have continued to be regarded as belated and provincial copies — ​­even as those of their contemporary descendants are welcomed as examples of global chic. In “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World,” Andreas Huyssen reminds us that modernist geographies “are also shaped by their temporal inscriptions.” 20 Thus, the logics of modernity required a particular politics of time and space. In different places, at different times, the past has informed the present or has been purposely reinvented to create a better future; this past is often marked by colonial oppression and real or perceived losses of cultural traditions and freedoms. Huyssen takes his lead from scholars such as George Kubler, Johannes Fabian, and Timothy Mitchell, who revolutionized how we think about the politics of temporality.21 For example, Fabian’s now widely cited discussion of “allochronism,” which explained how European thinkers were able to deny the coevalness of non-­Western populations, proved invaluable for unmasking the ideologies of difference at the heart of European modernism and for readying our approaches to modernity’s global faces.22 Like many others who began their investigations in the heady days of postmodernist debate, Huyssen has become increasingly concerned with the speed and density of temporality as it was imagined and experienced across varied terrains. Scholars of multiple modernisms have critiqued the denigration of works by artists outside the West as myopic and monocultural. Yet questions of time lag, speed, and the differentiated experiences of modernity continue to haunt us. As Smith rightly notes, “This perspective leaves curators and art historians with the job of playing ‘catch-­up modernism,’ their task confined to showing how these artists were really modernists, albeit in their own specific and located way. The goal becomes to write each artist into a universal narrative of the shared evolution of modernism, the outline of which has been set by developments in EuroAmerica. This is to fall for a fiction, to perpetuate the master-­slave relationship, and, strategically, to play a losing game.” 23 Many scholars now argue that the “temporal inscriptions” of modernist geographies are best understood through models of heterochronicity.24 Social theorist Reinhart Kosselleck, for example, asserts that different cultural understandings of temporality coexisted in the same chronological time, characterizing modernity as “the non-­contemporaneousness of diverse, but in the chronological sense, simultaneous histories.” 25 George Kubler’s well-­known meditation on “the shape of time” draws our attention to “different kinds of I ntroduction 

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duration” and what he calls “interchronic pauses,” whereby the passages of time and the perceptions of its markings fluctuate and shift. Following Kubler, we consider how the anticolonialist activities, philosophical debates, and artistic creations emerging from indigenous artists in the relatively short period of the “modern” might be calibrated to “speeds” at odds with European expectations and reigning narratives of modernization and developmentalism.26 Art historian Leon Wainwright has recently posited such an explanation when discussing the working methods and artistic choices of pioneering Caribbean modernists. In his provocative volume Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean, Wainwright joined the “world art” debate by asking how the politics of time and space could be “reengaged to rethink the global geography of art.” 27 With his consideration of the deliberate adoption of anachronistic forms by Caribbean painters, he aims to dislodge art history’s “continuing attachment” to models of modernity that emphasize (even within the global turn) what he calls the “over here” and “back there” scenario. What stakes were at play as colonized artists adopted, translated, or misread modernist forms? The complex histories of interaction, epistemic violence, and silencing of indigenous voices often hold within them creative practices of deliberate mistranslation and appropriation that produce what Esther Garbara has called “errant modernisms.” 28 In the context of creolized Caribbean modernities, for example, Edouard Glissant writes of a “forced poetics” initiated by displaced or enslaved populations living in the belly of modernist capitalism. The enslaved, fated to exist “outside the grammar forced upon them,” or faced with limited vocabulary or tools, “chose to warp it, untune it, in order to make the idiom [their] own.” 29

The case studies in this book evidence a wide variety of responses to and engagements with the ideas of difference, authenticity, primordialism, and spontaneity inscribed by primitivist discourses. They range from the antiprimitivist lobbying of Nigerian painter Aina Onabolu to the reimagined abstract Indigenous materiality of George Morrison. In different ways, these two modernists reclaimed and reworked visual forms, materials, or techniques from their cultural pasts, synthesizing what Chika Okeke-­Agulu calls “artistic assets,” to arrive at viable visual languages suited to anticolonialist and self-­ affirming politics.30 These discrepant expressions of modernity might adopt forms from colonial modern culture, but they were anything but blind deriva-

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tion or mimicry. Rather, they exposed “the ambivalence of colonial discourse” and disrupted its authority.31

(Re)mapping “Modernist Attitudes” As a quintessential product of modernity, art history has depended on tropes of mapping since its inception, fixing boundaries of space and time that continue to control the canon. As Robert Nelson writes, art history as a discipline “has been accorded the ability and power to control and judge its borders, to admit or reject people and objects, and to teach and thus transmit values to others.” 32 The processes of mapping, therefore, lead us into contentious historical terrain. Maps, as the critical literature shows, are heavily loaded documents. Since the Renaissance, cartographic imaging has invented modern spaces, turning abstractions into imperialist representations that could be wielded as a means to know, contain, and control place.33 This process has been particularly coercive in relation to indigenous peoples, as David Turnbull asserts: “The real distinguishing characteristic of Western maps is that they are more powerful than aboriginal maps, because they enable forms of association that make possible the building of empires, disciplines like cartography, and a concept of land ownership that can be subject to juridical processes.” 34 We revisit and reckon with the spatial politics of modernist scholarship by employing mapping in both a historical and a metaphorical sense, addressing the violence of imperialism and the hegemonic models informing narratives of modernism as well as the territories of the imagination. Decolonizing critiques employ mapping — ​­or remapping — ​­to acknowledge the centrality of place in the crafting of modernist Indigenous subjectivities. Such maps can complicate accepted and expected axes of colonial-­modern movement between center and periphery by allowing us to recognize complex local, regional, and global sources of artistic production and consumption, networks of travel, and polycentric nodes of modernist creation. Huyssen has pointed to the value of the comparative framework for transnational studies, arguing, “We lack a workable model of comparative studies able to go beyond the traditional approaches that still take national cultures as the units to be compared and rarely pay attention to the uneven flows of translation, transmission, and appropriation.” 35 To be analytically rigorous, however, comparative approaches require a controlled set of variables. We

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have thus limited our scope to modernist arts that arose in the interrelated and networked colonial spheres of Britain, France, and the United States. This decision recognizes the power of shared languages, which facilitated access to texts, images, and ideas, as well as the structural unities created by the systemic imposition of policies and institutions, which allowed colonial regimes to replicate particular strategies or to differentiate themselves from one another. Canada, for example, consciously imitated the system of Indian boarding schools first set up in the United States but chose not to copy the art programs set up on Indian reservations by the U.S. government’s Works Progress Administration during the 1930s. Colonial subjects living in French colonies in Africa and the Pacific might read the same journals or be given art classes by teachers trained in the same French educational system. And art academies in several African colonies produced students with joint degrees from the Slade School of Art in London. The comparative approach of this volume is aligned with a small but significant array of recent projects that seek to document what Kobena Mercer calls “modernist attitudes” and to overcome the “limitations of our available knowledge about modernism’s cross-­cultural past.” 36 His pioneering four-­volume Annotating Art’s Histories series is an important model for this book. We take up his invitation to pursue “avenues and departure points for future enquiry,” investigating a wide range of hitherto unlogged art histories, without inadvertently reifying the center.37 In a similar vein, the editors of Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity promote an understanding of modernism as “a global, complex, multidirectional, and divergent set of projects . . . [launched] from different locations at different times under unequal conditions.” 38 Living under colonial and neocolonial regimes, and identified by their colonizers as “native” or “indigenous,” the artists discussed here confronted similar obstacles in their efforts to become modern professionals. In some cases, their lives spanned the era of political independence, while other artists remain internally colonized.39 While some felt the coercive nature of modernity, for others, modernism held emancipatory possibilities, its affiliations suggesting and critiquing imagined or utopian futures.

Modern Values: Artistic Hierarchies and Modernist Primitivisms The “discovery” of so-­called primitive art by early twentieth-­century avant-­ garde artists is recounted as a central event in the origin story of modern Western art. It is framed as a recuperative project accomplished through the 10 

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encounters of modernist artists, writers, and collectors with objects they found in dusty ethnographic museums, flea markets, and shops selling exotic curiosities. They understood them as products of the “simpler” preindustrial and premodern lives of their makers.40 Roger Fry’s art criticism is representative. In two essays written in 1920, he celebrated the presence of “primitive art in civilized places,” while dismissing “civilized art in primitive places,” to play on Sally Price’s phrase.41 He celebrated European modern artists’ abandonment of a naturalistic representational ideal which had enabled them to profit from the models provided by non-­Western arts. “We are thus no longer cut off from a great deal of barbaric and primitive art,” he wrote, “the very meaning of which escaped the understanding of those who demanded a certain standard of skill in representation before they could give serious consideration to a work of art.” 42 In his essay “Negro Sculpture,” however, he argued that the social and intellectual backwardness of primitive societies prevented modern African artists from participating in that same modernism: “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. . . . [T]he lack of such a critical standard to support him leaves the artist much more at the mercy of any outside influence. It is likely enough that the negro artist, although capable of such profound imaginative understanding of form, would accept our cheapest illusionist art with humble enthusiasm.” 43 For critics like Fry, the modern arts created by descendants of the artists who had produced the masks and figures so admired by Western modernists could not easily be contained within the “primitive” art category. Under the logics of European modernism, “primitive” art forms belonged to isolated, premodern societies whose artists (and cultures) were mere “survivals” of earlier evolutionary moments, slated either to disappear under the weight of modernity or suffer fatal contamination through their exposure to its progressive forces.44 As Simon Gikandi notes, “Fry had endowed Africans with artistic genius but denied them the capacity to make critical judgments . . . thus acknowledging their importance to the creation of modernism but crucially without according them the civilizational authority of the modern.” 45 Many influential critics who shared Fry’s formalist appreciation of “primitive” art also shared his conviction of the definitional impossibility of non-­Western modernisms, which could only be generated, as in the West, through the artists’ cosmopolitanism, criticality, and intellectual reflexivity. The case studies in part 1 of this book illustrate the measures of value imposed by modernist primitivism and the belief in a Kantian hierarchy of fine I ntroduction 

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and applied arts used to classify the works of many indigenous artists. Colonial educational systems designed to bring “natives” up to the level of “civilized” European colonizers attempted to either suppress extant indigenous arts or contain them within the less evolved categories of craft and folk arts.46 The Zulu and Inuit case studies presented by Sandra Klopper and Heather Igloliorte nicely illustrate the dichotomous pairings of primitivism/modernity and craft/art at work. Zulu carver Zizwezenyanga Qwabe created innovative versions of the traditional mat rack that replaced geometric relief carving with a new mode of pictorial representation. He successfully exploited the modernization process at large in South Africa by making use of the new art markets created by the spread of modernist capital, the rise of migrant labor networks, and the patronage of American journalist Rebecca Reyher. Troubled by the modern sensibility of Qwabe’s works, seen in both their adoption of Western pictorial formats to inscribe historical memory and their commercial and innovative character, historians have not classified the art as authentic primitive art. Their functional origin as domestic furnishings and their wood-­carving medium have also prevented their recognition as modern fine art. Instead they enter the equally ill-­defined categories of folk art and craft. Igloliorte’s research on the development of modern Inuit commercial art production in the Canadian Arctic three decades later reveals a parallel negotiation of value and authenticity. She shows how the small illustrated booklet the government commissioned of artist James Houston, designed to inform artists about the kinds of objects that would appeal to southern buyers, became the unintended catalyst for a critical distinction between Inuit fine art and craft. Her case study shows that a clear demarcation between art and craft productions was necessary to position soapstone carvings as art, even though the artists’ own concepts of visual artistic expression did not make the same distinctions. In the process, Igloliorte also illuminates the roles played by mentors in framing these arts. Bill Anthes’s account of the shared modernity of Native American painters and basket makers in California and the Southwest suggests more capacious ways of articulating the linkages between indigenous identities, extant and shifting traditional practices, and persistent colonial frameworks of pedagogy and interpretation. His discussion of the innovative pictorial imagery woven into souvenir baskets by Native women in the desert communities outside early twentieth-­century Los Angeles opens for us alternative histories of training, reflections on the mastery of materials, varied responses to rapid modernization, and clear instances of market savvy. Anthes moves our discussions of 12 

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indigenous modernism far beyond those that have focused on “naïve” paintings and “vanishing” traditions. He argues persuasively for recognizing that a “fine art” genre, like painting, and a “craft” genre, like basketry, can convey experiences of modernity with equivalent authenticity and expressive power. These three chapters thus broaden the range of genres and media in discussions of the modern, positioning all as components of modernist indigenous cultural production. Crucially, they refocus our attention on the agency of Indigenous artists as cocreators of their own modernity, despite the conscripted nature of their involvement.47 In the early twenty-­first century, a visitor seeking examples of modernist indigenous arts in a large urban art museum is still likely to find them incorporated into a Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Although this grouping takes the form of a geopolitical list, its conflation of a set of spatially distant and historically unconnected artistic traditions has a well-­known genealogy in nineteenth-­century theories of cultural evolution and the early twentieth-­century modernist discourse of primitive art. While discredited for years by anthropologists and art historians alike, and rife with anomalies, the “primitive” art construct remains a familiar convention of museum displays, art books, and art history curricula. This construct groups art forms produced in small-­scale societies with those of large centralized kingdoms built on trade, mobile labor, and a cosmopolitan ethos. It brings into a unified representational space art made by the inhabitants of former tracts of empire now politically independent, and art by members of internally colonized communities who continue to suffer displacement and disenfranchisement. It also invokes the undifferentiated, often ambiguous, and problematic set of temporal coordinates we discussed earlier, mixing the ancient with the colonial and situating these productions outside, before, or beyond history. The stubborn survival of the aoa grouping, after decades of comprehensive critique, is of central significance for this book. We argue that this classificatory convention, however named, continues to obstruct recognition of the artistic modernisms produced by the peoples whose ancestral arts have been defined as “primitive” art. In other words, if the modern is, by definition, diametrically opposed to the primitive, and if modernist primitivism is integral to modern art’s “essential nature,” as Robert Goldwater wrote in the conclusion of Primitivism and Modern Art, the museological ghettoization of indigenous artistic modernisms from Africa, the Pacific, and North America and their exclusion from narratives of art history continue to inscribe an outdated and false dialectic.48 I ntroduction 

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The deconstruction of modernist primitivism was a central project of 1980s poststructuralist scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, accomplished through the work of James Clifford, Sally Price, Shelly Errington, Hal Foster, and others.49 Their analyses — ​­many provoked by the controversial 1984 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Primitivism and Twentieth-­Century Art: Affinities of the Tribal and the Modern and the 1989 Centre Pompidou’s Magiciens de la Terre — ​­compellingly demonstrated how the hierarchies advanced by discredited nineteenth-­century theories of cultural evolution pervaded late twentieth-­century museum displays, popular media, literature, and critical texts. Widely read and profoundly influential, this body of critical writing has circulated alongside and intersected with processes of political decolonization and economic and cultural globalization. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that once a classificatory term has been effectively deconstructed, its discursive power has been neutralized; and for many, these critiques have settled the issue of modernist primitivism. Indeed, the disappearance of the term “primitive art” from the titles of books, university courses, and curatorial departments during the past two decades has seemed to indicate the critiques’ effectiveness. As we have seen, however, the new rubrics, even if less ideologically laden, have left largely untouched the museological conventions and associated progressivist narrative of human development that have excluded indigenous modern arts. The radically formalist installations of African, Pacific Islands, and Native American arts in the Louvre’s Pavillon des Sessions and in the Musée du quai Branly’s dark and dramatically exoticist permanent exhibits — ​­both opened at the turn of the new millennium — ​­illustrate the profound failure of attempts to defeat primitivist framings.50 What accounts for the strength of these latter-­ day renewals of exhibitionary tropes? As Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush have argued, primitivism was invented prophylactically, as a “prehistory of the future,” which could counteract the negative consequences and supply the losses of urban and industrial dystopias.51 Primitivism, in other words, has continued to draw its strength from the awareness of modernity’s self-­destructive dynamics. Chapters by W. Jackson Rushing III, Ian McLean, and Elizabeth Harney demonstrate how the deeply entrenched nature of these attitudes was evident in the reception of indigenous modernisms during the mid-­twentieth century. The artists they discuss could be admitted to modernist art worlds only as exceptions. Damian Skinner and Karen Duffek present very different accounts of how local modernists rejected primitivist readings of their works and intervened in 14 

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display spaces to insert modernist works into contexts previously reserved for craft and traditional arts. By tracking exhibitions of Māori modernism in New Zealand, Skinner shows us how modernists negotiated a critical distance and difference from the past, as well as an ongoing relationship with it. During the fifties and sixties, Māori modernists showed their works in white cube galleries, department stores, and local meeting houses. Each exhibition mediated quickly shifting modernist Indigenous subjectivities within a young settler nation and questioned art world hierarchies. Duffek provides us with a comparative analysis of Bill Reid and Henry Speck, two pioneering Northwest Coast artists from British Columbia, Canada, arguing that their diverging career paths and aesthetic engagements with tradition tell much about the circuitous and often contradictory routes toward modernist status and self-­awareness. Critically, Duffek asks her readers to consider on whose terms and for what purposes the work of these artists was recognized — ​­or not — ​­as modern or even of their present, rather than as belonging to a vanishing (primitive) past?

Modern Identities: Indigeneity Historicized Unpacking indigeneity, like parsing primitivism, is a necessary step in revising art history’s narrative. In contrast to categorization as primitive, the term “indigenous” references neither levels of social and political organization nor particular kinds of art forms. Like primitivism, however, indigeneity is generated dialogically; in Mahmood Mandani’s words, “There can be no settler without a native, and vice versa.” 52 The artists we discuss were disadvantaged by their positioning as indigenous within historical colonial contexts of production and modernist institutional framings. Today, however, indigeneity’s references have shifted. Peter Geschiere points out that as globalization and the accompanying forces of neoliberalization increase, the importance of belonging to the local strengthens, engaging new understandings and uses of autochthony that differ from parallel debates around authenticity and nativism in earlier periods of modernity.53 To refer today to the inhabitants of modern African nations, or to those of Papua New Guinea or Samoa, as “indigenous” is redundant, misguided, or inaccurate. In contrast, internally colonized peoples within the settler nations of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere have reappropriated “Indigenous” (often capitalized) as a preferred denominator of identity.54 For these communities, as Steven Leuthold comments, “indigeneity reflects a growing awareness of the role of ethnicity in national cultures and acts as an organizational focal point for I ntroduction 

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anticolonialism.” 55 For the same reason, nationalism, as an aspect of modernity, has different valences for colonized peoples who have achieved their own political independence and nationhood than it does for people who remain internally colonized. Discourses of indigeneity, however, continue to be informed by a tension between an essentializing tendency, which attaches pure and unchanged qualities to indigenous status, and diasporic, mestizo, and cosmopolitan historical realities. Against the analytical advantage of this strategy, then, we must weigh a potential danger. When we deploy indigeneity as a subcategory of modernism we risk reinscribing the very phenomenon we seek to examine critically. We use indigeneity, then, as a troubling term, conscious of its historically contingent connotations and dialectical applications over time. We deploy the term “indigenous” to represent a historically operative category that artists had to navigate and actively shape. At the same time, however, we recognize the dialogical and relational evolution of the term’s referentiality and reject reified or essentialist meanings. We understand indigeneity, in other words, as a processual category that acknowledges its own historical instability and as a designation whose application during the colonial era relegated a set of globally dispersed modernisms to the margins of art history. Writers on indigeneity stress the historical origin of the term as a denominator of identity in early modern processes of European exploration, conquest, and colonization. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn argue that the category was invented to articulate an “imperial epistemology of sameness,” which “names a relationship based on a conception of time and space that differentiates among groups of people.” 56 European travelers to lands new to them distinguished the peoples they encountered by naming them ­indigenes — ​­a word derived from a late Latin term for “born in the country.” 57 In the Americas, such layered engagements with indigeneity can become highly complex. For instance, as modernist theorists and novelists writing from the Caribbean attest, the sense of displacement brought about by the Middle Passage is best understood when further complicated by knowledge of the widespread decimation and disavowal of indigenous populations that haunted new world slave economies; in the historical nexus of the black Atlantic, then, measures of belonging and claims to place remain both contingent and ultimately unresolvable.58 James Clifford has delineated contemporary connotations of the construct of indigeneity after centuries of colonial and settler occupation. Indigenous peoples, he writes, “are defined by long attachment to a locale and by violent 16 

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histories of occupation, expropriation, and marginalization.” 59 Mary Louise Pratt’s definition adds a quality of “unpayable debt,” which pertains specifically to settlers.60 Although we tend today to understand indebtedness in the context of land claims and other forms of restitution, indebtedness also informs the histories of modern art making. In modernism, the artist’s need to establish and legitimate lineages of origin can become a drive toward appropriation and universalism. The canonical example of Picasso’s quotations from preclassical Iberian art and African sculpture is repeated in the settler modernist’s citations of local indigenous arts, as exemplified by Australia’s Margaret Preston, Canada’s Emily Carr, and America’s Georgia O’Keeffe.61 Although positioned as gestures of homage, such works stake the settler’s competing and questionable claims to indigeneity. As many have noted, although the mainstream art world has admitted and celebrated the hybrid appropriations of European settler modernists, when African, Pacific Islander, or North American indigenous artists made similar borrowings from European art, their choices were not seen as analogous. For the first generations of indigenous modernists, these appropriations were potential sites of affirmation and resistance. Indeed, one of the aims of this collection is to ask how modern artists, working within and across a diverse set of colonial modern arenas, were able to make demands on the objects and representations at their disposal. Drawing from rediscovered, reactivated, or reimagined local aesthetic traditions, they translated and sometimes deliberately mistranslated, models of artistic practice that filtered through the discursive networks of imperialism, despite conditions of grossly unequal power. The chapters in part 2 explore these issues of indigeneity, identity, and transcultural exchange.62 In Nicholas Thomas’s examination of the modernist artistry of Papua New Guinean artist Mathias Kauage, he traces the artist’s move from the Highlands to the bustling colonial modern capital of Port ­Moresby. Once there, Kauage was able to mix with cosmopolitan communities of modernists at the university, gaining access to print workshops and ultimately becoming a rapporteur of a rapidly modernizing urban culture. For Kauage, artistic creation became a site for observing urban modernity and the rites and emblems of the new nation-­state. Occasionally, Kauage — ​­as “artist of PNG” — ​­proudly declared his affiliation with that nation. Yet he did so on his own terms, remaining committed to portraying modernity through what he understood as an established Chimbu aesthetic of self-­presentation and dress, mixing distinctive mythological beliefs and aesthetic predispositions with visions of local modern life. I ntroduction 

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Hybridity of style, nationalist appropriation, and cultural continuity all figure in Ian McLean’s chapter on Albert Namatjira, the Arrernte tribesman from a remote Lutheran mission in central Australia who became a central figure in a rising Aboriginal modern art movement. McLean describes the shifting relations between local Indigenous theologies, nationalism, and modern art practice and makes evident how Namatjira used the genre of Western landscape painting to express Aboriginal concepts of the deep histories and cultural values inscribed in land. In discussing the artist’s importance, McLean asks us to consider how Namatjira’s successes were soon heralded as those of a modern Australia, demonstrating how they established a “common ground between what hitherto had been the incommensurable differences of Indigenous and Western culture.” 63 Norman Vorano’s chapter recounts a different story of hybrid creativity — ​ ­one that simultaneously engaged with modernist aesthetics imported into the Canadian Arctic from Japan and Inuit traditions of belief and narrative. We again meet James Houston, who, motivated by a desire to introduce a new and economically remunerative artistic genre, brought Japanese prints to Inuit communities and taught local artists their printmaking techniques. In the subsequent half century, printmaking became a site for the expression of modern Inuit identities that drew on extant traditions and new forms of settlement life, technologies, and economic exchange. Imported pictorial conventions offered Inuit printmakers additional ways to tell their stories of modern experience. In postcolonial states, as in settler societies, the attribution of indigeneity has been wielded in diverse ways and at differing strategic moments to distinguish particular groups from their neighbors and to claim sovereignty, firstness, or a sense of belonging. The cultural histories of modern Africa, for example, can be described as syncretic, mobile, and cosmopolitan. They have been shaped by continuous migratory shifts in population, great and small, by transcontinental trading, slaving raids, intermarriage, and black Atlantic returns. And while histories of migration and settlement have led to the identification and self-­identification of some peoples as Indigenous, such as the San (Bushmen) of southern Africa and Namibia and the Mbenga (Pygmies) of central Africa, important stories of belonging and claims to tradition and nativeness have also characterized nationalist narratives in modern Africa. As Frantz Fanon and others have argued, decolonizing societies and their intellectuals required authentic traditions to attain legitimacy (even if they had to be invented), while their desire to attain the status of modern nation-­states required that they reject the past.64 Thus, African modernists found them18 

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selves in a double bind, always seeking to be both modern (and freed from the yoke of colonialism) and African (placed, distinctive, native). As imperial frameworks gave way to national ones, processes of decolonization gave birth to liberation politics, Indigenous pride movements, and interlinked Cold War narratives. Within these shifting parameters, visual artists often weighed the efficacy of looking backward to partly remembered, partly invented traditions against the value of forging new forms of participation in the shared spaces and times of modernity. The resulting works played pivotal roles in the art histories we tell. Chika Okeke-­Agulu’s chapter illustrates these dynamics through his discussion of three Nigerian artists whose works negotiated the modern, the indigenous (local), and the “primitive” (traditional) during the four decades leading up to Nigerian independence. In the same years that Roger Fry was writing his essays, Aina Onabolu traveled to study in England, where he acquired professional training enabling him to create accomplished illusionistic portraits. Okeke-­Agulu argues that these works should be regarded as reflexive and modern, for no task was more important for the modern artist than to seize and redeploy the unprecedented representational facility of portraiture in the academic style. They are no less modern than the work made several decades later by Uche Okeke and Demas Nwoko, artists who negotiated the avant-­gardist styles and primitivism of European modernists in the context of the politics of 1950s nationalism and postcoloniality. The work of all three artists helped forge identities that resisted the social and cultural inferiority coded by colonial constructs of indigeneity and discourses of primitivism while reclaiming local artistic traditions for modernism. Modern national identities are at play in all four chapters. Kauage and the Nigerian modernists used art making to express citizenship in newly independent nations. In contrast, Namatjira and the Inuit printmakers, as members of internally colonized peoples, found themselves in a more ambivalent position, gaining economic and expressive power through the production of modern art that was systematically appropriated to the cause of settler nationalism.

Modern Mobilities: The Networked Maps of Modernists The study of exchanges across space and the importance of mobility in stories of modernity allow us to ask how spatial practices are manifested within the aesthetic choices of artists. As we follow their itineraries and those of their interlocutors, we complicate the assumed workings of tradition, innovation, I ntroduction 

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and appropriation. We also, crucially, focus on how myriad mechanisms and institutions of imperialism turned specific spaces into places of oppression or resistance. The microhistories featured in this volume reveal that colonial powers in widely distanced locations from New Zealand to Canada to South Africa employed remarkably similar mechanisms of control and exclusion. Most important for our focus on Indigenous modernisms, aspiring artists, with few exceptions, were denied access to professional art schools. Yet despite such restrictions, they engaged with modernist tenets in many different ways. Artists traveled within their home countries and to the centers of empire, and for many, these travels resulted in new states of diasporic identity that were, inevitably, culturally syncretic. Although the number of artists able to travel was small, their influence on other artists as transmitters of new aesthetic ideas and solutions was often powerful. Many are today recognized as vital pioneering figures within their own communities. As many critics have argued, the recognition of difference within models of global modernity can be a strategy that ultimately leaves in place European centrality and primacy. By working with ideas of mobility through both physical and conceptual spaces, we can complicate the assumed cartographies, genealogies, and visual histories of modernity and shift what Walter Mignolo has called the “geopolitics of knowledge.” 65 We take our cues from the work of urban geographers and postcolonial theorists who enacted a “spatial turn” in the scholarship of the 1990s, urging us to imagine the work of modernity in terms of networks resembling the nodal structures of a rhizome and to envision a wider spread of centers that ebbed and flowed in power and significance according to local, national, regional, and global forces.66 Whether we invoke Edward Said’s discussions of the “voyages in” to Europe of exiles, intellectuals, and artists, or the work of James Clifford, Irit Rogoff, and Kobena Mercer on the significance of movement, exchange, travel, and spatiality in the crafting of modernist subjectivities, we are led to fundamental reconsiderations of how the histories of global engagements in modernity have been told.67 Arjun Appadurai’s writings on global flows of people, products, images, and ideas ushered in textured readings of the machinery of globalization and the linkages between location and identity in both earlier and more recent periods. This emphasis on movement also challenges the essentialized vision of indigeneity, as a state in which one is limited to localized sets of spaces — ​­reservations, boarding and residential schools, and real and imagined ties to ancestral lands. Clifford’s work on “traveling cultures” shows these habits of travel to be long standing.68 He questions the processes 20 

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by which traditions are essentialized, locating authenticity in a pure and immobile state of attachment to place, thereby denying actual historical patterns of indigenous mobility, diasporic relocation, and urbanization. Travel and mobility play a central role in the case studies included in part 3. W. Jackson Rushing’s study of the pioneering Anishinabe (Chippewa) modernist George Morrison argues that although the Native American painter developed his work in art metropolises like New York and Paris, his Lake Superior home came to deeply inform his modernity and his practice. Morrison’s career entailed more than three decades of expatriate training and work, taking him into the heart of vanguardist (particularly surrealist and abstract expressionist) activities. Yet, during the last decades of his life and in the context of the liberation movements of the 1970s, he returned to his ancestral homeland to investigate, through modernist painting, the roots of his identity in the land. Peter Brunt’s chapter contributes an evocative, poetic, and vivid microhistory. His account of the unique partnership of a French-­Russian migrant modernist, Nicolaï Michoutouchkine, and a Pacific Islander modernist, Aloï Pilioko, alerts us first to nomadism as a “mode of inhabiting modernity,” and then to the role of transitory exhibition and collection practices in the shaping of “island modernisms” in the South Pacific. During a life of perpetual travel, these two artists left a provocative series of diaries, notebooks, and sketches of life in transit, amassing a remarkable collection of ethnographic artifacts that they displayed alongside their own works. In the process, they contributed a critical intervention to the histories of primitivist discourse. Inspired by the tone and tenor of these archival traces of mobility, Brunt sketches for us a compelling tale of cross-­imperial travel and modernist imaginative worlds. In Elizabeth Harney’s study of the careers of painters Gerald Sekoto and Skunder Boghossian, who found their way from South Africa and Ethiopia to Paris in the immediate postwar period, she considers how each engaged and played with ideas of modernist primitivism. Sekoto’s social commentaries seemed to capture the lost dreams of a generation of black South Africans who saw their experiences of modernity increasingly shaped by apartheid. Boghossian’s canvases creatively reconciled elements of Ethiopian aesthetics and mysticism with discoveries of his pan-­Africanist subjectivity through a decidedly surrealist approach. Both operated under the weight of constrictive analytical categories; both joined in diasporic demands for decolonization; both endured the pleasures and melancholies of exile. Anitra Nettleton’s chapter peels back the assumptions made about moderI ntroduction 

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nity and modernism in relation to urban and rural spaces of twentieth-­century South Africa. Examining the works of two black artists, contemporaries Sidney Kumalo and Jackson Hlungwani, she shows how their very different paths through the armature of modernism in South Africa featured, respectively, travel and networking beyond the national frame and retreat to a rural homeland. The works of both artists were recognized as authentically African, but in different ways. The arguments surrounding their proclaimed connection to place and time echo the debates on invented identities, reclaimed heritage, and exilic living seen in Harney’s chapter on diasporic modernist painters who often found an Africa they sought within the framings of European primitivist mediations and within the storehouses of imperial museums. Artists and art patrons moved within and across the mapped borders of modern nationhood, challenging the attempts of colonialism to limit movement, and carrying objects, images, technologies, and ideas with them. Erin Haney’s chapter documents just such itineraries through an investigation of the photographic histories of the Lutterodt family of Accra. Their prolific careers depended on wide-­ranging networks extending from their Gold Coast base to Lagos, Fernando Po, Luanda, London, and Liverpool. These mobile, cosmopolitan photographers disseminated their works through innovative pop-­up studios, documentary projects for colonial authorities, and commissions that satisfied the needs of a growing local bourgeoisie eager to reflect its successes and identity. Along the way, they trained a generation of modernist photographers whose own careers continued to shape urban tastes and reflect modern subjectivities into the era of decolonization. The patterns of these movements need better recognition, for, as we have noted, most scholarship on multiple modernisms has positioned individual artists and movements or schools within local, national, or continental art historical narratives rather than broader transnational frameworks. In Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, for example, the editors acknowledge the vital place of “extraterritorial dynamics,” migrancy, and travel in the stories of modernism by stressing the centrality of cosmopolitan world cities as crucibles for artistic vanguardism. Nonetheless, they ultimately adhere to nationalist framings, arguing, “The national perspective dominates not only because it is the standard for art historiography, but also because, more substantively, the nation and nationalism held a central place in the political and cultural unconscious of most modern artists; and as a governing construct of modernity, the nation effectively determined the shape of modern identity, politics and official culture.” 69 22 

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In documenting Indigenous modern arts, all the contributors engage with the interrelated scholarly project of investigating modernity as a global historical condition. The current silences and erasures do not simply signal a failure to consider the transnational routes of modernity. Rather, they neglect to acknowledge the coproductions of modernity in all their varieties. As we have argued, the current omissions of indigenous modernisms are owed, in part, to the residual agency of aesthetic primitivism still deeply embedded within museums, the academy, and other art institutions. Yet, they also stem from the tendency of recent art criticism to telescope the historical phase of modernist production with the global politics of contemporary art. The compression of the time-­space coordinates of modernity and contemporaneity reinscribes primitivist modes of thinking by hiding from view the longue durée of indigenous peoples’ active participation in modernity. These approaches ultimately flatten out histories of exchange by invoking oversimplified binaries of local and global, or by minimizing the profound imbrications and refractions at work in all histories of modernity. Reading the case studies as a loosely aligned and provocative exchange of narratives about modernity and modernism allows us to question the mechanisms of power often occluded by pretensions of universality and to revisit debates about the politics of representation and enunciation, the nature of history writing, and the poetics of exhibiting and collecting. Critically, we focus on the heavy and often circuitous traffic of modernist forms, ideas, and artists across borders and cultures. These histories show that the artistic exchanges of the past have led not to the wholesale importation of concepts, forms, and techniques into hitherto closed cultural units, but to the emergence of myriad creative and generative misreadings, deliberate deformations, and counter-­ discursive reclamations that address the weight of colonial denigration, exoticization, and rupture.70 Notes 1. Shelly Errington, “What Became of Authentic Primitive Art?” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 2 (1994): 201–26. 2. See Partha Mitter, “Interventions — ​­Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-­Garde Art from the Periphery,” Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (2008): 531–48; the four-­ volume series Annotating Art’s Histories: Cross-­Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts, edited by Kobena Mercer: Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2005); Discrepant Abstractions (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2006); Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2008); and Pop Art and Vernacular I ntroduction 

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Culture (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2007). See also further development of this critique in Veronica Sekules, George Lau, and Margit Thøfner, eds., “Local Modernisms,” special issue, World Art 4, no. 1 (2014). 3. Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, introduction to The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds after 1989 (Karlsruhe, Germany: zkm Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, 2011), 6–7. 4. Nicolas Bourriaud, ed., Altermodern: Tate Triennial (London: Tate Publishing, 2009). 5. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 6. Mitter, “Interventions — ​­Decentering Modernism,” 532. 7. For considered analyses of what “world art” might be, see James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global?, vol. 3 of The Art Seminar (New York: Routledge, 2007); John Onians, “World Art: Ways Forward and a Way to Escape the ‘Autonomy of Culture’ Delusion,” World Art 1, no. 1 (2011): 125–34; David Carrier, A World Art History and Its Objects (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008); Whitney Davis, “World without Art,” Art History 33, no. 4 (2010): 711–16. 8. Three recent congresses of the Comité international d’histoire de l’art (ciha), which have included papers on Indigenous arts across time, are notable exceptions; see the program of the 2004 Montreal congress, “Sites and Territories of Art History,” accessed September 16, 2016, http://ciha2004.uqam.ca/ciha_htlm/v_anglaise/accueil .html; Jaynie Anderson, ed., Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, and Convergence (Carlton, Vic: Miegunyah Press, 2009), the proceedings of the 2008 Melbourne congress; and G. Ulrich Grossmann and Petra Krutisch, eds., The Challenge of the Object (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2013), the proceedings of the 2012 Nuremberg congress. 9. For other key texts on world art history, see Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme, eds., World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008); David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon Press, 2003); Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); John Onians, ed., Compression vs. Expression: Containing and Explaining the World’s Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 10. Kapur and Mitter on India; Enwezor, Harney, Okeke-­Agulu on parts of the African continent; and Mosquera, Garbara, and Guinta on sites in Latin America. These studies parallel those conducted on Indigenous modernities in settler societies in North America, Australia, and Oceania by Rushing, Phillips, Thomas, Anthes, Myers, Smith, Vorano, Skinner, and others. 11. Several other comparative studies have come out in recent years, most notably John Clark, “Is the Modernity of Chinese Art Comparable? An Opening of a Theoretical Space,” Journal of Art Historiography, no. 10 (June 2014): 1–27; Mercer, Cosmo24 

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politan Modernisms; Elaine O’Brien et al., eds., Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms (Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2013); Fuyubi Nakamura, Morgan Perkins, and Olivier Krischer, eds., Asia through Art and Anthropology: Cultural Translation across Borders (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 12. See Robert S. Nelson, “The Map of Art History,” Art Bulletin 79, no. 1 (March 1997): 28–40. 13. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, eds. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 3. 14. Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (2007): 449–514. 15. Terry Smith, “Modernity,” in Grove Art Online, Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press, January 1998, http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054 .article.T058788. 16. “Modernism,” Tate, accessed September 12, 2016, http://www.tate.org.uk/learn /online-­resources/glossary/m/modernism. 17. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1968), 169. 18. Bruce M. Knauft, ed., Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 3. Heather Igloliorte takes up these issues of antimodernity in her essay in this volume, “ ‘Hooked Forever on Primitive Peoples’: James Houston and the Transformation of ‘Eskimo Handicrafts’ to Inuit Art.” 19. Smith, “Modernity.” 20. Andreas Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World,” New German Critique 34, no. 1 (winter 2007): 190. 21. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962); Timothy Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 22. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 23. Terry Smith, “Rethinking Modernism and Modernity Now,” Filozofski vestnik 35, no. 2 (2014): 292. 24. Julian Johnson, “The Precarious Present,” in Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 86. 25. Reinhart Koselleck, “ ‘Spaces of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: Two Historical Categories,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1985), 267–88. This view mirrors Michel Foucault’s explanation of multiple spatialities — ​­what he called “heterotopias” — ​­a juxtaposition or gathering of incommensurable spaces of the postmodern. See Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (New York: Routledge, 1997), 330–36. 26. Kubler, Shape of Time, 17, 83; Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University, 1972). I ntroduction 

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27. Leon Wainwright, Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 13. 28. Esther Garbara, “Landscape: Errant Modernist Aesthetics in Brazil,” in O’Brien et al., Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 353–61. 29. Edouard Glissant, “Free and Forced Poetics,” in Ethno-­Poetics: A First International Symposium, ed. Michel Benamou and Jerome Rothenberg (Boston: Boston University Scholar Press, 1976), 95. 30. Chika Okeke-­Agulu, “Natural Synthesis: Art, Theory, and the Politics of Decolonization in Mid-­Twentieth-­Century Nigeria,” this volume. 31. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), 85–92. 32. Nelson, “Map of Art History,” 28. 33. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Thinking (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 34. David Turnbull, Maps Are Territories: Science Is an Atlas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 55. 35. Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism,” 194. 36. Mercer, Cosmopolitan Modernisms, 7; see also Mercer, Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers, 6–27. 37. Mercer, Cosmopolitan Modernisms, 9. 38. Doyle and Winkiel, Geomodernisms, 13. 39. These investigations complement those more specifically focused on questions of art and aboriginality by anthropologists like Howard Morphy and art historians such as Charlotte Townsend-­Gault. See Morphy, Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories (Oxford: Berg, 2007); and Charlotte Townsend-­Gault, Jennifer Kramer, and Ki-ke-in, eds., Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013). 40. For a valuable compilation of primary sources on primitivism, see Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch, eds., Primitivism and Twentieth-­Century Art: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). See also T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Anti-­modernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981). 41. Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 42. Roger Fry, “Art and Life,” the introductory essay to his Vision and Design (London: Chatto and Windus, 1923), 12. 43. Fry, “Negro Sculpture,” in Vision and Design, 103. 44. Ruth B. Phillips, “Norval Morrisseau’s Entrance: Negotiating Primitivism, Modernism, and Anishinaabe Tradition,” in Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist, ed. Greg Hill (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2006), 42–77.

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45. Simon Gikandi, “Africa and the Epiphany of Modernism,” in Doyle and Winkiel, Geomodernisms, 49. 46. On such educational policies across the empire, see, for example, Bruce Bern­ stein and W. Jackson Rushing, Modern by Tradition: American Indian Painting in the Studio Style (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995); Michelle McGeough, Through Their Eyes: Indian Painting in Santa Fe, 1918–1945 (Santa Fe, NM: Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 2009); Damian Skinner, The Carver and the Artist: Māori Art in the Twentieth Century (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008); Scott Watson, “Art/Craft in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Townsend-­Gault, Kramer, and Ki-ke-in, Native Art of the Northwest Coast, 348–79; and Ronald W. Hawker, “Welfare Politics, Late Salvage, and Indigenous (In)Visibility, 1930–60,” in Townsend-­Gault, Kramer, and Ki-ke-in, Native Art of the Northwest Coast, 348–403. 47. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 48. “But since primitivism itself and the effort to achieve the absolute character previously noted are both products of the same situation in modern art, its primitivist features may be considered not merely accidents, but of its essential nature.” Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1986), 271. 49. Particularly important and influential critiques are offered by James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-­Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places; Hal Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art, or White Skins Black Masks,” in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1985), 181–210; Thomas McEvilley, “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief: Primitivism in Twentieth Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art,” ArtForum 23, no. 3 (1984): 54–61; Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Shelly Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Several important edited volumes also contributed importantly to this critique, notably, Susan Hiller, ed., The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art (New York: Routledge, 1991); Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush, eds., Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); and Flam and Deutch, Primitivism and Twentieth-­ Century Art. 50. James Clifford, “Quai Branly in Process,” October 4, no. 120 (2007): 3–27; Sally Price, Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 51. Barkan and Bush, Prehistories of the Future.

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52. Quoted in Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn, introduction to Indigenous Experience Today, ed. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 4. 53. Peter Geschiere, The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 54. Michael Yellow Bird, “What We Want to Be Called: Indigenous Peoples’ Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Identity Labels,” American Indian Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1999): 1–21. 55. Steven Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media, and Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 5. 56. Cadena and Starn, introduction, 4–5. 57. OED Online, adj. “indigenous,” accessed November 15, 2005, http://www.oed.com/ view/Entry/94474?redirectedFrom=indigenous. 58. Jamaica Kinkaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000); V. S. Naipaul, The Loss of El Dorado: A Colonial History (New York: Vintage Books, 2003); Edouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 59. James Clifford, “Varieties of Indigenous Experience: Diasporas, Homelands, Sovereignties,” in de la Cadena and Starn, Indigenous Experience Today, 198. 60. Mary Louise Pratt, “Afterword: Indigeneity Today,” in de la Cadena and Starn, Indigenous Experience Today, 400–402. 61. On settler artists and appropriation, see discussions about Margaret Preston in Nicholas Thomas, Possessions: Indigenous Art / Colonial Culture (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 127–43; and Djon Mundine “Aboriginal Still Life,” in Margaret Preston, ed. Deborah Edwards and Rose Peel (Melbourne: Thames and Hudson Australia, 1995), 208. On Emily Carr, see Gerta Moray, Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006); and Sarah Milroy, From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2014). For Georgia O’Keeffe, see essays by Carolyn Kastner, “Changing Perspectives on Cultural Patrimony: Katsina Tithu,” and Alph H. Secakuku, “Katsinam: The Katsina Dolls in Pueblo Culture and as Depicted by Georgia O’Keeffe,” in Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico: Architecture, Katsinam, and the Land, ed. Barbara Buhler Lynes and Carolyn Kastner (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2012), 99–109 and 111–17. See also Ruth B. Phillips, “Aesthetic Primitivism Revisited: The Global Diaspora of ‘Primitive Art’ and the Rise of Indigenous Modernisms,” Journal of Art Historiography 12 (2015): 1–25, https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress .com/2015/06/phillips.pdf. 62. In the future, it will undoubtedly be illuminating and desirable to establish a still wider and more varied comparative framework for our discussions of networked world modernisms — ​­one that could include other Indigenous peoples such as the Sami of Scandinavia, the Ainu of Japan, the Adivasi (tribal peoples) of India, or those of

28 

E lizabeth H arney and R uth B . P hillips

Latin America. The panorama we provide here is intended to begin a conversation, to leave the discussions open ended, and ultimately, to complicate matters. 63. See McLean, “Modernism and the Art of Albert Namatjira,” this volume. 64. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (1968). 65. Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 66. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Biran Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Appadurai, Modernity at Large. 67. Mercer, Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers; Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Other Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2000); James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993). 68. James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Routes, 17–46; Clifford, “Varieties of Indigenous Experience.” 69. O’Brien et al., Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 2. 70. Garbara, “Landscape,” 353–61.

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PART I

MODERN VALUES

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SANDRA KLOPPER

1 

REINVENTING ZULU TRADITION The Modernism of Zizwezenyanga Qwabe’s Figurative Relief Panels

When the acclaimed South African photographer Lynn Acutt visited the Zulu town of Nongoma in 1937, he bought two large figurative pokerwork panels from an artist who has become known as Qwabe (figure 1.1). They feature depictions of contemporary urban life interspersed with scenes related to the history of Zulu king Cetshwayo and his son and successor, Dinuzulu. In theme and content, these panels resemble a less ambitious but equally interesting set that was found in an antique shop in Namibia before being donated to the Killie Campbell Africana Library in Durban in 1980. While the first set, now also in the Killie Campbell Collections, focuses primarily on momentous events prior to Dinuzulu’s seven-­year banishment to St. Helena in 1889, the second set appears to record his subsequent incarceration in 1908, during his trial for treason in Pietermaritzburg for harboring the wife of the leader of the 1906 Bambatha Rebellion, in which Africans had sought to overturn a poll tax imposed on rural households in present-­day KwaZulu-­Natal (figure 1.5).1 I argue in this chapter that both works warrant careful scrutiny for the bold modernity of their direct references to racial discrimination and their depictions of the contrasting realities of rural and urban life in a society in which exploitative migrant labor practices had become the norm (figure 1.2). These panels also raise crucial questions about Qwabe’s remarkable, if short-­lived, interest in constructing complex narratives based on oral and popular sources, such as photographs and postcards, thus drawing both on traditional Zulu poetic traditions and modern technologies of reproduction.

F I G U R E 1 . 1 

Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, pair of large vertical pokerwork panels, purchased by Lynn Acutt in Nongoma in 1937. Each panel: 29 × 4.5 in. (74 × 11.4 cm). Killie Campbell Africana Library, Durban.

The advent of modern Zulu arts in the twentieth century had deep roots in earlier traditions of royal patronage, which go back to the rise of the Zulu kingdom in the early nineteenth century. The great warrior king Shaka and his immediate successors employed skilled artists and craftsmen to produce prestige items for the king and his royal entourage. These included arm and neck rings cast in brass; intricately carved staffs of office, with complex abstract finials made from various hardwoods; and monumental chairs (each carved from a single block of wood), originally inspired by examples acquired 34 

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FIGURE 1.2 

Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, detail documenting racial discrimination and a migrant childminder from one of the panels purchased by Lynn Acutt in 1937. Killie Campbell Africana Library, Durban. FIGURE 1.3 

Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, detail of King Cetshwayo from one of the panels purchased by Lynn Acutt in 1937. Killie Campbell Africana Library, Durban.

from Portuguese traders at Delagoa Bay in present-­day Mozambique.2 Some artists attained considerable fame, among them Mtomboti kaMangcengeza, who produced two chairs for the third Zulu king, Mpande, before his death in 1872.3 Since no one but the king could sit on a chair, and those approaching him had to crawl on the ground, prestige items like these had an important symbolic function, affirming hierarchical power relations that were further reinforced through royal control over trade imports, like beads and blankets.4 The second Zulu king, Dingane, who had a keen interest in beads, once asked the American missionary George Champion whether it would be possible to “get a beadmaker to live with him.” 5 People visiting Dingane’s royal homestead in the late 1830s were received in a large thatched beehive dwelling, with twenty-­one supporting posts, covered from top to bottom with beads of various colors.6 A great champion of the arts, he was also interested in other forms of expressive culture, such as praise poetry, which he promoted actively throughout his reign.7 R einventing Z ulu T radition 

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Following the destruction of the Zulu kingdom by British forces in 1879, the disruption of royal patronage forced most specialists to cultivate new patrons, ultimately boosting the production of various skillfully honed household items, such as headrests and spoons for the inhabitants of ordinary homesteads. Some artisans also began to work for external markets, carving figurative staffs and walking sticks, which they sold as mementos to soldiers and other foreign visitors passing through the country during the South African war of 1899–1902.8 These artists generally relocated to burgeoning colonial centers such as Pietermaritzburg and Durban, where they established small workshops aimed at supplying the growing market for carved curios.9 By the early twentieth century, enterprising efforts to tap into additional sources of income had also encouraged several carvers to produce novelty items for indigenous patrons, including meat plates decorated with organic designs inspired by the craftsmanship of German missionaries, and small open-­shelf wall cupboards, commonly decorated with inlaid or burnished geometric patterns, in emulation of the early settler practice of fashioning comparatively inexpensive but visually arresting storage for cooking pots and other household objects. Indigenous interest in storage racks of this kind seems to have spread rapidly among African Christians who, as a sign of their rejection of traditionalist norms and values, abandoned the long-­established practice of living in circular thatch-­covered beehive dwellings in favor of European-­style wattle and daub homes. But these racks also became popular in remote rural communities, where they were used to store rolled-­up grass sleeping mats that to this day form part of the wedding gifts brides present to the relatives of their future husbands. The mat racks produced now are still commonly decorated with geometric patterns, but instead of carving elaborate designs into already burnished panels, mat rack specialists, since the 1950s, have taken to painting intricate multicolored patterns on their display surfaces (figure 1.4). In the early 1920s, one of the pioneering producers of these mat racks radically transformed the then-­emerging practice of decorating them with boldly burnished geometric designs by interspersing those designs with figurative motifs (figures 1.5–1.8).10 Almost certainly intended — ​­at least initially — ​­for the burgeoning tourist market in Durban rather than indigenous patrons, these figurative panels appear to have been part of the artist’s effort to supplement his income while working intermittently as a migrant laborer, either in domestic service or, more likely, as a rickshaw puller. This occupation had by then been monopolized by men from the Nongoma district of present-­day 36 

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FIGURE. 1.4 

Mat rack decorated with geometric patterns, ca. 1980s. Wood and enamel paints, each panel: 24.5 × 3.3 in. (62.2 × 8.3 cm). Private collection.

northern KwaZulu-­Natal; toward the end of the nineteenth century, after the aggressive land encroachments of white settlers had made subsistence farming inadequate, rural Africans left their homes annually for several months to support their families.11 Born and raised in the Nongoma area, this artist has since been hailed for his innovative pictorial practices, including his use of aerial perspective and symbolic proportion.12 Although his art should be recognized as a pioneering modern Zulu art form, considerable uncertainty R einventing Z ulu T radition 

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FIGURE 1.5 

Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, pair of vertical pokerwork panels, ca. 1930s, found in Namibia. Each panel: 27.3 × 3.1 in. (69.4 × 8 cm). Killie Campbell Africana Library, Durban.

F I G U R E 1 . 6  Zizwezenyanga

Qwabe, detail of Dinuzulu’s incarceration from one of the panels found in Namibia. Killie Campbell Africana Library, Durban. F I G U R E 1 . 7  Zizwezenyanga

Qwabe, detail of bride holding small ritual knife from one of the panels found in Namibia. Killie Campbell Africana Library, Durban.

F I G U R E 1 . 8 

Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, detail of a man drawn behind a cow on one of the panels found in Namibia. Killie Campbell Africana Library, Durban.

surrounds both his life and the extent of his oeuvre. Probably illiterate, he has been referred to variously as Ntizenyanga, Tivenganga, and Ntizenganfa Qwabe. None of these names is recognized by his surviving relatives, some of whom still live near the Qondo Trading Store, approximately twenty kilometers from Nongoma, where Qwabe once had his own homestead. According to them, his first name was Zizwezenyanga. They have no idea when he was born, or why and when he decided to dedicate his life entirely to producing figurative relief panels, but they all agreed that he died sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s.13 His name was originally recorded as Mzinyanzinya Qwabe by Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, an American suffragist who met him for the first time in 1925 while working as a journalist for Hearst’s International. Although her writing is a crucial source for understanding his work, in this chapter, I use the name ascribed to him by some of his surviving descendants.14 It is not possible to reconstruct Qwabe’s trajectory from migrant carver to full-­time artist without resorting to plausible explanation. After meeting Reyher, he seems to have abandoned his practice of working intermittently in Durban in favor of producing panels for sale at agricultural fairs and church fêtes, thereby satisfying a growing settler interest in African craft production. Returning permanently to the Nongoma region by the early 1930s, he sold work not only to rural patrons, but also to the growing number of local R einventing Z ulu T radition 

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and foreign visitors who traveled to Nongoma to meet members of the Zulu royal family after colonial officials agreed in the late 1920s to allow them to re­establish homesteads in this area. Nongoma, founded after a decision in 1887 to build Fort Ivuna as a colonial buffer between the Usuthu section of the Zulu royal family and rival factions, had by the 1930s become a thriving administrative center. It had a magistrate’s court; a Benedictine mission station, which in 1937 was expanded through the addition of a hospital; and the Mona market, which to this day remains a major center for the sale of medicinal plants, traditional dress worn by Zulu people on ceremonial occasions, and carved artifacts, like meat plates, which are still commonly used on occasions requiring the ritual slaughter of goats and cattle.15 Qwabe’s work became increasingly versatile over time. He repeatedly challenged the received artistic conventions of the rural community in which he was raised, modifying his figurative motifs for different markets and patrons. Often boldly adventurous, he produced progressively larger, delicately carved horizontal panels for his external market. But while he refined his pokerwork technique and constantly reconfigured the narrative elements in his work in new and inventive ways, by the 1950s he was relying more and more on stock scenes and characters in an effort to meet the overwhelming demand for his work in urban centers like Johannesburg. With the establishment of the Evangelical Lutheran Church Art and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift in 1965, and the Vukani Association in Eshowe toward the end of that decade, this growing market for sophisticated carvings, pottery, baskets, and tapestries produced by rural African communities was supported through the dedication of missionaries and other intermediaries.16 In earlier decades, however, artists like Qwabe were forced to engage directly with dealers, whose motivation was to profit from their work rather than to support their artistic development. Although mat racks, as decorated functional items carved of wood, fit the standard Western “craft” category, I argue that Qwabe’s innovative introduction of narrative pictorial imagery, affirming Zulu traditions of political leadership and responses to colonial modernity, should be understood as a foundational expression of modern Zulu art.

Qwabe as Oral Historian Each of the two large panels acquired by Acutt is surmounted by a portrait bust of King Cetshwayo, based on a photograph taken of him while visiting London to meet Queen Victoria following the destruction of the Zulu kingdom in 40 

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1879.17 Both panels reproduce his head ring, a symbol of his status as a mature married man (see figure 1.1). But in an apparent desire to draw attention to his identity as the dignified leader of a powerful independent nation, Qwabe modified one of the images to include bandoliers strung across the king’s tailored jacket (see figure 1.3). At the bottom of one of the panels, Qwabe included a depiction of Dinuzulu seated on a chair. Carefully copied from a photograph taken toward the end of Dinuzulu’s life, this image is heraldically enshrined in an elaborate border surmounted by a schematic rendition of the badge of the British Royal Air Force. Further depictions include paired elephants in close association with both kings; a roaring lion; a biplane, which appears to have been traced from a photograph; a boat surrounded by soldiers; and, directly below this scene, Dinuzulu standing on what appears to be a pier. We also see a bishop surrounded by white Afrikaner (Boer) combatants, and other Boers being killed by Zulu warriors. The imagery includes a further, dramatic depiction of a white bartender refusing access to a young black patron wearing tails and a bowtie, and a loosely grouped tableau in which the artist contrasts the lone figure of a comparatively well-­dressed woman — ​­presumably an urban migrant carrying the child of a white employer — ​­with that of two women in a rural setting, one of whom is pounding maize meal while the other balances a child on her hip. The lone figure of a woman carrying a child reappears on the edge of the bartender scene, along with a shield-­bearing Zulu warrior (see figure 1.2). Other similar warrior figures are scattered across both panels. Since Qwabe was almost certainly illiterate and would have been in his mid to late teens at the time of King Dinuzulu’s death in 1913, his knowledge of Zulu history must have been shaped in part by oral sources, such as the praise poems of kings and chiefs, the communications of emissaries dispatched by the royal family to provide information to rural communities on momentous occasions, and rumors and hearsay. Obvious examples of his familiarity with oral poetry are afforded, for example, by the inclusion of the roaring lion below one of the portrait busts of King Cetshwayo, which was almost certainly suggested by a praise poem referring to the king as the one who gives his people “the anger-­heated blood of a lion.” 18 Similarly, the two sets of paired elephants associated with images of Cetshwayo and Dinuzulu in other panels invoke the poetic metaphors that praise the rulers’ power and invincibility.19 This panel also includes a scene chronicling Dinuzulu’s successful retaliation against an Afrikaner (Boer) settler commando, which occurred toward the end of the South African war of 1899–1902, when Zulu warriors killed Field-­ Cornet Jan Potgieter (Upotolozi) and his party of fifty-­five men.20 Most of R einventing Z ulu T radition 

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those killed were local farmers under the leadership of General Louis Botha, who had destroyed a large Zulu settlement and seized 3,800 cattle and 1,000 sheep and goats. Like the oral poet who included an oblique reference to this event in Dinuzulu’s official praises — ​­“It happened that a Dutchman, Upotolozi, / Placed a hat on your head, / And it happened that the hat suited you” — ​­Qwabe appears not to have relied on historical or chronological logic to structure his narrative of dignity and triumph in the face of adversity.21 He chose, instead, to establish complex poetic associations in and between the horizontal bands into which his low-­relief images are structured. This reliance on associations helps to explain the otherwise incomprehensible prominence of a biplane in one of his panels, for the increasingly daring aeronautical feats of Louis Blériot, the Wright brothers, and others did not begin to unfold in the international press until 1908, at the time of the second trial and subsequent incarceration of King Dinuzulu. The popular illustrated accounts and images of Dinuzulu’s trial were often featured alongside others devoted to rapid changes in this new mode of transport. Thus, for example, on December 26, 1908, the front page of the Illustrated London News included a large engraving of several biplanes, with the inscription “A Scene of Three Months Hence. The Great Aeroplane Race at Monte Carlo: An Anticipation,” and a short account of the need to revise international law to extend national jurisdiction over the air. On the second page, a photograph entitled “The ‘Child’ and his Champion” showed King Dinuzulu standing next to Harriet Colenso.22 She, like her father, the Church of England’s first bishop of Natal, was a major advocate for the right to independence of the Zulu kingdom. In a clear allusion to the bishop’s role in supporting Zulu resistance to the land encroachments of Afrikaner farmers, Qwabe placed a scene showing Colenso looming over four Boer farmers immediately above the scene depicting the deaths of Field-­Cornet Potgieter and his party.23 Qwabe’s refusal to reproduce colonial narratives of domination and submission and his reaffirmation of the iconic status of Cetshwayo and Dinuzulu as leaders of their people are consistent with the storytelling practices of oral poets, who commonly draw attention to the shattering impact of kings and chiefs on their foes. Commenting on the images in Dinuzulu’s poem, Harold Scheub notes that they all depict “Dinuzulu’s relentless offensive and military prowess, the steady drumbeats of his conquests, his irresistible strength, and his annihilation of war material and armies.” 24 Qwabe’s rich mosaic of images linking heroic figures like these to larger social structures and networks, 42 

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including the lives and experiences of ordinary people, also finds echoes in the structure of these oral poems. For this reason, according to Mazisi Kunene, it would be more accurate to describe heroic praise poems as “poems of excellence,” which seek to elevate “the highest desirable qualities in society,” thereby projecting “an ethical system beyond the circumstances of the individual.” 25 When Qwabe revisited Dinuzulu’s 1908 trial, as depicted in the second set of Killie Campbell Africana Library panels, he recorded specific details related to events surrounding the king’s arrest and subsequent incarceration. One of these panels includes a scene of a man — ​­presumably Dinuzulu — ​­sitting in what seems to be a holding cell or prison, shaking hands with a man dressed in a suit, who most likely represents Eugene Renaud or W. P. Schreiner, the lawyers who defended him (see figure 1.6). Two of the adjoining three rooms in this scene are occupied by African men in what appear to be police uniforms, one of whom seems to be gesticulating toward the occupant of the first room, while the third room is inhabited by a white prisoner, an Afrikaner farmer who is easily identified by his wide-­brimmed hat. The uniformed men would be the Zulu-­speaking prison wardens who were arrested after they confessed to assisting Dinuzulu by passing a letter from him to Renaud.26 In a scene on the second panel of this set, a car is followed by a Black Maria, a police van designed to serve as a secure prison cell (see figure 1.5). Although both vehicles evidently date to the 1930s, Qwabe must have been familiar with either photographs of the horse-­drawn Black Maria in which the king had been transported in 1908, or, more likely, oral narratives referring to the events surrounding the hearing. Why the artist chose to update these vehicles and the clothing of colonial protagonists is unclear, particularly since he depicted the two African wardens’ uniforms in the style that would have been issued at the time of Dinuzulu’s trial and incarceration — but this tendency to collapse the past into the present was likely inspired by the practice of oral poets. In a further scene, we see three white men, one wearing what appears to be evening dress and smoking a pipe, one a visitor in day clothes, and the third a policeman. In another, we see a woman in contemporary dress, probably portraying Harriet Colenso, standing next to a seated man. Viewed together, these panels leave little doubt that the subject is the lead-­up to the trial, Harriet Colenso’s unfailing efforts on behalf of the king, and General Botha’s subsequent intervention to have Dinuzulu released after the general became the first prime minister of the Union of South Africa in 1910.27 Scheub’s observation about the art of oral poetry applies not only to countless novels and modernist paintings, R einventing Z ulu T radition 

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but also to Qwabe’s reliefs: “If the narrative of history is present, it is evident only in fragments; it is submerged, its contours apparent through inference.” 28 Dinuzulu’s relationship with Botha dated back to the 1880s, when Botha led a group of Afrikaner farmers known as Dinuzulu’s Volunteers in support of the Zulu king’s claims against one of his rivals. These Afrikaner mercenaries subsequently secured almost half of the former Zulu kingdom as farms in return for their assistance, forming an independent republic, with St. Lucia Bay as an outlet to the sea and a town called Vryheid (Freedom) as its capital. Most of the land was never recovered by the Zulu despite numerous attempts to do so. But the establishment of the so-­called New Republic eventually brought Dinuzulu into direct conflict with Botha in 1902. To this day, some Afrikaners refer to Dinuzulu’s retaliation against Potgieter (Upotolozi) and his men at that time as the Holkrans massacre. This checkered history of fraught interactions between Boer settlers and the Zulu kingdom notwithstanding, Botha was convinced that Dinuzulu had not received a fair trial following the Bambatha Rebellion. Prime Minister Botha therefore ordered Dinuzulu’s release from prison and arranged for him to be exiled to Uitkyk, a distant farm in the Transvaal, where he died in October 1913. It is not inconceivable that Qwabe chose to produce his Dinuzulu images more than twenty years later because of the growing attempts to revive the status of the Zulu royal house following the death of Dinuzulu’s son, Solomon, in 1933. When the Zulu kingdom was destroyed in 1879, the official jurisdiction of Dinuzulu’s father, Cetshwayo, had been reduced to that of the Usuthu section of the royal family. After Dinuzulu’s return from exile in 1897, he was appointed as the Natal government’s induna (chief) and adviser. By the time Solomon ascended to the throne in 1916, he “was officially treated as no more than a private individual.” 29 Qwabe’s preoccupation with the genealogical claims of the Zulu royal family and the related matter of Dinuzulu’s trials and tribulations would also have been fueled by rumors from his childhood, when Zulu speakers commonly believed that Dinuzulu would eventually succeed in uniting chiefdoms on either side of the Thukela River, the historical boundary between the Zulu kingdom and its southern tributaries, thereby effectively turning the clock back to a precolonial past.30

Rebecca Reyher’s Influence on the Careers of Qwabe and His Circle Qwabe’s ambitious historical panels were likely intended originally for a patron who would have understood his complex narratives and symbolic allu44 

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sions, perhaps even a member of the Zulu royal family. But whoever he had in mind when he produced them, it is difficult to imagine that he would have decided to carve panels like these had it not been for the intervention of the American suffragist Rebecca Reyher, who had an unintended but far-­reaching influence on both his work and that of other carvers in his circle. Reyher’s newspaper report, “Natives Who Are Artists in Woodcarving: The Work of the Qwabe Brothers,” is the sole source of information on the early production of Qwabe and several other carvers from the Nongoma district, including Abenizo Zulu.31 Written some time after her second trip to South Africa in 1934, it provides invaluable insights into the work of these rural carvers, including the expanding market for their art, which had developed following her first encounter with them in Nongoma in early 1925.32 When Steven Sack produced his groundbreaking 1989 catalog and exhibition on the art of modernist African artists who had either been overlooked or ignored in earlier accounts of the history of South African art, he noted, incorrectly, that Reyher’s initial encounter with Qwabe had taken place in 1927, claiming further that Qwabe’s work had originally been bought by Oswald Fynney, the chief magistrate in Zululand. Contrary to this assertion, Reyher’s account of her introduction to Qwabe and his circle shows clearly that she initiated contact with — ​­and purchased work from — ​­him and his circle. As she noted in the article she wrote on these carvers following her second visit to South Africa: Ten years ago I went on my first trip to Zululand, and noticed that many natives carried roughly-­carved sticks, with rarely the same design repeated. . . . [I]t was sufficient to inspire my curiosity as to whether there were any natives who carved figures and sticks of a more elaborate nature. Mr Oswald Fynney, then Chief Magistrate, sent runners out all over his territory to scout for carvers, and there gathered one day in his court an impressive assembly of several dozen. . . . Most of it was worthless and ugly, but there were two brothers Qwabe whose work was both interesting and good. I bought what I could of it.33 After reconnecting with the Qwabes in the mid-­1930s, Reyher learned that in the interim, her intervention had led them to participate in “native” craft shows that had “made their work much better known and had brought them money and appreciation.” An undated photograph taken in the African section of the Durban Agricultural Show (figure 1.9) features Qwabe working on a relief panel filled with wild animals separated by geometric pokerwork designs, R einventing Z ulu T radition 

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FIGURE 1.9 

Undated photograph of Zizwezenyanga Qwabe and another carver at the Durban Agricultural Show. Killie Campbell Africana Library, Durban.

which Reyher described as “black and white diamonds and other decorative patterns.” Another carver appears in the foreground of this photograph, his head partly out of focus and his foot protruding into the middle ground. He is facing a carefully arranged display, which includes several vertical pokerwork panels by Zizwezenyanga and four figurative staffs, some by his brother, Amos, and others by Abenizo Zulu. Some of these pokerwork panels show stock images of wildlife and young men and women traditionally dressed in skins and beadwork. In the center of this repetitive display is a single horizontal panel that includes what appears to be a depiction of the Tower of London straddling two sprawling urban structures. This image confirms that by the mid-­1930s, Qwabe had come to rely on newspapers and other ephemeral sources for the subject matter of his more adventurous works. It also raises several important questions regarding the differences in artistic practice of Qwabe and others working in his circle. Reyher noted these differences when she wrote about Abenizo Zulu, whom she met for the first time in 1934, when the Qwabes introduced her to him.34 She had learned, “He now spent all his time at carving,” because when he saw what she had paid the Qwabes for their work ten years before, “he decided 46 

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from then on that he would be a carver and nothing else.” 35 Contrasting his work with that of Zizwezenyanga’s brother, Amos, she pointed out that, unlike Amos, who produced staffs and walking sticks “upon which crawl fantastic animals,” and who generally worked in wild olive wood, “subtly contrasting the yellow and grey graining in the structural design” of his work, Abenizo Zulu always carved staffs for the royal family in red ivory, a hardwood that had been used by Mtomboti kaMangcengeza to produce chairs for the third Zulu king, Mpande. Reyher was impressed by Abenizo’s “sensible decision” to become a full-­time artist. When she visited members of the Zulu royal family during the cleansing ceremony (iHlambo) for the late king Solomon, she noted that Mshiyeni, who had become the Zulu regent in 1933, “proudly displayed” one of his figurative staffs “on his rondavel wall, where it attracted much admiration.” She also observed, “To-­day his sticks are in demand in all of northern Zululand” among indigenous and European patrons. Unable to convince anyone to resell one of them to her, she tried, instead, to send Abenizo out “to buy and coax back his own workmanship as my time was short and I could not wait for duplicates.”

The Art of Invention Although Reyher’s intervention clearly had a significant effect on the expansion of the market for Abenizo Zulu’s staffs, it had no influence on his practice as an artist. Working for various patrons, Zulu emulated what had become a traditional Zulu art form, carving comparatively simple but carefully honed figurative staffs similar to those popular among non-­indigenous patrons toward the end of the nineteenth century. Qwabe’s figurative panels were, in contrast, unique, as Reyher realized soon after seeing them for the first time. She later wrote on the back of a composite photograph of several relief scenes she had acquired from him: “No one else in Zululand makes them. His idea of pictures uses knife and poker to burn out design. Introduces shading and heightening by use of lead pencil. No instruction.” 36 Surprisingly, she did not appear to realize that Qwabe’s figurative panels had emerged from the comparatively recent tradition of making mat storage racks using sets of short horizontal and long vertical panels decorated with burnished geometric designs. Qwabe’s links to this tradition explain the inclusion on many surviving panels of a bride holding a small ritual knife (isinqindi), which, when pointed downward, is customarily associated with the loss of her virginity (figure 1.10; see also figure 1.7). He clearly decided early on in his career to market these and R einventing Z ulu T radition 

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other panels either individually or in pairs to outside patrons, thus facilitating their use as decorative hangings. The vertical panels that depict events surrounding Dinuzulu’s trial (see figure 1.5) demonstrate interesting ways in which Qwabe, for a time, interspersed aspects of Zulu history with images of Zulu tradition, such as the bride, as well as other scenes of rural life, such as homesteads with thatched beehive dwellings surrounding cattle byres. By 1939, when Qwabe sold panels to Natal’s commissioner of Native affairs, H. C. Lugg, and to the Duke of Devonshire during an official visit to Nongoma (see figure 1.12), the artist appears to have abandoned the practice of producing hybrid panels, instead depicting idyllic scenes of rural life on his horizontal panels, and using animal and wedding-­ related imagery on his vertical panels (see figure 1.10).37 Although he sometimes introduced minor variations in the horizontal imagery — ​­such as the figure of a nineteenth-­century leader, wearing indigenous leather garments, walking toward a tree to the right of a large homestead — ​­all panels evoke a precolonial era of chiefly control and domestic abundance. Most include a tableau depicting an ibandla (council or assembly), overseen by a king or a chief shown seated on a chair, surrounded by men whose positions on the ground respectfully acknowledge his status. Large byres filled with horned Nguni cattle, intricately carved in contrasting hues of light and dark, invariably occupy the most prominent space at the center of these panels, while women are shown returning from the river carrying pots of water on their heads or grinding corn in the safety of the homestead’s enclosing walls. By affirming entrenched divisions of labor, particularly the role of women in looking after the homestead, these panels reinforce hierarchical relations of power that suggest a deep nostalgia for the past. Panels like these clearly appealed to outside buyers whose sense of racial and cultural superiority would have been affirmed in the face of such rural idylls. Qwabe’s arcadian vision also found favor, however, with rural patrons, who were struggling to come to terms with their impoverished circumstances as subsistence farmers in a racially segregated society. Other themes, always in the horizontal format preferred by the external market for Qwabe’s work, include a scene of barrels being transported on ox-­drawn carts, accompanied by men wearing rural costume (figure 1.11).38 Alluding to the gradual expansion of colonial trade networks over the course of the nineteenth century, these panels are framed by decorative burnished comma-­like borders not found in any of his other relief carvings. Qwabe also frequently depicted animated scenes of combat between Zulu warriors, shown carrying shields and assegais (spears), a reference to the devastating 48 

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F I G U R E 1 . 1 0 

Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, pair of vertical pokerwork mat racks, 35.5 × 2.5 in. (90.2 × 6.4 cm). Purchased by Grete Mannheim between 1936 and 1949. Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York, NY.

i­ nternecine battles that followed the destruction of the Zulu kingdom by British forces in 1879. Similar scenes appear in at least three of the relief panels Reyher purchased from him. Following further expansion of his external market in the 1940s, Qwabe collapsed many scenes found in his earlier panels into increasingly large horizontal reliefs, which combined depictions of homesteads, like those in the panels Lugg and the Duke of Devonshire purchased in 1939 (figure 1.12), with elements formerly reserved for his vertical panels, such as homestead heads, brides, young men and women, and domestic and wild animals. These components were neatly compartmentalized by decorative borders, which were similar to those commonly used in the Illustrated London News, a periodical to which Qwabe seems to have had intermittent access. Some of these later panels also had compartments filled with shield-­bearing warriors, standing shoulder to shoulder in neat lines. None of these panels, however, returns to the specificities of historical moments and people as in his earlier works. The interest of these later panels lies, instead, in Qwabe’s increasingly sophisticated manipulation of his medium, as shown in a horizontal panel currently held by the University of Pretoria (figure 1.13). These manipulations include the delicate shading and animated naturalism of his animals; a reliance on foreshortening; his tendency to truncate animals and people as though they were caught, fleetingly, through the lens of a camera; and his increasing use of playfully arbitrary juxtapositions, such as the overlarge torsos of two youths that pop up both inside and outside a homestead scene at the top of the Pretoria panel.39

Reyher’s Primary Passion When Reyher visited the Qwabe brothers at their homesteads near the Qondo Trading Store, she was delighted to discover that relatives and close neighbors were clearly very proud of what she referred to as their special gifts: “They watch the brothers and speak of their work with the greatest respect. They speak of the artists as men apart.” Echoing this appreciation, she lamented that what she called the general public — ​­the American audience for which she was writing — ​­“is not aware of the scattered native work which is of so outstanding a quality that their product ceases to be a mere curio and becomes worthy to be ranked as art.” Her own interest in art had originally been fostered through her relationship with Luisine Havemeyer, who in 1913 founded the National Women’s Party with Alice Paul. A major patron of the arts, Havemeyer regularly allowed members of the party to view her extensive private collection fol50 

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FIGURE 1.11 

Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, horizontal pokerwork panel portraying an ox-drawn wagon, purchased by Lynn Acutt in 1937. 3.6 × 30 in. (9 × 78 cm). Killie Campbell Africana Library, Durban. FIGURE 1.12 

Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, horizontal pokerwork mat rack panel depicting idyllic rural life, 1939. 5.3 × 27.3 in. (13.4 × 69.5 cm). Donated to the Killie Campbell Africana Library by former commissioner of Native Affairs, H. C. Lugg. FIGURE 1.13 

Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, horizontal figurative pokerwork panel demonstrating increasing sophistication, ca. late 1960s. 10.4 × 29 in. (26.4 × 74.1 cm). S. van der Walt Collection, University of Pretoria, no. 594499.

lowing the large afternoon meetings she held at her home in New York City.40 She and her children later donated an extensive collection of impressionist and pre-­impressionist art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, including major paintings by Corot, Courbet, and Monet.41 Having spent several years in Paris, Havemeyer had also acquired works by Mary Cassatt, among them portraits of herself and her daughter Electra. She subsequently commissioned the American designer Louis Tiffany to transform her home into an elegant showpiece for the display of her large collection of European art in the 1890s.42 R einventing Z ulu T radition 

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It is unlikely that access to these art circles would have prepared Reyher for her first encounter with Qwabe’s relief carvings. Luisine Havemeyer had been “indifferent to the talents of such younger artists as Gauguin, van Gogh, and, later, Matisse and Picasso,” all of whom were, of course, inspired to a greater or lesser degree by the art of the exotic and the so-­called primitive communities to which many European artists began to turn for inspiration in the early twentieth century.43 Luisine’s daughter, Electra Havemeyer Webb, who became a major collector of American folk art (and who would found the Selbourne Museum in Vermont in 1947) may have inspired Reyher to express an early interest in alternative art traditions, but she probably developed her interest in African art through her friendship with Cape Town–based expressionist artist Irma Stern.44 While living in Germany in her early twenties, Stern had studied for a time with Max Pechstein, who was an avid collector of African art. Soon after returning to South Africa, she traveled to Umgababa, on the south coast of present-­day KwaZulu-­Natal, in search of new subject matter for her art, which she likely found in subjects such as the young woman Stern depicted in a drawing Reyher acquired from her before the latter returned to the United States in 1925.45 Evidently inspired by Stern’s example, Reyher made contact with other collectors of African art in Cape Town, including a former army officer who had acquired what Reyher described as “some good carvings,” as well as several books detailing art forms produced by southern African communities.46 Among these were Henri Junod’s The Life of a South African Tribe and Hendrik P. N. Muller and Johannes F. Snelleman’s Industrie des Cafres du sud-­est de l’Afrique: Collection recueillie sur les lieux et notice ethnographique. Published in 1892, the latter volume contained thirty folio plates recording the artifacts Muller and Snelleman had collected while walking through parts of Mozambique and present-­day KwaZulu-­Natal in the late nineteenth century. Some of these plates focused on beadwork, while others focused on household objects, such as headrests and clay pots. One also included a figurative carving of a man on horseback, described as an “objet de fantaisie,” which clearly had been produced for sale to a non-­indigenous market.47 After arriving in Cape Town in September 1924, Reyher had originally proposed to do “some stories about women and the many discriminations against them,” but, as she later recounted, the editor of Hearst’s International, Norman Hapgood, “couldn’t have been less interested.” 48 She therefore decided to write instead on Cape Dutch architecture and furniture, among other local forms of colonial art.49 But her interest in the individual and collective histories of women encouraged her to return to South Africa ten years later and led her to 52 

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write a biography of Christina Sibaya, the first of Zulu king Solomon’s sixty-­ four wives, in which she recounts the harrowing abuse Christina suffered at the hands of her husband. The biography, published in 1948, was based on interviews conducted with the assistance of Eric Fynney, son of the Zululand magistrate, who acted as Reyher’s interpreter and translated verbatim Christina’s accounts of events in her life.50

Qwabe at Nongoma’s Bantu Agricultural Show The colonial government’s refusal to recognize the royal status of King Cetshwayo’s successors was reversed by the apartheid state after it came to power in 1948. Implementing a policy that accorded “independence” to African communities living in segregated “homelands,” it announced in 1951 that it was “pleased to confer” the title of paramount chief of the Zulu people on Cyprian Bhekuzulu, Christina and Solomon’s son and successor.51 Reyher met him when she returned to Zululand for a third time in the early 1950s (figure 1.14), but she does not appear to have had any further contact with the Qwabes. As Katesa Schlosser discovered several years later, Amos had by then ceased producing carvings altogether. When she visited him at his homestead in June 1959, he told her that he had given a particularly beautiful stick to King Cyprian, but he also explained that he had always regarded his staffs as little more than a hobby. Showing her two damaged walking sticks that he had never completed, he noted that the income he had derived from carving was in any case negligible. By contrast, Zizwezenyanga had become increasingly prolific. When Schlosser met and photographed him at the Bantu Agricultural Show (figure 1.15) and at his home (figure 1.16) near the Qondo store, she was struck by the confident fluidity of his practice, noting, “He worked on each fascia board in such a way that it could immediately be functionally utilised if a Zulu customer wanted to incorporate it into his sleeping mat frame; he drilled a hole into each of the four corners. Vertical fascia boards could be fastened through these holes with pegs to the short horizontal wooden pieces of the frames.” She also mentioned Qwabe’s habit of producing work in the presence of onlookers, obviously intent on impressing potential patrons. After arriving at the market with a relief panel from which he “had only partially carved out the motifs on the blackened surface, .  .  . Qwabe made more and more figures appear” with his pocket knife over the course of the day: “He let several parts remain black. By varying the depth of the cuts into the blackened layer R einventing Z ulu T radition 

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FIGURE 1.14 

Rebecca Reyher photographing King Cyprian, ca. 1951. This ­photograph was probably taken by Father Ignaz Jutz from the Benedictine monastery, Nongoma. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

or cutting right through it, he achieved colour-­differentiation and a certain three-­dimensional effect.” 52 This sophisticated use of shading, which became a hallmark of Qwabe’s work when he had access to comparatively fine-­grained hard woods, is a far cry from the pencil touch-­ups he commonly used in the mid-­1930s, which are visible on the Acutt panels and on some of the works Reyher purchased. His shading was also quite unlike the technique employed in his panel recording King Dinuzulu’s 1908 incarceration, where he drew directly onto the surface of the panel images of a man standing behind a cow (figure 1.8), a cattle byre filled with cattle, and the king in prison with a visitor and the guards who had been imprisoned for trying to assist him (see figure 1.6). In some cases, he seems to have drawn these details because they were too small to include as relief carvings; in others, drawing might have been an awkward attempt to suggest spatial depth. Qwabe’s increasing technical fluidity notwithstanding, by the late 1950s, as Schlosser recounted, he clearly had developed the habit of manufacturing “offcuts into small horizontal plates with only one motif, say, a kraal or maybe a leopard.” 53 Like the mat racks he continued to produce for local clients living in Nongoma area, he provided these platelets with four holes, which, as Schlosser pointed out, “were in any case advantageous to the curio trade, as 54 

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F I G U R E 1 . 1 5 

Zizwezenyanga Qwabe at the Bantu Agricultural Show, Nongoma, 1959. Photograph by Katesa Schlosser.

F I G U R E 1 . 1 6 

Zizwezenyanga Qwabe at his homestead near the Qondo Trading Store, close to Nongoma, 1959. Photograph by Katesa Schlosser.

they could then easily be hung up.” On odd occasions, he also carved “extra-­ long slats of almost 90 cm for specific purposes,” but he was finding it difficult to meet the demands for his work by traders in Johannesburg and Pretoria, who purchased the “vast majority” of his production.54

Conclusion Part of the difficulty in trying to provide a coherent interpretive framework for Qwabe’s works is that he had no artistic peers. Like the Congolese artists whose paintings have become widely known through the patronage and research of Johannes Fabian and Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Qwabe became increasingly client centered over time, ultimately producing multiple versions of a single icon rather than unique and idiosyncratic creations of particular scenes or historical narratives.55 But other comparisons between his works and theirs are in some respects more revealing, including the complex relationship he established between imagination and popular memory in the (re)construction of historical events, his evocation of heroic martyrs like King Dinuzulu as a deliberate act of resistance against colonial historiography, and his tendency to rely on minute pictorial details, including elephants and scenes of contemporary life, to perform complex symbolic functions.56 Eurocentric narratives of modernity generally deny the agency of African artists, repeatedly undermining their experience of colonialism as a form of loss. These narratives of modernity also tend to question marginalized indigenous artists’ creative capacity to reflect critically on their understanding of the diverse values and worldviews of their clients.57 But as Qwabe’s history of engagement with his increasingly complex market demonstrates, he managed repeatedly to transcend the artistic assumptions of the rural community in which he was raised without compromising his ongoing commitment to affirm the importance of historically entrenched rituals and cultural concepts, which challenged and sometimes destabilized colonial perceptions of the Zulu kingdom’s history and the life experiences of ordinary people. Reconstructing Reyher’s role in the gradual unfolding of this shifting landscape of images and ideas with any degree of certainty is no longer possible. But her total lack of concern for upholding or celebrating false hierarchies between, for example, art and craft and the work produced by educated and self-­trained artists, played a decisive role in her spontaneous validation of the importance of Qwabe’s work. Reyher’s exposure to the Havemeyers and to Irma Stern introduced her to early modernist, folk, and primitive tastes. In 56 

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combination, they enabled her to resist standard art-­craft hierarchies. Reyher’s unqualified acknowledgment of the originality of Qwabe’s figurative panels appears to have afforded him the creative space to challenge his own preconceptions about the value and purpose of his art, ultimately encouraging him to muster the confidence to use his work to confront racial prejudice, the collective memory of painful historical events, and colonial narratives of the Zulu kingdom’s transformation from an independent African state to an impoverished colonial vassal in the aftermath of its destruction by British forces in 1879. In a remarkable testament to Qwabe’s capacity for invention, some of the works he appears to have produced in response to Reyher’s celebration of his artistry — ​­such as the historical narratives of King Cetshwayo and his son and successor Dinuzulu — ​­would become springboards for the increasingly complex compositional structures and pictorial solutions he developed in subsequent efforts to meet the growing demand for his work by indigenous patrons and the external market. Ultimately, though, he would abandon his interest in richly varied historical references in his effort to service these markets. Notes 1. The history of the Bambatha Rebellion is detailed, most notably, in Shula Marks, Reluctant Rebellion: The 1906–1908 Disturbances in Natal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). 2. James Stuart and D. McK. Malcolm, The Diary of Henry Francis Fynn (Pietermaritzburg, ZA: Shuter and Shooter, 1969), 269. 3. Sandra Klopper, “Carvers, Kings and Thrones in Nineteenth-­Century Zululand,” in African Art in Southern Africa: From Tradition to Township, ed. Anitra C. Nettleton and David Hammond-­Tooke (Johannesburg: ad Donker, 1989), 49–66. 4. Dirk J. Kotze, Letters of the American Missionaries, 1835–1838 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1950), 158; James Y. Gibson, The Story of the Zulus (London: Longmans, Green, 1911), 241. 5. John Bird, ed., The Annals of Natal, 1495–1845 (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1965), 205. 6. George E. Cory, ed., The Diary of the Rev. Francis Owen (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1926), 61. 7. David K. Rycroft and Abednego B. Ngobo, The Praises of Dingana: Izibongo zika Dingana (Durban, ZA: Killie Campbell Africana Library, 1988), 4. 8. Sandra Klopper, “ ‘Zulu’ Headrests and Figurative Carvings: The Brenthurst Collection and the Art of South-­East Africa,” in Art and Ambiguity: Perspectives on the Brenthurst Collection of Southern African Art, ed. Patricia Davidson (Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1991), 80–89. R einventing Z ulu T radition 

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9. Sandra Klopper, “Entangled Meanings: Historical Perspectives on Style and Patronage in Carving Traditions from Southern Africa,” in The Art of Southern Africa: The Terence Pethica Collection (Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2007), 25. 10. The panels shown in figure 1.10 were collected by Grete Mannheim, who emigrated from Germany to South Africa in 1936, and from South Africa to the United States in 1949. In South Africa, where she worked as a children’s photographer, she traveled widely, often purchasing souvenirs like these panels during her trips. The panels were acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. 11. The most sustained account of the history of rickshaw pullers is provided by Ros Posel, “Amahishi: Durban’s Ricksha Pullers,” Journal of Natal and Zulu History 13 (1990–91): 51–70. For a discussion of the link between beachfront tourist pullers and Nongoma, see Sandra Klopper, “Home and Away: Modernity in the Art and Sartorial Styles of South Africa’s Migrant Laborers and Their Families,” in Visual Century: South African Art in Context, 1907–2007, vol. 2, 1945–1976, ed. Lize Van Robbroeck (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2011), 120–39. 12. Elza Miles, Land and Lives: A Story of Early Black Artists (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 1997), 47. 13. On my trip to the area in August 2012, I met and spoke with Qwabe’s nephew, Sibiya, whose mother was Zizwezenyanga’s sister. 14. Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, “Natives Who Are Artists in Woodcarving: The Work of the Qwabe Brothers,” undated clipping marked 17.4.37, News Cuttings Book 9, Killie Campbell Africana Library, Durban, South Africa. For further details about this clipping, see note 31 below. The confusion over the spelling of Qwabe’s first name was likely compounded in part by his seeming illiteracy as well as inconsistencies in applying orthography rules for the Zulu language, which remain a problem to this day. 15. Sandra Klopper, “ ‘He Is My King, but He Is Also My Child’: Inkatha, the African National Congress and the Struggle for Control over Zulu Cultural Symbols,” Oxford Art Journal 19, no. 1 (1996): 53–66. 16. Sandra Klopper, “Necessity and Invention: The Art of Coiled Basketry in Southern Africa,” in Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art, ed. Dale Rosengarten et al. (New York: Museum of African Art, 2008), 172–203. 17. The photographs Qwabe used for his depictions of Cetshwayo and Dinuzulu were reproduced in Robert C. Samuelson, King Cetshwayo Zulu Dictionary (Durban, ZA: Commercial Printing, 1923). This dictionary, which was compiled by Cetshwayo’s official interpreter, also includes the praise poems of both kings. Samuelson was commonly known by his Zulu name Lubhembhedu, but Cetshwayo always addressed him as Robert. 18. Samuelson, Zulu Dictionary, xiii. 19. Samuelson, Zulu Dictionary, xiv and xxv. 20. The Zulu also suffered heavy losses, with fifty-­two men killed and forty-­eight wounded. 58 

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21. Samuelson, Zulu Dictionary, xxiv. 22. It is very plausible that Qwabe had intermittent access to old copies of the Illustrated London News, and he may have also looked at images in local newspapers like the Natal Mercury. No photographs or engraved images appear in early editions of the Zulu-­language newspaper Ilanga lase Natal, which was founded in 1903 by John Dube, who later became the first president of the African National Congress. 23. See Jeff Guy, The Heretic: A Study of the Life of William Colenso, 1814–1883 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983). 24. Harold Scheub, The Poem in the Story: Music, Poetry, and Narrative (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 110. 25. Mazisi Kunene, Emperor Shaka the Great: A Zulu Epic (London: Heinemann, 1979), xxix. 26. James Stuart, A History of the Zulu Rebellion 1906: And of Dinuzulu’s Arrest, Trial and, Expatriation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 452. 27. See Jeff Guy, The View across the River: Harriett Colenso and the Zulu Struggle against Imperialism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002). 28. Scheub, The Poem in the Story, 29. 29. See Nicholas Cope, To Bind the Nation: Solomon kaDinuzulu and Zulu Nationalism, 1913–1933 (Pietermaritzburg, ZA: University of Natal Press, 1993), 63. 30. Michael R. Mahoney, The Other Zulus: The Spread of Zulu Ethnicity in Colonial South Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 31. It is not clear when Reyher’s article on Qwabe and his circle was published. A copy of this article was lodged in News Cuttings Book 9 at the Killie Campbell Africana Library in Durban, with the date 17.4.37 added at the top. This might be a reference to either the date of publication or the date on which the article was received by the library. The article seems to have been written following Reyher’s return to the United States some time after her second visit to South Africa in 1934. 32. Judging from Reyher’s diary entries related to her first visit to South Africa between September 1924 and May 1925, she first met Qwabe on January 27, 28, or 29, 1925. Folders 11.1 and 11.4, mc 562, book 3, series 1, Rebecca Hourwich Reyher Papers, 1877–1988, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 33. Reyher, “Natives Who Are Artists,” n.p. 34. As Abenizo Zulu’s surname suggests, he was a member of the Zulu royal family. 35. Reyher, “Natives Who Are Artists,” n.p. 36. Photograph mc 562-­dd 34–4, Subseries A: Photographs, ca. 1920–1965, Series 7: Photographs, Oversized, and Memorabilia, Reyher Papers. 37. The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire bought a panel almost identical to the one sold to Lugg, in addition to a panel depicting an oxcart transporting barrels, another common theme in Qwabe’s work. See the sales catalog for Michael Graham Stuart, Africa: Conquered Difficulties (London: privately printed, 2012). R einventing Z ulu T radition 

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38. This theme appears on several, almost identical surviving panels. There is also one in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. 39. The Qwabe panel in the University of Pretoria collection appears to have been acquired in the late 1960s. It was donated to the university by Sarel van der Walt, who worked for the Bantu Investment Corporation (bic) of South Africa. In the early 1970s, van der Walt exhibited work purchased mainly from KwaZulu at the South African Association of Arts in Pretoria; the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium; and the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna, Austria. Gerhard de Kamper, University of Pretoria, personal communication, November 9, 2012, and July 3, 2015. See also Jenni Basson, “Zulu tentoonstelling is groot treffer in Europa,” Rapport, September 1, 1975. 40. Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, Amelia R. Fry, and Fern S. Ingersoll, “Heading the New York Office 1918–1919, 1922,” Search and Struggle for Equality and Independence (Berkeley: Regional Oral History Office, University of California, 1977), n.p. Search and Struggle is a lengthy interview with Reyher conducted by Fry and Ingersoll as part of the Suffragists Oral History Project. The information on Reyher’s relationship with Havemeyer is recorded in the subsection titled “Board Members and Volunteers: Efforts of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer.” 41. Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Splendid Legacy: The Havemeyer Collection (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993). 42. Some of the Tiffany works commissioned for the Havemeyers’ New York residence on the Upper East Side are now in the collection of the University of Michigan Museum of Art. 43. Frelinghuysen, Splendid Legacy, 6. 44. Reyher, who also collected folk art in later life, mentioned the importance of Electra’s interest in these traditions in Reyher, Fry, and Ingersoll, Search and Struggle. 45. Reyher acquired only one drawing by Stern. Her other acquisitions included a still life and two works painted on the recto and verso sides of a single canvas, a depiction of the Cape Town flower market and scenes from the city’s Malay Quarter. Stern also painted a portrait of Reyher, which was sold at auction in London in 2012, along with the other Sterns formerly in her collection. Irma Stern: Five Works Originally from the Collection of Rebecca Hourwich Reyher (London: Christie’s, June 2012), auction catalog. 46. Folder 11.1, mc 562, book 2, 111–12, series 1, Reyher Papers. 47. Hendrik P. N. Muller and Johannes F. Snelleman, Industrie des Cafres du sud-­ est de l’Afrique: Collection recueillie sur les lieux et notice ethnographique (Leiden: Brill [1892]), plate 21, figure 8. 48. Reyher, Fry, and Ingersoll, “Articles for Hearst’s International,” in Search and Struggle, n.p.

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49. These articles included “The Land of the Gable,” Country Life, April 1926; and “South African Antique Furniture,” Good Housekeeping, October 1926. 50. Rebecca Hourwich Reyher’s Zulu Woman: The Life Story of Christina Sibiya was republished by the University of Natal Press in 1999, with a historical introduction by Marcia Wright and a literary afterword by Liz Gunner. 51. Anna K. Buverud, “The King and the Honeybirds: Cyprian BhekuZulu kaSolomon, Zulu Nationalism and the Implementation of the Bantu Authorities System in Zululand, 1948–1957” (master’s thesis, University of Oslo, 2007), 47. 52. Katesa Schlosser, “Bantukünstler in Südafrika,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 100, no. 1/2 (1975): 38–98. The translations from the original article quoted in this chapter were done by Claudia Ringelmann, German Department, University of Pretoria, South Africa. 53. Schlosser, “Bantukünstler in Südafrika,” 71. 54. Schlosser, “Bantukünstler in Südafrika,” 72. 55. For useful comparisons, see especially Johannes Fabian, Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Bogumil Jewsiewicki, ed., A Congo Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art (New York: Museum of African Art, 1999). 56. Fabian, Remembering the Present, 218. 57. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), on the displacement of alternative narratives of history and modernity.

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HEATHER IGLOLIORTE

2 

“HOOKED FOREVER

ON PRIMITIVE PEOPLES” James Houston and the Transformation of “Eskimo Handicrafts” to Inuit Art

In 1951, the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, funded by the Department of Resources and Development and in cooperation with the Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc), published an instructional pamphlet (figure 2.1) entitled Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts.1 Written and illustrated by the guild’s Arctic representative, a young artist named James Houston, the pamphlet offered suggestions to Inuit on what to create and what materials to use in their handicraft and carving production to make their work appealing to the Qallunaat (non-­ Inuit) who lived in southern Canada, far from their Arctic settlements and communities. The purpose of Sanajaksat, which means “things to work with” or “things that can be made” in Inuktitut, was to stimulate a craft and carving industry in the North. Initially, the idea was well received and enthusiastically promoted throughout the Canadian Arctic by the teachers, missionaries, Hudson’s Bay Company traders, and officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp) who distributed it. In the introduction to the booklet, Houston notes that Sanajaksat was intended to be the first of a series of similar illustrated guidebooks. Yet shortly after its celebrated publication, the booklet was withdrawn from circulation and came to be considered an embarrassment to many of those who had earlier promoted it. The failure of the booklet has since caused many Inuit art curators and historians to conclude that Sanajaksat therefore had an insignifi-

F I G U R E 2 . 1 

Cover, Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts (Montreal: Canadian Handicrafts Guild, 1951). Reproduced with the permission of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada.

cant effect on the development of Inuit art. In this chapter, however, I propose an alternative interpretation of Sanajaksat’s influence. Instead of viewing this moment as an inconsequential misstep in the early development of an Inuit art industry, I argue that the massive failure of the souvenir works promoted in Sanajaksat was a major catalyst for the shift toward fine-­art production and the international acceptance of Inuit art as a new, modern, and “primitive” art form during the mid-­twentieth century. Through an investigation of the circumstances surrounding the creation, content, and reception of Sanajaksat, I analyze the features of the booklet that contributed to its “failure” and, conversely, to the success of modern and contemporary Inuit art in the latter half of the twentieth century. I consider the ingenuity of Inuit artists in developing an international arts industry from a small-­scale handicrafts initiative, and examine the influence of midcentury modernism and modernist primitivism on the development of Inuit arts under the guidance of Houston, who acted as Inuit art’s most influential mentor in the North, its primary advocate in the South, and the key mediator between these two dissonant worlds. The backlash that greeted the souvenir handicrafts initiative as initially conceived spurred Houston to cultivate midcentury modernism in Inuit stone sculpture “ H ooked F orever on P rimitive P eoples ”  

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and to mobilize early twentieth-­century primitivist sentiments in the promotion of Inuit art. This development, led by a new generation of artists, enabled contemporary Inuit stone sculpture to emerge from the shadow of souvenir art production to be claimed and, eventually, to be acclaimed internationally as modern art by art cognoscenti.

Inuit Art Industries before Modernism Reflecting on the introductory period of Inuit art in the late 1940s, prominent early collector Ian Lindsay explained that when Inuit ivory carvings first made their debut in the South, they were considered merely “Native craft” and were associated with First Nations craftwork.2 Before 1949, Lindsay recalled, “Few southerners had ever seen an Eskimo, let alone the Arctic. Eskimos were often thought of as being some sort of Indian (when they were thought of at all), who dwelt in igloos and travelled by dogsled in a cold, inhospitable land. And that was about the sum of it.” 3 The Inuit, in return, had been exposed only to the margins of the dominant culture within the small-­scale contact zone created by exchanges with explorers, whalers, missionaries, military personnel, administrators, and trading post staff located within Inuit land. Experience had taught the Inuit to produce crafts and carvings tailored to this limited market. Therefore, when the handicrafts experiment was initiated with the goal of producing objects salable in the South, the Inuit had to rely heavily on their white contacts for guidance in creating “what the white man wanted.” 4 Inuit knowledge of “things that can be made” for sale or trade with Qallunaat before the 1940s was based on their existing expertise in creating everything they had needed for life in the Arctic before European contact, coupled with the experiences of several centuries of increasing contact with southern visitors. For millennia before contact, Inuit across the circumpolar North had employed steatite, commonly known as soapstone — ​­one of the most popular and common contemporary sculptural materials — ​­to create cooking pots, lamps, and other vessels, while objects of personal, cultural or spiritual significance, such as hair combs, ornaments, and amulets, were almost exclusively carved from the most valuable carving material, walrus ivory.5 By the eighteenth century, the arrival of whalers in the eastern and central Arctic created a stimulus for new carving genres. Eager to obtain valuable European goods like steel needles, saw blades, trade cloth, flour, and sugar, Inuit traded on their expertise as guides and mapmakers, while also beginning to carve ivory figurines to barter with whalers. The whalers in turn taught Inuit 64 

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the art of scrimshaw, which expanded on the existing bow drill engraving techniques that Inuit artists had used for millennia to incise elaborate decorative patterns in ivory; thus the introduction of scrimshaw initiated a wave of Inuit intercultural trade production in the eastern Canadian Arctic.6 Successive generations of whalers not only enthusiastically collected all manner of precontact ivory carvings representing northern life, but also encouraged the production of such intercultural souvenirs as ashtrays and cribbage boards — ​ ­Western objects that Native artisans made from materials indigenous to the Arctic, particularly ivory, decorated with Inuit motifs. The fur trade, and the establishment of Hudson’s Bay Company trading posts, provided a further site for exchange during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the posts, Inuit souvenir carvings and curiosities, such as replica tools and hunting accoutrements, were disseminated to a relatively small market of trading post staff, missionaries, military personnel, anthropologists, government police, and Arctic administrators. In the twentieth century, two other parties became interested in Inuit handicrafts. The first was the Canadian Handicrafts Guild (established in 1906), a nonprofit organization whose mandate was to preserve and stimulate the production of “traditional” Canadian handicrafts, including forms of settler folk art and Indigenous handicrafts.7 Ellen Easton McLeod has argued that the guild’s annual exhibitions both created and gratified the demand for “authentic” Native arts among collectors and tourists, noting that by exhibiting indigenous crafts in the art gallery, the guild gave them a stature above the “curio.” 8 And because the Northwest Territories Council of the federal government was invested in fostering indigenous arts industries, in 1938 Major David McKeand, the council’s secretary in charge of the Eastern Arctic Patrol, began to explore how the guild could encourage Inuit handicrafts as a way to provide support in the face of decline in the fur trade. He was particularly concerned with Inuit who were orphans, elderly, unable to hunt, or living in institutions because of illness or disability.9 The imagined future for Inuit carvers and craftspeople, as conceived variously by the guild, the government, and the Hudson’s Bay Company, was thus firmly rooted in the faithful reproduction of “authentic” handicrafts, the mass carving of souvenir trinkets, and the creation of an ad hoc replacement economy for those who were underemployed, ill, or disabled. Post managers of the Hudson’s Bay Company had encouraged the production of “realistic and craftsmanlike depictions of life in the Arctic,” whereas the guild had encouraged the elevation of traditional Inuit “curiosities” to gallery-­worthy collectible pieces.10 The Northwest Territories Council was primarily concerned that “ H ooked F orever on P rimitive P eoples ”  

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the goods produced provide some economic relief, while other Arctic visitors sought out transcultural items to take home as souvenirs. Given these various and sometimes conflicting recommendations from outsiders, the expectation that Inuit carvers and craftspeople would welcome the Sanajaksat guidebook in the coming years seemed reasonable.

The Reception of Sanajaksat in the North While the booklet has received little scholarly attention thus far, archival records show that for a brief period, Sanajaksat was widely used in the Canadian Arctic, where it was shared and circulated at rates much higher than have been reported. Government invoices and correspondence reveal that one shipment of fifteen hundred copies went north in 1951, and that as many as seventy or eighty copies were given out per settlement. This would have likely been enough to allow each family to receive a booklet; even today most Inuit communities number fewer than a thousand people, and settlements were much smaller during the time of their formation.11 In fact, rcmp reports stated that in the Keewatin District, on the west side of Hudson Bay, in the areas around Arviat and Padlei, officers made sure that every family received a booklet.12 The welfare administrator and teacher in Kuujjuaq, Nunavik (then known as Fort Chimo), also reported distributing copies to all adults in the surrounding camps and urging them to participate in the initiative. The production and sales of carvings and handicrafts increased dramatically in the communities that received the booklet. Inukjuak (Port Harrison), for example, experienced an increase in purchases from just $76 in 1948 to $11,700 in 1952. In Povungnituk, the increase was from $90 to $1900 in the same time span.13 Spurred on by Houston’s initiatives, this preliminary success responded to a deep economic need in Inuit communities. The cyclical decline in white fox populations — ​­the mainstay of the Arctic trapping industry for decades — ​­and the diminishing value of fur during the Great Depression had left many newly settled Inuit suddenly dependent on governmental support, a situation that had been causing great distress to the self-­reliant Inuit as well as to their paternalistic benefactors in the government and hbc. The distribution of relief funds soon decreased significantly in communities participating in the new initiative, and rcmp officers further reported an overall increase in self-­esteem of Inuit who were given the opportunity to regain their independence and support their families by participating in handicraft production.14 Given the positive and almost immediate effects artistic production had on the contrib66 

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uting communities, an instructional booklet was welcomed because it offered guidance to the carvers and craftspeople on what objects would be most valued cross-­culturally. Yet despite these initial good results, the pamphlet soon drew sharp criticism from many earlier supporters.

The Creation of Sanajaksat: Precursors, Content, and Controversy In the two years before the creation of the booklet, Houston had been actively engaged in purchasing and promoting Inuit crafts and carvings on behalf of the guild. The story of how he became involved with the initiation of this modern art form has been recounted often by Houston and others. In brief, he had studied art in Canada during the 1930s before enlisting in the armed forces. After serving in World War II, he spent a year at L’Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, and then returned to Canada in 1947. He first encountered the Inuit on a chance trip to Inukjuak, Quebec, in 1949 and was so impressed by their artistic talent and interest in creating artworks for trade that upon his return south, he immediately approached the guild about developing the handicraft industry in the North. By his own account, Houston had long been searching for such an opportunity without knowing exactly what it was he had been seeking. Born in Toronto in 1921, his interest in art and in “primitive” peoples had begun early. As a child, he took classes at the Art Gallery of Toronto, where he received instruction from renowned Canadian painter Arthur Lismer. When Houston was about twelve, as he later recalled in a New Yorker interview, Lismer returned from a trip somewhere on the continent of Africa and came dancing into the classroom wearing a huge mask while playing a recording of drums and song. “I was hooked forever on primitive peoples,” Houston explained. “Lismer changed everything for me, I was going to travel and draw.” 15 Like many young Canadian artists at the time, Houston was inspired by the Group of Seven and Emily Carr, who decades earlier had established the vast Canadian landscape as their primary subject matter, and then traveled extensively in the West and North to capture this landscape on canvas.16 After the war, Houston returned to Ontario and immediately headed north, eventually hitching a ride on a flight headed to Inukjuak. There, Houston began sketching the Inuit he met. In exchange for a portrait, Houston was gifted with a tiny stone caribou. He first assumed it was ancient, but when he showed the piece to the local hbc trading post manager, he was surprised to learn that it had probably been made for him just the night before. After a brief moment “ H ooked F orever on P rimitive P eoples ”  

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FIGURE 2.2 

James Houston displaying carvings and crafts in Pangnirtung, 1951. In the 1950s Houston toured the Central Arctic, instructing Inuit on how to make crafts and carving that would appeal to a southern audience. Reproduced with the permission of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada.

of disappointment, Houston became excited to discover that carving was still practiced in the North.17 Returning south, Houston presented a proposal to the guild’s Indian and Eskimo Committee on November 18, 1948, for the development of Inuit handicrafts in the Arctic.18 Soon, a tenuous agreement was brokered between the guild, the Northwest Territories administration, and the Hudson’s Bay Company. This agreement facilitated Houston’s purchasing and promotional trips throughout the North as well as the sale of the pieces he collected in the South (figure 2.2). The first exhibition, which opened without fanfare at the guild on November 21, 1949, was a great success despite its relatively modest promotion.19 The following year, the government agreed to finance a second excursion to the North. Encouraged by Houston, Inuit living in several communities in the Northwest Territories and in northern Quebec produced approximately 2,500 pieces, mostly carvings, between February and July 1950. These pieces, too, sold briskly in the South. Houston thus encouraged this handicraft and carving production in advance of the publication of Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts. Numerous sources have reported that while he traveled with several crafts and carvings to show Inuit, he also frequently made sketches of the things he collected across the 68 

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Arctic and circulated these drawings for the purposes of instruction. George Carpenter of the Montreal Gazette interviewed Houston for the guild’s exhibition opening on November 19, 1951, and reported, “Jim makes drawings of any new and authentic Eskimo carvings and passes them around to other bands.” 20 In Ethnic and Tourist Arts, anthropologist Nelson H.  H. Graburn reported that Inuit artists told him, “Mr. Houston made small drawings with a pencil on paper and asked if they could be copied in soapstone, saying that these carvings would be bought.” 21 In the article “Canadian Eskimo Carving in Historical Perspective,” Charles Martijn, another anthropologist working in the North during those years, cited Guy Mary-­Rousselière as telling him in 1961 that in “Repulse Bay, and no doubt other settlements as well, the Hudson’s Bay Company store had on display a big placard of drawings by Houston, providing the Eskimos with some ideas on what kind of carvings they ought to be making.” 22 A 1950 National Film Board photograph of a display shelf in the Inukjuak hbc store corroborates this account, showing Inuit carvings and crafts arranged directly below two large and prominent posters, complete with instructions written in Inuit syllabics in what is unmistakably Houston’s hand (figure 2.3). Departmental reports note that similar displays and information had been seen in settlements and posts across the Arctic. Using drawings, then, Houston had already been surmounting the language barrier between himself and the Inuit and had begun to suggest what they should make based on what he had seen during his trips across the Arctic. The guild’s publication of its instructional pamphlet thus came early in the history of the fledgling craft and carving industry. Four years earlier, the guild had published a similar one-­page list entitled “Suggestions for Eskimo Handicrafts,” which had been circulated throughout the eastern Arctic. As an instructional guide, however, Sanajaksat was more comprehensive and effective because it included on every page both pictorial suggestions and explanatory texts, which had been translated into Inuktitut syllabics.23 Houston’s approach to instruction by circulating illustrations changed how Inuit received information about making art that would appeal to Qallunaat and widen their repertoire. The twenty-­eight-­page booklet, and the initial productions it fostered, did not differentiate among the kinds of things Inuit had been making for themselves or for sale to outsiders for centuries, and those that had been collected as curiosities, souvenirs, and crafts, rather than as “art,” such as tools, toys, and figurines. On page eight, for example, Houston drew a harpoon head, a model snow knife, and an ulu (a woman’s knife, with a handle and semicircular blade), the primary uses of which are, respectively, hunting, building an “ H ooked F orever on P rimitive P eoples ”  

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FIGURE 2.3 

Display shelf in Inukjuak, Quebec, 1950. Photograph by Wilf Doucette, National Film Board of Canada, Library and Archives Canada, 1971-271 npc, e011160482. Reproduced with the permission of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada.

iglu, and skinning and butchering animals; on page twenty-­five, he illustrated a goose wing brush, used to dust snow from traditionally prepared skin and fur clothing to prevent it from freezing. These functional objects were held in great esteem by the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, as well as by Qallunaat buyers who had long appreciated Inuit tools and technologies as ethnographic curiosities, and many savvy Inuit had already created replicas of these practical objects for trade. In Houston’s introduction to Sanajaksat, he stressed that these “purely Eskimo” objects depicted in the booklet could be made wherever materials were available, regional or cultural specificity notwithstanding. To make these “curiosities” appealing to a southern Canadian audience, Houston reiterated the instructions from his introduction on the relevant pages, 70 

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reminding Inuit to carefully polish all ivory models and to thoroughly clean any skin or fur products — ​­such as the sealskin purse, button-­down coat, and rifle case complete with ammunition pouch — ​­to ensure the removal of all “native” smells. While Clifford Wilson of Hudson’s Bay House had forewarned the guild that the smell of these naturally tanned items would be unappealing to a southern audience, the guild insisted it would still purchase these works because they would be valuable for exhibition purposes or “for sale to curio collectors.” 24 Houston and his guild collaborators believed it necessary for makers to abide by these contradictory specifications — ​­“keeping the native character” but finishing according to southern tastes — ​­for their products to appeal to the underdeveloped Inuit handicraft market. Sanajaksat also included drawings of objects inspired by the long history of transcultural contact and exchange with European whalers and explorers during the preceding centuries, as well as many models of Arctic wildlife scenes still popular today. Ashtrays, keepsake boxes, matchstick holders, and bracelets were suggested, all decorated with Inuit motifs and made from materials indigenous to the Arctic. Inuit-­made cribbage boards of walrus ivory, such as the one depicted on page six of Sanajaksat, were particularly popular (figures 2.4 and 2.5).25 Other pages of the booklet depict carvings of animals or Inuit figures engaged in camping or hunting. In the context of Arctic carving production, such animals and figures would have been accessible, iconic representations of the Inuit creators and their way of life as imagined by southern consumers. These experimental early works, which pointed to the artistic potential of the Inuit sculptors from the beginning of the fledgling art movement, were described as “moments in time” by Houston. The carvings, while still quite small, were often pegged to bases, making them suitable (and stable) for tabletop display. This was a new way for Inuit to conceptualize their sculptural work, which had been previously created to be worn on the body or turned over in one’s hand, rather than displayed on a surface.26 This new era thus ushered in a number of significant adaptations to Inuit artistic production, both reflected in and inspired by the booklet, some more unusual than others. By far the most perplexing inclusion in the booklet was the “totem pole,” illustrated on page eleven (figure 2.6). Miniature totem poles made of argillite and wood had long been produced on the Northwest coast of Canada, where totem poles were both culturally and regionally specific to a number of Northwest Coast First Nations, as well as popular early twentieth-­ century tourist attractions; not so in the Canadian Arctic, where most Inuit would never have seen anything like a totem pole before. That examples of “ H ooked F orever on P rimitive P eoples ”  

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Cribbage board, Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts (Montreal: Canadian Handicrafts Guild, 1951), 6. Reproduced with the permission of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada.

FIGURE 2.4 

Bracelets, needle case, and matchstick holder, Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts (Montreal: Canadian Handicrafts Guild, 1951), 7. Reproduced with the permission of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada.

FIGURE 2.5 

these Inuit-­made totem poles predate the booklet’s publication and can be found in several Canadian collections from this era is not itself the mystery; Houston had been circulating drawings prior to Sanajaksat, and in fact, several totem poles appear in the image of the aforementioned Inukjuak hbc store shelf in 1950 (see figure 2.3).27 The questions are, rather, why Houston chose to include iconic Northwest Coast imagery in an Inuit art instructional guide at all, and where the original inspiration for these Inuit “totem poles” came from. Ingo Hessel has commented that “totem imagery is not inconsistent with Inuit spiritual beliefs,” and it is true that sculpting in the vertical is often used to represent the transformation from humans to animals, or to express the kinship between Inuit and Arctic nonhuman entities.28 Yet Houston’s drawing 72 

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Totem pole, Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts (Montreal: Canadian Handicrafts Guild, 1951), 11. Reproduced with the permission of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada.

FIGURE 2.6 

of a totem pole — ​­depicting large-­faced stylized animals stacked one above the other, with a raven with wings outspread on the top — ​­is clearly influenced by Northwest Coast art, even if Houston refers to the piece not as a totem pole but as “the animals carved from a single piece of stone.” 29 This drawing likely influenced the production of several similar carvings now at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, while another example discovered in the Canadian Museum of History collections so closely resembles Houston’s drawing that it could “ H ooked F orever on P rimitive P eoples ”  

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F I G U R E 2 . 7   Detail of totem pole, Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts (Montreal: Canadian Handicrafts Guild, 1951), 11. Reproduced with the permission of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada. FIGURE 2.8 

Isa Oomayoualook (attributed), animal totem sculpture, ca. 1951. Inukjuak. Stone and ivory. Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, Quebec, iv-b-1725, s98-3371.

have feasibly served as his model for the booklet illustration. As Hessel has written, determining which works were copies from the booklet and which were not is difficult, as even the earlier carvings could have been drawn from other sources.30 Winnipeg Art Gallery curator Darlene Coward Wight has also suggested that Houston might have been inspired by the earlier “composite” works to combine this Inuit transformation imagery with “his own Northwest Coast-­flavoured drawings.” Yet, based on government correspondence and other archival discoveries, I believe the most likely explanation is that Houston was responsible for the prebooklet “totem-­poles,” and that he suggested the creation of these miniature poles based on those he had seen in Alaskan Native Arts and Crafts (anac) catalogs. These catalogs, which used photographs rather than drawings, were published annually during the 1930s and 1940s. Produced by the U.S. Department of the Interior Indian Arts and Crafts Board and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the anac catalogs included work not only by Alaskan Inuit (Yupik and Iñupiat), but also by other diverse Northwest Coast First Nations native to the Alaskan region, such as the totem-­pole-­making Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian.31 Correspondence between Deputy Commissioner R. A. Gibson and anac Clearing House manager D. L. Burrus in November 1949, confirms that just months after commencing the “Eskimo project” with the guild, Gibson requested information on the U.S. Cooperative for Eskimos in Juneau, Alaska, and received in response a letter explaining the anac procedures for collecting and distributing works and a list of the most popular items: moccasins, dolls, baskets, carved ivory animals, and totems.32 Considering Houston was in the employ of Gibson and the Northwest Territories administration in 1949, he likely saw these publications prior to creating Sanajaksat. The timing of the Gibson’s request for information suggests that these catalogs were likely sent for on Houston’s behalf, and since the catalogs grouped the art of all Alaska’s Native peoples, they may well have been the source of Houston’s confusion about the nature of the totem poles, resulting in their perplexing inclusion in his “Eskimo” booklet (figures 2.7 and 2.8).33

Reactions to Sanajaksat’s Content and Productions The response to Sanajaksat was remarkable, but not in the manner that had been hoped for or expected. Although Houston had written that the booklet was intended to “in no way limit the Eskimo,” the didactic tone of the instructions and the simplified illustrations led many carvers to believe that “ H ooked F orever on P rimitive P eoples ”  

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those objects, and only those objects, were exactly what the Qallunaat desired. Instructions such as “A man standing over the seal hole; snow blocks for protection. Dressed in skins; ivory face; harpoon in hand,” or “They can be made in any position, either sitting or walking,” seemed to leave little room for creativity, and the Inuit reasonably interpreted these definitive statements as a set of rules, therefore reproducing the illustrated works en masse. Over decades of increasing contact, the Inuit had become accustomed to Qallunaat government agents issuing strict missives, and they seem to have misconstrued Houston’s suggestions as similar directions, against his best intentions. The Inuit efficiency in this effort thus resulted in the production of numerous examples of remarkably similar, and therefore unsalable, copies of the objects depicted in the booklet. Hudson’s Bay posts were soon inundated with numerous examples of objects replicating those Houston had illustrated, many of which displayed little creative sensitivity or workmanship.34 Douglas Lord, a Coppermine government teacher who was actively involved in handicrafts development in the early stages of production, also reported on the “flood” of inferior souvenir articles, noting that he feared that this new incentive to make “easy money” was taking hold in Coppermine, and carving was replacing hunting activities.35 Likewise, hbc officials expressed concern that this turn toward carving would cause the Inuit to neglect hunting and trapping.36 The latter was clearly the reason the company was involved with the Inuit in the first place, and they continued to insist on the “spare time” nature of handicrafts production, despite the failing ability of the fur trade to provide for Inuit livelihood. The government was concerned about the tone of the booklet, which in later years was severely criticized for its “instructional nature” and came to be considered an embarrassment.37 R. A. J. Phillips, then chief of the Arctic Division of the Department of Northern Affairs, described Eskimo Handicrafts as “unfortunate.” 38 Particularly objectionable were the condescending captions that accompanied some illustrations. On page 3, for example, Houston wrote, “The small Eskimo man and woman . . . are carefully smoothed and polished. Can you make one?” On page 4, he instructed, “When it is done with great cleverness it is a thing anyone would want. Polish it carefully.” And on page 14, he advised, “If they are carefully carved and polished the kaloona [sic] will buy them.” In the end, the pamphlet did not turn out to be “the first of a series” as promised; it was withdrawn from circulation shortly after its publication and recalled in 1958.

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Stone Sculpture Gains Ground in the Wake of Sanajaksat While criticisms of the “souvenir” goods and mass-­produced miniatures included in Sanajaksat were many, some of the small stone carvings began to quietly gain a warm reception in the South, and prices for these works increased. Historically, soapstone had rarely been used for anything but oil lamps and cooking pots, yet small numbers of diminutive soapstone carvings, like the caribou Houston had been given on his first trip to Port Harrison, had begun appearing on the market in the 1940s.39 Houston recognized that soapstone, cheaper than ivory and readily available, was an ideal replacement for ivory, which by that time was in short supply.40 Found walrus tusk ivory, furthermore, had to be at least a year old to ensure it would not warp or crack after carving, and it had a high intrinsic value, so post managers were reluctant to allow children or novice carvers to practice with it.41 Because Houston’s favored method of encouragement was to purchase everything that Inuit artists produced, he saw stone, an inexpensive material, as ideal for the inexperienced carvers to practice with.42 Stone also facilitated an increase in scale beyond what had been previously possible. Whereas ivory pieces, such as those that had inspired Sanajaksak’s illustrations, could be only a few inches in diameter, the new stone carvings grew first to six or eight inches tall, and then to “pedestal” or “tabletop” dimensions.43 The change in scale made it more difficult to marginalize these works as “souvenirs” or “Native crafts.” This transformation in carving practices was driven by innovative Inuit artists in the North adapting to new approaches as well as the tastes of discerning patrons in the South, who paid good prices for larger works. As the market for bigger carvings developed through the guild, stone quickly became the favored material in the minds of collectors and artists alike.44 Though the trend had begun with works by a small handful of daring carvers, within just a few years, Inuit stone carving would become highly sought after.45 The public reacted positively to these new carvings, which conveyed a sense of the primitive to its audience through the rounded, reductive, and simplified forms of Arctic figures. At the time, romantic notions of the “Eskimo,” closely associated with the rugged northern tundra and its wild Arctic animals, still referenced the long-­standing Inuit way of life on the land, even though that reality was quickly changing into a different kind of existence.46 This nostalgic quality made the new stone carvings highly appealing to the Western art world, conforming to the close association of modern avant-­garde taste with “primitive art” during the first half of the twentieth century.47 “ H ooked F orever on P rimitive P eoples ”  

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To sustain the success of these new carvings, Houston saw that promotion of both the carvings and the carvers would have to change dramatically and quickly in response to modern tastes. As evidenced by shifts in his writing and collecting, in his promotional activities in both the North and the South, and especially in his instructional practices, Houston quickly realized that the curio carvings and crafts he had envisioned for the Inuit handicraft industry, and had promoted in Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts, ignored the carvings’ greater potential as a new modern primitive art form. Ideally positioned as the primary mentor to artists in the Arctic, their main promoter in southern Canada, and the key mediator between artist and market, Houston was able to influence both production and promotion, shaping the early industry into the success it would become. Rather than dwelling on the shortcomings of the handicrafts initiative, or continuing its avid promotion, Houston made an about-­face in the years immediately following the publication of Sanajaksat. Inspired by the ambitious new sculptures of the Inuit he worked with, he took steps to dissociate the new Inuit art from the transcultural objects included in the booklet that contradicted the myth of Inuit primitiveness and thus diminished their appeal to the modernist primitive art market. This shift is evident in the numerous promotional articles Houston wrote during the 1950s, the first decade of contemporary Inuit art production, and particularly in changes in his language that reflect the tastes of modernist primitivism. For example, in his first article on the subject, “Eskimo Sculptors,” published in 1951 in the widely read hbc magazine the Beaver, Houston described the Inuit as “carvers,” the objects they produced as “Eskimo work” or “handicrafts,” and the “Eskimo Project” as an “industry” intended to aid the Inuit economy rather than as an art form.48 By 1952, however, he had begun using the terms “art” and “artists.” 49 As Kristen Potter has noted, Houston’s task was to naturalize Inuit commercial art production for the “armchair tourist,” the indirect consumer of Inuit culture, in order to maintain the myth of primitivity held in the South.50 To do so, Houston focused on what Christine Lalonde has called “the sensationalism of hunters-­become-­artists.” 51 In his 1952 article “In Search of Contemporary Eskimo Art,” Houston wrote, “When we ask an Eskimo if he carves art objects (sinourak), he replies, ‘Certainly.’ ” 52 At the end of this article, Houston added that the Eskimo “is delighted with the opportunity to improve his living (and to avoid the necessity of Government relief) through the creation of art,” writing that 75 percent of Inuit in the settlements he had visited were making Inuit art.53 This is a significant shift from the 1951 article, in which he described the new industry as a replacement 78 

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economy for trapping in the summer months, rather than as an emergent art practice. Houston also shrewdly downplayed the use of power tools and contemporary sculptural techniques, noting, “Files and saws are now used to some extent but when those are not available the carver readily returns to his old ways.” 54 His statement, “There is no copying of one another in this work,” appeals simultaneously to primitivist notions of authenticity and modernist valuations of the singular object over commodity production.55 Houston then located the Inuit in an imagined ahistorical primitive ­reality  — ​­what Mary Louise Pratt has called the timeless present tense.56 He pondered, “What motivates this man? What inner spring of consciousness demands an art of him? Perhaps it is a clinging remnant of a forgotten civilization of the Asiatic continent where he almost certainly originated. Perhaps it is a pure worship of craftsmanship which he obviously holds in high esteem.” 57 He thus guaranteed the desired authenticity by closely associating the Inuit with ancient man, while fetishizing the commercial art production of a paradoxically prehistoric yet modern people. In 1954 he wrote further, “The Eskimo possesses a cheerfulness and a tranquillity of mind to a degree that seems almost unknown in our modern civilization.” 58 Such statements reflect a keen awareness of the modernist idealization of “authentic” Indigenous societies as untouched, pastoral, and unprogressive. Because the modern industrial world is unstable and mutable, the conception of authentic Inuit society is necessarily static and distant, “frozen” in imagined primitivist nostalgia. In 1955 Houston wrote even more explicitly in Canadian Eskimo Art, the catalog of a major traveling exhibition, “Even today, after a century of exposure to European culture, this primitive art persists, original, creative, and virile.” 59 This new mode of promotion in the years immediately following Sanajaksat’s withdrawal from circulation facilitated the ability of modernist buyers desiring “authentic” primitive art to suppress their knowledge of the actual conditions of the art’s production, allowing them to maintain the belief that the art they collected was both primitive and unique.60 By 1954 Houston rarely mentioned “handicrafts” in the media, and his writing began to demonstrate a deeper appreciation for the modern primitivist art market. In the North, Houston also sought new ways to provide assistance and direction to artists without interfering in the creative process. In 1953, following Sanajaksat, Houston published a series of Eskimo Bulletins for the North, writing in the inaugural edition, “The pictures here are some of the things that have been made by Eskimos. They are not shown to have you copy them but to give you an idea of some things that are wanted. Make your own carvings the “ H ooked F orever on P rimitive P eoples ”  

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way you want but try hard to make them the best you can.” 61 Clearly, Houston was trying to avoid the pitfalls of Sanajaksat by encouraging Inuit to be creative and to experiment. Yet in the second edition of his Eskimo Bulletin, subtitled “Handicrafts” but containing only carving suggestions, Houston wrote, Eskimos are becoming well-­known for their cleverness in carving. The things some of you make are very good and many people in the white men’s countries buy them and like them very much. Some things they like better than others and it is to let you know which things are best liked that we are writing this article. The things they like best are carvings of people, animals and birds. They like the single pieces best, not the ones that are joined or pegged together. They want stone, ivory or bone carvings of people, bears, walrus, seals, caribou, whales, fish, otters, owls, ptarmigan, ducks, geese, seagulls and loons; stone kayaks with kayak-­men and a few ivory or stone iglus. They like both large and small carvings but they want good ones, so all the things you make should be carefully and perfectly carved.62 Houston was clearly at pains to encourage creativity and to enable Inuit to learn how to appeal to the modernist primitivist art market, and yet in listing seventeen separate and specific subjects for carvings, complete with illustrations, his message appears at variance with his intentions. As became evident in the works and growing fame of individual artists, Houston had significantly altered his promotion to encourage Inuit artists to follow the lead of the most successful of the new generation of sculptors, including using stone, increasing scale, and developing individual styles. Exhibitions in Montreal and internationally began to publicize an emergence of “master” Inuit sculptors. Akeeaktashuk, an artist originally from Inukjuak, was one of the few artists who had begun his rise to fame even before Sanajaksat was published (figure 2.9).63 By the time Houston featured his sculpture in Canadian Eskimo Art, Akeeaktashuk’s work was already gaining wide recognition; he was a featured artist in the landmark 1953 exhibition held in London’s Gimpel Fils gallery (which had drawn the attention of European admirers of primitive art, such as Henry Moore, to the new Inuit sculpture).64 Like Akeeaktashuk, artist Amidilak (Amidlak), of Kogaluk River on the east coast of Hudson Bay, was quick to gain early fame and was featured in several publications between 1950 and 1953. Boosted by sales at the guild and coverage in Houston’s articles, artists such as Sywollie (Sarollie), Johnny Inukpuk, Osuitok Ipeelee, and Johnny POV were soon sought after by private and public collectors alike, beginning a 80 

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F I G U R E 2 . 9 

Akeeaktashuk, Woman and Child, ca. 1948–1953. Steatite (soapstone). Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, Quebec, iv-b-1179, s2002-2128. F I G U R E 2 . 1 0 

Amidilak, Bear Sculpture, ca. 1950s. Steatite (soap­ stone). Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, Quebec, na 586, s98-3343.

newfound, if slow to develop, appreciation for Inuit artists as individual talents, rather than as anonymous cultural producers (figure 2.10).65 One factor that contributed to this new modern art form’s success was its aesthetic accessibility. In contrast to the “primitive” arts of other Native North Americans, this contemporary art form was easily “understood” by the public. Free from abstraction or codified symbols, the bold, simplified, and expressive forms and the recognizable Arctic subject matter catered to the primitivist market. This acceptance was accompanied by frequent comparisons to “masterpieces” and “masters” of Western art. In a review of Canadian Eskimo Art, for example, Henry Strub writes, “The Eskimo sculptures from life, but not in realistic detail such as is found in Rodin. It is more reminiscent of Maillol showing love of life, of form, of texture and of rhythm. It is a strange coincidence that Eskimo artists have independently arrived at so many conclusions that we associate with what is most modern in art.” 66 Such comparisons, of course, were not the result of coincidence but were carefully orchestrated by Houston, a modernist artist whose tastes had been formed by exposure to the Group of Seven, a lifelong interest in “primitive peoples,” and a year studying art in Paris, in 1947, during a period when primitive art had become closely associated with the modern art of the avant-­ garde.67 Martijn notes, “As an artist in his own right, and having been imbued at art school with all of the values and ideas peculiar to Western art tradition, [Houston] could not help but interpret Inuit carving on the basis of what his training had taught him. Perhaps unconsciously, Houston ended up imposing his Euro-­Canadian art concepts on the acquiescent Eskimo carvers who benefited from his hints and advice by making their handiwork as acceptable as possible to southern buyers.” 68 Houston’s influence and instruction thus ensured that not only would Inuit art’s primitive qualities appeal to mid-­ twentieth-­century Qallunaat buyers, but its modernism would as well.69

Inuit Artistic Agency in the Age of Colonization (and Decolonization) Although the early handicrafts industry produced many noticeable benefits for Inuit, Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts and its resulting productions were received very poorly by Inuit, the government, and the public alike. Yet during the same years, in some ways ignited by Houston’s initiatives, the stone carvings produced by a small but growing group of talented Inuit artists began garnering recognition and a following in the South as a modern primitive art form. Faced with the failure of Sanajaksat, and the growing acceptance 82 

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of stone sculpture by the national and international art world, Houston was able to use his position as a middleman to promote Inuit art and artists as modern and neoprimitive. These two discursive shifts were interdependent. Houston’s new focus on the development and promotion of individual artists’ talents was tied to the failure of handicrafts and, on a deeper level, to his longer interest in modernist primitivism, sparked in his youth and no doubt rekindled during his year as an art student in Paris. As the primary contact between North and South in handicrafts developments, Houston was positioned to exert decisive influence on both the white administrators and the Inuit producers, to exercise direction over the initial handicrafts experiment, and later, to dramatically alter the initial plans for that arts and crafts development to the eventual benefit of those involved. His ambassadorship for the industry led to an unprecedented collaboration among government, Inuit, trade industry, and a major philanthropic organization, each with a very different agenda for Inuit handicrafts development. Of course, no matter how influential or charismatic the promoter, promotion alone cannot create and sustain an art movement or market. Whatever lens was cast on Inuit artists in the mid-­twentieth-­century by its initial audience in the South, Inuit creative expression, talent, leadership, and tenacity have made this industry the success it is today. As Marybelle Mitchell has written, although the guild, the government, and the hbc  — ​­united by ­Houston  — ​ ­had laid the foundation of the carving industry in the 1950s, only under later Inuit cooperative control did that the industry became a multimillion-­dollar business.70 Ruth B. Phillips has explained, in a parallel context, that by absorbing Houston’s advice and adapting his strategies in his or her own work, each Inuit artist “turns modernist primitivism into indigenous modernity.” 71 Inuit art is now internationally recognized, and the arts in all forms and media contribute significantly to sustaining both the economy and community well­ being. Kinngait (Cape Dorset), for example, has recently been declared Canada’s most artistic community, with the highest per capita number of artists in the country.72 Modern and contemporary Inuit artists have been able to create and maintain appreciation among both the general public and discerning modernist and contemporary art collectors. Although Inuit craft industries never completely vanished, and some major exhibitions continued to include “handicrafts” with “fine arts” well into the next decade, the initial shift from a general purview of Inuit expression to the focused fine-­art production of stone sculpture, then prints, and eventually drawings, undeniably succeeded in firmly cementing a clear division between “ H ooked F orever on P rimitive P eoples ”  

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Inuit “high” fine arts and “low” craft productions that persisted in the field for decades. While the fine-­art genres of stone carving and printmaking may have gradually developed into major streams of production on their own, I would argue that Houston and the innovative first generation of Inuit stone sculptors with whom he collaborated played a critical role in encouraging this rapid shift in the public perception of Inuit art during the early 1950s. Ironically, the failure of Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts can now be seen as having had a palpable effect on the development of contemporary Inuit art. The poor reception of souvenier and craft objects, such as those promoted in Sanajaksat, fueled a shift away from handicraft production toward fine arts, and away from didactic instruction to an emphasis on encouraging quality of workmanship and the development of individual styles. While handicraft production — ​­the creation of “useful and acceptable” objects like parkas, mitts, and slippers — ​­has always been an important industry in the North, the early success of Inuit art in the South has relied on its separation from craft and its transition from miniature ivories and souvenirs to the fine-­art genres of large stone carvings, wall hangings, drawings, and prints; today this has grown to include such contemporary modes of production as painting, photography and installation. In those brief yet formative years, it is remarkable how quickly and nimbly Inuit were able to shift from the role intended for them, as the rote producers of mass souvenirs, to self-determined, modern artists. In so doing, they have inspired successive generations of Inuit artists to also carve their own path in the art world. Notes 1. The cover of the booklet only shows stylized Inuktitut syllabics, and the title is not repeated anywhere else in the booklet in Inuktitut roman orthography, so respected Inuit elder and language preservation advocate Piita Irniq, the first commissioner of Nunavut, translated the title into contemporary Inuktitut: “Sanajaksat: things to work with.” Previous mentions of this booklet, including my own and others cited throughout this essay, include spellings of the same term as Sunuyuksuk and Sanajaksat. 2. Ian Lindsay, “A Look Back at the Early Days: Some Personal Thoughts,” in The First Passionate Collector: The Ian Lindsay Collection of Inuit Art (Winnipeg, MB: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1990), 21. 3. Lindsay, “A Look Back,” 21. 4. Nelson H. H. Graburn, “Inuit Art and the Expression of Eskimo Identity,” American Review of Canadian Studies 17, no. 1 (1987): 52. 5. While this chapter refers primarily to ivory sourced from found walrus tusks,

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Inuit carvers also sculpted with ivory sourced from mammal teeth and narwhal tusk as well. 6. Archaeological evidence and oral history attest that Inuit from Labrador were engaged in trade practices with other Indigenous peoples along the coast of southern Labrador and Newfoundland long before the arrival of Europeans to the Canadian Arctic, after which Inuit traded or stole precious European goods such as metal. 7. In 1974, the Canadian Handicrafts Guild merged with the Canadian Craftsman’s Association to become the Canadian Crafts Council in Ottawa. In Quebec, the new entity was renamed the Canadian Guild of Crafts Quebec, which remains its name today. “Historical Background,” Canadian Guild of Crafts, accessed July 10, 2015, http:// www.canadianguildofcrafts.com/modules.php?name=Historique&newlang=english. 8. Ellen Easton McLeod, In Good Hands: The Women of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1999), 217. 9. McKeand subsequently became the Northwest Territories administration representative of the Indian and Eskimo Committee, thus cementing the commitment of the guild and the government to work together on the development of an Inuit craft and souvenir art industry. Interestingly, the first collaboration between the guild and the Northwest Territories administration was to create a one-­page list of “Suggestions for Eskimo Handicrafts” to be distributed by the steamship Nascopie on its summer voyage “to every post where there was a white woman, missionary, nurse or teacher, wife of a Factor, or an R.C.M.P. man.” Alice Lighthall, Annual Report of the Indian and Eskimo Committee, Canadian Guild of Crafts Quebec (cgcq), 1941, c10 d1 017, Canadian Handicrafts Guild Archives. When Major McKeand retired in 1945, James Wright, chief of the Arctic Division, took over responsibility for the Inuit handicrafts industry. During his tenure, Wright also explored the possibility of using the handicraft industry to benefit ill or disabled Inuit living in institutions, as well as orphans and the elderly. Helga Goetz, The Development of Inuit Art (Hull, QC: Department of Indian Affairs, 1985), 10. 10. Graburn, “Expression of Eskimo Identity,” 52. 11. G. E. B. Sinclair to A. Lighthall, May 2, 1951, and I. M. Plummer to G. E. B. Sinclair, May 14, 1951, file 255–1, pt. 1, vol. 108, rg85, Library and Archives Canada (lac). 12. Goetz, Development, 16. 13. These figures are estimates by Goetz and include prices paid by the guild, hbc, Catholic and Anglican missions, and military personnel. Goetz, Development, 22. 14. Nelson H. H. Graburn “Authentic Inuit Art: Creation and Exclusion in the Canadian North,” in “Beyond Art/Artifact/Tourist Art: Social Agency and the Cultural Value(s) of the Aestheticized Object,” ed. Nelson Graburn and Aaron Glass, special issue, Journal of Material Culture 9, no. 2 (2004): 148. 15. Mary D. Kierstead, “Profiles: The Man,” New Yorker, August 29, 1988, 34. 16. Ann K. Morrison has explained that these journeys by modernist artists “have been equated with the nineteenth-­century ideal of personal enlightenment through “ H ooked F orever on P rimitive P eoples ”  

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the testing grounds of the wilderness, their status as avant-­garde artists reaffirmed through their imagery and use of paint.” Morrison, “Nationalism, Cultural Appropriation and an Exhibition,” in Rhetorics of Utopia: Early Modernism and the Canadian West Coast, Collapse 5, ed. Grant Arnold (Vancouver, BC: Vancouver Art Forum Society, 2000), 97. 17. Houston’s own multiple accounts of the period between 1948 and 1953, from the time of his first encounter with the Inuit until the end of the “handicrafts experiment,” are rife with conflicting information, inaccuracies, and errors. While the key elements are usually consistent, the minor details vary significantly. For a discussion of these inconsistencies and possible reasons for the discrepancies, see Richard C. Crandall, Inuit Art: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000), 47–101. 18. Virginia Watt, “The Beginning,” in Canadian Guild of Crafts, Quebec: The Permanent Collection, Inuit Arts and Crafts, c. 1900–1980, ed. Virginia Watt (Montreal: Canadian Guild of Crafts Quebec, 1980), 12. 19. Darlene Coward Wight, “The Handicrafts Experiment, 1949–1953,” in The First Passionate Collector: The Ian Lindsay Collection of Inuit Art (Winnipeg, MB: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1991), 45–92. 20. George Carpenter, “Tuktu-­Angot, North Spirit in City to Guard Eskimo Art,” Montreal Gazette, November 19, 1951, 3. 21. Nelson H. H. Graburn, “Eskimo Art: The Eastern Canadian Arctic,” in Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World, ed. Nelson H. H. Graburn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 42. 22. Charles A. Martijn, “Canadian Eskimo Carving in Historical Perspective,” Anthropos 59, no 3/4 (1964): 564. 23. These texts would have been accessible to the widest possible audience of Inuit artists and craftspeople, as syllabic literacy was widespread throughout many communities in what is now known as Nunavut and Nunavik by the mid-­twentieth century. The introduction of the syllabic reading and writing system is credited to missionary Rev. James Peck. Following the successful initiation of a syllabic writing system with the Cree, Peck created and introduced an Inuktitut version of syllabics throughout the North. Beginning in Cumberland Sound in 1894, Peck spent eight years translating texts into Inuktitut and teaching syllabic literacy to Inuit, which was then spread to other Inuit settlements across the Arctic. See Heather E. McGregor, “History of the Eastern Arctic: Foundations and Themes,” in Inuit Education and Schools in the Eastern Arctic (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 21. 24. Clifford P. Wilson to C. J. G. Molson, February 11, 1949, c10 d1 024, cgcq. 25. Inuit cribbage boards were exquisitely carved, often elaborately constructed pieces featuring engraved or relief-­carved Arctic animals and camp scenes, hidden compartments, and fanciful decorative pegs. The boards were so popular that even today, numerous examples fill museum drawers in Arctic collections in Canada and internationally. 86 

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26. Edmund Carpenter, Frederic Horsman Varley and Robert Joseph Flaherty, Eskimo (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), 43. 27. For example, the Ian Lindsay Collection, now primarily housed in the Winnipeg Art Gallery, contains several of examples of these miniature stone “totem poles,” purchased between 1948 and 1950. 28. Ingo Hessel, Inuit Art: An Introduction (Vancouver, BC: Douglas and McIntyre, 1998), 30; Darlene Coward Wight, The First Passionate Collector, 105, cat. no. 27n. 29. James Houston, Sanayaksak: Eskimo Handicrafts (Montreal: Canadian Handicrafts Guild, 1951), 11. 30. Hessel, Inuit Art, 30. 31. I am indebted to Molly Lee for her observation — ​­mentioned in passing in a 1987 essay by Nelson Graburn — ​­of the similarity between the appearance of anac catalogs and Sanajaksat, which led me to research the connection between anac and Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (diand), leading to the discovery of ongoing correspondence between Deputy Commissioner R. A. Gibson, and anac Clearing House manager D. L. Burrus in 1949. The mention of Lee’s observation can be found in Nelson H. H. Graburn, “The Discovery of Inuit Art: James Houston, ‘Animateur,’ “ Inuit Art Quarterly 2, no. 2 (spring 1987): 3–4. 32. In addition, Burrus attached a three-­page promotional document on the totem poles of the Alaskan Natives, as well as information on basketry and Chilkat blankets. D. L. Burrus to R. A. Gibson, November 4, 1949, file 255–1, pt.1, vol. 108, rg85, lac. 33. Based on Houston’s introduction to Sanajaksat, in which he stressed that all the objects depicted in the booklet were “purely Eskimo” and could therefore be made wherever materials were available — ​­whether or not Inuit in a particular region had been producing that style of work previously — ​­we know that Houston was not concerned about introducing various kinds of “Eskimo” art from one Arctic region to another. Though Houston does not specify the regional origins of any of the objects, several items are illustrated in the booklet that Houston would have knowingly introduced from one region of the Arctic to another, such as grass basketry and goose wing brushes. By encouraging Inuit to copy from widely dispersed groups in the early years of the handicrafts experiments, Houston ignored the significance of regional and cultural diversity among the Inuit, at least as far as artistic production. This supports my thesis that Houston willingly introduced miniature totem poles to parts of the Arctic where he had never seen real totem poles erected, under the belief that they were “purely Eskimo” and native to Alaskan Inuit, and therefore could be made wherever materials were available. 34. Goetz, Development, 17. 35. Helga Goetz, “Inuit Art: A History of Government Involvement,” in In the Shadow of the Sun: Perspectives on Contemporary Native Art, ed. Canadian Museum of Civilization (Hull, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1993), 362. 36. Goetz, “Inuit Art,” 362; Goetz, Development, 20. “ H ooked F orever on P rimitive P eoples ”  

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37. In addition to these criticisms, complaints came from government agents on multiple points. One government official particularly objected to Houston’s illustration of a hunter stalking a musk ox. The musk ox was a protected animal under the Game Ordinance, and the government had been trying for years to enforce conservation laws in the North, without much success. The government’s frustration over the hunting of protected species is clear in an excerpt from an “open letter” to the Inuit written by the director of the Northwest Territories and Yukon Branch of the Department of the Interior, O. S. Finnie, in 1924: “The Government and the Police say that the people must not kill musk-­ox. If any more are killed the Government will be very angry. Traders will not buy musk-­ox skins. The Government and the Police are the true friends of the Eskimos. The Eskimos should do as they say because it is right. The Government wishes the Eskimos to be well and happy.” This letter and other attempts like it to curtail musk-­ox hunting had done little to curb the practice among the Inuit over the years, especially in remote and isolated areas, and as late as 1949, western Arctic officials made complaints that the Inuit did not follow regulations, or appreciate the need for conservation. In light of this, it is understandable that the illustration received criticism for any reference “that might conceivably convey to the Eskimos that they can now kill musk ox.” Goetz, Development, 15. 38. Goetz, Development, 17. 39. Ernest S. Burch Jr., “Canadian Inuit Culture 1800–1950,” in Canadian Museum of Civilization, In the Shadow of the Sun, 305. Nelson H. H. Graburn recorded that in Salluit, an Inuk had told him that before soapstone was in regular use for carvings, in the early 1940s, he had carved some souvenirs out of a used soapstone pot when he had run out of ivory. The Hudson’s Bay Company would not purchase them at the time, but he sold some to whalers and traded others to sailors; subsequently, other Inuit also began carving soapstone figurines for trade. Graburn, “Eskimo Art,” 42–43. 40. Goetz, Development, 13. 41. Wight, “Handicrafts Experiment,” 71. 42. James Houston, “In Search of Contemporary Eskimo Art,” Canadian Art 9, no. 3 (1952): 104. 43. George Swinton, Sculpture of the Inuit, 3rd ed. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1999), 142. 44. Gradually, too, each community developed recognizable traits in stone carving, based in part on the different colors and veins of stone in local quarries, which came to be associated with art production in particular areas. Large-­scale antler and whalebone works would also gain favor in the southern art market over the subsequent decades. Yet when many species of whales were declared endangered in 1972, the international market for whalebone pieces dropped dramatically. 45. Not all collectors were enthusiastic about this new development. Some maintained that the change in scale would fundamentally alter the character of the work, and other critics of the “new” art form, such as Edmund Carpenter, denigrated the 88 

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shift in materials and size as being the products “Western” influence. Carpenter often repeated the assertion that Inuit art was not “Eskimo” at all, saying stone carving and printmaking were “White” and “inauthentic.” Edmund Carpenter, Eskimo Realities (New York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, 1973), 195. 46. These changes included Inuit settlement in communities around trading posts; the introduction of the federal day school program, a northern residential school system related to the southern Indian residential schools; forced High Arctic relocations; and numerous other shifts in Inuit lives brought about in the mid-­twentieth century. 47. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-­Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 242. 48. James Houston, “Eskimo Sculptors,” Beaver (June 1951): 34–39. 49. Houston, “In Search of Contemporary Eskimo Art.” 50. Kristen Potter, “James Houston, Armchair Tourism, and the Marketing of Inuit Art,” in Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories, ed. W. Jackson Rushing III (New York: Routledge, 1999), 42. 51. Christine Lalonde, “Status 2000: Presenting Contemporary Inuit Art in the Gallery Setting,” in On Aboriginal Representation in the Gallery, ed. Lydia Jessup and Shannon Bagg (Hull, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2002), 195. 52. Houston, “In Search of Contemporary Eskimo Art,” 99. 53. Houston, “In Search of Contemporary Eskimo Art,” 99. 54. Houston, “Contemporary Art of the Eskimo,” Studio 147, no. 731 (February 1954): 44. 55. Houston, “In Search of Contemporary Eskimo Art,” 100. 56. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 62. 57. Houston, “Contemporary Art of the Eskimo,” 43. 58. Houston, “Contemporary Art of the Eskimo,” 44. 59. James A. Houston, Canadian Eskimo Art, exhibition catalog (Ottawa: Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, 1955), 7. 60. Ruth B. Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1998), 7. 61. James Houston, “Handicrafts,” Eskimo Bulletin 1, no. 2 (June 1953): 2. 62. Houston, “Handicrafts,” 1. 63. Akeeaktashuk, who had been relocated to Craig Harbour. 64. Judy Hall, “Charles Gimpel: Early Promotion of Inuit Art in Europe,” Inuit Art Quarterly 24, no. 1 (spring 2009): 34–42. 65. For a discussion of those “famous” carvers whose work appears in the Ian Lindsay Collection, see Wight, “Handicrafts Experiment,” 85–86. 66. Henry Strub, “New Books on the Arts: Canada Eskimo Art,” Canadian Art 12, no. 1 (1954): 32. 67. Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 242. “ H ooked F orever on P rimitive P eoples ”  

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68. Martijn, “Canadian Eskimo Carving,” 577. 69. Martijn, “Canadian Eskimo Carving,” 577. 70. Marybelle Mitchell, “Social, Economic, and Political Transformation among Canadian Inuit from 1950–1988,” in Canadian Museum of Civilization, In the Shadow of the Sun, 343. 71. Ruth B. Phillips, “The Turn of the Primitive: Modernism and Indigeneity in Settler Art Histories” (paper presented at Annotating Art’s Histories: Exiles, Diasporas, and Strangers, Institute of International Visual Arts, London, July 6–7 2006), 3. 72. “Cape Dorset Named Most ‘Artistic’ Municipality,” CBC.ca, February 13, 2006, https://web.archive.org/web/20080629235818/http://www.cbc.ca:80/story/arts /national/2006/02/13/report-­artistic-­capedorset.html.

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BILL ANTHES

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MAKING PICTURES ON BASKETS Modern Indian Painting in an Expanded Field Indian women all make you pictures, you call them, we make pictures on basket. I tell you about pictures. ​­H E R N A N D A | quoted in Emil Paulicek Steffa, “Tales of a Desert Indian”

The pictorial arts — ​­painting in watercolor or ink and drawing in pencil — ​­were a novel form introduced in Native communities in the American Southwest and southern plains during the last years of the nineteenth century. Painting and drawing were certainly “modern,” in that these artworks by artists in New Mexico, Oklahoma, and elsewhere were produced with manufactured materials acquired through encounters with non-­Native anthropologists, collectors, and other patrons and mentors and were made to be viewed by audiences far from Indian Country.1 Paintings and drawings by Native artists served no ceremonial or economic purpose in Native communities, although they were effective in communicating information about Native cultures and values to non-­Native viewers. They were simultaneously documents of “autoethnography” and portable intercultural aesthetic commodities.2 In the American Southwest, anthropologists commissioned artworks depicting ceremonies and other cultural practices. Early twentieth-­century paintings by Native artists, perhaps betraying their origins in illustrations made for ethnographers (revealing artists’ early exposure to commercial illustrations and promotional images for the region’s burgeoning tourist industry), were characterized by picturesque ethnographic subjects, depicted with clear outlines filled in with flat areas of color, an absence of background, and spatial illusions effected by

Fred Kabotie, Two Bird Dancers with Costumed Audience, ca. 1920s. Watercolor on brown paper, 19.5 × 12.5 in. (49.5 × 31.75 cm). Hartley Burr Alexander Collection of American Indian Artwork, Ella Strong Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, California.

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the repetition and grouping of figures rather than by chiaroscuro modeling or dramatic foreshortening (figure 3.1). Particularly in the Southwest and southern plains, a set of institutions that trained and supported Native artists — ​­mostly male — ​­was in place by the 1920s. This art world was shaped largely by the unequal relationship between Indian artists and their white patrons, as was the style in which most successful artists painted. It featured stylized and sentimental depictions of the past, with little attention to the modern experiences of Native people.3 An unintended irony has come to inform the term given to this art by its promoters: “traditional Indian painting.” Prominent among these were Dorothy Dunn, who established the first official studio program at the Santa Fe Indian School in 1932, and the influential Native artist-­teachers who taught at Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma, from the 1930s through the 1970s, including Acee Blue Eagle (Creek), Woody Crumbo (Potawatomi), and Dick West (Southern Cheyenne). Both programs produced several significant artists, whose legacies define Native American art in the middle twentieth century.4 One narrative of Native American modernism has highlighted the break with 92 

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this style and its institutional supports by artists such as Oscar Howe in the 1950s. In the first part of this chapter, I sketch, briefly, how artists such as Howe conceived of a Native American modernism in opposition to the “traditional style” of Native American painting that had become established by the mid-­ twentieth century. This story of Native American modernism, however, in privileging painting and drawing (and to a degree sculpture) to the exclusion of the diverse range of Native North American cultural production, highlights genres that are easily recognized as modernist. Such art histories also reinscribe a Western notion of the individual creator, usually male, and the innovative, paradigm-­ shifting breakthrough.5 In this context, exclusive attention to painting might reproduce the shortcomings of art historical narratives of modernism that a focus on Native cultural production might otherwise hope to critique.6 Privileging visual or “fine” arts over “crafts” and other expressive forms remains a problematic hierarchy for Native North American art histories, the history of Native North American modernism no less so. The modernity of a diverse range of locally valued objects as well as that of craft and souvenir production in ceramics and textiles — ​­genres, most often produced by women, that tend to fall beyond the pale of modernism — ​­remains unaccounted for and therefore less visible in the present as a resource and legacy for contemporary Native artists. In the second half of this chapter, then, I suggest how this narrative might be complicated by considering painting as just one aesthetic practice in an expanded field. I use as my case study a collection of baskets made by Cahuilla and other Native female weavers from the inland desert valleys of Southern California, a collection assembled by Emil Paulicek Steffa while he was working in the region as a water resources surveyor in the early twentieth century. Steffa collected several hundred baskets and recorded extensive documentation, including information on materials and techniques as well as the names of weavers — ​­rare information for what are often termed tourist arts. The collection and its documentation tell a story of economic and environmental change in the region and evidence the response of local Native artists to a shifting landscape. I argue that considering painting in such an expanded field would enable a more nuanced understanding of twentieth-­century Native American art as a set of intercultural and generically heterogeneous aesthetic commodities that respond to a broader context of societal modernization. By the early 1930s, drawings and paintings by Native American artists had been exhibited as “art, not ethnology” (in the words of the organizers of the Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts held in 1931 at Grand Central Art Galleries) M aking P ictures on B askets 

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in locations as distant as New York and Venice, Italy.7 Fred Kabotie, a Hopi artist who exhibited at the 1931 Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts and at the 1932 Biennale di Venezia, began making drawings and paintings, along with other young Native students from the western United States, while studying at the Santa Fe Indian School, a federal Indian boarding school in New Mexico’s capital. In 1918, Elizabeth DeHuff, wife of superintendent John DeHuff, began an unofficial art program at the school, inviting Native students into the family home and supplying paper, pencils, watercolors, and encouragement to make pictures based on traditional subjects. Similar informal programs flourished in the early twentieth century in other locales. Many of these early mentors and patrons worked against the grain of popular sentiments and federal policies intended to speed the assimilation of Native peoples into the American mainstream. Encouraging young Natives to express themselves as artists with valuable — ​­if racialized — ​­Native subjectivities ran counter to the Indian school curriculum, which was designed to train students for future lives as agricultural laborers, domestics, or manual tradesmen. This informal art curriculum could be dangerous for its promoters. John DeHuff, for example, was censured for his wife’s activities. Nevertheless, the work of Elizabeth DeHuff and other early mentors and patrons introduced the radical idea that traditional cultures could have continuing relevance for Native peoples in the twentieth century, and perhaps for whites as well. This radical idea was foundational to an American formation of modernist primitivism that flourished in the years between the First and Second World Wars, as avant-­garde artists and intellectuals redefined — ​­contra government policy and church-­related initiatives — ​­Native cultures as a unique and vital component of an autochthonous American cultural heritage, distinct from European traditions. Northeastern bohemians took to summering in Taos and Santa Fe, and some, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Mabel Dodge, and Raymond Jonson, took up permanent residence. Other visual artists and writers, such as Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Bellows, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, George L. K. Morris, and Mary Austin, broke with academic representation and concomitant cultural hierarchies by appropriating Native aesthetic idioms, pictorial motifs, and musical rhythms. As modernists they claimed an affinity that enabled them to break free from stultifying traditions and parochial notions of art and identity.8

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Oscar Howe’s Native American Modernism Yanktonai Dakota Oscar Howe came from Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota to the Santa Fe Indian School in 1933 to study art in Dunn’s studio program. Under Dunn, the young artist mastered the mode developed by Kabotie and other early twentieth-­century innovators, which has come to be known as the “studio style,” or “traditional Indian painting.” The studio style was characterized by the depiction of subjects drawn from what might be thought of as an “ethnographic present,” in an illustrational style that Dunn and other supporters regarded as “authentic” Native American art. Yet this “traditional” style was also modern; the works not only were produced in new material (pencil, watercolor, and ink on paper) but were also conspicuously not rooted in specific or local indigenous visual traditions. Rather, the art was “pan-­Indian,” a byproduct of the off-­reservation, intertribal educational environment of institutions such as the Santa Fe Indian School and others that encouraged and supported artists. Howe later remembered the pedagogy at the studio, which, while lacking in overt direction (thought to be unnecessary because Native students were assumed to be “natural” artists), still encouraged the culturally diverse young artists to adopt a standard formula: There were no lectures at all on anything, not even hints of instructions. We weren’t allowed to do research. The teachers . . . said: “Start painting.” I stayed there three years, but I never heard a word of instruction. The idea to figure out one’s own way of doing drawings or detail work was . . . quite a challenge for me. I depended on my knowing of Sioux culture and things of symbolic meaning. It seems that we all did the same technique, whether he or she was a Navajo, Hopi, Apache, Sioux, Kiowa, Cheyenne or what.9 Perhaps more than any other Native American artist, Oscar Howe’s biography mirrors the history of Indian painting in the twentieth century, from the institutionalization of the traditional style in the 1930s to its supersession by more innovative and individual styles after the Second World War. Howe was born during the reservation period, a time when Native cultures in North America were in crisis because their communities had been confined to meager slices of marginal land. Traditional spiritual practices, languages and cultures were repressed and persecuted. The Native population was at its nadir and was the target of the federal government’s massive assimilation campaign. During a period when traditional arts were collapsing under the influence of M aking P ictures on B askets 

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Americanization and the dire poverty that afflicted reservations, Oscar Howe’s bold artistic innovations are all the more remarkable. As a young artist Howe excelled in the traditional style. While still a student, his works were exhibited with those of other Santa Fe Indian School students at the Brooklyn Museum and in San Francisco, Paris, and London. After completing his studies under Dunn in Santa Fe, Howe taught art at the Pierre Indian School, in South Dakota, and undertook commissions for a division of the federal Works Progress Administration. He saw active duty in North Africa and Europe during the Second World War and met his future wife, Heidi Hemple, while stationed in Biedelkopf, Germany. After the war, Howe’s paintings were regular prizewinners in the annual Contemporary American Indian Painting Exhibition held at the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and elsewhere. With the assistance of the 1944 Serviceman’s Readjustment Act, or the gi Bill, Howe completed a bachelor degree at Dakota Wesleyan University in 1952 and a master of fine arts degree at the University of Oklahoma in 1954. As Mark Andrew White has demonstrated, Howe was joined at the University of Oklahoma by other Native veterans who were taking advantage of the gi Bill, such as Dick West (Southern Cheyenne) and Chief Terry Saul (Choctaw/Chickasaw). They were trained by a young faculty in the thrall of modernism, especially Mexican muralism and European cubism, expressionism, and surrealism. Moreover, Howe and his fellow students would have had access to a collection of American modernist painting assembled in 1946, under the auspices of the U.S. State Department, for exhibition as part of U.S. cultural diplomacy abroad. Advancing American Painting included works in a variety of styles by artists such as Ben Shahn and Adolph Gottlieb. As White notes, the exhibition became a political football “when conservative members of Congress learned that not only had the State Department purchased the paintings with public money but that some of the artists included had communist sympathies.” The exhibition was recalled, and the works were sold at public auction in 1948. Several paintings were acquired for the University of Oklahoma Museum of Art, where they were regularly exhibited and had a recognizable influence on the student work in an art department steeped in modernist aesthetics.10 In an undated work, Woman Buffalo Dreamer (plate 1), probably produced during Howe’s studies at the university, he integrated surrealist form and Dakota content. As White writes, “Howe demonstrated an awareness of the elongated forms, desolate plains, and timeless environments of Dalí, Yves Tanguy, and Alberto Giacometti. The subject evokes the visionary and oneric subject matter of the Surrealists, but within a Native context. 96 

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A buffalo dreamer was usually a man of exceptional visionary ability who helped the tribe locate bison, ensuring the survival of the people. A woman with such abilities was extraordinarily rare, according to oral tradition, and Howe attempted to suggest the nature of her gift through the strange scene around her.” 11 By the mid-­1950s the notion of a “traditional” style was becoming increasingly contentious. Non-­Native audiences and institutions, including the Phil­ brook, continued to promote the illustrative style associated with Dunn’s studio, Bacone College, and other centers. But Howe and other artists argued that the categories non-­Natives had created for Native American art had become irrelevant to Native artists’ lives and work. In 1958, Howe entered his innovative expressionistic painting Umine Wacipi: War and Peace Dance in the 13th Annual Contemporary American Indian Painting Exhibition at the Philbrook Art Center. As a prizewinner at several previous Philbrook Indian annuals, Howe was shocked when a panel of Indian and white jurors disqualified his inventive and abstract painting from the competition, explaining that it was “a fine painting . . . but not Indian.” 12 When his artwork was excluded from judging, Howe sent an angry letter to Philbrook curator Jeanne Snod­grass. “Whoever said, that my paintings are not in traditional Indian style has poor knowledge of Indian art indeed,” he wrote. “There is much more to Indian art than pretty, stylized pictures. . . . Are we to be held back forever with one phase of Indian painting, that is the most common way?” 13 Howe’s famous letter is widely cited as a central document in the history of Native American modernism in the United States. A key statement by an ascendant Native voice, it stands as a precursor of contemporary Native artists and critics who argue that indigenous perspectives and epistemologies should be fundamental to any interpretation of Native artists’ work.14 As a mature artist, Howe maintained that his paintings represented a personal aesthetic evolution of northern Plains visual practices — ​­specifically citing Dakota abstract quill embroidery and hide painting — ​­rather than a borrowing of modern styles.15 This position — ​­perhaps strategic and ­rhetorical — ​ ­distinguished Howe’s sense of his own practice from that of artists like Dick West, who advocated aesthetic crossbreeding of Native and modern (i.e., European art historical) forms, or George Morrison (Chippewa), who embraced modernist aesthetics and fashioned an identity as an artist foremost, without racialized qualifiers.16 Howe sought to opt out of the European tradition, claiming an identity as a Yanktonai Dakota modernist. While it is true that Howe, like West and Saul, benefited from instruction by University of M aking P ictures on B askets 

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Oklahoma faculty who were versed in modernist aesthetic theory and technique, he claimed to be developing an abstract art that evolved not from European cubism and abstraction, but from specific Indigenous sources. Howe’s style, developed by the mid-­1950s, marked the culmination of his conscious engagement with a Plains tradition of abstraction painted on animal hides, tipis, clothing, and winter count robes, albeit filtered through and inflected by modernism. As Howe explained it, Dakota abstract art was centuries old, but it had been overshadowed since the early twentieth century by the dominance of the pan-­Indian narrative style promoted by Dunn and other white champions of Native painting. Howe rediscovered Dakota abstraction as a resource, and as a modernist artist, he reinvested its practice with cultural and personal significance.

Another Native Modernism An alternative narrative of Native American modernism might consider painting as just one aesthetic practice in a field that includes not only the “traditional” artists and institutions against which Howe had railed, but also contemporary craft and souvenir productions in ceramics and textiles. Baskets and other craft and souvenir arts were most often produced by women and have tended to be excluded from histories of modernism.17 Elizabeth Hutchinson offers an important corrective in her book The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915. She writes, “For much of the twentieth century Native American art has been separated into studies of mediums associated with Western academic traditions (often referred to as ‘modern’ Native American art) and handicrafts (or ‘traditional’ arts). Books exploring the relationship between Native American art and mainstream aesthetic trends have primarily addressed Indian painting. They have also focused on art from the interwar years or later.” To correct for the effects of this bias, Hutchinson suggests, “Looking at an earlier period, when the hierarchy between art and craft in the mainstream art world was less stable, allows us to recognize the modernity of a wider variety of Native objects, including those made for pure aesthetic contemplation, those made for use, and those made for circulation outside indigenous communities.” 18 Emil Steffa assembled his collection of baskets in the early twentieth century, as rapid agricultural and industrial development encroached on the small reservations set aside by executive order in the 1870s for scattered inland desert Native communities, or bands.19 In addition to his meticulously cata98 

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loged collection of baskets, Steffa also authored two unpublished manuscripts illustrated with his own photographs — ​­“Tales of a Desert Indian” (n.d.) and “Basket Makers of the Coachella Valley” (1927). These offer insight into his relationships with the women weavers whose work he purchased, as well as the changing economy and culture of the inland desert valleys of Southern California in the early twentieth century. After graduating from Pomona College in 1899, Steffa worked as a water resources surveyor in the burgeoning cities along the southern foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, which were developing as centers for agriculture, particularly citrus production, and other industries. Steffa also made collecting trips farther east, into what he described as the “wonderful below-­sea-­level agricultural empire of Southern California.” 20 The Coachella and Imperial Valleys, as well as the areas surrounding the Salton Sea, were in the midst of development by private interests, assisted by government policies and spending. Steffa’s collection and manuscripts allow for a close examination of the production of basketry in communities whose cultural, economic, and environmental systems had been affected for generations by successive waves of Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. settlers. They also reflect the revival of traditional art practices and craft technologies that was underway at the beginning of the twentieth century. They reveal Native artists as historical actors and highlight Native arts as deliberately produced intercultural commodities and as individual aesthetic and economic responses to a changing world. A focus on the inland desert weavers places them in an emerging intercultural history of the American West (with parallels to larger global patterns that the authors in this volume explore in varied contexts) and links their art to an emerging body of scholarship on settler colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial visual arts and their markets. Thinking about these art forms in terms of movements from environments to networks, and makers to markets, can highlight the role of Native American cultural production in the imaging of a regional identity for Southern California in the early twentieth century. Steffa’s “Basket Makers of the Coachella Valley” established the backdrop against which he interpreted the work of the women weavers whose baskets he collected. He described the Native population’s adaptation to the harsh desert climate and the basket makers’ art as the expression of their relationship to land and place. The early history of these people is one of simple wants with the means of supplying them close at hand. Nature placed the means of livelihood

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at their very door, but though they were present, it took infinite ingenuity, patience, and wisdom to separate the good from the bad, to shape them to fit their needs. This the Indian did. Through ages of toil and suffering they built up a system (if you please to call it such) that not only supplied their bodily wants, but also gave opportunity to indulge the artistic and temperamental side of their being. No one thing so completely combines and exemplifies these facts as their basketry. Usefulness and bodily convenience always, but ever a line or a curve to satisfy the longing for adornment that is inherent in all of the human race. Out in the sun scorched desert, where death lurked at every hand, “in the places that God forgot,” these people tore out the secrets of nature and turned them to their needs. The beans of the mesquite, the seeds of other desert shrubs, the leaves and even stalks of the cacti contributed to stay their hunger and feed their bodies. The stalks and bark of not more than four plants made it possible for them to produce baskets that are works of art. In them the soul of the maker is set forth, her ideals, her strivings, the successes of herself and her tribe, her yearnings for, and conception of the infinite, all find a place and are reproduced by the nimble fingers of the basket maker. For her and hers the waste places “blossomed like the rose.” To be sure it had its thorns and many of them, yet it also had its sweetness, and of that fragrance the Indian partook and was happy.21 Steffa noted the development of large-­scale agriculture in the region, made possible by automated irrigation and paving the way for increased white settlement in the desert: “But where once were broad plains of windswept desert brush and barren flats, we now see row and groves of trees, patches of cotton, fields of alfalfa, vineyards of early table grapes, acres upon acres of cantaloups [sic], tomatoes and onions, groves of grapefruit, gardens of the stately date palm, and towns and villages of the white man. Over all floats the incessant chug, chug, of the gas engine and the whir of electric motors, as they raise the life-­giving waters that have made this change possible.” 22 Agriculture and development gave rise to a new intercultural landscape, dotted with reservations on small parcels of once open land, as young Native men headed off to work in the fields. Steffa took a particular interest in water resources, noting the existence of natural springs, as well as old Indian wells — ​­now abandoned — ​­and that water was now supplied by modern wells drilled at government expense to serve relocated Native communities. He also noted a pattern of outmi100 

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gration and urbanization: “To be sure some of the younger generation go to mingle with our cosmopolitan population in other parts of the country and to the public are lost sight of as Indians, becoming simply members of that vast mixed unnamed class that is a class by itself, and yet the fact remains that that the Indian population is getting less and less.” 23 The nostalgia of Steffa’s narrative is striking. Even as mentors, patrons, and other promoters of Native art in the Southwest and Northeast championed a revitalized “traditionalism” appropriate to modern times (and appropriate to the demographic rebounding in Indian country, after its late nineteenth-­ century nadir), Steffa clung to a notion of Native disappearance. Perhaps this was understandable, given the pace of development as water resources were marshaled and arid lands were conscripted into service to feed a growing population of new arrivals to the state. Looking around the changed landscape of the inland valleys, Steffa could only foresee the end of the line for the Chemehuevi, Cahuilla, and other desert peoples. In his undated manuscript “Tales of a Desert Indian,” his informant Hernanda, a weaver from the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians (in the Palm Springs area, approximately one hundred miles east of Los Angeles), voices the following eulogy: “Sometimes we go to the great towns of the white man. But, oh, they are not for us! We come back to the desert, content with that which we know. Not unhappy, but sad because we know that our time is past. We are the children of the desert! As the desert that we have known will soon be no more, we too will be forgotten. The places that knew us will know us not. The land of the Cahuilla is no more.” 24 Steffa also wrote extensively of the possibility that the areas below sea level inhabited by the inland desert Native communities might flood and become once again an inland sea as in prehistoric times. Indeed, Steffa seems to conflate the purely historical, political, and social factors that threatened these lands and their people with the unstoppable forces of nature. For him, the loss is inevitable. The final photograph he included in his manuscript depicts an adobe bungalow in ruins, its sun-­baked clay blocks returning to the earth. Steffa’s nostalgia and primitivism notwithstanding, the baskets themselves exhibit a good measure of aesthetic self-­referentiality, even playfulness. Abstract (and presumably esoteric motifs Indigenous in origin) coexist with English text and presumably non-­Native and novel pictorial elements, including arrowheads, mission bells, palm trees, eagles, horned toads, deer, and the swastika (or as he terms it, a “good luck symbol”), which nevertheless played to expectations and communicated across linguistic boundaries in the interM aking P ictures on B askets 

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Unknown Chemehuevi artist, Basket, ca. 1914. Juncus, deer grass, and sumac, 12 × 26 in. (30 × 66 cm). Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, California. Gift of Mr. Emil P. Steffa, P1326.

FIGURE 3.2 

cultural marketplace of the inland Southern California deserts. Particular baskets thematize their own manufacture and purchase. As Hernanda told Steffa, “Indian women all make you pictures, you call them, we make pictures on basket. I tell you about pictures.” 25 One basket in Steffa’s collection, a thirteen-­ inch-­tall olla-­shaped form that Steffa identified by the Cahuilla term ka-­va-­ mal, features schematic human figures representing the collector and his wife. He wrote, “The Indian woman who made the basket had known me for some time and laughingly assured me that it was my picture. On another side of the basket is the figure of a woman. This the maker said was my wife.” 26 Steffa described a large, flat-­bottomed, hemispherical coiled basket by an unknown Chemehuevi artist (figure 3.2) as “the largest basket in the author’s collection and one of the most profusely decorated and finely made.” Twelve inches high, the basket flares out to a twenty-­six-­inch diameter rim. The inner surface of the basket features a complex pictorial of a landscape populated by diverse animal and plant life, including “a deer upon the background of a mountain and the stately outline of a palm tree,” a rattlesnake’s tail, the snake’s head emerging from behind a mountain near the basket’s rim, as well as sundry tree branches, flowers, and a desert tortoise. The bottom of the basket features a five-­star or five-­petal flower motif, outlined in several shades. Steffa wrote, “The wonderful smoothness and blending of color in the finished basket is not often found.” 27 102 

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Other landscape pictorial baskets in Steffa’s collection feature hunting scenes with a silhouetted deer and a hunter with bow and arrow, traversing mountain ranges. One basket includes a sailing ship woven by a young student at the Sherman Indian School in the nearby city of Riverside, a seascape likely based on magazine or advertising illustrations. On another basket, a seemingly abstract motif was interpreted by Steffa as representing the water level of the Salton Sea, which, Steffa reported, the maker had seen rise to its highest level, then recede.28 Another example, a large, restricted, hemispherical coiled basket with a flat base, which Steffa termed a to-­vig-­nil, or “gift basket,” attributed to Chemehuevi weaver Magdalena Augustine, is described in clearly primitivist terms (plate 2). Noting that the individual motifs are not organized as a landscape, Steffa praised Augustine’s basket as a “marvel of workmanship and accuracy.” He wrote, “The decorations are typical of the Indian. It has a wild beauty of the strikingly bold type, which is possible only to a mind that still has ideas primitive to the race and is not overcome by modern influences. The horse, the butterfly, the rugged mountain peaks are the conceptions of a simple, wild mind. The crosses on the mountain peaks are the expression of an idea, whose suggestion can be traced to the Mission Padres.” 29 Here, Steffa distinguishes between “conceptions of a simple, wild mind” and “ideas” suggested by the Spanish missionizers, such “ideas” perhaps being comparable to the polyglot images that characterize baskets made for intercultural trade. The collector praised the weaver’s artistry and technical ability, but also located her genius in racialized knowledge and modes of expression. For Steffa, as for many commentators and supporters, including Dorothy Dunn, this was the essence of the Native artist: someone possessed of a natural creativity whose work expressed a racialized subjectivity. Yet this view also contains an ambivalence around the idea of the modern and Native artists’ capacity for modernism, understood as an artist’s self-­conscious relationship to time and to history. It was as if, Steffa seems to suggest, the weaver’s genius lay in her ability to resist time, the “ideas” of the padres and those of later purchasers. “Surrounded as she is by the modern influences,” he wrote, “the maker of this basket still has within the depths of her soul, bold ideas of a wild beauty that find expression in her baskets. She is, if not the best, at least one of the best, basket makers of her time.” 30 Steffa wrestled in his manuscript with the ambivalent effects of the new market he foresaw. He recognized that it perpetuated an art-­making tradition, even as it motivated artists to adapt forms and create new motifs that would M aking P ictures on B askets 

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appeal to contemporary demands and other literacies, and he believed that he could distinguish designs purported to be of the “old school . . . so old that if they had any meaning it has been lost” from the “pattern made simply to look pretty . . . the outcome of a desire for something new . . . [s]omething to please the eye and the prospective purchaser.” At the same time, Steffa credited the weavers themselves with innovations, recognizing in them individual creativity befitting an artist. Ultimately, however, he fell back on a racialized narrative of cultural transformation in the face of larger historical and sociological forces. “Commercialism,” he wrote, “was the great incentive of the basket maker to leave the old time-­worn ideas and get something new. It is not by any means an improvement on the old patterns, but rather the result of the resistless [restless?] change that is gradually overcoming the entire Indian race. The old-­time-­honored patterns are becoming scarcer as the years go by. A good one is a joy to the collector and is greatly prized.” In Steffa’s view, racialized cultural practices yielded to the new, innovative, and individual “works of art . . . pages of recorded thought from the mind of the maker.” 31 Steffa was relying on a modernist (and Eurocentric) notion of what distinguishes a “utilitarian” object from a “work of art.” Moreover, he echoed others in the 1920s who noted the transformations in craft forms brought about by the adoption of manufactured “utensils” in place of the handmade. As these changes occurred in a shared modern American consumer culture, they also had the effect of transforming traditional modes of making into “works of art,” or intercultural aesthetic commodities. Steffa, however, seems to have taken a less negative view of this transformation, recognizing the weavers as autonomous individual creators and artists. Steffa also continued to link basket making, as a gendered practice, to nineteenth-­century notions of women’s domestic pursuits: “Basketry is today the Indian woman’s fancy work. Removed as it now is from the realm of necessity, it has become more and more an art and as such is being sadly neglected.” 32 And if the basket-­weaving tradition was “neglected” by the desert tribes because it had lost its utilitarian function in the changing landscape, it was also underappreciated by the “purchasers.” Tourists and other uninformed consumers were drawn — ​­perhaps as the weavers themselves were — ​­to the “pattern made simply to look pretty,” rather than to the venerable designs of the “old school,” which expressed the “racial genius” of the “primitive” artist. Thus Steffa also distinguished between the “collector” and the mere “purchaser” — ​­bringing into play a hierarchical scale of connoisseurship linked to class and educational refinement. There is further ambivalence in this formulation, for while Steffa acknowledged the 104 

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individual innovation and creativity of the artists, implicit in his narrative was a shift from racialized cultural practices (“The old-­time-­honored patterns [which] are becoming scarcer as the years go by”). He felt the loss deeply, as did Hernanda, whose lament he reported: “The places that knew us will know us not. The land of the Cahuilla is no more.” Unfortunately, we have no access to the voices of the weavers other than those filtered through Steffa’s narrative. Indeed, “Hernanda” merely gives voice to ideas Steffa expressed elsewhere. Unlike Howe’s letter to the Philbrook, Steffa’s writings contain no directly verbalized artists’ perspective on their own negotiations of the new intercultural markets and the California desert valleys. Yet the words Steffa ascribed to Hernanda (“Indian women all make you pictures, you call them, we make pictures on basket”) nevertheless suggest that the weavers who captured Steffa’s attention in the early twentieth century were consciously and deliberately remaking their work into intercultural commodities that they considered art. But without the weavers’ voices — ​­and their perspectives on their art and their place in time, history, and a changing landscape — ​­the only self-­conscious modernist in Steffa’s manuscript is Steffa himself. As rich as Steffa’s collection and manuscripts are as resources, the very limited access they afford to the weavers’ voices and perspectives exemplifies the limitations of the archive for histories of Native modernisms. The women who made the works of art in Steffa’s collection are inaccessible in their silence. Oscar Howe’s carefully negotiated position — ​­his eloquent anger — ​­regarding the past and the present is a resource for Native artists today in a way that the women in Steffa’s manuscript cannot be. Their modernity appears only in Steffa’s transcriptions of their conversations and exchanges, which took place in what he described as an “incomprehensible” mix of English, Spanish, and Native languages. In another sense, however, the weavers’ artworks are an archive for those who can read them. The baskets are a precious resource today for a new generation of weavers, who are working once again to revitalize the art form and to ensure that it will persist for future generations. The California Indian Basket Weavers Association works to perpetuate the art through education and collaborates with public agencies to preserve access to traditional materials on public and tribal lands, monitor land use and development, and discourage the use of harmful pesticides in vulnerable areas where traditional materials are gathered.33 And today, work in forms that have been classified as traditional arts or “handicrafts” is also a resource for contemporary Native AmerM aking P ictures on B askets 

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ican artists, much as it was for modernists of Howe’s generation. In Howe’s modernist art, the abstract quill embroidery and hide-­painting techniques traditionally practiced by women in Plains cultures was subsumed within the artist’s individual innovation, invisible to all but the most astute viewers. As Native artists reckon their relationship to time and tradition, the past remains present as a resource for negotiating a changing world. The baskets in Steffa’s collection also need to speak with all the force of Howe’s 1958 letter, which is justifiably seen today as a key document in the history of Native American modernism. But there are other documents of modernism if we can learn to read them. Histories of modernism have tended to draw distinctions between “modern” works made in relative isolation, such as the baskets produced by the weavers Steffa documented, and “modernist” art made in dialogue with metropolitan modes and discourses. But Howe’s abstractions, which he insisted he drew from Indigenous sources, suggest that Native modernisms are not so easily parsed. Howe’s innovative painting (along with sculpture and other modernist artworks by other Native artists in the twentieth century) might be more properly understood as one of the many art forms in an expanded field — ​­a field we should look at in its entirety, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of twentieth-­century Native North American art as an intercultural aesthetic commodity within the broader context of societal modernization and Native peoples’ roles within those complex histories. Notes 1. A distinction should be made here between painting and drawing as an intercultural art form in the Southwest and the pictorial arts practiced by Plains men — ​ ­commonly referred to as “ledger art” — ​­that developed from the male tradition of making historical and autobiographical records, traditionally on animal hide, and later on new surfaces such as bound ledgers, found or acquired through trade with white settler merchants and military men. While Plains ledger arts did later come to the notice of nonnative audiences, these visual records were made primarily to function as personal and community histories for the benefit of Plains peoples. See Janet Catherine Berlo, ed., Plains Indian Drawings, 1865–1935: Pages from a Visual History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996). 2. My use of the term “autoethnography” draws from David Penney and Lisa Roberts’s essay “America’s Pueblo Artists: Encounters on the Borderlands,” in Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories, ed. W. Jackson Rush­ing III (New York: Routledge, 1999), 21–38, which in turn borrows the term from

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Mary Louise Pratt’s influential work on travel writing. Pratt defines “autoethnography” as “instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms. If ethnographic texts are a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others, autoethnographic texts are those the others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations.” Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 7. 3. For an early critique, see J. J. Brody, Indian Painters and White Patrons (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971). Recent scholarship has taken a more nuanced view, emphasizing the complex positionality of artist and patron, and locating Native epistemologies and agency in early paintings. See Bruce Bernstein and W. Jackson Rushing, Modern by Tradition: American Indian Painting in the Studio Style, exhibition catalog (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995); J. J. Brody, Pueblo Indian Painting: Tradition and Modernism in New Mexico, 1900–1930 (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1997); Penney and Roberts, “America’s Pueblo Artists”; Bill Anthes, Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Aaron Fry, “Local Knowledge and Art Historical Methodology: A New Perspective on Awa Tsireh and the San Ildefonso Easel Painting Movement,” Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas 1 (spring 2008): 46–61; Michelle McGeough, Through Their Eyes: Indian Painting in Santa Fe, 1918–1945 (Santa Fe, NM: Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 2009); Sascha Scott, “Awa Tsireh and the Art of Subtle Resistance,” Art Bulletin 9, no. 3 (December 2013): 597–622. 4. See Margaret Archuleta and Rennard Strickland, Shared Visions: Native American Painters and Sculptors in the Twentieth Century (New York: New Press, 1991); Lydia L. Wyckoff, ed., Visions and Voices: Native American Painting from the Philbrook Museum of Art (Tulsa, OK: Philbrook Museum of Art, 1996); Mark Andrew White, ed., The James T. Bialac Native American Art Collection: Selected Works (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013). 5. The opening exhibition of the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., in 2004 reinforced this narrative, focusing on abstract painting by George Morrison (Chippewa) and sculpture in stone and metal by Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache). See Truman Lowe, ed., Native Modernism: The Art of George Morrison and Allan Houser (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005). 6. The resonance with the feminist critique of art history in the 1970s and 1980s should be apparent. For a useful introduction, see Thalia Gouma-­Peterson and Patricia Mathews, “The Feminist Critique of Art History,” Art Bulletin 69, no. 3 (September 1987): 326–57. 7. Molly Mullin, Culture in the Marketplace: Gender, Art, and Value in the American Southwest (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), esp. 91–127; Jessica L. Horton, “A Cloudburst in Venice: Fred Kabotie and the U.S. Pavilion of 1932,” American Art 29, no. 1 (spring 2015): 54–81. M aking P ictures on B askets 

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8. W. Jackson Rushing III, Native American Art and the New York Avant-­Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997); Margaret D. Jacobs, Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879–1934 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Mullin, Culture in the Marketplace; Elizabeth Hutchinson, The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 9. Oscar Howe interview, July 12, 1977, American Indian Research Project, no. 1044, 10, Institute of American Indian Studies, University of South Dakota, Vermillion. For a more detailed biography of Howe, see Anthes, Native Moderns, 155–70. 10. Mark Andrew White, “A Modernist Moment: Native Art and Surrealism at the University of Oklahoma,” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 7, no. 1 (2013): 58–59. 11. White, “A Modernist Moment,” 66, 68. 12. Frederick J. Dockstader, “The Revolt of Trader Boy: Oscar Howe and Indian Art,” American Indian Art Magazine 8, no. 3 (summer 1983): 42–51; Mark Andrew White, “Oscar Howe and the Transformation of Native American Art,” American Indian Art Magazine 23, no. 1 (winter 1997): 36–43; and Anthes, Native Moderns, xi. Because the painting was disqualified from competition, it was not purchased by the Philbrook and is now lost. 13. Oscar Howe to Jeanne Snodgrass, April 18, 1958, Jeanne Snodgrass King Collection, H.  A. and Mary K. Chapman Library, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 14. Nancy Marie Mithlo, “The First Wave . . . The Time Around,” in Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism, ed. Nancy Marie Mithlo (Santa Fe, NM: Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 2011), 18–27; Jolene Rickard, “Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors,” in “Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law,” edited by Eric Cheyfitz, N. Bruce Duthu, and Shari M. Huhndorf, special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 2 (spring 2011): 465–86. 15. Anthes, Native Moderns, 162–68. 16. W. Richard West, Sr., “Traditional Motifs and Contemporary Principles,” South Dakota Review 7, no. 2 (summer 1969): 101–2; W. Jackson Rushing III and Kristin Makholm, Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013). See also W. Jackson Rushing III, “Being Modern, Becoming Native: George Morrison’s Surrealist Journey Home,” this volume. 17. Moreover, the history of “traditional” Native painting contains numerous examples in which baskets, textiles, and other women’s arts are depicted, and arguably the abstract and nonobjective styles by Native artists of the later twentieth century are informed by traditions of pottery painting, quillwork, and symbolic abstraction practiced by women in many Native North American cultures. This history of mostly

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male modernists picturing or otherwise incorporating women’s “crafts” suggests continuities between what are termed “traditional” and “modern’” arts. Thanks to Jessica Horton for suggesting this reading of these pictorial “citations.” Horton, e-­mail message to author, November 10, 2014. For a study of a Northern California Native basket production in the context of modernization and the growth of the tourist industries, see Marvin Cohodas, Basket Weavers for the California Curio Trade: Elizabeth and Louise Hickox (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997). 18. Hutchinson, The Indian Craze, 7. 19. For an overview of Cahuilla history and culture, see John Lowell Bean, Mukat’s People: The Cahuilla Indians of Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 20. Emil Paulicek Steffa, “Basket Makers of the Coachella Valley” (1927), 5, Special Collections, Claremont College Library, Claremont, California. 21. Steffa, “Basket Makers,” 15–16. Steffa’s biblical reference (Isaiah 35:1, “The desert was made to rejoice and blossom as the rose”) suggests that his primitivism was informed by his Christian education at Pomona College, founded in 1887 by Protestant Congregationalists. 22. Steffa, “Basket Makers,” 28. 23. Steffa, “Basket Makers,” 56 24. Emil Paulicek Steffa, “Tales of a Desert Indian” (n.d.), 6–7, Special Collections, Claremont College Library, Claremont, California. 25. Steffa, “Tales of a Desert Indian,” 6. 26. The basket, catalog P1263 in the collection of the Pomona College Museum of Art, is identified as having been made by “Mrs. Chuple.” 27. Steffa, “Basket Makers,” 96–97 28. Steffa, “Basket Makers,” 127. 29. Steffa, “Basket Makers,” 123. In addition to finding in the basket a “wild beauty,” Steffa suggested a racial explanation for its patterning: “The reverse side of the basket . . . has a small figure in the center, the meaning of which has not been obtained. In showing this basket to a Chinese student of Pomona College he exclaimed, ‘We have that pattern in our Chinese art.’ This may be simply another straw that indicates this country was once inhabited by Asiatics” (124). 30. Steffa, “Basket Makers,” 124. 31. Steffa, “Basket Makers,” 77, 79. 32. Steffa, “Basket Maker,” 70. 33. “CIBA Vision Statement,” California Indian Basket Weavers Association, accessed July 1, 2014, http://www.ciba.org/home/vision-­statement.

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KAREN DUFFEK

4 

AN INTERSECTION

Bill Reid, Henry Speck, and the Mapping of Modern Northwest Coast Art

In 1967, the year of Canada’s one-­hundredth anniversary of confederation, a major department store in downtown Vancouver staged an event called Eaton’s Salute to Indian Culture. It was a public celebration of the Indigenous arts and cultural practices of the province of British Columbia, arranged by the venerable national retailer from street level to the sixth floor. There were artifact displays and carvers demonstrating their craft among racks of clothing and hardware, chiefs offering autographs on Saturday between 2:30 and 4:00 pm, “Mrs. White” distributing samples of her barbequed salmon, and non-­Native artists showing paintings of “Indian” people and totem poles.1 On the main floor, the young Haida artist Robert Davidson demonstrated argillite carving; nearby was the already well-­known Haida artist and radio broadcaster Bill Reid, depicted in the brochure wearing a headband and loincloth while carving a cedar screen with a stone adze (figure 4.1). Prints of Chief Henry Speck’s Kwakwa-ka-’wakw thunderbirds and sea monsters were displayed on floors two and five; and in the middle of the Ladies’ Lingerie department was the ’Namgis artist Doug Cranmer (quite contentedly, as he later recalled), carving a ten-­foot totem pole.2 The Eaton’s event was organized to complement the concurrent Arts of the Raven exhibition at the nearby Vancouver Art Gallery (vag), which set out to contribute “explicitly and emphatically” to an institutionally driven “shift in focus from ethnology to art.” 3 Such an approach had been gradually constituted since the late 1930s, through museum and gallery exhibitions of the

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Eaton’s Salute to Indian Culture brochure, 1967. Collection of the Audrey and Harry Hawthorn Library and Archives, University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, a035049.

province’s historical Northwest Coast and other Native art and artifacts.4 Doris Shadbolt, then acting director of the vag and one of the organizers of the exhibition, declared in her often-­quoted catalog statement that the selected works were “art, high art, not ethnology.” The sculptures and jewelry presented in the contemporary section of the show, moreover, “though truly enough of Indian descent,” were to be further recognized during this year of nationalist celebration as “Canadian art, modern art, fine art.” 5 If from our perspective today, there was an obvious disjuncture between Eaton’s recontextualization and the optimistically modernist pronouncements of Arts of the Raven, there were certainly also cross-­articulations. Mapped in the gradually escalating dotted pathway and crude caricatures of the Eaton’s brochure is something of the entrenched hierarchies and binaries that have marked the twentieth-­century cartography of Northwest Coast Indigenous art and public performance. These distinctions aimed to differentiate between past and present, “primitive” and Western, the culturally protected and the nationally appropriated, the low and the high, the hidden and the revealed. Yet “Indian dancing and singing,” canoe carving, food, and sweater knitting shared equal space at the department store with displays of painting, sculpture, and photography. The featured artists and artisans represented their work within an unabashedly hybrid setting of commercial consumption, cultural translation, and national commemoration. At the vag’s Arts of the Raven, by contrast, the need for clear distinctions, even boundaries, between singularized “masterpiece” artworks and collective “ethnological,” or cultural, practices was emphasized. The gallery’s bold reclassification of selected Northwest Coast artworks into an aesthetic space occupied by modern Canadian (non-­Native) fine art, despite their indigeneity, promoted what Marcia Crosby describes as “an abstract equality that eclipsed the concrete inequality most First Nations people were actually experiencing.” 6 Reinforcing Western typologies of art history and anthropology, the exhibition simultaneously recognized Indigenous art while distancing it from Indigenous frameworks of value. Here were strong hints about the price of admission into the lineage and discourse of modernism. This chapter investigates the divergent, intersecting, and still incomplete routes through which two of the artists featured in Eaton’s storied salute — ​­Bill Reid and Henry Speck — ​­experienced and sought access to the modern. Like the distinct pathways offered by Eaton’s and the vag in 1967, the metaphor of routes is helpful in making visible the spatial and temporal platforms on which these two artists positioned themselves and were positioned by others, against and within the discursive framings of modernity and modernism. 112 

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Bruce M. Knauft offers an image of the “alternatively modern” as being “more processual than classificatory, more concerned with specific disempowerments and cultural engagements than with typological differences.” 7 While a multiple modernisms approach would resist the notion that Reid’s and Speck’s engagement with modernity and modern art practices should be considered “alternative” to a model centered elsewhere, understanding their trajectories as processual rather than linear opens up the complex ways in which these artists negotiated the spaces and categories within which their art functioned and was received. Adds Knauft, “It also moves us close to ethnographic and historical specifics, which are often if not typically our best defense against the imposition of Western assumptions and oppositions.” 8 Whether contesting or affirming notions of what it meant to be traditional or modern, each artist drew from his own inherited cultural traditions and their ongoing histories; each engaged with diverse and sometimes intersecting networks and audiences. Each has helped to complicate assumptions about the apparent chasm between an autonomous art aspiring to inclusion in “modern art” worlds and an art contributing to Indigenous cultural practices and narratives of ­modernity — ​­challenges that loomed large, and with differing implications, for Reid as well as for Speck. Bill Reid is widely credited with playing a seminal role in what is often called the “renaissance” of Haida and other Northwest Coast art that emerged in the 1960s — ​­a process of renewal and expansion of both art production and public interest that followed the period of more than a century of colonial persecution and profound culture change for Indigenous people in British Columbia.9 Born in 1920 to a Haida mother and Euro-­American father, Reid became known through his metalwork, carvings, and sculptures as the first twentieth-­century master of Haida art. He often referenced the distance he felt from the cultural traditions of his maternal ancestors, articulating what he saw as contradictions in his position as both a maker of art in a historical Haida style and, as he succinctly said, “a product of urban 20th-­century North American culture.” 10 In his public discourse Reid not only confounded the beliefs of others, both Native and non-­Native, about what Haida art and culture had been and were now becoming, but he simultaneously and strategically drew on and resisted the values of Western modernism through his art practice.11 The rupture between art practices of the past and present became his starting point. He navigated Haida art with the initial intention of making the ancient forms of a “bygone” culture modern, and he provoked controversy within the Haida and academic communities with his discourse of universalA n I ntersection 

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ism over cultural protectionism.12 Yet he came to stand for Indigenous art and its framing institutions more than he probably ever intended. Reid was a defining figure in establishing public recognition for historical and new Northwest Coast Indigenous art — ​­indeed, for the idea of “Northwest Coast art” as it came to be understood institutionally and in the art market after the mid-­twentieth century. His story received much popular and scholarly attention during his lifetime, with numerous reappraisals by Haida and non-­Haida scholars.13 Henry Speck’s work, by contrast, has only recently begun to be critically assessed within the field of artistic modernisms.14 The Kwakwa-ka-’wakw artist and hereditary chief was born in 1908 in the coastal village of K-alugwis and died twenty-­seven years before Reid, in 1971 — ​­too early to witness the expansion of the market and institutional support in the 1970s and 1980s for new Northwest Coast art, including silkscreen prints, that both he and Reid had helped set in motion. A committed Christian and respected community leader, dancer, and singer, Speck was active in countering assimilationist legislation suppressing Kwakwa-ka-’wakw cultural practices and self-­governance, as well as in facilitating the modernization of his reserve community’s infrastructure and economy. He painted and carved for much of his life, but was “discovered” by a Vancouver art dealer in 1961 for his compositions on paper — ​­works that, with this new patronage, allowed him to experiment visually and conceptually with motifs drawn from his deep connection to Kwakwa-ka-’wakw ceremony, place, and story. The works’ recognition as inventive forms of expression — ​­images centered as much on culturally specific knowledge as on “modern” mediums and genres of painting — ​­did not, however, result in Speck’s inclusion, until recently, in either the modernist or the local Indigenous modern canons.15 If modernism may be defined in part by its “critical overturning of previously held values and ways of doing things,” we can observe how Reid and Speck contended differently with modernist regimes of value.16 The “rupture” between past and present, between the culturally entangled or owned and the detached or universal, between tradition and modernity, was not just a foundational construct of modern art. Preceding and running concurrently with each artist’s story were the legacies of colonization that imposed real rupture on Indigenous people in British Columbia. Beginning in the 1860s, colonial policies worked to separate art and its cultural functions from one another, paralleling the separation of the land from the people. The survival of cultural practices was threatened, and externally constructed narratives of artistic and social decline were established. The effects of Christianization, devastating 114 

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population loss due to epidemics, radical economic change and marginalization, loss of lands and resources, and assimilationist strategies, including Indian residential schools, combined to disrupt the exchange and transference of cultural knowledge within communities — ​­from master to apprentice, uncle to nephew, and grandmother to granddaughter. Between 1885 and 1951, moreover, the Canadian government prohibited the potlatch and related feasts and winter ceremonies, the central ceremonial complex among Northwest Coast Indigenous peoples.17 The potlatch encompassed spiritual, economic, judicial, genealogical, and political elements performed through oratory, dance, display of masks, and other inherited privileges, wealth distribution, and witnessing. “From this potlatch prohibition period,” observes the Kwak­ wa-ka-’wakw educator Daisy Sewid-­Smith, “many carvers and painters became well known as ‘Northwest Coast artists’ ” — ​­in part because the federal government encouraged curio production as a form of economic development and, paradoxically, as a national symbol.18 As a newly emerged category, Northwest Coast art was born of that forced rupture. Making masks and other art objects for the purposes of ceremony between 1885 and 1951 became a criminalized activity, whereas making representations of functional items for sale to tourists, or carved totem poles as commissioned state symbols, was encouraged.19 This history of forced detachment is inseparable from the discursive space of modernity on the Northwest Coast, where cultural traditions subjected to colonial erasure or assimilation struggled for recognition on their own terms. Scott Watson points to non-­Native Canadian modernists who, in the early decades of the twentieth century, looked to assimilate Indigenous arts to create a true Canadian art rooted to place: “Native art was accordingly stripped of local meaning and placed within the horizon of universal expression and timeless form. Its greatness assured that it belonged to ‘mankind.’ ” 20 And later, when the Arts of the Raven exhibition included selected contemporary Northwest Coast artworks with those of the old masterpieces, “The crucial emphasis on ethnicity, even more than on cultural experience, as an authenticating factor in the production of native art, contradicted all the arguments made for its universality — ​­the very quality that made it high art.” 21 Clearly, Indigenous artists confronted the ideal of an emancipated art at these intersections of imposed and desired modernities, of collective cultural responsibilities and modernist regimes of value. Here, it is worth noting the often-­contrasting routes taken by Reid and Speck, individually and relationally. They raise questions central to achieving an expanded yet locally situated understanding of modernism; in their differences, they also complicate the conventional narraA n I ntersection 

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tives of twentieth-­century Northwest Coast art.22 As individuals, each man set out to articulate for himself the terms of his heritage and his modernity within a broader local history of colonization and ongoing marginalization of Indigenous peoples. Each resisted but also took advantage of the freedoms that a modernist approach to art making promised. Both sought a contemporary public platform on which their inherited traditions would be recognized as equal among other art traditions of the world. This rests on two primary questions: How did Reid and Speck negotiate the art/artifact, art/craft, traditional/ modern, and locally specific/universal distinctions by which their work was given value and meaning in art institutions and changing markets? And on whose terms and for what purposes was their work recognized — ​­or not — ​­as modern, or even as contemporaneous to their present, rather than as belonging to a supposedly vanishing (“primitive”) past? Underlying these questions is the challenge of articulating a modernism that not only encompasses but is also informed by the diversity of Indigenous art practices developed in response to the conditions of modernity. Discussions of Indigenous modernisms have, to date, often posited the use of “new” media — ​­such as painting on canvas or paper — ​­or visual art approaches already established by Western modernists as requirements for recognition.23 Moreover, as Charlotte Townsend-­Gault reiterates, modern art “is a critical project aimed at freeing the individual from oppressive social systems. This degree of freedom appears to run counter to the constraints implicit in identifying with a distinct culture and its traditions.” 24 Of course, for Indigenous artists, their own traditions were not the only ones that might be considered oppressive. To avoid yet another externally defined criterion for inclusion in a history of twentieth-­century modernism — ​­which carries with it the potential of dismissing work that reaffirms collective origins, ancestry, and connections — ​­I argue for a more nuanced view in which modernism stands for “a condition of being modern that entails both a rupture from the past and a re-­engagement with it.” 25 Both Reid and Speck created artworks referencing locally specific, culturally rooted practices as responses to — ​­not denials of — ​­the conditions of modernity. In so doing, they negotiated a kind of “third space” of framing that is neither traditional nor modern; rather, it asserts the presence of the traditional within the modern. But then, can we call them modernists?

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Bill Reid (1920–1998) Faithful to his home tradition, Bill Reid has fully assimilated its laws but his own genius has allowed him to continue to diversify it without ever repeating the message of his ancestors. Sensitive to the universal import of this message he has released it from the special conditions in which it was conveyed for generations. . . . Hereafter, thanks to Bill Reid, the art of the Indians of the Pacific coast enters into the world scene: into a dialogue with the whole of mankind. C L A U D E L É V I -­S T R A U S S

| quoted in Bill Reid: A Retrospective

Exhibition, 1974 Those old people were completely educated in their universe. Our universe is no longer a stretch of beach and a number of genealogies and a body of myth. It extends far beyond that. BILL REID

| quoted in Karen Duffek, “On Shifting Ground,” 1984

Much has been written on Bill Reid’s life and art, and he was himself a prolific and cosmopolitan writer, poet, and speaker who complicated the terms by which his work, as well as Haida art and history, were understood.26 His legacy remains a subject of reassessment because of his place as a contentious figurehead, an argued-­about symbol of the “revival” of Native culture, an embodiment of both Haida and European cultures, and a metaphorical bridge between the lost (primitive) culture and modern art.27 In his own words he emphasized the temporal and spatial distances under that bridge, lamenting but accepting as inevitable his own (as well as other Haidas’) detachment through colonization from an authentic past, arguing for the need to “cut the losses” and be modern.28 His apparent place in between two worlds positioned him as mediating opposites and contradictions (whether Native and European, or traditional and modern) that could more accurately be seen as dynamic and overlapping. Indeed, Reid’s journey as an artist began far from the villages of his mother and grandparents on Haida Gwaii. Born in Victoria, British Columbia, to a Haida mother and a non-­Native father, Reid described his sense of being “just a middle-­class WASP Canadian” as an effect, in part, of his mother Sophie Gladstone’s experience at Indian residential school.29 “My mother,” he wrote, “had learned the major lesson taught the native peoples of our hemisphere during the first half of this century, that it was somehow sinful and debased to A n I ntersection 

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be, in white terms, an ‘Indian,’ and certainly saw no reason to pass any pride in that part of their heritage on to her children.” 30 His mother and aunts did wear gold and silver bracelets made by his maternal grandfather, Charles Gladstone, and John Cross.31 These were for Reid a first glimpse of the art forms to which he would later dedicate his career, deciding at age twenty-­eight to train as a goldsmith. While working as a radio commentator for the national Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc), Reid studied conventional European jewelry techniques at the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto for two years. There, he developed an interest in new jewelry design, looking to the work of modernists like Margaret de Patta, whose Bauhaus-­and American-­ inspired sculpted jewelry became as influential on his emerging aesthetic as the monumentally sculpted Haida totem pole from T’anuu, his grandmother’s birthplace, that he discovered in the nearby Royal Ontario Museum.32 Later, he advanced his goldsmithing techniques with an apprenticeship at the Platinum Art Company in Toronto and, in the late 1960s, with a year of study in contemporary jewelry design in London, England. But Reid’s interest in Haida art was newly sparked when, on his return to the west coast of British Columbia in 1951, intending to establish himself as a designer of contemporary gold, platinum, and diamond jewelry, he saw a pair of bracelets owned by one of his great-­aunts and engraved by Da.a xiigang, Charles Edenshaw. “It was during this period,” Reid writes, “that I built up an unrepayable debt to the late Charles Edenshaw, whose creations I studied, and in many cases shamelessly copied, and through whose works I began to learn something of the underlying dynamics of Haida art.” 33 For Reid, Edenshaw’s metalwork embodied a high point in the “classical” nineteenth-­century Haida style and a standard of craftsmanship that deserved worldwide recognition. In important ways Edenshaw’s output was already an art of the world. His inventive, wide-­ranging, and still-­influential practice was rooted in a deep understanding of Haida art and cosmology, but also in the clash and coexistence with Euro-­Canadian cosmologies and economies that he experienced. Edenshaw’s art registered an emerging modernity: in form and intent, it belied the notion of traditional art as unchanging. During a period of legislated cultural oppression and concurrent market expansion, he made works for his community and a wide network of coastal Indigenous peoples, as well as for tourists and international museum collectors.34 These works modeled for Reid an aesthetic both canonical and uniquely individual on which he chose to build his own understanding and interpretation of the tradition. Reid applied European techniques to Edenshaw’s motifs and to other 118 

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artifacts he studied in books and examined and photographed in museums and private collections. His goals were to bring attention to the masterworks of the past, to apply their level of craftsmanship to new work, and to create a modern Haida art that would enter into a dialogue with current international jewelry design (figure 4.2). “It was not a commitment to the ceremonial, to the mythical, to any part of it — ​­it was an attraction to the aesthetic of the art forms and the wonderful experience of seeing these things grow as they were applied to the pieces of jewelry,” he recalled.35 Undertaking his investigations without cultural constraint, extracting and translating the crest and mythological images from lineage and social obligation into art, Reid gradually began to see the possibilities for his own creativity within the Haida tradition. The techniques he commanded, such as repoussé and casting, enabled him to move his practice beyond the engraving he had seen on work by his Haida predecessors. Ultimately, he fused Haida expressive forms with the conventions of Western sculpture and modernist jewelry design, confronting notions of Indigenous cultural purity even as he came to embody a link to master artists of the past in the public imagination (figure 4.3). During that early period of learning and experimentation, in the 1950s, Reid joined anthropologists Wilson Duff (of the then British Columbia Provincial Museum) and Harry Hawthorn (University of British Columbia) on two expeditions to salvage historical totem poles from abandoned villages in southern Haida Gwaii.36 Together with other members of the British Columbia Totem Pole Preservation Committee, they selected, purchased, and relocated pieces to museums in Victoria and Vancouver with the stated objective of protecting the poles from vandalism and decay.37 “We came . . . to honour the carvers in our own way — ​­by taking what remained of their work, to preserve it, and show the outside world something of the wonder of the old days,” stated Reid in a CBC television broadcast about the 1957 trip.38 Marcia Crosby has written extensively on how Reid was then beginning to position Haida culture, and himself, in relation to urban institutions — ​­museums and the university — ​­and to participate as a leading figure in building a new discourse and value for Northwest Coast art.39 The trips and the poles themselves became part of the raw material that simultaneously reinforced his sense of connection to his maternal heritage and his appreciation of the nuances of nineteenth-­century Haida sculptural form. Moreover, these experiences laid a foundation for his ensuing role in the recognition of Haida art according to universal aesthetic values. As Aaron Glass summarizes, “Salvage paradigms in anthropology and the universalist aesthetics of modernism provided a rationale for the removal A n I ntersection 

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FIGURE 4.2 

Bill Reid, hinged bracelet depicting the Raven, ca. 1955. Gold, 1.7 × 2 × 2.4 in. (4.3 × 5 × 6 cm). Photograph by W. McLennan. Dr. Sydney Friedman and Dr. Constance Livingstone-Friedman Collection, University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, 2923/1. FIGURE 4.3 

Bill Reid, earrings in abstract design, 1961. Silver, 0.7 × 0.9 × 0.5 in. (1.9 × 2.3 × 1.3 cm). Photograph by Tim Bonham. FitzGerald Collection, University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, Nb1.708 a–b.

and decontextualization of indigenous objects and imagery, while the perceived loss of this ethnographic context was a precondition for that material’s transformation into fine art.” 40 With institutional patronage, Reid took on his first monumental wood-­ carving commission: an outdoor complex of Haida-­style totem poles and two cedar-­plank houses for the University of British Columbia, constructed between 1959 and 1962 with the assistance of experienced Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw (’Namgis) 120 

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carver Doug Cranmer (figure 4.4). The project marked a shift in scale for Reid and contributed to the repositioning of Northwest Coast art within an urban Canadian frame. Reid selected and combined figures drawn in part from the pole fragments salvaged for museum collections, piecing together the crests not in relation to specific clan and family histories, but in a way that could more generally represent the main supernatural beings from Haida narrative for the education and enjoyment of a diverse public. Restorative in style rather than function, Reid’s poles were modern in their autonomy from the social relations that crest figures traditionally symbolized, even as the new works replicated nineteenth-­century forms. Yet these were also the first old-­style Haida houses to be made in the twentieth century. The project ultimately provided an impetus for further totem-­pole carving by a new generation of Haida artists, including Robert Davidson. Specific clan histories and other local meanings may have been subsumed, but they had clearly not been erased for the Haida people who found in Reid’s new works more than a mere recognition of the historical and universal value of Haida sculpture. In 1978, Reid contributed directly to the renewal of carving in Haida Gwaii, producing a fifty-­six-­foot house-­front pole, which was raised at the band council office in his mother’s village of Skidegate. Yet throughout much of his career, Reid based his artistic approach on a firm belief in the death of Haida culture. With equal conviction, he spoke about the importance of reassessing its material legacy — ​­its art — ​­in universal terms. In the years leading up to the 1967 Arts of the Raven exhibition, he participated with art historian Bill Holm in articulating a language of formal analysis that could be applied to Haida and other northern Northwest Coast art styles to enable understanding and cross-­cultural appreciation of their underlying logic.41 Moreover, he succeeded in bringing Haida motifs into modern institutional frameworks and discourses, both locally and nationally (figure 4.5). His pronouncements of cultural extinction reinforced more widely held assumptions about the rupture between the art and the spiritual and cultural traditions it represented. But throughout the 1980s and to the end of his life, Reid increasingly contradicted his own remarks as his ties to the living Haida community strengthened. In 1989, for example, he used his international renown and cosmopolitan networks to protest Canada’s refusal to recognize Haida territorial title by taking the canoe he had carved to Paris and refusing to fly the Canadian flag while paddling it down the Seine. His was a process of conscious reconnection, countering while always complicating the historical effect and modernist criterion of “rupture” between a culturally implicated A n I ntersection 

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FIGURE 4.4 

Bill Reid paints the interior house post he carved with Doug Cranmer for the University of British Columbia’s Haida House complex, ca. 1962. Photograph by Derek Applegarth. Courtesy of the Audrey and Harry Hawthorn Library and Archives, University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, a034048.

F I G U R E 4 . 5   Left to right: Audrey Hawthorn (curator, ubc Museum of Anthropology), Bill Reid, and Robert Davidson present a totem pole to the City of Montreal, represented by Mayor Jean Drapeau, at Man and His World, Montreal, 1970. Davidson was brought to Montreal to carve the pole in public, and Reid, who was then living there, assisted him. The project was part of the first major public exhibition since 1956 of Museum of Anthropology’s growing collection. Photo credited to ubc Extension Department. Courtesy of the Audrey and Harry Hawthorn Library and Archives, ubc Museum of Anthropology.

and an autonomous art. Crosby has pointed to the questions raised for the Native community by Reid’s assertion throughout this process that Haida art belongs to the world: “At what point does that which has been ­distinguished — ​ ­precisely because it is culturally Haida — ​­become separate from its origins through identification as ‘universal’ and cease to have the freedom to acquire selfhood? To be Haida?” 42 Haida citizen and language teacher Diane Brown, who knew Reid well, recognized his relationship to the Haida this way: “I saw the struggle that went on in him. So many things about how Bill operated and how we as Haida people operated were different. Whenever we do something, the protocol has A n I ntersection 

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to be right: we have set rules. And Bill always managed to just smash all those up.” 43 As Townsend-­Gault adds, “Ignoring rules was a modern thing to do.” 44 Smasher and rebuilder, Reid remains an iconic and yet contentious figure in the twentieth-­century history of Haida and Northwest Coast art. He helped to both reestablish the formal “rules” for classical Haida art and free himself from them; he struggled for inclusion in the living Haida community yet argued passionately for a classically based, detached, and modern Haida art that could stand on its own. And into the last decade of his life, Reid continued to state, wryly and publicly, “I haven’t made up my mind yet whether Haida culture is extinct. If it’s become more than that, it’s only recently.” 45

Henry Speck, Udzi’stalis (1908–1971) cbc interviewer Norman Newton: Do you follow the purely traditional style, or do you alter it to suit your own needs? Henry Speck: I alter it to suit my own needs. . . . It’s been handed down to me, this talent. . . . I find myself an artist ever since I was a little boy. NN: Let’s say you have a design which, two hundred years ago, stood for a spirit that the people really believed in — ​­say, the Dzunuk’wa — ​­and they could give it a lot more power and conviction because they really believed that. HS: I actually believe it, because it’s right in our village. I hear a lot of stories about this Dzunuk’wa; it has a magical power, and still does today. | interview with Henry Speck on the cbc radio program The Indian as an Artist, 1965

NORMAN NEWTON

The popular media narrated the story of Henry Speck, an artist of the Tlawit’sis tribe of the coastal Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw people, as beginning with the paintings on paper through which he was “discovered” in 1961. After this moment, his work began to circulate and to be promoted as “pictures so old they are new” in the urban setting of Vancouver.46 Of course, only part of his story started there. Of greater relevance to the Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw way of defining who he was are the stories of who his ancestors were, where they originated, and what they encountered on their journeys. These were the subjects of Speck’s paintings; they represented particular, situated knowledge and its movement through time and space. His images of dancers and supernatural beings stood for the Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw people’s ancient connections and ongoing accountability to their belief systems, territories, and laws; to their genesis and ge-

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nealogical relationships manifested in the present; and to a cosmos in which one’s place is always subject to change. They also demonstrate a fundamental misalignment between the terms of modernism and Speck’s artistic strategy in asserting, rather than articulating opposition to, a continuum with what had come before.47 Henry Speck was born in the village of K-alugwis on Turnour Island, near the northern tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Known and still remembered today as Ga-lidi’y in the Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw community, he belonged to a high-­ranked family, receiving the privileges and responsibilities that such a position entailed.48 Because Speck attended the Boys’ Industrial School (Indian residential school) in Alert Bay for only two years, he was able to retain his Kwak’wala language, unlike children who spent many years in that assimilationist institution. He was given a rigorous education in Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw ritual, song, dance, and traditional protocol by his uncles and other cultural leaders, who initiated him, at the age of eight, as a dancer in the sacred hamat’sa society. “There’s no one ever teach me how to draw,” Speck wrote in a 1963 biographical statement, bringing to mind not only the trope of innate Native artistry but also modernist myths of genius: “My first art work far as I can remember. I used to copy everything that’s in the [mail-­order] catalogue.” 49 In a 1968 interview, he recalled, “It was in my blood, they say. . . . I just grab those carving knives and paintbrush and start in. They find I’m a good artist.” 50 Speck’s maternal grandfather, X - i’x-a’niyus (Chief Bob Harris) — ​­an acclaimed artist, who performed as part of a “living exhibit” with other Indigenous people from Vancouver Island at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 — ​­is said to have worn Ga-lidi’y’s umbilical cord at his wrist when carving in order to transmit his talent to his grandson.51 Speck’s ritual initiation occurred during the period when Canadian law prohibited the potlatch, along with other Indigenous gatherings related to land claims. He first danced as a hamat’sa at a potlatch in Alert Bay in 1922, the same year that many Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw individuals were fined or sent to prison in Vancouver for participating in Dan Cranmer’s potlatch on nearby Village Island. More than six hundred potlatch-­related items — ​­including masks, whistles, regalia, and valuable hammered shields known as ­“coppers” — ​­were forcibly surrendered by participants at Cranmer’s potlatch in return for the promise of lighter prison sentences.52 The illegally confiscated regalia were displayed in the parish hall of the Anglican church at Alert Bay in what must be considered among the most significant public institutional exhibi-

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tions of Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw visual culture in the twentieth century.53 “Curated” by Indian agent William Halliday, who initiated the raid and presided over the prosecutions in his fervor to eliminate the potlatch, the exhibition was intended more as a righteous display of colonial booty than of fine art. Yet the dispossession it celebrated intersects in profound ways with the discourse of detachment and rupture that long defined modernist art. For Speck, who maintained his ceremonial and art practices throughout and beyond the three remaining decades of potlatch prohibition, the implications of “detachment” may have ultimately encompassed aesthetic freedoms; but he also experienced it as the enforced separation of his people from their culture, economy, and right to self-­determination.54 As a young man, Henry Speck succeeded his father as a hereditary chief of the Si’santla namima (clan) of the Tlawit’sis, and took on the ancestral name of Udzi’stalis, translated as “The Greatest,” under which his paintings were later promoted.55 An accomplished dance-­screen painter and song leader, he worked as a fisherman for most of his life. He was an active member of the rights organization the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia (nbbc), and at age forty-­four he joined the Pentecostal church. In his home community of K-alugwis, Speck organized the building of a church, a power plant, a dam for a water source, a school, and a community hall.56 He moved to the community of Alert Bay in the late 1950s or early 1960s, several years after the ban on potlatching had been removed from the Indian Act. He had been invited by the influential cultural figure and elected chief James Sewid to become one of a group of leaders committed both to revitalizing the potlatch and to modernizing the village infrastructure. They began by constructing a traditional-­style bighouse, for which Speck oversaw the carving of interior house posts, to have a site for community ceremonial purposes and for the economic potential of performing for tourists the previously banned dances (figure 4.6). The group determined that “reviving” the art after its legislated oppression could offer a much-­needed source of employment, and so it formed the Kwakwala Arts and Crafts Organization.57 Advocating against the exploitation of Native art by outside interests, the group looked beyond cultural preservation toward greater Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw control over their own representations, their cultural property, and the production and circulation of objects in expanding art markets. In all these initiatives, Speck was clearly a modernizer. But was he also a modernist? Crosby offers a more nuanced question: “How did his work as a ‘modernizer’ overlap with his work as an artist?” 58 Speck had been painting Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw motifs on paper for much of 126 

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FIGURE 4.6 

Henry Speck carves interior house posts for the new community bighouse at Alert Bay, 1964. Photographer unknown. Photograph courtesy of the Thomas and Mildred Laurie Collection, Audrey and Harry Hawthorn Library and Archives, ubc Museum of Anthropology, a033146.

his life, as is evidenced by early works owned by family members.59 Former surrealist painter and theorist Wolfgang Paalen may have picked up one of his stylized paintings of a killer whale when he famously toured the Northwest Coast in 1939, collecting artifacts and seeking an understanding of myth and totemism as part of his attempt to develop “a new consciousness for modernity.” 60 The painting, featured on the cover of Paalen’s internationally circulated art journal dyn — ​­its 1943 “Amerindian Number” — ​­is attributed to a James Speck, but appears to be in the style of Henry Speck and features a motif repeated with many variations in Henry’s hundreds of known paintings on paper.61 But not until 1961, when Henry Speck was fifty-­three years old, was he “discovered” by the Vancouver art and antiques dealer Gyula Mayer, who began to purchase and promote Speck’s paintings on paper. Mayer, one of the 200,000 refugees who fled Hungary after the revolt of 1956, was a distiller by trade and a serious art collector. On arriving in Canada in the late 1950s, A n I ntersection 

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he was “horrified at how little the provincial or federal governments are doing to revive the genuine art of the Indian tribes.” 62 He decided to stimulate the production of a new Native fine art to counter the commercialism he felt was degrading the ancient traditions. With his then business partner William Scow, a Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw hereditary chief, he traveled up the coast seeking older artifacts to sell amid the European historical paintings and decorative arts featured in his Muse Antiques and Art shop, but he also brought watercolors, brushes, and paper to distribute to Indigenous artists and community members interested in painting. He offered to purchase any resulting work. Henry Speck proved to be the most prolific, and accomplished, of the painters Mayer contracted, producing more than two hundred works on paper for him.63 While Mayer’s initial impetus may have been a desire to restore past (authentic) art forms and standards, Speck’s spontaneous, freehand, and color-­ rich depictions of masked dancers, sea monsters, and biblical scenes instead marked an intercultural, aesthetic translation: a kind of reconfiguration of his lived cultural knowledge for an unspecified, but potentially global public (figure 4.7 and plate 3). In some works, he depicted supernatural beings mapped onto the landscape features of Tlawit’sis territory, or the holy family in button robes and head rings. Depicting a mask in a painting, rather than carving and painting a mask to wear, marked a conceptual change made possible by the medium of painting on paper for a purpose outside the ceremonial space of the gukwdzi, or bighouse. Mayer and a larger group of business partners — ​­bc Indian Designs ­Limited  — ​­organized an exhibition of forty Speck paintings in 1964 at Vancouver’s New Design Gallery. One of the first galleries dedicated to contemporary art in Canada, the space was also rented out to artists to organize their own shows, as was presumably the case for Speck’s exhibit. While his images may have been the first representation of Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw cultural production and experimentation in that edgy space, they did not participate in the discourse of antipainting, performance, and new media then emerging on the Vancouver art scene.64 The show’s invitation promised a “world premiere — ​­a new and exciting discovery,” while a catalog by the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology’s Audrey Hawthorn gave ethnographic context to the images.65 Photographs of the opening event show Speck, who believed that ceremonial regalia should properly be worn only in the bighouse, wearing suit and tie (figure 4.8).66 He in turn honored Mayer by placing a cedar-­bark neck ring around his patron’s shoulders. The paintings received much media acclaim and some criticism for the re128 

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Henry Speck, Sea Monster, ca. 1958–1964. Gouache on paper, 20 × 22 in. (50.8 × 56.4 cm). Photograph by Kyla Bailey. University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, 2984/1.

FIGURE 4.7 

contextualized Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw motifs they presented. Perhaps not surprisingly, newspaper reviews with such headlines as “The Chief Gives a Tootle for Talents of Kwakiutl” signaled the paternalism in some media descriptions of the paintings as products of the naïve, untutored, and uncosmopolitan Native.67 Often they focused on the role of Gyula Mayer as savior, reinforcing the modern/traditional binary that Speck’s art might have been seen to complicate. In a lengthy cbc radio broadcast, Bill Reid offered his own opening-­ night review of what he called “a wonderful art of the past”: What the New Design Gallery is presenting is, to me at least, an almost unbelievable phenomenon — ​­an art which really has no business to be in existence at all. For it was born of a culture which has now almost entirely disappeared. . . . A n I ntersection 

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F I G U R E 4 . 8   Henry Speck (far right) stands beside dealer Gyula Mayer, federal ministers, and other dignitaries at the opening of Henry Speck, Ozistalis, March 24, 1964, New Design Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia. Photo courtesy of Suzanna Mayer.

His drawings are imaginative in their concept, often going far beyond anything attempted before in Kwakiutl art, but still retaining the basic convention intact. . . . And yet . . . I felt that something was very wrong. . . . For theirs was a dramatic, theatrical art, and their masks, house posts, and house paintings were all bigger than life. On a house wall forty feet long, a painted beast could be awe-­inspiring. In a 19-­by 24-­ inch picture frame, it looks trapped and desperate rather than fierce.68 Here, in an intersection of Reid’s and Speck’s paths three years before Eaton’s 1967 Salute to Indian Culture, Reid applied his own struggle with modernist terms of recognition to evaluate Speck’s paintings as a kind of misplaced modernity — ​­or perhaps a misplaced indigeneity. Family crest or modern art? Culturally functional or autonomous? Reid was both drawn to and troubled by the apparent temporal and spatial (dis)placement of Speck’s motifs, as though their references to the ancient would be more properly located else130 

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where. Speck, who experienced little of the institutional patronage that Reid had then already garnered, welcomed this new platform. He performed his own autonomy even as he resisted universalist claims of a singular modernism. After all, his images remained meaningful to his community in this and other locations, despite being reframed as commodity or relic of the past. They also inspired new generations of Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw and other Northwest Coast artists who saw — ​­and still see — ​­in these vibrant and textured compositions a possibility for the creative renewal of their two-­dimensional art.69 Speck’s trajectory, therefore, raises a provocative question: Can his clear and deep engagement with the supernatural world of the Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw be recognized as also standing for his own modernity and his experience of being a participant in modernity? Speck’s “trapped beasts” preceded the development of the Native print market that emerged in the 1970s, during which Reid issued a series of images, each featuring a single creature of Haida narrative centered on a white page. As Crosby notes, Speck’s paintings predated the “formalist language and criteria for ‘mastery’ of Northwest Coast fine art that by the late 1960s had gained pre-­ eminence.” 70 This system of valuation arose in part through art historian Bill Holm’s influential analysis and invention of a new vocabulary of “formlines” and “ovoids” — ​­and to some extent through the positioning of Bill Reid as its exemplar by art institutions and museums.71 The new discourse created a way of evaluating the art that left little room for Speck’s nonconformist pictorial renderings of three-­dimensional performance arts. The “world premiere” of his paintings traveled to a handful of venues after Vancouver, and after entering the storage vaults of a few museums and private collectors, largely fell from public view. Three years later, Speck’s paintings were not included in the vag’s Arts of the Raven, which Reid helped curate — ​­an exhibit that included new work in historical mediums and claimed a lack of accomplished living artists.72 Still active as a carver and designer of totem poles, Speck died in 1971.

New Intersections If I say I am dancing, what does it mean to you now? I am dancing not for you, but in the footsteps of my ancestors who taught me how to resignify Indigeneity, or more specifically Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw knowledge, such that it does not lose its meaning and power in the face of colonial constraint. SARAH HUNT

| “Ontologies of Indigeneity,” 5

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In these words Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw scholar Sarah Hunt invokes her experience of dancing in the bighouse to ask how, and in what contexts of knowledge production, Indigenous ways of being can be legitimized.73 Her question also applies to the place of Indigenous art and values within modernist frameworks shaped by a selective “politics of inclusion” or “colonial politics of recognition,” which are receiving increasing and necessary critical attention in relation to contemporary global art practices and Indigenous decolonization efforts.74 Many contemporary practices assume an inclusive rather than a marginalizing approach, mapping Indigenous knowledge and identity in the urban landscape and in the bighouse. They seek to place a formerly displaced indigeneity in the foreground, whether the work is directed toward cultural functions or global art worlds. They carry Indigenous concepts and ways of knowing into the hierarchies of values with which cultural production is judged to belong, or not, to the present moment. Such contemporary practices are helping to complicate the still-­pervasive binary between autonomous and culturally situated approaches to art, as revealed by this discussion of how Bill Reid and Henry Speck contributed to the history of modernism on the Northwest Coast. These practices continue the debates with which both artists grappled on their divergent, intersecting, and still incomplete paths through a twentieth-­century art history. Notes 1. The term Indian is less commonly used today, especially as a term of self-­ designation; in this chapter, I use the terms now more commonly used in Canadian discourse: Indigenous, Aboriginal, First Nations, and Native, recognizing the problematics of all such homogenizing labels. Regarding Bill Reid’s Indigenous heritage more specifically, the Haida people are a First Nation whose traditional territory is Haida Gwaii, in what is now British Columbia. (The territory was named the Queen Charlotte Islands by British captain George Dixon in 1778; that name was “repatriated” by the Haida to the queen in 2009.) Speck identified as Tlawit’sis, one of the eighteen tribes or nations of the Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw (meaning Kwak’wala-­speaking) people, whose traditional territories extend over northeastern Vancouver Island to the adjacent coastal mainland of British Columbia. 2. Recollection from Vickie Jensen, cited in Jennifer Kramer, K´esu’: The Art and Life of Doug Cranmer (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 59. 3. Doris Shadbolt, foreword to Arts of the Raven: Masterworks by the Northwest Coast Indian, edited by Wilson Duff, exhibition catalog (Vancouver, BC: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1967), n.p.

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4. For an important analysis and critique of Arts of the Raven and its contexts, see Marcia Crosby, “Indian Art/Aboriginal Title” (master’s thesis, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1994), 7–8. 5. Wilson Duff, “The Art Today,” in Duff, Arts of the Raven, n.p. Note that some of the works were actually made by non-­Natives and Americans. 6. Crosby, “Indian Art/Aboriginal Title,” ii. 7. Bruce M. Knauft, ed., Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 26. 8. Knauft, Critically Modern, 26. 9. See Aaron Glass, “History and Critique of the ‘Renaissance’ Discourse,” in Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas, ed. Charlotte Townsend-­Gault, Jennifer Kramer, and Ki-ke-in (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), 487–517. 10. Karen Duffek, Bill Reid: Beyond the Essential Form (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986), 3. 11. See Karen Duffek, “On Shifting Ground: Bill Reid at the Museum of Anthropology,” in Bill Reid and Beyond: Expanding on Modern Native Art, ed. Karen Duffek and Charlotte Townsend-­Gault (Vancouver, BC: Douglas and McIntyre, 2004), 71–92. 12. See Marcia Crosby, “Haidas, Human Beings and Other Myths,” in Duffek and Townsend-Gault, Bill Reid and Beyond, 108–30; and Charlotte Townsend-­Gault, “Struggles with Aboriginality/Modernity,” in Duffek and Townsend-­Gault, Bill Reid and Be­ yond, 225–44. 13. See especially Marcia Crosby, “Construction of the Imaginary Indian,” in Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art, ed. Stan Douglas (Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks, 1991), 266–91; and essays by twenty-­one different writers in Duffek and Townsend-­Gault, Bill Reid and Beyond. 14. Crosby, “Making Indian Art Modern,” Ruins in Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties digital archive, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the grunt gallery, accessed August 28, 2017, http://www.vancouverartinthesixties.com/essays/making-­indian-­art-­ modern; Karen Duffek and Marcia Crosby, Projections: The Paintings of Henry Speck, Udzi’stalis (Vancouver: ubc Museum of Anthropology, 2012). This includes the exhibition that Marcia Crosby and I cocurated (Projections: The Paintings of Henry Speck, Udzi’stalis, ubc Museum of Anthropology at Satellite Gallery, Vancouver, BC, July 14–September 15, 2012), which helped to bring Speck’s work and historical context to renewed public attention; our research is ongoing. 15. Duffek and Crosby, Projections; Crosby, “Making Indian Art Modern.” 16. Charlotte Townsend-­Gault, “The Material and the Immaterial across Borders,” in Townsend-­Gault, Kramer, and Ki-ke-in, Native Art of the Northwest Coast, 976. 17. This was implemented through an 1885 amendment to the Canadian Indian Act legislation.

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18. Daisy Sewid-­Smith, “Interpreting Cultural Symbols of the People from the Shore,” in Townsend-­Gault, Kramer, and Ki-ke-in, Native Art of the Northwest Coast, 17; Scott Watson, “Art/Craft in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Townsend-­Gault, Kramer, and Ki-ke-in, Native Art of the Northwest Coast, 351. 19. Watson, “Art/Craft,” 351; see also Leslie Dawn, “Northwest Coast Art and Canadian National Identity: 1900–50,” in Townsend-­Gault, Kramer, and Ki-ke-in, Native Art of the Northwest Coast, 304–47. 20. Scott Watson, “The Modernist Past of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s Landscape Allegories,” in Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Born to Live and Die on Your Colonialist Reservations, ed. Charlotte Townsend-­Gault, Scott Watson, and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (Vancouver, BC: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 1995), 62. 21. Watson, “Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun,” 67. 22. The constructed idea of “Northwest Coast art” is unpacked from multiple perspectives in Townsend-­Gault, Kramer, and Ki-ke-in, Native Art of the Northwest Coast. 23. See, for example, Bill Anthes, Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940– 1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 24. Charlotte Townsend-­Gault, “Struggles with Aboriginality/Modernity,” in Duffek and Townsend-­Gault, Bill Reid and Beyond, 225. 25. Veronica Sekules, George Lau, and Margit Thøfner, “Foreword: Local Modernisms,” World Art 4, no. 1 (2014): 2. 26. See Crosby, “Construction”; Crosby, “Indian Art/Aboriginal Title”; Crosby, “Haidas, Human Beings and Other Myths,” 108–30; Duffek and Townsend-­Gault, Bill Reid and Beyond; Bill Reid, “Curriculum Vitae 1 [1974],” in Solitary Raven: The Essential Writings of Bill Reid, ed. Robert Bringhurst (Vancouver, BC: Douglas and McIntyre, 2009), 113–21; Shadbolt, foreword to Arts of the Raven; Duffek, Bill Reid; Bringhurst, Solitary Raven; and their extensive bibliographies. 27. See Aaron Glass, “Was Bill Reid the Fixer of a Broken Culture or a Culture Broker?,” in Duffek and Townsend-­Gault, Bill Reid and Beyond, 190–206. 28. Townsend-­Gault, “Struggles with Aboriginality/Modernity,” 226. 29. Duffek, Bill Reid, 4. 30. Duffek, Bill Reid, 4. 31. Haida and perhaps other carvers began in the 1800s to carve bracelets from hammered-­out American silver dollars. 32. Monica Moses, “Groundbreaking Jeweler: Margaret De Patta,” American Craft Council, May 1, 2012, http://craftcouncil.org/post/groundbreaking-­jeweler-­margaret-­ de-­patta; Reid, “Curriculum Vitae,” n.p. (also in Bringhurst, Solitary Raven, 116). 33. Reid, “Curriculum Vitae,” n.p. (also in Bringhurst, Solitary Raven, 117). 34. See Robin K. Wright, Daina Augaitis, and James Hart, eds. Charles Edenshaw (London: Black Dog, 2014).

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35. Reid, quoted in Duffek, “On Shifting Ground,” 76. 36. The village sites were abandoned because a series of smallpox and other epidemics, particularly in the 1860s, led to the near decimation of the Haida population and the movement of survivors to two main communities: Skidegate and Old Massett. 37. Some of the funds from the sale of totem poles were put toward the Skidegate Inlet General Hospital Fund. Wilson Duff, “Last Six Haida Totems to Victoria’s Museum,” Native Voice 8, no. 7 (July 1954): 3. 38. Transcript of this May 21, 1959, broadcast, “Rescue Mission for Haida Art,” narrated by CBC’s Pacific 8 program host Bill Reid, ubc Museum of Anthropology Archives. 39. Crosby, “Construction”; Crosby, “Indian Art/Aboriginal Title”; Crosby, “Haidas, Human Beings and Other Myths.” 40. Glass, “Was Bill Reid the Fixer,” 202. 41. Bill Holm, Northwest Coast Indian Art: Analysis of Form, Thomas Burke Memorial Washington State Museum Monographs 1, rev. ed. (Seattle: University of Washington Press with the Bill Holm Center for the Study of Northwest Coast Art, Burke Museum [1965] 2014). 42. Crosby, “Haida,” 127. 43. Gwaganad (Diane Brown), “A Non-­Haida Upbringing: Conflicts and Resolutions,” in Duffek and Townsend-­Gault, Bill Reid and Beyond, 69. 44. Townsend-­Gault, “Struggles with Aboriginality/Modernity,” 225. 45. Duffek, “On Shifting Ground,” 71. 46. Stephen Scott, “Indian Chief Newly Discovered Artist,” Peterborough Examiner, May 1, 1964. 47. The following discussion of Henry Speck’s work draws on previous and ongoing work by the author and Marcia Crosby, including the exhibition that we cocurated and its associated publication (Duffek and Crosby, Projections). 48. His father was John Speck, Tlakwagila’game, a hereditary chief of the Tlawit’sis people, and his mother was ‘Wadzidi (Lucy) Harris, an Eagle chief of the Mamalilik-a-la people. Henry Speck’s paternal grandfather carried the name Udzi’stalis, which was passed down to John Speck and then to Henry. 49. Henry Speck, “My Life Story — ​­by Ozistalis” (unpublished manuscript, ca. 1964), n.p. I have not yet found further information on what kinds of images he copied, or whether any still exist. 50. Norman Newton, interview with Henry Speck and other artists, “Program 2: Problems of Style,” The Indian as an Artist (Ottawa, ON: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1965), audiocassette, aaac0115, bc Archives, Royal bc Museum, Victoria, British Columbia. 51. Quentin Ehrmann-­ Curat, “A Short Biography of X - i’x-a’niyus, Bob Harris,” T’sit’sak’alam (summer 2012): 1. 52. “The Potlatch: On the Suppression of the Potlatch,” The Story of the Masks,

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U’mista Cultural Society, accessed August 3, 2014, http://archive.umista.ca/masks_ story/en/ht/potlatch02.html. 53. I am grateful to Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw artist and scholar Marianne Nicolson for first alerting me to the place of this display in the lineage of Northwest Coast art exhibitions. 54. In 1962, the British Columbia government shut down the school in Tlawit’sis and ended monthly hospital ship visits. With no prospect of providing their own alternative to residential school and no access to health care, community members relocated throughout Vancouver Island and southern British Columbia. Tlowitsis Nation website, accessed July 20, 2014, http://www.tlowitsis.com/. 55. Speck signed his name Ozistalis. Udzi’stalis is the newer spelling of this ancestral name and more accurately represents its pronunciation. 56. John Speck, personal communication with the author and Marcia Crosby, April 16, 2012. 57. James P. Spradley, ed., Guests Never Leave Hungry: The Autobiography of James Sewid, a Kwakiutl Indian (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1972), 240–42. 58. In Duffek and Crosby, Projections, n.p. 59. John Speck, personal communication; Wedlidi Speck, personal communication with the author, May 17, 2012. 60. W. Jackson Rushing III, Native American Art and the New York Avant-­Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 121. 61. The attribution of this image to a “James Speck” has been unquestioningly cited in publications about dyn ever since, but personal communication with Speck family members affirms that, while the name does exist in their twentieth-­century genealogy, none was an artist. Confirming the attribution to Henry Speck requires further research. 62. Gyula Mayer quoted in “Former Hungary Collector Trying to Save Indian Art,” Vancouver Sun, July 27, 1962, 8. 63. Among the more than thirty other artists represented in the collection are Ben Dick, Charles Dudoward, Godfrey Hunt, Allan James, and James King. 64. In Duffek and Crosby, Projections, n.p. 65. Audrey Hawthorn, Kwakiutl Art by Chief Henry Speck (Vancouver: bc Indian Designs, 1964), n.p. 66. John Speck, personal communication. 67. Moira Farrow, “The Chief Gives a Tootle for Talents of Kwakiutl,” Vancouver Sun, March 24, 1964, 10. 68. Bill Reid, “Ozistalis, a North American Phoenix,” Critics at Large, cbc, transcript of radio commentary, March 24, 1964. My thanks to Suzanna Mayer for sharing the transcript of Reid’s critique with me. 69. Chuuchkamalthnii (Ron Hamilton), personal communication with the author, January 2002 and December 2014. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

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painting had been one of the most prominent and inventive forms of visual art on the Northwest Coast, as evidenced in historical photographs and surviving examples of monumental house-­front paintings and interior dance screens and curtains. In the early to mid-­twentieth century, moreover, artists such as George Clutesi (Tseshaht), Frederick Alexcee (Tsimshian/Iroquois), and Mungo Martin (Kwak­wa-ka-’wakw), among others, created paintings on paper and canvas. See Bill McLennan and Karen Duffek, The Transforming Image: Painted Arts of Northwest Coast First Nations (Vancouver, BC: Douglas and McIntyre, 2007). Some paintings and drawings created by students at the Alert Bay residential school in the 1960s, now in the collection of the ubc Museum of Anthropology, were clearly inspired by Speck’s paintings or reproductions of his works. 70. Crosby, “Making Indian Art Modern,” 5. 71. Holm, Northwest Coast Indian Art. 72. Gallery 8 in Arts of the Raven featured “The Art Today.” Wilson Duff ’s text introducing this section in the catalog states, “The old Indian cultures of the coast are dead, but the art styles continue on in new and modern contexts. The Kwakiutl style never did suffer a full eclipse, but was kept alive by such artists as Charlie James, Mungo Martin and Ellen Neel. Today in the hands of Henry Hunt and Tony Hunt of Victoria, Doug Cranmer of Vancouver, and Henry Speck and many others in the Kwakiutl villages, it is continuing as always to find new expressions. The Haida style, kept barely alive for many decades by a handful of slate carvers, has recently been rediscovered and revived by Bill Reid, Bill Holm, and others.” Wilson Duff, “The Art Today,” in Duff, Arts of the Raven, n.p. Artists shown in the exhibition included Doug Cranmer (carvings and painted panel), Robert Davidson (argillite and silver), Bill Holm (non-­Native; carvings), Henry Hunt (carvings), Tony Hunt (carving), Michael Johnson (non-­Native; carving), Bill Reid (silver and gold jewelry; carvings in ivory, slate, and wood; thirteen works), and Don Lelooska Smith (non–Northwest Coast Native; carvings in ivory, mountain-­sheep horn, and wood). 73. Sarah Hunt, “Ontologies of Indigeneity: The Politics of Embodying a Concept,” Cultural Geographies 21, no. 1 (2014): 5, doi:10.1177/1474474013500226. 74. Sunanda K. Sanyal, “Critiquing the Critique: El Anatsui and the Politics of Inclusion,” World Art 4, no. 1 (2014): 89–108, doi:10.1080/21500894.2014.893902; Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

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DAMIAN SKINNER

5 

MODERNISM ON DISPLAY

Negotiating Value in Exhibitions of Māori Art, 1958–1973

Exhibition History and the Negotiation of Value Māori artists began to produce modernist work in Western genres of sculpture and painting during the late 1940s and 1950s, at the same time that more radical modernist art practices began to develop among settler-­artists in Aotearoa (Māori for New Zealand).1 Two projects sponsored by the New Zealand government provide the context for the development of Māori modernist art: the first was a project to revive traditional or customary Māori art in the 1920s and 1930s, especially through the Rotorua School of Māori Arts and Crafts, established in 1927; and the second was the art specialist scheme established as part of the New Zealand education system reforms in the 1940s and 1950s, which also saw Māori art introduced into the curriculum for all New Zealand children.2 The acceptance of these new forms of Māori art as authentic and as modern required, for both Māori and Pākehā [settlers of European descent] audiences, various shifts in the critical environment. These shifts included transforming Māori artifact (displayed in vitrines according to the discourses of anthropology) to art (displayed in temporary exhibitions according to the discourses of art history); moving Māori art among the marae (the complex of land and buildings where many Māori ceremonies take place), the museum, and the art gallery; and managing the tensions between customary art and modernist art. What was involved in negotiating these shifts is in part visible through a series of five exhibitions of modernist Māori art held between 1958 and 1973, in which the intersections of these tense pairings can be tracked, along with how the differing physical spaces of Māori community buildings, and in one case

FIGURE 5.1 

Māori Festival of the Arts, Ngāruawāhia, December 1963. Photograph by Ans Westra. Ans Westra Proof Sheets, m643, National Library of New Zealand, Wellington.

a Pākehā art gallery, continually flip and invert the relationships of artworks to contexts. The larger forces shaping Māori art in the twentieth century came to bear immediately on the exhibitions that are the subject of this chapter. For example, an exhibition of modernist Māori art at the 1963 Māori Festival of the Arts was held in Māhinarangi, a whare whakairo (meeting house with customary arts) completed by the Rotorua School of Māori Arts and Crafts in 1929, under the supervision of Sir Āpirana Ngata (figure 5.1). A politician and cultural expert, Ngata was a leading promoter of the renewal of the whare whakairo, which became a center of community life and a way to strengthen Māori cultural practices and identities in the first half of the twentieth century. For Ngata, the power of the whare whakairo was not in its purity but in its ability to adapt to Western innovations — ​­in lighting, ventilation, flooring, elevation, and construction materials and methods — ​­yet still remain identifiably Māori. He established the Rotorua School of Māori Arts and Crafts by an act of parliament in 1926, and in May 1927 the school began work in Rotorua, training carvers, then weavers and painters, to produce the distinctive art M odernism on D isplay 

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F I G U R E 5 . 2   Contemporary Māori Painting and Sculpture exhibit, Festival of Māori Arts, Hamilton, August 1966. Photograph by National Publicity Studios, Archives New Zealand, Wellington, aaqt 6539, a81,944.

forms that mark out the meeting house. Art played the role of establishing and maintaining a familiar identity for Māori in the face of massive change and acculturation. Defined as a kind of ornamentation and disguise for the technical and social innovations of the whare whakairo, customary arts worked to minimize the presence of modernity and the modernizing agenda that was at the heart of Ngata’s political program. While the whare whakairo changed under Ngata’s direction in the early twentieth century, the changes were undertaken to firmly connect the art forms inside to the past, not to the modernized future that otherwise so concerned him.3 Within a very short time, the innovations that Ngata pioneered in the 1920s and 1930s began to seem historical, as if the whare whakairo as imagined and built by Ngata and the Rotorua School had existed for hundreds of years. Jeffrey Sissons describes this process as “traditionalization,” an effect of the process whereby “aspects of contemporary culture come to be regarded as valued survivals from an earlier time.” 4 At the Māori Festival of the Arts in 1963, held inside Māhinarangi and surrounded by examples of Māori carving, weaving, and painting that represented the best of customary Māori artistic achievement, was an exhibition of 140 

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modernist artworks by three Māori artists, part of a pioneer generation who broke with the customary art promoted by Ngata and embraced the values and strategies of modernism. It is commonplace to speak of the “Tovey generation” when describing these Māori artists, a reference to Gordon Tovey, who was national supervisor of arts and crafts, in charge of the art specialist scheme and therefore a significant employer of artists. The term is also, however, a way of noting his influence on the kind of art made by the Tovey generation artists.5 Reviewing an art exhibition that was part of the 1966 Festival of Māori Arts (figure 5.2), journalist Harry Dansey thought “perhaps the most significant aspect” was that the exhibitors were teachers as well as artists: “These young men and women are almost all employed as art advisors to the Education Department.” 6 Tovey’s agenda of translating Māori customary culture into simple structures and practices for Māori and Pākehā children to use in schools was a parallel task to that undertaken by these Māori artists in their search for artistic strategies that could translate motifs and ideas from customary Māori art, their heritage as Māori, into the spaces and issues of contemporary art in Aotearoa New Zealand during the 1950s and 1960s. As art historian Jonathan Mane-­Wheoki writes, “What happened — ​­simplification of form, creative distortion, untrammeled expressivity — ​­was consistent with the modernist’s reverence for children’s art and tribal art Tovey shared with his team of art advisers. From this kind of experience the contemporary Maori art movement emerged.” 7 The decision in 1959 to make Māori art part of the arts and crafts program for all New Zealand children led Tovey to facilitate a hui, or meeting, at Ruatōria in March 1960, where art specialists had the opportunity to study under cultural experts. The meeting was both an authorization of Tovey’s project and an attempt to push back against the traditionalization of Māori art that had resulted from Ngata’s scheme. One of the key cultural experts, Pine Taiapa, had been closely associated with the Rotorua School of Māori Arts and Crafts, and his involvement in the hui at Ruatōria is often interpreted as his conferral of a kind of blessing on modernist Māori art. For Carol Henderson, Taiapa’s willingness to work as a part-­time specialist in Māori art for the Education Department “signaled both his support of changes being made to traditional Maori arts and crafts and his personal endorsement of Gordon’s aspirations and methods.” 8 A single exhibition of Māori art in 1963 demonstrates the complex relations between customary and modernist art that are the subject of this chapter. M odernism on D isplay 

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Individual artists had quite extensive careers in dealer galleries and public institutions during this period, as my case study of Selwyn Muru later in this chapter reveals. But this history of group exhibitions of modernist Māori art, rather than exhibitions by modernist Māori artists, enables me to identify the various dynamics that come into play in such exhibitions. By tracking the spaces in which modernist Māori art circulated and the various claims made for and about it, as well as identifying how different audiences invested in these artworks, we can see how indigenous modernism is subject to an ongoing negotiation of value. This negotiation includes classifying the artworks and their varying presentation as modernist art made by Māori artists or, as they are framed in this text, modernist Māori art.

Modernist Māori Art and the Education System The first exhibition of modernist Māori art was a simple affair. A show “that had no title, no curator or named venue” was notable, in the view of one journalist, because one of the artists had been a member of the national All Blacks rugby team. This exhibition of five artists marked the beginning of the growing visibility of modernist Māori art in New Zealand artistic culture.9 Held in 1958 at the Adult Education Center in Auckland, the exhibition was organized by Matiu Te Hau, who worked for Continuing Education at the University of Auckland, part of the university’s night school program. Ngahiraka Mason describes Te Hau as an example of “takawaenga Māori,” individuals who served their communities by bridging the gap between Māori and Pākehā at all levels of society.10 Te Hau attended Ardmore Teachers Training College and received a bachelor of arts from the University of Auckland before taking up his position with Continuing Education in 1953. Apart from being aware of new developments in Māori art through his extensive networks and contact with Māori and Pākehā institutions and communities, Te Hau and his family had taken in Arnold Wilson (one of the artists who would be in the exhibition) as a boarder when he first began studying at Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland; as one of the few Māori in higher education positions in the 1950s, Te Hau was also an important mentor for Muru Walters (another of the artists).11 Unfortunately, very little documentary evidence remains of this exhibition. There was an anonymous review (“Show by Maori Artists”) published in the Auckland Star on May 29, 1958, and another front-­page article (“Maori Goes

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in for Abstract Painting”) in the same newspaper on June 10, 1958. Beyond this, there are no photographs of the event, exhibition list, or even artist recollections, which would provide insight into what artworks were included in the show. (Selwyn Wilson was in London at the time, while Ralph Hotere, Katerina Mataira, Muru Walters, and Arnold Wilson were working as teachers in Northland.)12 Yet, we can still draw several conclusions based on what information is available. Certainly, much about this exhibition is typical of modern Māori art in the 1950s and 1960s. First, the artists were closely tied to the education system, which acted as patron and employer. Four of the five artists in the 1958 exhibition — ​­Selwyn Wilson, Ralph Hotere, Katerina Mataira and Muru Walters — ​­worked as art specialists with the Department of Education, while Arnold Wilson, the fifth artist in the show, was an art teacher. Second, these artists were part of an urban context, representatives of a generation of Māori who were migrating to the cities and making the most of the education and employment opportunities found there. Their art was exhibited and purchased within the Pākehā art system and considered to be part of that system. As one newspaper review noted, “Most of the works are oils, and although painted by Maoris, are not Maori paintings.” 13 Third, these artists were modernists. Another reviewer wrote, “Admittedly the show has crudities but throughout are the strong lines and sweeping rhythms, the gusto and the naiveté, that stamped the workmanship of the exhibitors’ forebears.” 14 The emphasis on “strong lines and sweeping rhythms,” the approving use of terms like “gusto” and “naiveté,” and even the suggested link to customary Māori art are all indications of the rhetoric of modernism as it was operating in Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1950s, and the applicability of these terms to the artworks of these Māori artists reveals a new closeness between Māori and Pākehā art during this period. Notably this first exhibition of modernist Māori art took place under the auspices of the Continuing Education program of the University of Auckland, rather than the Adult Education system run by the University of New Zealand, which was a major source of funding for and promotion of customary Māori arts. Writing in 1957, Maharaia Winiata described a number of academies of Māori art that were run by tutors funded through the Adult Education scheme. Catering to mostly Māori but also Pākehā students, these academies were usually connected to meeting house projects. “The Academy scheme centralises the centre of instruction, sets it within local communities desirous of building carved meeting houses and brings into it expert instructors,” wrote

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Winiata. “The financial burden is shared between the people and the Maori Purposes Fund, with the Adult Education tutor coming in as stimulant and co-­ordinator of effort.” 15 Te Hau’s exhibition of modernist art made by Māori artists who worked independently as creative artists was a contrasting statement to the communal nature of customary Māori art production. Multiple commentators returned to this distinction in the 1960s. Opening an exhibition of artworks by Paratene Matchitt, Clive Arlidge, and Fred Graham in 1964, John Waititi “expressed his pleasure at seeing the work of three young Maoris who, having overcome the tradition of communal work, had made that extra effort necessary to succeed in expressing themselves in colour and design, which was often a lonely one.” 16 Another reviewer, writing in 1967, noted that in contrast to the communal activity of customary Māori art, “modern Maori art is highly individual. The artist follows his personal vision, and relies on the uncertain market of those art lovers who are pleased by it. Pakeha firms will sometimes commission a work; Maori communities hardly ever.” 17

Modernist Māori Art and the Marae In December 1963, Tūrangawaewae marae in the Waikato town of Ngāruawāhia hosted the first Māori Festival of the Arts to celebrate the centennial of the Kīngitanga, the Māori king movement established in the nineteenth century to combat the predatory effects of colonialism and the ongoing loss of Māori land at the hands of Pākehā settlers. The festival included poetry readings (by contemporary poets of their own work, and translations of traditional songs and histories), two concerts (one of opera, and the other of popular music), and an exhibition of modernist art by three Māori artists, as well as carved gourds by Pākehā artist Theo Schoon and paintings of Māori subjects by Charles Goldie and Gottfried Lindauer from the early twentieth century.18 Perhaps most notable about this exhibition is its location within Māhinarangi, a whare whakairo on Tūrangawaewae marae that was a showcase of customary Māori art from the early twentieth century.19 As Ans Westra wrote in Te Ao Hou magazine, “Mahinarangi, with its elaborate carvings and its many mementos and reminders of past history, made a striking background for an exhibition of contemporary art which included work by the sculptors Arnold Wilson and Para Matchitt and the painter Selwyn Muru, who are among the most promising younger artists working in New Zealand today.” 20 Māhinarangi was initially conceived as a hospital, a place where Māori patients could 144 

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receive European medical care in an environment that respected Māori values and cultural practices, and the architecture and art forms of the whare whakairo were used to present a familiar and comforting appearance for the Māori who would receive care there.21 The meeting house was funded by money raised from a concert party tour to Hawkes Bay, East Coast, and Auckland, and by contributions of timber and money from the government, as well as the services of the Rotorua School of Māori Arts and Crafts. Building began in September 1928 and was completed by March 1929. Because the Pākehā authorities refused permission for Māori to use it as a hospital, arguing that it did not meet the standards required for such buildings, Māhinarangi came to be used as a reception hall and museum, with the interior being “subsequently furnished in the style of a European living-­room.” 22 To a certain extent, the modernist artworks by Māori artists shown in 1963 were in tension with the customary Māori art created by the Rotorua School of Māori Arts and Crafts in the late 1920s, which formed the backdrop for the exhibition. For example, one of the artists, Arnold Wilson, spoke out in classic modernist style against what he saw as an inauthentic cultural model: “Reviving so-­called Maori arts and crafts is a dead loss,” he says. “All they’re doing is reviving something that doesn’t apply to the Maori’s present-­day attitudes and way of life.” And out of that comes more specifically his conviction that teaching traditional Māori sculpture and carving serves no use in preserving Māori culture. “It’s time they scrubbed it,” he says. “All they’re getting is a template of what was done before 1840, or what is even worse, a template of the template that was created by the Ngata revival.” 23 Modernist Māori art was, in contrast, invested in originality and innovation. As Ans Westra wrote in 1963 of Matchitt, another of the artists in the exhibition, “The starting-­point for his paintings is usually a traditional Maori story, but though the reference to the story gives his work another dimension of meaning, here again his interpretation is an entirely new one; like all good artists, he is interested in doing something which has not been done before.” 24 It is a telling statement, which indicates the kind of milieu of activity and interpretation in which Māori artists like Matchitt and Wilson operated. The desire for innovation, to create “something which has not been done before,” was not part of how artists working as part of the “Ngata revival” thought about their work. From a twenty-­first-­century perspective, this conjunction of modernist artworks and customary context seems meaningful, particularly the irony of Māori artists, whose work is in part articulated as a rejection of Ngata’s M odernism on D isplay 

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FIGURE 5.3 

Viewing a sculpture at the Māori Festival of the Arts, Ngāruawāhia, December 1963. Photograph by Ans Westra. Ans Westra Proof Sheets, m656, National Library of New Zealand, Wellington.

project, showing their modernist artworks in a whare whakairo, which is a prime example of the kind of Māori art they oppose. The juxtaposition also reveals how Ngata’s whare whakairo and modernist Māori art were different aesthetic responses to the ongoing transformations of Māori society in the twentieth century. But in 1963 this conjunction was also interpreted as revealing a relationship between the past and the present, the old and the new, the customary and the modernist. An editorial in Te Ao Hou magazine noted that while such festivals allowed Māori and Pākehā audiences to enjoy the work of some promising young artists, musicians, and writers, the festival presented art of a very specific kind: An occasion such as this is of much interest in giving the public an opportunity to consider the ways in which talented young Maoris are expressing themselves today in the arts: to see how these young people, the inheritors of two rich cultures, are making something new of their own — ​­something to which both of these cultures are contributing. 146 

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It was especially illuminating to see their work at Turangawaewae, the centre of such strong historical and traditional associations. In this setting the contrast between the old and the new was a striking one — ​­but a sense of continuity was even more apparent.25 Modernist Māori artworks construct a different subjectivity for the viewer, who enters into a specific relationship with the object. It is tempting to draw links between the subjectivity constructed by new forms of Māori art and the new subjectivity constructed by the novel urban context Māori were negotiating in the 1950s and 1960s. A series of photographs taken by Ans Westra at the Māori Festival of the Arts in 1963 visually represents this kind of complexity in particularly interesting ways (figure 5.3). What experience of being Māori did these works provide to the viewers who look so carefully at them in Westra’s photographs? How did these individuals articulate the relationship between the artworks on tables and the customary Māori art displayed on stands in Māhinarangi? As Conal McCarthy writes, “In the extraordinary photographs of Ans Westra showing young Māori coming face to face with modern Māori art, we see how object and subject constitute one another through the culture of display.” 26

Modernist Māori Art and the Museum In 1966 the exhibition New Zealand Māori Culture and the Contemporary Scene opened at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch. Curated by Buck Nin, a Māori artist who had recently graduated from the School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury, and Baden Pere, a Royal New Zealand Air Force officer at Wigram air force base in Christchurch, the exhibition is notable because it “was almost certainly the first curated exhibition of contemporary Maori art to be welcomed into a ‘mainstream’ cultural institution.” 27 It marked an important moment in modernist Māori art’s engagement with the artistic mainstream in 1960s Aotearoa New Zealand, and through the accompanying catalog, the exhibition presented an ideological argument about the purposes and functions of “this modern movement in Maori expression [which] is barely five years old and subject to many changes in direction.” 28 As Jonathan Mane-­Wheoki has noted, New Zealand Māori Culture and the Contemporary Scene needs to be understood as constructing a staged antagonism with Peter Tomory’s exhibition Contemporary Painting in New Zealand, which was held at the Commonwealth Institute in London in 1964. The argu-

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ment that Nin and Pere had with Tomory’s show revolved around the meaning and value of terms like “indigenous.” As Tomory wrote in his catalog essay, “In the selection of this exhibition consideration has only been given to those artists who have been working in New Zealand during that period, since the selectors felt that the British public would be more interested in the indigenous art rather than that by expatriates working in England or elsewhere.” 29 Tomory’s exhibition did not include any Māori artists, just Pākehā, so a paraphrase of his sentiment in the catalog for Nin and Pere’s exhibition of modernist Māori art could document an entirely different artistic history. As the foreword to New Zealand Māori Culture and the Contemporary Scene states: “The works here represent contemporary painting and sculpture derived from an indigenous culture — ​­that of the Maori. Consideration has been given to only those artists who have been working in New Zealand since we felt that the overseas public would be more interested in indigenous art rather than that of expatriates working in England or elsewhere.” 30 A significant amount of the essay titled “Art — ​­The Reflection of a Society” published in the New Zealand Māori Culture and the Contemporary Scene catalog was given over to negative reviews of Tomory’s show, lamenting the lack of a distinctive national identity in the art shown in London. According to Nin and Pere, the answer to this problem was modernist Māori art: “If a true New Zealand school of art emerges, the rich inheritance of the Maori people, here interpreted in modern forms, may well provide a major source of inspiration for the future.” 31 This appeal to national identity, established around a kind of primitivist modernism that demonstrated “patterns derived from two cultures” in artworks that showed “how two cultures may be assimilated to produce new art forms,” was the mechanism by which Nin and Pere made their unabashed appeal for the importance and authority of modernist Māori art within the contemporary art scene of the 1960s.32 According to the curators, the artworks in their exhibition were interesting and excellent not merely in relation to Māori culture, but in terms of mainstream modernist art practice in Aotearoa New Zealand. These Māori artists did not belong to a cultural milieu separate from that of Pākehā modernism. As Nin concluded in his remarks at the exhibition opening, “We can make a valid contribution to the value of contemporary painting and sculpture in New Zealand.” 33 Exhibitions like this one, and the modernist Māori art they promoted, activated tensions and disagreements within Māori audiences. In reference to the contemporary New Zealand art debate, one article noted, “To some Maoris, art such as this, as modern in its technique as in its subject, is as much 148 

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anathema as a Hepworth bronze was to some Pakehas not so long ago.” 34 A journalist reported that when the New Zealand Māori Culture and the Contemporary Scene exhibition was shown at the Wellington Māori Arts Festival in 1967, “John Taiapa, instructor and master carver from the Maori Arts and Crafts Institute in Rotorua, shook his head when asked for his opinion. . . . ‘I think of attempts to create new forms in that way as a prostitution of Maori art,’ he said.” 35 Yet New Zealand Māori Culture and the Contemporary Scene actively explored the relationship between customary and modernist Māori art by displaying examples of nineteenth-­century Māori art from the Canterbury Museum collection alongside the modernist artworks. This pointed to a complex relationship. It established specific relationships between the aesthetic features of modernist and customary Māori art, notably the sculptural depth of older Māori carvings echoed in the sculptural depth and lack of surface patterning on modernist Māori art — ​­a connection asserted by some Māori artists in the 1950s and 1960s.36 And this relationship also spoke directly to transformations that were happening in museums during this period. As McCarthy argues, “The most important change in the genealogy of [museum] display from the 1940s to the 1960s was a shift in emphasis from artifact to art, the subtle transformation of the dominant category from something that might be described as ‘artefact/art’ toward ‘art/artefact.’ ” 37 What had previously been called Māori artifacts were in the process of becoming Māori art, and objects in museums were increasingly being judged according to their artistic qualities. “Certain objects, freed from the didactic confines of the show cases, were isolated as sculptural elements in their own right by being silhouetted against a plain wall or left on the floor as free standing forms,” writes McCarthy of the display strategies at the Dominion Museum in Wellington, which allowed audiences to appreciate Māori art as art/ artifact.38 The idea of Māori art as a form of primitive art (which in Aotearoa New Zealand more frequently referred to Pacific objects) was supported by the display technology of the “temporary exhibition,” which enabled this new category to become visible within museums. Whereas the permanent exhibit took the form of didactic displays, contextualizing objects within a model of Māori culture based on the anthropologist’s field report (and using text and images), temporary exhibitions featured objects as artworks against neutral walls and with minimal staging. Notably, New Zealand Māori Culture and the Contemporary Scene was held in the temporary exhibition annex in the Canterbury Museum foyer, and in M odernism on D isplay 

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this sense, the exhibition was a way for the Canterbury Museum to embrace this shift in terminology and display strategies. Bringing modernist art and customary art together in the format of the temporary exhibition enabled the museum to recontextualize its collections as Māori art rather than artifact, and to demonstrate an awareness of up-­to-­date transformations in museum trends.

Modernist Māori Art and the Gallery The one exhibition to display Māori art in an art gallery during the 1960s took place in 1969 at the National Art Gallery (nag) in Wellington. Sharing the same building as the Dominion Museum (where customary Māori art was on display) and the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts (which catered to the conservative tastes of an aging group of wealthy patrons), the nag was, in the immediate postwar period, dedicated to showing a selection of British academic art and its New Zealand–based followers. It began to attract growing criticism for its conservative focus, as new developments in dealer galleries and public institutions, such as the Auckland City Art Gallery, made the nag’s ornately framed oil paintings, hung in a single line in neutral galleries, appear increasingly old-­fashioned.39 Modernist Māori art had entered the nag by the mid-­1960s. Both Selwyn Muru, whose painting Kohatu (1965) was the first work by a Māori artist acquired by the gallery (plate 4), and Ralph Hotere had artworks in the national collection, and Muru’s painting was, by 1969, on permanent display along with a group of modern New Zealand and Australian paintings.40 But Māori art as a category did not feature in the exhibition program of the nag until 1969, when the New Zealand Māori Council organized an exhibition called The Work of Māori Artists. Like other exhibitions of modernist Māori art discussed in this chapter, this exhibition was part of a wider event, in this case a Rangatahi [Youth] Weekend run by the New Zealand Māori Council to promote the achievements of Māori youth. As a note in the catalog for The Work of Māori Artists states, “Through the various functions arranged for this weekend, the Maori Council aims to highlight the contribution that our younger people are making to New Zealand as a whole.” 41 An awards ceremony, a concert at the Wellington town hall, and the nag art exhibition were the main events. Although the exhibition took place within a Pākehā art gallery, it was similar to the other exhibitions organized during the 1960s. Selwyn Muru was named as the curator for the exhibition. In practice this meant contacting 150 

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fellow artists and asking them to submit work, which would then be cataloged and displayed. (As it turned out, there was too much work to fit into the small nag space, which could house only twenty artworks, and additional works were housed in the Display Centre, a for-­rent exhibition and events center across town.) The cover of the catalog featured a pen-­and-­ink drawing by Selwyn Muru in which the words “Maori” and “art” are faceted within an oval that brings to mind the early twentieth-­century synthetic cubist collages of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braques. Even the exhibition review in the Dominion newspaper strikes a familiar note, suggesting, “This Maori work is an indication of adjustment to a new age of science and culture,” and praising artists like Fred Graham, Paratene Matchitt, and Selwyn Muru for their ability to use “Maori traditions to make art of our own century” whose “sophistication combined with the best of an exciting culture of the past” produced “an intelligent compromise between the old and the new.” 42 What was unusual about this exhibition was the furor that erupted in the local newspapers after an emergency meeting of the nag’s Building and Finance Committee resulted in a memo sent to John Booth, of the New Zealand Māori Council, giving instructions as to how the artists and their guests were to behave at the opening: “1. function is to finish at 6.30p.m. 2. the building must be cleared at 6.45 p.m. 3. no smoking or drinking of liquor permitted outside the Blue Room. 4. Adequate ash trays are to be provided by the N.Z. Maori Council. 5. any person misbehaving is to be removed immediately.” 43 As the official records of the National Art Gallery show, this memo reflected a series of misunderstandings and differences between the nag’s ways of operating and the more casual ways in which exhibitions such as these were usually managed. For example, director Melvin Day commented that some of the proposed artists and works were “of a standard high enough for the gallery to be associated with,” but demanded that organizers vouch for other artists whose names he did not know. This must have rankled, especially as this exhibition included experienced and well-­known Māori artists such as Arnold Wilson, Fred Graham, and Cliff Whiting. McCarthy concludes, “Under the guise of maintaining fine art standards and rules, this gate-­keeping behavior confirmed that the nag reflected the values of the dominant culture.” 44 It certainly reaffirmed for several Māori artists taking part that they faced discrimination in seeking entry to the Pākehā art world that they had, from the 1950s onward, identified as the appropriate context for their modernist art. As Cliff Whiting later recalled, the argument was about “whether Māori should be displaying art in a place like this. . . . [T]hey M odernism on D isplay 

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suggested that if they displayed our art, Māori art, up there, then you would have all these people eating kai, having parties . . . in the galleries!” 45

Modernist Māori Art on the Marae In 1973, the Māori Artists and Writers Society held its inaugural meeting in Tūkākī whare whakairo (one of the meeting houses produced by the Rotorua School of Māori Arts and Crafts) at Te Kaha marae on the east cape of the North Island (figure 5.4). The poet Hone Tuwhare was the convener, and the conference “attracted over 200 people either involved or interested in Maori culture. They included writers, poets, artists, sculptors, photographers, actors, dancers, carvers and culture group leaders.” 46 As well as readings, performances, and workshops, the event included an art exhibition, which was described by poet Rowley Habib in his report of the weekend’s events: Two busloads go to the local high school to view the art exhibition. Now here’s something. There’s guts, here, vitality. . . . I leave with the strong notion that this is what art is all about. And that it should never have left here in the first place. One couldn’t help being struck by the significance of the whole concept. For here were works by people who, in the main, were not only leading Maori artists, but leading New Zealand artists, hanging on walls and in some cases propped up precariously against the blackboard of this humble school, in this humble settlement, away out in the sticks.47 The Māori Artists and Writers Society, founded in 1973, was essentially the patron of returning modernist Māori art to the marae, the complex of buildings, including the meeting house, where Māori ceremony and identity is performed in its most intense form. Though modernist Māori art of the kind displayed in Te Kaha — ​­and indeed by some of the same artists — ​­had already been shown inside the Māhinarangi meeting house in Ngāruawāhia in 1963, the intention behind the society’s project was not the same. Māhinarangi had served as a venue, and while the juxtaposition was meaningful and important in many different ways, the view articulated by Habib that Māori art “should never have left here in the first place” had not been present earlier. The display strategies born of necessity in the Māori Festival of the Arts in 1963 — ​­which McCarthy describes as “A wide range of objects . . . haphazardly arranged on tables and standing panels like a school fair” — ​­was affirmed in 1973 as a means to break down the barriers erected by professionalism and the rules of the 152 

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John Miller, Evening Concert, Tūkākī wharenui, Te Kaha-nui-a-tiki marae, Te Kaha, June 2, 1973. Classical music recital, with Ivan Wirepa (from Whanarua Bay) on piano and Stephen Sheath on cello. Digital scan from original 35 mm black-and-white negative. Collection of the artist.

FIGURE 5.4 

Pākehā gallery that kept Māori audiences away from the work of contemporary Māori artists (figure 5.5).48 The Māori Artists and Writers Society had a specific political and social agenda, revealed by Māori novelist Witi Ihimaera in the account of the Te Kaha meeting he published in Te Ao Hou magazine. Groups were formed to discuss “the position of the Maori artist in New Zealand society; what directions are needed; are our people sensitive to our presence; is there communication in the development of our art and artists in relation to our people; use of the marae for creativity; and the dilemma of the Maori artist in expressing Maori concepts or feeling within a Pakeha medium.” 49 These agenda items make it clear that in 1973, the Māori Artists and Writers Society sought a Māori audience quite unlike the Pākehā audience that had been addressed in 1966 by New Zealand Māori Art and the Contemporary Scene. By the early 1970s, artists like Cliff Whiting were suggesting that the marae was a conceptual space deeply relevant to their art. One could argue that this was in part a response to the question of audience; seeking to connect with M odernism on D isplay 

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John Miller, Artists’ Exhibition Te Kaha-nui-a-tiki District High School, Te Kaha, June 1973. Work by Para Matchitt. Digital scan from original 35 mm black-and-white negative. Collection of the artist.

FIGURE 5.5 

Māori people, the marae was the logical starting point since it was the place where Māori people encountered and expected art. This is how Whiting made the case in 1974 when he told Anne McLaughlin, “The marae is the Maori people’s art gallery, and it is here that the full meaning of Maori art will be found.” 50 This shift in meaning was tied to the changing social and political context of the 1970s, especially to the so-­called Māori renaissance. The new visibility of cultural activity in New Zealand society was tightly connected to the resurgence of mana Māori (Māori authority, power, and cultural autonomy) in political and social spheres, and it represents a moment in the 1970s when Māori became irrevocably part of mainstream life in Aotearoa New Zealand. During that decade, modernist Māori art was increasingly caught between two big shifts: an emerging Māori nationalism, which demanded a new artistic politics, and a dethroned artistic nationalism, which demanded new artistic identities and practices, including allegiance to alternative forms of modernist and postmodernist art practice.51 The ideal of a “blended” culture drawing from Māori and Pākehā cultural forms ran out of steam and was transformed into a desire to express and maintain Māori culture as a defined 154 

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and unique entity. Art, like many other aspects of Māori culture in the 1970s, was not concerned with Māori and Pākehā interaction but became instead an expression of Māori culture in the face of Pākehā ignorance and racism. Social and cultural pressures meant that the sense of individualism that had made modernist Māori art so useful in the 1950s and 1960s as an expression of resistance and political action was no longer the most obvious or powerful way to achieve such outcomes. Yet to identify as Māori was to be committed to a social and political struggle, and art still had a vital and visible role to play in this process. It became necessary, however, to bridge the gap between modernist and customary Māori art that earlier art practices and exhibitions had worked so hard to establish.

Māori Artists and Contemporary New Zealand Art Māori artists were regular exhibitors in the late 1950s and 1960s, taking part in group exhibitions and holding solo shows at many of the leading public institutions and private galleries responsible for supporting and promoting New Zealand modernist art (figure 5.6). The exhibition possibilities available to Māori artists during this period are nicely illustrated by the example of Selwyn Muru, who burst into the New Zealand art world (and public) consciousness in 1963 after six of his paintings were selected for the Autumn Exhibition at the Auckland Society of Arts. The exhibition committee, led by Paul Beadle, an artist and a lecturer at the Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland, decided to restrict the exhibition of members’ work to a grand total of 16 paintings chosen from the 140 submitted. The selection of 6 paintings by Muru was thus a staggering vote of confidence in a twenty-­three-­year-­old artist, prompting John Reid, who opened the exhibition, to ask “where he had been hiding his talent for so long, that the public had never heard of him.52 Muru, a secondary school teacher who had no formal art training other than that provided by art lecturer Philip Barclay at the Ardmore Teachers Training College in Auckland, quickly followed this achievement with other exhibitions, including the Painters and Sculptors of Promise exhibition at the Auckland Society of Arts in 1963, and solo exhibitions at the Willeston Gallery in Wellington and the Uptown Gallery in Auckland in 1964, the Centre Gallery in Wellington in 1965, and again at the Willeston Gallery in 1966. An article published in the Wellington Evening Post in 1964 noted that Muru “has exhibited at the Auckland City Art Gallery, the Ikon Gallery in Auckland, the Auckland Art Society (all one-­man exhibitions), the Contemporary M odernism on D isplay 

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F I G U R E 5 . 6   Left to right: Arnold Wilson, Growth Forms, and Alison Duff, Anima. Recent New Zealand Sculpture exhibit, Auckland City Art Gallery, May 1966. Photograph by Gregory Riethmaier, National Publicity Studios, Archives New Zealand, aaqt 6401, a80,598.

New ­Zealand Exhibition in Japan and South-­east Asia (a group exhibition by leading New Zealand contemporary artists) and recently . . . at the Willeston Gallery in Wellington.” 53 Throughout this chapter I have used the term “Māori art” and discussed a sequence of mid-­twentieth-­century exhibitions in which these artworks were displayed to explore the various ways in which subsets of this term — ​­notably modernist Māori art and customary Māori art — ​­interacted with each other and with various audiences. What the early exhibition history of an artist like Muru makes clear is that while he and other artists were usually acknowledged as Māori, their work was not often described or positioned as Māori art. For example, in 1964 Mac Vincent wrote, “Muru is one of the group of young Maori artists, all of strong individuality and with a personal vision, who within the past few years have come into public view. Hitherto the Maori race had lagged in the arts, and had produced no really good painter; now the men in this group are doing some of the best work among our contemporary artists.” 54 A 1963 profile in the New Zealand Listener talked at length about Muru’s background in a small village in Northland, including his family and cultural experiences.55 But even though the artist is always identified as Māori, at no point is the work itself described as Māori art; rather, it is called “contemporary” or “modern” art. This suited the diverse subject matter and approach of an artist like Muru, who might just as easily present an “impressionistic landscape,” as he would “a painting which gave to a traditional Maori motif the jeweled richness of color which one associates with medieval stained glass,” or talk about his work in terms clearly related to European and Pākehā modernisms of the 1950s and 1960s.56 In Rosemary Vincent’s 1964 article about Muru in Te Ao Hou magazine, she reported that the artist thought execution to be more important than subject (figure 5.7). She compared him to Van Gogh, whom “we don’t remember . . . for his ability to draw so much as for his unusual and highly original technique,” and noted that Muru’s philosophy of painting was based on that of Pablo Picasso, who said, “I do not seek but I find.” Such references to modernist masters, however, also emphasized the particular relationship that modernist Māori artists such as Muru constructed with customary Māori art. As Vincent quoted Muru, “I feel the old masters have done an excellent job; therefore there’s no point in trying to better what they did. But the creative avenues leading from traditional Maori art are still open for the artist to explore.” 57 This is a good reminder that an exhibition history of modernist Māori art reveals the active negotiations by artists, curators, critics, and viewers not only M odernism on D isplay 

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FIGURE 5.7 

Selwyn Muru in Wellington, 1964. Photograph by Ans Westra, Ans Westra Proof Sheets, m784, National Library of New Zealand, Wellington.

of issues such as the art/artifact classification and the values and possibilities of different spaces such as the marae, the museum, and the art gallery, but also of the very idea of “modernist Māori art” — ​­a category that can only be used in this chapter because of the negotiations of value performed during this critical fifteen-­year period. Putting Indigenous modernism on display did more than make such practices visible to contemporary audiences. Exhibits of modernist Māori art were fundamental to how the category of Māori art itself, including both customary and modernist art, was negotiated and established. Notes 1. Damian Skinner, “Indigenous Primitivists: The Challenge of Māori Modernism,” World Art 4, no. 1 (2014): 67–87. 2. Damian Skinner, The Carver and the Artist: Māori Art in the Twentieth Century (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008). 3. Skinner, The Carver and the Artist, 16–46. 4. Jeffrey Sissons, “The Traditionalisation of the Maori Meeting House,” Oceania 69, no. 1 (1998): 37. 158 

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5. Skinner, The Carver and the Artist, 80–85. 6. Harry Dansey, “Maori Artists Make Mark as Professionals,” Auckland Star, September 3, 1966. 7. Jonathan Mane-­Wheoki, “Gordon Tovey,” in Tovey and the Tovey Generation (Porirua, NZ: Pataka Porirua Museum, 2000), 4. 8. Carol Henderson, A Blaze of Colour: Gordon Tovey, Artist Educator (Christchurch, NZ: Hazard Press, 1998), 171. 9. Ngahiraka Mason, Turuki Turuki! Paneke Paneke! When Māori Art Became Contemporary (Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery, 2008), 15. 10. Mason, Turuki Turuki! Paneke Paneke!, 20. 11. Mason, Turuki Turuki! Paneke Paneke!, 22. 12. Mason, Turuki Turuki! Paneke Paneke!, 22. 13. “Show by Maori Artists,” Auckland Star, May 29, 1958, 4. 14. H. M., “Maori Goes in for Abstract Painting,” Auckland Star, June 10, 1958, 1. 15. Maharaia Winiata, “The Future of Maori Arts and Crafts,” Te Ao Hou 19 (1957): 34. 16. CHP, “Maori Painters at Art Gallery,” Waikato Times, November 30, 1964. 17. A. S. F., “Modern Art and the Maori,” New Zealand Listener, May 5, 1967, 6. 18. Ans Westra, “Ngaruawahia Festival of the Arts,” Te Ao Hou 46 (1964): 29. 19. Conal McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori: A History of Colonial Cultures of Display (Wellington, NZ: Te Papa Press, 2007), 124–25. 20. Westra, “Ngaruawahia Festival of the Arts,” 29. 21. Michael King, Te Puea: A Biography (Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977), 127, 144. 22. King, Te Puea, 146. 23. “Reviving Maori Art and Craft Is Dead Loss, Says Maori,” unsourced newspaper clipping, 1966(?), Arnold Wilson Artist Files, E. H. McCormack Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. 24. Ans Westra, “Para Matchitt: Painter and Sculptor,” Te Ao Hou 45 (1963): 26. 25. “First Maori Festival of the Arts,” Te Ao Hou 46 (1964): 4 26. McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 145. 27. Jonathan Mane-­Wheoki, “Buck Nin and the Origins of Contemporary Maori Art,” Art New Zealand 82 (1997): 62. 28. Buck Nin and Baden Pere, New Zealand Maori Culture and the Contemporary Scene 1966: An Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture Derived from Maori Culture (Christchurch, NZ: Canterbury Museum, 1966.), n.p. 29. Peter Tomory, Contemporary Painting in New Zealand (Wellington, NZ: Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council, 1964), n.p. 30. Nin and Pere, New Zealand Maori Culture, n.p. 31. Nin and Pere, New Zealand Maori Culture, n.p. 32. Nin and Pere, New Zealand Maori Culture, n.p. M odernism on D isplay 

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33. Cherry Andrew, “Christchurch Exhibition of Maori Art,” Te Ao Hou 58 (1967): 39. 34. A. S. F., “Modern Art and the Maori,” 6. 35. A. S. F., “Modern Art and the Maori,” 6. 36. Skinner, The Carver and the Artist, 123. 37. McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 110. 38. McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 110. 39. McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 122. 40. McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 128. 41. The Work of Māori Artists, exhibition catalog (Wellington: New Zealand Māori Council, 1969), n.p. 42. “Maori Council Art Display,” Dominion, September 2, 1969. 43. Sir Hamilton Mitchell, Chairman, nag Committee of Management, memorandum, to Mr. Booth, Secretary, NZ Māori Council, August 21, 1969, mu 7/10/1: Maori Art Exhibition, Te Papa Archives, Wellington, New Zealand. 44. McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 211. 45. Quoted in McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 212. 46. Witi Ihimaera, “Conference at Te Kaha,” Te Ao Hou 74 (1973): 22. 47. Rowley Habib, “Artists on the Marae,” Te Māori 5, no. 1 (1974): 34–35. 48. McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 124. 49. Ihimaera, “Conference at Te Kaha,” 22–23. 50. Anne McLaughlin, “Cliff Whiting: Art Is Part and Parcel of His Life-Style,” Te Maori 6, no. 6 (1974): 25. 51. Skinner, The Carver and the Artist, 143–55. 52. Rosemary Vincent, “Selwyn Muru’s Paintings Win Wide Acclaim,” Te Ao Hou 46 (1964): 25. 53. “Maori Painter Adds Acting to His Laurels,” Wellington Evening Post, October 3, 1964. 54. Mac Vincent, “The Aucklanders Diary,” Auckland Star, May 3, 1963. 55. M. J. A., “The Art of S. F. Muru,” New Zealand Listener, July 12, 1963, 11. 56. Vincent, “Selwyn Muru’s Paintings,” 25. 57. Vincent, “Selwyn Muru’s Paintings,” 26–27.

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PART II

MODERN IDENTITIES

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NICHOLAS THOMAS

6 

“ARTIST OF PNG”

Mathias Kauage and Melanesian Modernism

Precursors In artistic modernism’s canonical European expressions, the movement was stimulated powerfully, albeit in contradictory and much-­debated terms, by ethnography and specifically by renewed interest from the late nineteenth century in the arts of Africa, Oceania, and Native America. In certain of its Oceanic expressions, artistic modernism was likewise stimulated by ethnography, but in quite a different sense: fieldwork’s generative traffic in information, description, and representation called for local artists to take novel approaches that, in some instances, were modernist or led to modernist practice. In 1962–1963, anthropologist Anthony Forge commissioned a group of more than 150 paintings on paper by Abelam artists, those of Papua New Guinea’s Sepik region. Forge was engaged in a sustained ethnographic study of art, visual communication, and social organization in the region; his inquiries centered on questions of style, and he was undertaking a sort of experiment. The men who had collectively painted the great façades of Abelam houses now created, for him, what were in effect samples, images representative of the motifs and compositions of the much larger works integral to the preeminent architectural form of Abelam society (figure 6.1). The group of samples represented, for the mildly positivistic anthropologist, a dataset, one that a doctoral student at the London School of Economics would later analyze.1 In commissioning these works, Forge was enacting a method employed, or at any rate improvised, by ethnographers in Oceania since the late nineteenth century (and by eminent counterparts such as Franz Boas elsewhere).

F I G U R E 6 . 1 

Kuanimbandu, Tots, ca. 1960. Painting on paper, 20 × 15 in. (51 × 38 cm). mss 411, Anthony Forge Papers, Mandeville Special Collections Library, uc San Diego.

A. C. Haddon in the Torres Strait, C. G. Seligman in Papua, W. H. R. Rivers and A. M. Hocart in the western Solomon Islands, and later Ronald Berndt among Yolgnu in northern Australia had all provided paper and materials to Indigenous informants and encouraged them to illustrate ceremonies and narratives.2 In some cases, the Indigenous collaborators did so by adopting the conventions of European drawing, for example, by representing ritual structures in profile. In other cases, they transposed to paper forms and designs otherwise painted onto bodies, bark, and — ​­in Abelam — ​­houses and sculpted figures, scaling them down and adapting them to the proportions of the sheets provided. These works can be seen from two (and no doubt more) perspectives. In one sense, they were part of the corpus of data generated in diverse media by ethnography, along with field notes, responses to questions, photos and moving images, audio recordings of narratives, sketch maps of settlements and gardens, and genealogical diagrams. Yet in another sense, they were novel artistic creations. If, indeed, the articulations of custom and diagrammatic representations of social relations that fieldwork produced were also novel in their conceptual form, and not simply transcriptions of cultural knowledge 164 

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that already existed, the drawings and paintings were visual works that employed new media, novel and adapted conventions, and original concepts. Works from the Torres Strait, Papua, and the western Solomon Islands functioned in ways that customary art had never done, in the sense that they were descriptive and illustrative. They represented ancestral ritual activities and customary warfare, practices that had been abandoned or suppressed. They were therefore images that engaged memory and documented custom from the aftermath of ruptures — ​­specifically, the ruptures of colonial pacification and conversion to Christianity. The drawings recalled and imaginatively revived practice. In some cases, if not all, they were affirmations of tradition, expressing and celebrating a customary aesthetic, or a form of sociality, through two-­dimensional imagery and new materials. In multiple respects, therefore, from the late nineteenth century onward, drawings from the Pacific were expressions of modernity and a modernization of consciousness. Although reproductions of a few works appeared in ethnographic publications, the drawings themselves were preserved (if at all) in anthropological archives. They entered neither the visual culture of their communities, nor that of the anthropologists’ societies. While Melanesian masks, sculptures, and other customary works were extensively displayed in the great ethnographic museums of Europe and North America, the commissioned ethnographic images, with a few intriguing exceptions, would essentially disappear. Over the last twenty years, a sense of the richness of anthropological collections has steadily grown; artists, Indigenous people, and researchers from various disciplines have increasingly brought extraordinary historic photographs, texts, and graphic work “into the light” (as Brook Andrew has put it), but these kinds of works on paper have only recently been more fully published and represented through exhibitions.3 Until now, they were significant simply because they were created, not because they had circulated and entered or shaped public imagination.

Port Moresby Just five to six years after Forge’s experiment, a new cultural conjuncture arose in Papua New Guinea, specifically in the capital, Port Moresby. By the end of the 1960s, in the context of global decolonization, the University of Papua New Guinea (upng) had been established, and those who taught there were well aware that their students would be the first leaders of an independent nation. In 1967, Ulli Beier was recruited from Nigeria to teach literature. He was well “ A rtist of P N G ”  

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known for having mentored and encouraged writers, particularly through the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, established in 1961, and the magazine Black Orpheus, which provided an early publication outlet for writers such as Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. Georgina Beier, Ulli’s wife, had worked extensively with painters and sculptors, similarly encouraging the creation of new images and expressions appropriate to an independent nation. By the time the Beiers left for Papua New Guinea (PNG), the Mbari Art Gallery had presented some seventy-­five exhibitions representing not only Nigerians, but artists from Ghana, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere. Some artists now considered major African modernists, such as Ibrahim el Salahi and Malangatana, had their first exhibitions outside their own countries there.4 In Port Moresby, Georgina Beier was shocked by the complacency and racism of the colonial community and by the mediocrity of the local expatriate art scene. She quickly found work to do, at first conducting drawing and painting workshops with inmates in the colony’s psychiatric asylum at Laloki, then going on to produce arresting limited edition prints from works by several artists there, notably Tiabe, Mathias, and Hape.5 Soon afterward, Georgina was introduced to Timothy Akis, a man in his late twenties from Tsembaga, in the Simbai Valley, who had worked as an assistant and an informant to linguists and ethnographers, including Ann Rappaport and Georgeda Buchbinder. Like those who had assisted Haddon, Seligman, Forge, and others, Akis had often produced sketches while providing information, not least to illustrate matters that were hard to explain in Tok Pisin (PNG pidgin, the lingua franca). Beier subsequently wrote that at first she had been impressed by the intensity of Akis’s personality rather than by his work, but he had great energy and worked intensively with her over the course of a six-­week period in Port Moresby. In February 1969, at the end of his stay, an exhibition was mounted at the upng. Following a group show dedicated to the work of Laloki artists, this was the first exhibition to present the work of a single Melanesian artist. It was a founding event, one of the beginnings of a modern and modernist Melanesian art world. Akis’s drawings could have easily disappeared into an anthropological archive; instead his practice was offered to the public, interpreted, affirmed, and in due course marketed. It is important to ask why, exactly, Akis’s work received this treatment. What were the motivations of the expatriates, without whom this artist would not have been encouraged to create work in this form, nor present it to the public? His situation is distinct from that of other Indigenous artists, whose mentors aimed primarily to foster a craft industry, to encourage communities to pro166 

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duce objects, including artworks, that could be marketed in hopes of enabling more self-­reliance, especially among remote, welfare-­dependent Aboriginal people. No doubt, interests were diverse in the university environment at this time, and some people in the art world were certainly working on local economic empowerment. But the predominant interest in Aboriginal artworks seems not to have been sociologically framed nor economically driven; rather, the interest was focused on fostering a new public culture shaped by Papua New Guineans themselves. To this end, the works were not offered for sale, though some were later acquired and displayed by upng, and the Beiers retained at least eight others.6 Ulli Beier wrote an introductory text to the 1969 exhibition of Akis’s art, stressing the originality and the personal nature of the works, “owe[d] nothing to the traditions of his people, whose artwork consisted mainly of geometric shield designs.” 7 In Georgina Beier’s later reflections, she stressed that the artist “was never sidetracked by European influences. . . . [He] depicted the world he knew intimately — ​­the animals that inhabited the Simbai valley: the cassowaries, bandicoots, lizards, sugar gliders and snakes.” 8 These commentaries were and are apt: Akis’s signature was indeed the vivid and distinctive image of one such animal or another, though he went on to depict human-­animal hybrids, creatures of the imagination, and humans in strange predicaments, bearing thorns or squeezed between boulders (figures 6.2 and 6.3). But in making these seemingly straightforward observations, the Beiers inaugurated a new frame and language for Melanesian art, which had formerly been understood almost exclusively in ethnological, curatorial, or antiquarian terms. Now, Akis could be presented as an individual artist, authentic precisely because he owed nothing to either tradition or European art, while being responsive to his environment, to what he knew. In a manner at once modest and audacious, between a backyard studio and improvised university galleries, the Beiers and their local partners created an art scene, soon supported by and documented in a local critical literature — ​­the magazines Kovave and Gigibori.9 Shortly thereafter, the artists began to receive international exposure, through dealer and university gallery shows arranged opportunistically and inexpensively in Australia, Nigeria, and the United States.10 Anxious that Akis not feel isolated among a crowd of expatriates at his exhibition opening, the organizers invited the Papua New Guinean laborers and cleaners who worked on the university campus to the February 1969 event. Among them was Mathias Kauage, a Chimbu man, at the time about twenty-­ five, who had an immediate sense that he could follow Akis’s example. He had “ A rtist of P N G ”  

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Timothy Akis, Untitled, ca. 1970. Ink on paper, 32.4 × 27.5 in. (82.5 × 70 cm). University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Gift of Professor Marilyn Strathern, 2009.43.

FIGURE 6.2 

F I G U R E 6 . 3   Timothy Akis, Man i hait namil long tupela ston [Man hiding between two stones], ca. 1977. Screenprint, 31.4 × 27.5 in. (80 × 70 cm). University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Acquired with the support of the Art Fund, maa 2011.74.

a friend present some of his drawings to Georgina, who was unimpressed yet quickly warmed to the man, as she had initially reacted to Akis and his work. “Kauage visited us every evening bringing bundles of awful drawings. They were clumsily executed with no originality, except on one occasion he had drawn a spider, hiding in the corner. . . . I ask[ed] him to draw more spiders, but he didn’t. Finally I said: ‘Kauage, come every evening, you are welcome. Have your beer, we can talk, but don’t bring any more drawings.’ ” 11 But Kauage, like Akis, drew with great intensity, swiftly moving away from the copies he had made of illustrations in English children’s books to imaginary creatures, male and female figures, horses and riders. He soon began to fill in figures and “ A rtist of P N G ”  

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Mathias Kauage, Magic Fish, 1969. Screenprint, 30 × 35 in. (76 × 89 cm). University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Gift of Professor Marilyn Strathern, 2010.674.

FIGURE 6.4 

faces with dynamic patterning, bars, chevrons, zigzags, checked fields, and concentric motifs. As well as many drawings, he produced, with Georgina’s assistance, a series of woodblocks in the latter months of 1969, which broadly foreshadowed the style he would sustain; though on larger sheets of paper, his imagery became lighter as well as more mobile and dynamic (figure 6.4).12 The Beiers went back to Nigeria from 1971 to 1974 before returning to PNG to establish the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies. Over the next two decades, they moved between PNG, Australia, and Germany, periodically revisiting West Africa. In Bayreuth, Ulli was founding director of Iwawela House, like all the Beiers’ endeavors a catalytic institution, ahead of its time in showcasing what would later be called “world art,” as well as theater and literature. It is unclear how much work Kauage produced in Georgina Beier’s absence, 170 

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F I G U R E 6 . 5   Mathias Kauage, Pasindia trak [Passenger truck], ca. 1977. Screenprint, 28 × 41 in. (71 × 104 cm). University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Acquired with the support of the Art Fund, 2011.45.

but what he created from 1974 onward was accomplished and ambitious in a new way. Helicopter appears to have been his first work representing modern transport; he went on to depict planes, one of which had brought the first missionary to his district. He also invented the motif of a passenger bus in profile, replete with people, which he reworked and adapted in a number of different pieces. These were images of the city; he was painting modern Melanesian life. It is worth reflecting on what the urban environment might have meant to a man from the Highlands at the time (figure 6.5). In No Money on Our Skins: Hagen Migrants in Port Moresby, an early and rich study in urban anthropology, Marilyn Strathern drew attention to the difficulties migrant workers seemed to have when asked to explain why they had left home and come to the city. “Positive statements about the town are rarely heard. And yet in much of their behaviour many individuals show a strong, if not permanent commitment to town life. But when it comes to speaking about it, they tend to be off hand, saying that they will stay till they decide to go, or that they like it well enough. . . . [B]eing ‘of town’ confers no real status, either from the point of view of the rural society, nor in any unambiguous way among migrants themselves.” 13 Highlands laborers were, in other words, unable to represent urban life in positive moral terms. In town, wantoks (mem“ A rtist of P N G ”  

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bers of the same language group) might gather to mingle and provide mutual support, but they struggled to represent sociality, or social value, in the city setting. Kauage saw town as explicitly corrupting in the sense that Melanesian girls and women were prone to embrace Western dress, seek out wealthy white men, and become prostitutes. A series of works from the late 1970s represent such women. These ebullient images convey the pride and beauty of their subjects, but Kauage’s exegeses of the sexual politics — ​­now patently problematic from the vantage point of postcolonial feminism — ​­amount to a lament regarding this aspect of modernity. “When I first came to Port Moresby in 1964, I didn’t see any Papua New Guinean girls driving cars. Today there are plenty driving all kinds of cars and with all kinds of decorations and chasing after rich men,” he commented in 1977; of a 1978 print of a woman going to market, “Golm has really fancied herself up. . . . Look at her. She should be ashamed.” 14 Without the caption supplied by his quoted comments, the judgmental character of the works themselves would hardly be as self-­evident. Kauage’s younger contemporary David Lasisi created didactic images that presented problems of self and identification between tradition and modernity. The Whore made the modern Melanesian woman a figure of shame and of the corruption of city life; Kauage appears to have shared Lasisi’s misgivings, but his style did not render his images as vehicles for this kind of moral critique. The artist’s most important works of the mid-­1970s were two colored screen­ prints, Independence Celebration 1 and 4, which were based on paintings made at the time of ceremonies marking Papua New Guinea’s independence from Australia in September 1975 (figure 6.6). (The paintings themselves were bought by expatriates at the time and have not been traced.) The moment was one of great festivity, and Kauage’s images reflect that joy; his motif is the passenger truck, which is now a vibrantly colored bearer of dancers, of a collectivity, of people invested in celebrating independence. The significance of these works is that they are the first in Kauage’s oeuvre, and indeed the first in Melanesia, to represent a political event in the modern sense, that is, a happening in the narrative of a nation and its affairs. As such, they might be compared with works by modern African and Asian artists who likewise represent and narrate the passages from colonialism to decolonization. Yet, if comparisons are made, for example, with the work of Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, from Zaire, they only make apparent that Kauage’s response to the event is oblique.15 The African artist depicted the ceremony that actually effected the transfer of power, including the speech of the leader of the new 172 

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Mathias Kauage, Independence Celebration 4, 1975. Color screen­print, 20.5 × 30 in. (52.2 × 76.4 cm). University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Gift of Professor Marilyn Strathern, 2009.29. FIGURE 6.6 

nation; Matulu artistically enacted the nation’s chronology and its characteristic mode of personification. Other than flags, which become increasingly conspicuous, like stage decorations, in Kauage’s paintings, he appears indifferent to the notion of nation and its defining expressions, but he was evidently entranced by the spectacle, by the excitement and the presence of independence on the street. We could identify a sort of populism here: the artist is interested less in the abstractions of government and its official narratives than in the drama and the experience of the new order from the perspective of the man or woman who lives in Port Moresby. But he is never a social or documentary artist; unlike the South African township painters, he does not depict shabby but vital urban environments; he does not try to represent the way people live and work. His visual art seems rather to present a phenomenon or a moment that is in some sense exemplary. The 1970s and early 1980s were a high point for printmaking in Papua New Guinea, and both Akis and Kauage produced a host of impressive works over the decade: Kauage’s included further mobilizations of the “passenger truck” motif, in which the vehicle assumes the form of a display board on which the decorated faces of a group of people fill the available space. In a 1979 screenprint, Man draiwim tripela member bilong hilans (Man driving three members “ A rtist of P N G ”  

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[of parliament] from the Highlands), the interest in representing national political life resurfaces; the vehicle is adorned with unspecific but dynamic flags.

Artist of PNG Kauage subsequently spent time with the Beiers in Bayreuth and Sydney, and during these periods, when he was evidently most directly supported by Georgina, he produced outstanding paintings, especially during the late 1980s and early 1990s. One series was represented by two works acquired by the Australian Museum in Sydney in 1987, importantly but belatedly bringing him to the permanent collection of a major public institution.16 The paintings represented the life and death of the politician Iambakey Okuk, of interest to Kauage because both he and Okuk were Chimbu, extending the artist’s interest in the representation of the nation’s political affairs. One work featured Okuk campaigning, emerging from a helicopter in customary dress to bestow gifts on supporters. Kauage’s commentary, presumably transcribed around the time the work was purchased, stated that the painting shows Okuk with Missus [i.e., his wife] Nahau Runi and Stephen Taku who are down below inside the helicopter. They’ve put pig’s teeth and kina in their noses. They are campaigning, going around all the places in Papua New Guinea in the helicopter. They throw away money to all the people. They go around Papua, New Guinea too. New Guinea, Papua, it’s the same, they throw the kina [banknotes] down onto the grass and all the ground. The flag is there, they’ve fastened spears to the helicopter. If a bighead man is walking about looking for a fight, the spears are ready, that’s why they’re there.17 This was thus an account of the vitality and efficacy of a national leader. The second painting represents Okuk’s son, who had been studying in the United States when he learned of his father’s death, arriving at the airport (figure 6.7). Kauage’s account is intriguingly tangential: [The young man] came to 7 mile [a point on the road] with his bicycle. He took the bicycle, thinking ‘Is papa dead or is it a lie?’ He didn’t ride the bicycle to parliament, not yet. He sat down, thinking ‘Is my papa dead, or is he sick?’ Then he rode the bicycle to parliament, he didn’t take a car or something; no, he went by bike. ‘Papa is inside parliament at a meeting,’ he thought, ‘He is not dead.’ That’s what Okuk’s son 174 

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Mathias Kauage, Okuk’s Son at Moresby Airport, 1987. Acrylic on canvas, 64 × 74 in. (162 × 183 cm). Courtesy and copyright Australian Museum, e081510.

FIGURE 6.7 

was feeling in his belly. But when he saw his papa in the coffin, he understood.18 In this case, a distinction needs to be made between the “work” of Kauage’s commentary and the work that is the painting itself. Kauage’s story represents an empathetic and psychologically insightful effort to grasp the sense of disbelief that those who lose parents and loved ones often feel. But neither the particular work, nor Kauage’s visual art as a whole, attempts to convey the inner mental state or reflections of the persons depicted. Further, though paintings in general often image, for instance, the composure, piety, or anguish of subjects, painters do not typically seek to represent specific thoughts. It may be obvious that a story is often the verbal and narrative counterpart to a visual “ A rtist of P N G ”  

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image, but in this case the key questions are, What kind of image has Kauage produced? And in what sense is it a counterpart to the talk that might circulate around a figure such as Okuk? Kauage had been in Sydney in 1988, the year of the bicentenary of white settlement, marked both by public pomp and much contention around the settler nation’s history. While the anniversary was that of the First Fleet’s arrival, not that of Captain Cook’s 1770 visit in the Endeavour to Botany Bay, the foundational status in national history of the famous explorer meant that he loomed large in public imagining, which Kauage responded to by adapting his approach in rendering passenger trucks and airplanes to resemble the tall-­ masted ship. He went on, in the early 1990s, to produce some of his strongest later paintings, a series representing the defining aspects of Papua New Guinea’s colonial and postcolonial history. One work depicts a missionary leading a service, and another, Australian medical officers giving a group of schoolchildren injections. A third, entitled Buka War, dramatizes the confrontation between the Papua New Guinea Defence Force and the Bougainville secessionists in 1990, when long-­standing grievances gave way to a guerilla war, the Pacific counterpart to Biafra, which brought to the fore the discontents of decolonization that insiders and locals already knew too well (figure 6.8). Biting the Doctor’s Arm was also personal: the boy resisting the needle is supposed to be Kauage himself, and the scene a Chimbu village (figure 6.9). But the space in the world that the village occupies is indicated in the upper righthand part of the painting by the flag of the independent nation. This is an anachronism in that at the time the incident took place, presumably during the artist’s boyhood in the 1950s, the flag, featuring the bird of paradise, had yet to be designed, let alone officially adopted. But in another sense its inclusion is absolutely appropriate: the image is one of a history that belongs to Papua New Guinea. His inscription, “Kauage 1969–1994,” refers to the span of the artist’s career, beginning in 1969 and continuing in the year the work was painted. Though a painter having an interest in signaling his or her situation in art history is nothing unusual, Kauage’s painting notably celebrates a story, a nation, and the accomplishments of the artist all at once. Kauage had thus progressed from quirky figures of his imagination to scenes of modern Melanesian life, before becoming a kind of national history painter. He would go still further. The Glasgow city museums had acquired several of his works from his London dealer, Rebecca Hossack, following an exhibition there in the northern summer of 1994. A new institution, the Gallery of Modern Art, opened in Glasgow in 1996, and Kauage was brought 176 

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Mathias Kauage, Buka War, 1990. Acrylic on canvas, 49 × 69 in. (125 × 175.5 cm). Glasgow Museums. Permission from Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London.

FIGURE 6.8 

Mathias Kauage, Biting the Doctor’s Arm, 1994. Acrylic on canvas, 49 × 68 in. (125 × 175 cm). University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Acquired with the support of the Art Fund and the V&A Purchase Fund, 2010.364.

FIGURE 6.9 

F I G U R E 6 . 1 0   Mathias Kauage, Kauage Flies to Scotland for the Opening of New Museum of Modern Art in Glasgow, 1999. Acrylic on canvas, 47 × 72 in. (120.5 × 183.5 cm). Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London.

across for the event, where he performed for and met Queen Elizabeth II.19 Such institutional inaugurations are, needless to say, moments when civic life and the worlds of art and culture connect, as well as moments of diplomacy and ceremony involving distinguished guests, visiting artists, and others. Kauage was fully aware of the consequence of the occasion and celebrated it in a magnificent painting in 1999, featuring himself and the queen, with the Qantas aircraft that had brought him to Britain for the occasion. The Queen’s handbag has undergone translation into a PNG bilum, or string bag, an emblem of Melanesian womanhood (figure 6.10). Again, Kauage’s signature is interesting: “Kauage Mathias O.B.E. / Artist P.N.G. 1999,” that is, “Artist of PNG”; several earlier and contemporaneous works, including paintings in the collection of the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, bear similar inscriptions. Kauage was, in other words, increasingly conscious of his status as an artist “of PNG,” an artist whose work responded to the state of his country, a representative of one nation in a world of nations. Yet the climate for art in Papua New Guinea became increasingly difficult. The modest but catalytic level of support that had empowered a new move178 

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ment in the years immediately before and after independence was reduced, as was the local market. While Kauage and his friends had for a period been permitted to show and sell work in the foyer of one of the more prominent hotels, some change in policy led them to be displaced at first onto the pavement outside and then across the street, where today artists producing Kauage-­style works, among them some of his relatives, display paintings on a chainlink fence in the hope of selling them to professionals, expats, and tourists. Kauage died in 2003, “for no reason,” Georgina Beier told me, meaning of an illness that might have been readily treated with better medical care.

True Falsity Kauage’s art was emphatically modern, but his modernism was also distinctively Melanesian. During the years 1979–1981, Georgina Beier recorded a series of Kauage’s “stories,” narratives merged with commentaries on a range of issues, which she translated from Tok Pisin and published (see also figure 6.11). One of the short texts reflects on a visit to the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide and other art venues in that city. I went to Adelaide. I looked at paintings in museums, in galleries. I went around looking. I look at this one, then another one: on this picture there is a man walking about, there’s bits of grass here and there. That’s all. They don’t make any lines. They take the brush and throw on the paint, they don’t make any designs. They get a lot of money, some are $6,000, some are $8,000 or something. I look at one of them — ​­a boat with sails. They don’t work at the space, their work is like a fraud: in the middle there was lots of space and nothing on it, it’s not filled up. . . . [M]any of them are false, truly false. In New Guinea my boy Chris also wants to be an artist. I’ve talked to him many times. He makes pictures, but he follows the fashion of the whites, he makes his pictures look real. I say, “Alright, but put some of the marks that belong to you and me. Don’t make them look like nothing.” He wants to be an artist now. He can’t be the same as me. Our marks belong to the past, to our papas and their papas.20 This remarkable passage implies that Kauage understood his work in terms that could be seen to reverse those of the preceding commentary, that echo the usual contextualization of this work. Various catalogs and a film have “ A rtist of P N G ”  

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F I G U R E 6 . 1 1 

Mathias Kauage, ca. 1990s photograph by Ulli Beier. Author’s files, courtesy of Georgina Beier.

been entitled New Images from New Guinea; I suggest that Kauage was, in important and profound senses, an artist of modernity. Yet this is precisely what he would seem to deny, in asserting the embeddedness in tradition of his “marks,” the association of those marks with the past, and the inability of his son to sustain quite this kind of art. These comments are more perplexing than they might appear to a reader unacquainted with the art traditions of New Guinea. Such a reader might assume that Kauage’s paintings are like those from central Australia or Arnhem Land, which are essentially transpositions of sacred ancestral designs, formerly painted on other media, or drawn in sand. To the contrary, one of the distinctive features of the work of Kauage (and, for that matter, Akis) is that although Highlands cultures are renowned for body decoration, they did not feature painted houses or boards, or other artifacts visually patterned in a manner that inspired either artist. Kauage’s text is revealing in another fashion. The essentially vacuous and false nature of the paintings he encountered in South Australia lay in their lack of “marks,” their lack of “design,” their spaces not being “filled up.” Which is to allude, conversely, to the nature and effect of his own “filling up,” of what we might call the façades of his trucks, helicopters, and airplanes, since being replete with imagery is precisely the quality that defines these vehicles. The “marks” that do the “filling” are of two kinds. Some amount to abstract 180 

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or seemingly abstract design that has a geometric and dynamic character. Otherwise they are face motifs. Some of the artist’s figures are individualized (Kauage himself, the queen), but those I call his façades are not; to the contrary, they are comparatively homogeneous. In almost all of Kauage’s works, the people depicted bear stylized versions of the famous body decorations for which the Papua New Guinea Highlands are renowned. Chimbu aesthetics — ​­those of Kauage’s people — ​­were arguably similar to those of Mount Hagen. A classic account by Marilyn Strathern focused on “the act of display”: “Achievements of certain kinds have emphatic value in Hagen culture; above all the acquisition of wealth and demonstration of influence bring men prestige and make them big. The capacity for achievement is a personal matter, but for an individual’s success to be of public significance he depends upon the involvement of his clansmen. . . . Occasions of formal display are always the concern of the group, and what is displayed is the sum of individual effort . . . wealth, strength and power.” 21 In these contexts, decorations act as “a medium of display,” their deployment at once potent and anxious, an affirmation of solidarity, an assertion of political vitality that is always risky, since spectators may judge decorated men unimpressive if they do not appear big, if their skin appears dull rather than glossy. Performances appear to celebrate an accomplishment, but they may be considered ineffective and inauspicious. They are staged for others but need to convince the dancers themselves: displays “have repercussions in their social and political relations with others, indicate their inner resource and point to future destiny.” 22 For Wahgi, Michael O’Hanlon cited the adage “handsome is as handsome does”: the decorated body revealed the performers’ inner moral state.23 All these Highlands societies differed, of course, but broadly shared these aesthetic precepts. As Kauage said, “We don’t sing every day, we stay in shirt and trousers. But when the time comes to decorate, all the men change, they belong to the spirit time. We look at them. Are his decorations no good, or is he a winner? That’s what we are thinking.” 24 It is striking that in a painting such as Biting the Doctor’s Arm, everyone who forms part of the scene is “in bilas,” that is, decorated in some manner, though the schoolchildren, nurse, and doctor would not have been. Kauage’s painting constitutes a ceremonial occasion, an event. This painting and others depict events in the form of achievements, and stand as achievements themselves. I suggested earlier that works on paper by the informants and collaborators of various ethnographers from Haddon onward, works that recalled and re-­created a range of Melanesian ceremonies, amounted to a kind of hidden “ A rtist of P N G ”  

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history of Melanesian modernism: they were novel in their techniques and media, and they also expressed a modernization of consciousness, at least in the specific sense that they often celebrated great customary activities that had been suppressed or abandoned; they thus dwelt on rupture and loss. Yet the implicit baggage carried by the notion of the precursor is of course misleading. Despite the direct analogy between Akis’s situation and that of, say, Ango, who drew for Rivers and Hocart while also producing curiously Europeanized sculpture, often on commission for colonial officials, there are some senses in which the earlier works on paper are more modern than their “successors.” Kauage responded in a remarkable way to the history of his nation, the wider history of Australia and the Pacific, the theater of the global art world, and even the great events of European politics (a painting I have not discussed, in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, features the Brandenburg Gate and relates to German reunification). Yet in another sense, his approach to all these subjects was shaped, to a profound extent, by what might be called a Highlands aesthetic of self-­decoration. The comments that Ulli and Georgina Beier made, in framing Akis’s accomplishment, that he “owed nothing” either to his own tradition or to European art, could not rightly be applied to Kauage, whose conceptions of value and effect in art derived, he insisted, from “[his] papas and their papas.” Throughout its history, Melanesian “modernism” has been replete with paradox.

Coda Kauage’s works did not at first, or mostly, enter the collections of art institutions or individual connoisseurs. In 1979, at age eighteen, when I moved to Canberra to begin undergraduate studies in archaeology and anthropology, my mother gave me two prints, one each by Akis and Kauage, bought presumably in a Sydney gallery. These were framed, and over my student years, they moved from house to house, sharing the walls with activist screenprints, some made by friends at Australian National University (anu), reflecting support for international solidarity, gay liberation, and other causes. From the mid-­ 1980s, when I finished my PhD and got my first appointments in Cambridge and then back in Canberra, the prints moved between various flats and offices, until finally I gifted them to anu when I moved to London in 1999. Earlier in the 1970s, Marilyn Strathern had acted as a kind of agent for Georgina Beier, helping support the artists by finding buyers for prints among

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friends and colleagues, including Chris Gregory, Jack Goody, and Edmund Leach; some were bought by individuals and then presented to the Department of Social Anthropology in Cambridge. In Adelaide, Basel, and Berlin during this period, ethnographers, development economists, geographers, and others with PNG connections likewise bought prints and paintings, which populated our homes and workplaces. Along with baskets and textiles, they constituted a visual culture of connection, an evocation of progressive interests in the past and future of Melanesia. In July 1994, Kauage had a show at the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery in Fitzrovia, London, which featured the series of “history” paintings I discussed, some of which were subsequently acquired by the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow. Georgina Beier was at the opening party, and so was the artist, who had dedicated a good part of the afternoon to decorating himself with paint and feathers. Michael O’Hanlon and I exchanged wry remarks on what we took to be a performance of exoticism. Such observations were natural enough, given the preoccupation with otherness and its staging that marked theory and museum talk at the time, and even reasonable, given that, bare-­chested and painted, Kauage certainly did cut an exotic figure even by the standards of nearby Soho, and he knew that. Yet in another sense, I at least missed the point. Kauage was not in bilas primarily because he wished to parade a Papua New Guinean identity. He was decorated because his art and its exhibition represented an occasion, an achievement, that he had to mark in this manner. The occasion was the kind that might prompt one to ask, as he had put it, “Are his decorations no good, or is he a winner?” A winner he surely was. Notes I wish to thank: Michael O’Hanlon for conversation over many years around aspects of ‘the modern’ in Papua New Guinea; Marilyn Strathern, for her donation of works by Akis, Kauage and others to the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in 2010, which prompted me to follow up longstanding interests in these artists, and for reading a draft of the text; and above all Georgina Beier who has been extraordinarily generous with archives, conversation and reflections upon Kauage and upon Papua New Guinea in the period discussed here. 1. Anthony Forge, “Style and Meaning in Sepik Art,” in Primitive Art and Society, ed. Anthony Forge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 169–72. The paintings are archived with Forge’s papers in the Mandeville Special Collections Library of the University of California, San Diego. The student study was that of Sheila Korn, “The Structure of an Art-­System” (PhD diss., University of London, 1974).

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2. These works are in the collections of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge (Torres Strait, western Solomon Islands); the British Museum (Papua); and the University of Western Australia (Arnhem Land). See Peter Brunt and Nicholas Thomas, Art in Oceania: A New History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2012), 16. 3. The Indigenous Australian artist Brook Andrew has drawn extensively on imagery derived from anthropological archives in his primarily photo-­based work over the last twenty-­five years. See the artist’s statement in Nicholas Thomas and Brook Andrew, The Island (Cambridge: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2008). 4. Ulli Beier, Decolonising the Mind: The Impact of the University on Culture and Identity in Papua New Guinea, 1971–74 (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2005), is a fascinating memoir that is broader in scope than the title implies. Adele Tröger, ed., Georgina Beier (Nuremberg: Verlag für moderne kunst, 2001), is also important though primarily an artist’s monograph rather than a study of Georgina Beier’s practice as a catalyst and mentor. 5. The best discussion of these early initiatives is Melanie Eastburn, Papua New Guinea Prints (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2006), a publication prompted by the National Gallery’s acquisition of a substantial collection from the Beiers. Considering the gallery also holds works gifted by or bought from several other individuals in the PNG region, it probably holds a larger and more representative collection of modern work from Papua New Guinea than any other art institution. The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge also holds about eighty original drawings and prints by multiple PNG artists; some beaten coppers by Mathias Kauage from the early 1970s; and other pieces of sculpture, mostly dating from the end of the 1960s to the early 1980s. 6. Eastburn, Papua New Guinea, 16. These eight were among the works that the National Gallery of Australia acquired from the Beiers. 7. Quoted in Eastburn, Papua New Guinea, 16. 8. Quoted in Eastburn, Papua New Guinea, 16. 9. Kovave was the first of these magazines, officially launched in November 1969. Ulli Beier arranged for it to be professionally printed in Brisbane, though it was mainly sold through the upng bookshop; its emphasis was primarily literary, with the exception of a special 1974 issue edited by Georgina Beier, “Modern Images from Niugini,” which was dedicated to visual art. “Niugini” was a pidginized version of the country’s name in vogue at the time. Gigibori was the journal of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies. First published in 1974, it carried a mix of literary contributions and essays on wider topics. 10. The Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles (an art school that dated back to 1918) hosted what was described as the “first worldwide exhibition” of “contemporary New Guinea art” in January and February 1971. The poster featured work by Sukoro and Tiabe (also illustrated by Eastburn, Papua New Guinea, 6 and 9, respectively). Geor-

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gina Beier told me (in December 2014) that this exhibition had been arranged through “a friend of a friend.” 11. Georgina Beier, “Kauage: Inventing His Own Tradition,” public lecture at the opening of the exhibition Kauage: Artist of Papua New Guinea, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, March 17, 2009. 12. There is no monograph dedicated to Kauage’s work, though it is discussed more or less briefly in many publications, including early texts by Georgina Beier and Ulli Beier, as well as in more recent commentaries. The earliest is perhaps an exhibition brochure: Georgina Beier, Contemporary Art from New Guinea at the Aladdin Gallery, Sydney, September 1969, archives of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge. See also Georgina Beier, “Kauage,” Kovave 3, no. 2 (1972); and Beier, “Modern Images from Niugini.” Other texts include Mathias Kauage, a short catalog of a retrospective, including a brief essay by Ulli Beier. Beier, Decolonising the Mind, 80–96, includes detail not otherwise published. Kauage featured in survey exhibitions, such as Luk Luk Gen! Contemporary Art from Papua New Guinea, toured by the Perc Tucker Gallery, Cairns (Queensland, Australia), from 1990; the catalog of the same title was edited by Hugh Stevenson and Susan Cochrane. While a major compendium of Oceanic art, published as late as 1993 (Adrienne L. Kaeppler, Douglas Newton, and Christian Kaufmann, L’art Océanien [Paris: Citadelles et Mazenod, 1993], still the largest such book) could omit modern art altogether, more concise surveys published soon afterward did feature contemporary art from Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, and elsewhere. My own Oceanic Art was probably the first general book to situate Kauage and his contemporaries within a broader Pacific art history; likewise, Anne D’Alleva did so soon afterward in Art of the Pacific (London: Everyman Art Library, 1998). 13. Strathern, No Money on Our Skins: Hagen Migrants in Port Moresby (Port Moresby: New Guinea Research Unit, 1975), 112, 418. 14. Both quotations in Eastburn, Papua New Guinea, 33. 15. See Johannes Fabian, Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 16. The second of the works referred to here receives considerable emphasis in the catalog of Pieces of Paradise, an innovative 1988 exhibition at the Australian Museum, curated by the archaeologist Jim Specht. The show was advanced in that it addressed a host of questions ranging from aesthetics to the history of collecting and colonial hybridity in material culture, and concluded with a section on “The New Pacific,” in which Kauage’s work, and a portrait photograph of the artist by Ulli Beier, loomed largest in a discussion that also mentioned Akis among other artists of the independence period. Though preceded by the PNG art magazines cited earlier, this exhibition was the first large survey of Pacific art that included modern work; and the catalog was the first publication by any public museum to feature it. 17. Kauage, quoted in exhibition text, in relation to painting e086991, archived at

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Australian Museum Collections, accessed May 1, 2015, http://collections.australian​ museum.net.au. 18. Kauage, quoted in Jim Specht, Pieces of Paradise (Sydney: Australian Museum, 1988), 45. 19. On this occasion, either Kauage personally or the Papua New Guinean government presented the queen with a portrait, Kauage’s Missis Kwin, 1996, now in the Royal Collections Trust (rcin 407778). 20. Georgina Beier, trans. and ed., Kauage’s Stories (Sydney: Migila House, 2006), 19. This key source for Kauage’s ideas and imagination appeared first in a German version: “Kauage erzählt” appeared in the exhibition catalog Mathias Kauage, and then in 1998, printed by the Ray Hughes Gallery in Sydney. A copy of the 2006 edition is in the archives of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge. 21. Marilyn Strathern, “The Self in Self-­Decoration,” Oceania 49 (1979): 244. 22. Strathern, “The Self,” 256. 23. Michael O’Hanlon, Reading the Skin: Adornment, Display and Society among the Wahgi (London: British Museum Press, 1989). 24. Beier, Kauage’s Stories, 15.

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7 

MODERNISM AND THE ART OF ALBERT NAMATJIRA

He spoke in quiet, correct English — ​­not in pidgin — ​­the result of his having been born at the Hermannsburg Mission and grown up in its school. . . . We talked for a while of things that interest painters, and I told him I had been an art student. . . . This increased his interest, and the discussion became technical, with Albert surprising me by his wide knowledge of painting and of painters. . . . Here was a man, a full-­blooded aboriginal, with, I could see, an intellect. V I C H A L L | remembering meeting Albert Namatjira for the first time in 1942

In the 1940s and 1950s an Indigenous Australian artist was for the first time in the limelight. No Australian artist, Indigenous or otherwise, ever had or has received such media attention. Albert Namatjira’s very celebrity made him a figure of modernity, as did his status as the first fully professional Indigenous artist and the founder of an art movement, dubbed “modern Australian Aboriginal art” by friend and artist Rex Battarbee in 1952.1 Namatjira cannot be avoided in the history of modern Australian art, yet his very presence troubles its narratives and those of modernism more generally. Namatjira’s first one-­person exhibition occurred in 1938, a year after Hitler’s Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich and a year before a large exhibition of similar European modernist art in Australia. Both these large exhibitions were media events that brought into sharp focus the nexus between modernism and primitivism, so it is not surprising that Namatjira’s art was received in the context of his Aboriginality and his art’s apparent modernism. At the time

these were mutually exclusive — ​­and therefore linked — ​­concepts, and because there seemed nothing Aboriginal about his work, the apparent modernism of his art came under the more intense scrutiny. The Aboriginality of the artist may have also touched a nerve in the complex currents that gathered force in mid-­twentieth-­century Australia (and indeed the world). In the years after World War I, an emerging provincialism, cast in the ideology of nationalism by both conservative and progressive quarters of Australian culture, sought inspiration from local situations. And while the more avant-­garde tendencies of surrealism and its primitivism had little traction in Australia, a growing number of critics (especially in literature) and artists advocated the indigenization of Australian culture, which after World War II became something of a fashion. Indigenous art and myth, it was reasoned, provided a tradition or heritage for Australian culture that made up for its lack of classical monuments. Moreover, in the twenties and thirties, Australian art critics were sharply divided between supporters of modernism and an antimodernist faction that sought solace in classical Western virtues, but most artists followed the British tendency of seeking common ground between modernism and tradition — ​­what Clement Greenberg would have dubbed a diluted “middlebrow taste,” which, he argued, came into its own at this time.2 Australian highbrow taste, be it a conservative classicism or modernist progressiveness, found no redeeming features in Namatjira’s art. Yet, his art appealed enormously to the emerging middlebrow taste in Australia, perhaps because it found a common ground between what hitherto had been the incommensurable differences of Indigenous and Western culture in the context of an emerging provincial nationalism. Highbrow critics of conservative and modernist persuasion agreed that not only was Namatjira’s art un-­Aboriginal it was also unoriginal. Nevertheless, its Westernness, even if unoriginal and therefore unmodern, was difficult to discredit. There was a general consensus that he “stood alone” among Aborigines “as an artist in the Western romantic tradition.” 3 Of course, there was something very modern about being the first Aborigine to paint so convincingly in a Western style even if his Westernness and modernism were a sham. Such was the conundrum presented by Namatjira’s art that Battarbee understandably claimed the story of his friend and painting partner “is like fiction.” 4 But it was a true story. Born Elea, a carpet snake, at the Lutheran Hermannsburg Mission in central Australia in 1902, when his parents converted in 1905 he was baptized with the name Albert. At this time converted Arrernte were given a single Western name to signify their new status. Having rights to his 188 

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Albert Namatjira, Mt. Hermannsburg with Finke River, ca. 1940. Watercolor on bean wood, 4.7 × 10.1 in. (12.1 × 25.8 cm). Photograph by Flinders University Art Museum. Flinders University Art Museum Collection, Adelaide. Gift of Helene and Dudley Burns, 1988, from the collection of the late Reverend and Mrs. F. W. Albrecht. © Namatjira Legacy Trust, 2018.

FIGURE 7.1 

father’s tjurunga — ​­namatjira, the flying ant — ​­he also took this name in 1938 when he had his first exhibition, as if the name Albert Namatjira was a suitable transcultural signifier for a modern artist and his modern Aboriginal identity. Namatjira learned watercolor technique from Battarbee in 1936 (see, e.g., figure 7.1 and plate 5). In 1939 he became the first Indigenous artist whose work had been acquired by a state art gallery. By 1950 he was Australia’s best-­known living artist, despite residing in remote regions far from the art centers of Sydney and Melbourne. His paintings commanded high prices, the newspapers could not get enough of him, and he is the only Australian painter to have ever been mobbed by autograph seekers.5 Royals visited him, he was the guest of honor at Lord Mayor luncheons, and his death in 1959 was experienced as a national tragedy. Namatjira, the person, and his art struck a nerve in the psyche of a young modern nation. Today his watercolors attract record prices at auctions. In short, his legacy has endured, and he remains one artist whose name nearly every Australian knows. He is, in this sense, Australia’s Picasso. Whatever thoughts Namatjira had on the matter, the Aboriginality of his art was the first thing to go, because in the art world logic of the day, it couldn’t be Aboriginal and modern. Although he had a large popular following, as well as a small group of influential supporters who could put some pressure on MODERNISM AND THE ART OF NAMATJIRA 

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art world institutions, neither conservative nor progressive elements in the art world could fit him into the categories of their thinking. The Art Gallery of South Australia purchased an example of his work in 1939 as part of its modern Australian, not Aboriginal, collection (which it did not collect anyway), but it was the only state art gallery to do so. Despite his fame, Namatjira’s paintings were never included in the increasing number of Aboriginal art exhibitions held in his lifetime. Nor were they included in official exhibitions of Australian art. For curators, his example troubled each category, as if, like the categories of primitive and modern, those of Australian and Aboriginal were mutually exclusive. Only in recent times, when postcolonial theories began to frame notions of both Aboriginal and Australian identity, has Namatjira’s art found a central place in official discourse. The style and subject matter of Namatjira’s paintings correspond to a mid-­ twentieth-­century pastoral modernism (as I am calling it), which was very popular with middlebrow taste in Australia, as well as in other countries, during the two decades after World War I. In applying the pared down formalism of modernism to the sacral intentions of the picturesque, pastoral modernism is a middlebrow version of the Return to Order (Le rappel a l’ordre) that reengaged the Western avant-­garde in its classical roots after the trauma of the war. In Australia it was also the cultural front of a growing nationalist mood that embedded national consciousness in a distinctive depopulated primordial Australian landscape — ​­what one enthusiastic writer called “the Big Country beyond.” 6 While pastoral modernism also appealed to certain conservative ideologues, in an astute analysis, conceptual artist Ian Burn — ​a prominent figure in the New York branch of Art and Language — ​­observed that its practitioners generally sought to marry modernist formal concerns with what by then was a popular impressionism. As well, he observed, their preference “for greater formal unity and iconic power” favored outback imagery, because here — ​­as in Hans Heysen’s painting The Land of the Oratunga (1932) — ​­the land was pared back and skeletal: “The forms were simpler and more abstract . . . even the most naturalistic depiction of a desert wasteland could look surreal.” 7 In the years after World War I, continued Burn, such “images of this inland landscape had begun to take grip of the popular imagination, providing a potent modern symbolism of the antiquity of the land and a new sense of national heritage” that met the patriotic sentiment of this time.8 Hans Heysen is the most celebrated artist associated with Australian pastoral modernism. His landscapes of central Australia, which he began painting in the late 1920s, were praised for giving “the sensation of an unalterable 190 

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Albert Namatjira, Central Mt. Wedge, 1945. Watercolor over pencil on woven paper loosely attached to composition board, 11.4 × 15.4 in. (29 × 39.2 cm). Photograph by Queensland Art Gallery. Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. © Namatjira Legacy Trust, 2018.

FIGURE 7.2 

landscape, old and young as Time — ​­a landscape of fundamentals, austerely Biblical, and yet for us intimately associated with our aboriginal stone age.” 9 Namatjira acquired the conventions of pastoral modernism from Battarbee’s Heysenesque manner (see figure 7.2). Bernard Smith, in his seminal history Australian Painting, first published in 1962, placed Namatjira and two of his followers as late practitioners of this Heysenesque manner. They are the only Aboriginal artists discussed in Smith’s history, because Smith, like other critics of his day, did not consider their art to be Aboriginal.10 Burn would also compare Namatjira’s paintings to those of Heysen. If in the mid-­twentieth century Battarbee called Namatjira’s art “modern,” he did not mean it in a theorized Greenbergian sense. It was modern simply because at the time, the term was a synonym for contemporary Western and especially French-­type art. In the mid-­twentieth century, when social evolutionist notions of progress and primitivism still figured large in the popular imagination, modernism exemplified something Western and contemporary, an art of today. Battarbee was well aware of the irony in his claim, however, and of Namatjira’s philosophical challenges to the founding categories of Western MODERNISM AND THE ART OF NAMATJIRA 

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thinking and its modernity, as well as the social and political challenges to the then apartheid-­like policies of the Australian nation-­state. Battarbee was a firm advocate of the policy of assimilation (as it was then called), advocated by Indigenous civil liberty organizations and their allies, which gained increasing traction in the mid-­twentieth century. In the inaugural issue of the first Indigenous newspaper, in April 1938, the Abo Call declared: “We do not want to go back to the Stone Age. Representing 60,000 Full Bloods and 20,000 Halfcastes in Australia, we raise our voice to ask for Education, Equal Opportunity and Full Citizen Rights.” Namatjira and his people were then wards of the state, without the rights of movement, property, inheritance, political representation, or social welfare enjoyed by Australian citizens. Even though Namatjira did not make traditional Aboriginal art, in the racial theory of social evolutionism that underpinned mid-­twentieth-­century theories of art, he had not escaped his Aboriginality. Claims that he was a pseudo-­modernist, advanced by both conservative and modernist critics, rested on his Aboriginality. The conservative critic Harold Herbert wrote, “Although he be the first aborigine to exhibit paintings in a purely realistic manner there is no need for a fanfare of trumpets. . . . Japanese art was spoiled in this manner. It became Europeanised Japanese. . . . Japan has not improved its art by European influences.” 11 More biting was the criticism from modernist painter Paul Haefliger: “Through having learnt so dexterously our Western outlook, Albert Namatjira has become less of an artist.” We should not, said Haefliger, “praise him for having lost his native capacity to feel.” 12 Deploring “that aborigines should be taught in the European manner,” Haefliger believed that we should “instill in them a love and a respect of the art of their fore­ fathers, and encourage them in their natural expression.” 13 Author Mary Durack (who mixed in modernist circles), commented in her 1946 review of a Namatjira exhibition: “They took a fine, primitive artist and turned him into a polite and conventional echo of our civilisation.” 14 Even Battarbee tended to agree. He believed that in learning “to paint as well as a white artist,” Namatjira had lost “his aboriginal sense of decoration,” and so his Aboriginal sensibility.15 Battarbee was more taken by Namatjira’s follower, Edwin Pareroultja. The man, said Battarbee, was a “genius,” because in retaining his Aboriginal sensibility he had all the qualities of a genuine and original modernist. “The outstanding feature of this artist is that he is himself, a being full of colour, strength, and emotional feeling, and his work is vital. It gives one a shock at first sight, because it is new. . . . His work is like that of Gauguin . . . yet he has never heard of Gauguin or his work.” 16 192 

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The art world tended to agree. Pareroultja was the second Indigenous artist to have work purchased by a state art gallery. The National Gallery of Melbourne bought a painting, Mt. Sonder from Ormiston, in 1946, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales bought another, Amulda Gorge, in 1947. Melbourne and Sydney were the centers of Australian modernism, and the highbrow guardians of each gallery had refused to purchase works by Namatjira despite a public outcry. Namatjira was not just any Aboriginal, he was also a Western Arrernte. Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen’s acclaimed study of the Arrernte, published in 1899, provided the prototype of the primitive in turn-­of-­the-­century European scholarship from Frazer to Durkheim and Freud.17 During Namatjira’s lifetime, this scholarly discourse was central to debate around kinship, totemism, and tribalism, providing a general background and frame to modernist artists’ interests in primitivism. Few Indigenous groups were so thoroughly studied and widely known. And they were widely known, thanks to Spencer and Gillen, as the most primitive people on the planet. Spencer was also scathing of the Hermannsburg Mission, believing that it had corrupted the Western Arrernte and destroyed their culture. This provided the art critics with a way out. Namatjira was a “mission black,” a “trousered native,” and thus neither Aboriginal nor Western. The more Western Namatjira’s art looked, the shabbier it seemed, especially to the professionals in anthropology and the art world. In 1976 the U.S. anthropologist Nelson Graburn characterized Namatjira and his Arrernte followers as “conquered minority artists [who] have taken up the established art forms of the conquerors, following and competing with the artists of the dominant society.” Graburn pronounced it “assimilated fine arts . . . characteristic of extreme cultural domination.” 18 By the 1970s the art world had lost interest in Namatjira. With the ascendency of Greenberg’s theory of modernism in the 1960s, the faux middlebrow pastoral modernism of Namatjira and his followers seemed beside the point. After Namatjira’s death in 1959, his art, along with that of Heysen and other pastoral modernists, quickly dropped off the agenda. Moreover, modernism was now something to be surpassed rather than fought over. The emergence of postcolonial theory and the Indigenous contemporary art movement in the last two decades of the twentieth century brought renewed interest in Namatjira’s art but not as a signifier of modernism. The interest had shifted to its Aboriginality. Previously denied, the Aboriginality of his art was now proclaimed. In 1992 Sylvia Kleinert argued that Namatjira’s paintings “appropriate the landscape tradition of non-­Aborigines to recreate the totemic sites MODERNISM AND THE ART OF NAMATJIRA 

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symbolically and pass on traditional knowledge by reaffirming land rights.” 19 Other critics made similar claims: “By mastering the art of landscape painting,” wrote Philip Jones, “he was the first Aranda [Arrernte] man to take a European cultural item and, in a subversive sense, to make it his own.” 20 In a highly original essay, Ian Burn and Ann Stephen showed, through a comparison of Namatjira’s paintings and those of Heysen, how Namatjira was no mindless mimic but made pastoral modernism his own. Their close pictorial analysis drew attention, for the first time, to the formal characteristics of Namatjira’s Aboriginal way of seeing country. Heysen “monumentalizes” the landscape, creating a “grandeur of forms,” whereas Namatjira “articulates a rich mosaic of textures, of surfaces rather than forms of the landscape.” 21 Unlike Heysen’s work, they often lack a single focus point and instead “feel as if they have been composed in from the edges, resulting in an overall symmetrical tension across the surface.” A “heightened stimulus [is] given to borders,” creating an effect of the “picture crowding in from the edges and wrapping itself around the viewer, forcing the peripheral vision of western perception to be no longer peripheral.” 22 Pushing “our eyes up into the landscape,” Namatjira made us feel “in rather than outside, detached and contemplating it.” Heysen’s paintings, it goes without saying, do the opposite. Further, Namatjira’s “visual emphasis on edges reinforces the feeling of his paintings being objects.” And instead of giving priority to forms such as tree trunks in the landscape, as Heysen does, “for Namatjira the overall landscape has priority. . . . We even discover trunks reading as negative space.” 23 As well, “his pictures . . . do not privilege the purely visual . . . but rather the haptic quality, inferring not only a different kind of perception but also a different configuration of the senses.” 24 Burn and Stephen note, “The more we analyze his paintings, the more convinced we become that the artist is covering the surface in a different way[,] one which has little conformity to Western picture-­making as applied to landscape painting.” 25 Burn had a keen eye, and as generalizations, his readings are difficult to refute. Nevertheless, his and Stephen’s comparisons can seem a little forced, and in seeking to determine essential differences in the way each artist, and by inference culture, sees — ​­“a different kind of perception but also a different configuration of the senses” — ​­misses the transcultural achievement of Namatjira’s paintings, as indeed Burn and Stephen’s most interesting conclusion testifies: “What becomes curious then is how like Western landscape his finished pictures are.” 26 This conundrum provided Burn and Stephen with their main insight: that Namatjira’s art is “a model of inter-­cultural exchange able to ar194 

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ticulate a complexity of its own cultural reality” — ​­as if in pastoral modernism Namatjira had found a common ground between Western and Arrernte ways of seeing country.27 Thus Burn and Stephen agree with the old accusations that Namatjira copies Western art, but they add a twist: “Namatjira did not simply see with Western eyes but was mimicking that regime of vision as an access to a particular knowledge.” 28 In Namatjira’s art, Western pastoral modernism morphs into the “counter-­colonial strategies” of postcolonialism. Arguably these recent claims say more about the state of art criticism and the influence of Namatjira’s art in the 1990s than they do about its meaning and function in the mid-­twentieth century. How much, we might ask, has Burn’s conceptualism played a role in his readings of Namatjira’s art? Moreover, the qualities that they discerned in Namatjira’s paintings curiously echo those in the landscapes of archetypal Western modernists such as Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso. A more useful way of understanding the impetus behind Namatjira’s art might be to consider it in the context of Western Arrernte history rather than that of Western modernism or postcolonial theory. What if his paintings were a response to local Arrernte politics rather than either a mimicry or subversion of Western modernism?

Western Arrernte Modernity Modernity is not simply imposed on the world from powerful centers. It has to be translated or remade in the image of the locality into which it is thrown. The choice facing Indigenous people with the challenge of European colonialism was not to simply abandon their old ways and adopt new Western ones or to resist the new in the name of the old. Both choices were elements of Indigenous tactics, but generally, the overarching strategy of Indigenous people was to make from modernity something of their own through transcultural processes in which they fashioned their own modern practices. Generic to all modernities is the conflict between the old and the new, which creates a profound sense of temporal discontinuity between present and past. Modernity’s rupture brings into being the radical difference of the old and the new, as if the ancient and the modern are caught in a binary opposition and without genealogical ties. At Hermannsburg in central Australia, this rupture was expressed in the difference between “heathen” and “Christian” times, and was played out in an iconoclastic struggle concerning appropriate imagery and symbols.29 Namatjira’s way of making images, I argue, played a central role in resolving this struggle and thereby invented an Arrernte modernism. MODERNISM AND THE ART OF NAMATJIRA 

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Understanding the nature and meaning of Arrernte modernism requires, as it inevitably does of all art movements, knowledge of its historical context — ​­in this case, of the particular modernity and the political and aesthetic struggles it engendered at the Hermannsburg Mission. With the completion of the Overland telegraph line in 1872 — ​­three thousand kilometers of dusty track and cable connecting eleven telegraph stations between Darwin and Port Augusta, each manned by a handful of ­Europeans — ​ ­the gates of modernity were opened in central Australia. The telegraph line’s tenuous infrastructure was enough of a foothold to attract European cattle­ men, prospectors, anthropologists, and missionaries to this Indigenous stronghold. The latter, in particular, were the vanguard of modernity in this part of the world. Among the first to arrive were two Lutheran missionaries, Herman Kempe and Wilhelm Schwarz, who had traveled halfway around the world from Germany. The journey out to Adelaide was relatively quick, but the final leg up to the center of Australia nearly killed them. The 360-­kilometer train trip to Port Augusta didn’t take long; however, the remaining 2,100 kilo­ meters took twenty-­two arduous months, most of it on foot across some of the most inhospitable country in the world. On the June 4, 1877, with a contract worker named Mirus and two thousand livestock, they set up camp at a place the Arrernte called Ntaria, 130 kilometers west of the telegraph station that would eventually become the township of Alice Springs. Here, on a grassy plain, the missionaries began building the rudiments of their new life. The local Aborigines were, as always, moving about their estate seasonally. Ntaria was a summer camping ground, so it was rarely occupied in the middle of the year. We know from Tjalkabota’s account, the only surviving Aboriginal report of these early days, that the arrival of the missionaries was keenly observed. They were believed to be spirits returning to the place where they had died long ago, and the sheep that accompanied them were devils. The locals initially thought it best to keep a distance and hope that these spirits and devils would move on, but after two months, they decided to make contact. On August 4 two Aboriginal men, “powerful figures with noble beards,” went forward to test the waters. The missionaries gave them gifts — ​ ­clothes, flour, and meat — ​­as was expected in such a situation. But the Arrernte remained cautious. Back in their camp, they fed it to the dogs to see if they would die.30 And so the artifacts of modernity received their first test. By the end of another cycle of seasons, the missionaries and sheep clearly weren’t going away. Their number had increased substantially. There were now three missionaries, their wives — ​­white women were a rare occurrence in the 196 

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contact zone — ​­seven permanent laborers, several of whom also had wives, and also several local hired help, including a few Aborigines — ​­such as Tjalkabota and his father, Tjita — ​­employed as shepherds. Five buildings had been erected, and the mission was well and truly established as a forward post of European modernity. By 1896 the mission was the largest settlement for hundreds of kilometers. The number of Europeans was much the same, but the Indigenous population had skyrocketed. Up to 150 were living and working there as builders, shepherds, cooks, and in other laboring jobs.31 The mission had become a microcosm of the regulatory institutions of European modernity: a school, a shop, a magistrate and post office, a substantial catering service, a research center that investigated anthropology and linguistics, a sizeable agribusiness with a construction and transport arm, and a modern management system with a head office in a distant center. Tjalkabota’s memory of first setting foot on the mission in 1878 when he was a child reads like science fiction: “When we came we saw the buildings already standing, three of them. I couldn’t imagine how they could do this. What is this? . . . I felt the buildings with my hands, asking myself, ‘How did they do this?’ ” 32 The Arrernte were impressed that the mission shared everything with them, providing food, shelter, clothing, and medicine, and protected them from police and pastoralists. Though many Arrernte were at first hesitant to engage with the mission, when the first large consignment of white flour and sugar arrived in November 1879, large numbers suddenly appeared, staying until the supplies ran out. From that point, the mission became an accepted part of the place; that is, the Arrernte began to assume ownership of it. If the mission protected the Arrernte from the more devastating aspects of colonialism, it was no less a colonial regime, in which the mores of modernity challenged Indigenous traditions. The gift of such a large quantity of flour and sugar was perhaps the first time that the Arrernte sensed a new order on the horizon and tasted, quite literally in this instance, modernity. By this I mean they digested the import of modernity, that they felt its order of power and regulation, in Foucault’s sense of how the practices of modernity infiltrate the daily lives of its citizens by distributing power in a measured way around a putative norm.33 In Ntaria processed foods became the new raw ingredients of a modern sedentary lifestyle. More importantly, modernity also infiltrated their lives in the very language systems that the mission introduced in its translations of prayer books and biblical texts. Producing an Arrernte written language involved intense intelMODERNISM AND THE ART OF NAMATJIRA 

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lectual engagements between the two groups about linguistic, theological, and anthropological matters. In this way, each party contributed to a transcultural milieu that itself was the fabric of a new Arrernte modernity, rather than an imposed European one. Despite the mission’s benign regime, it was not all milk and honey. The mission was plagued by droughts, and its Indigenous population, not used to living in such concentrated numbers, was plagued by epidemics. But the greatest challenge occurred in the arena of theology. Here, modernity’s reputation for revolution — ​­and in this case, it was an Arrernte revolution led by converts — ​­was most evident and of great import for Namatjira’s modernism. Revolution and crisis are concepts dear to European modernists and their war on tradition, but they can be misleading lenses in understanding what happened at Ntaria. European modernity assumes that the two great social revolutions in mankind’s history were the shifts from a hunter-­gather to an agrarian economy, and the subsequent shift from an agrarian to an industrialized economy. At Ntaria the Western Arrernte had little difficulty making these shifts; indeed they took to shepherding and droving cattle like fish to water. They also had little difficulty engaging in cross-­cultural research, especially of a theological nature. Such speculation was the lifeblood of Arrernte intellectual life. Claude Lévi-­Strauss described the Arrernte “taste for erudition” as “intellectual dandyism.” 34 In his characteristic manner, Lévi-­Strauss’s irony — ​­which relies on the perceived primitiveness of the Arrernte — ​­was meant to challenge Western assumptions about its own sense of difference. The clash of cosmologies that occurred on missions can also be exaggerated. The very love of theological dispute shared by both parties produced remarkable compromises. Both sides agreed that the two key terms in each cosmology, Altjira and God, signified the same idea: a transcendent creative force that is ever present and continually incarnated in the world.35 The ethnographer Francis Gillen, postmaster in charge of the telegraph station at Alice Springs, translated Altjira as Dreamtime, and this, or Dreaming, as it is now more usually rendered, has become its most accepted translation. Kempe, who first attempted to translate the term, said it meant “everlasting existence.” 36 In this way the processes of translation reconfigured a theological artifact of European modernity into an Indigenous worldview. In the Arrernte Bible, God is translated as Altjira. These processes of translation also reflected Indigenous notions of temporality, in which history is a series of eternal returns and not a series of convulsive revolutions or discontinuities. Thus the missionaries were initially 198 

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perceived as returning Arrernte ghosts, and when this proved not to be the case, their strange ways and beliefs were rapidly incorporated into practices that conformed with, rather than challenged, Arrernte cosmology. God was simply Altjira by another name, and a new ancestral pantheon from the Bible was introduced into the Dreaming. Yet, for Tjalkabota (who chose Moses as his Christian name) — ​­the leading figure among the new converts — ​­the exchange was not this simple. At issue for him were the symbols in which Altjira now manifested. Focusing his iconoclastic zeal on the tjurunga, he delivered a standard sermon titled “Churinga or Christ.” 37 For him, the translation did require an aesthetic revolution. Tjurunga, which are the most powerful symbols of Altjira and authority in traditional Arrernte society, deeply embedded in its social politics, are uncreated secret sacred engravings on stone or wood that are literal incarnations of Altjira. The term can also refer to the songs and ceremonies with which these engravings are associated. Ancestors dropped tjurunga during their wanderings and left traces of Altjira in the places (totemic sites) they visited. These sites can also be called tjurunga. Its function is impregnation, or the continuity of life. Tjurunga are, quite literally, the seed from which one is conceived. Those left by wandering ancestors transform into spirit children who jump into women as they pass by. Following his initiation, a young man is reunited with his personal conception tjurunga, which would have been retrieved by the old men after his conception. He may also inherit his father and mother’s tjurunga and receive others through kin relations and from his knowledge of tjurunga songs and ceremonial cycles. The possession of tjurunga is the basis of power and authority in traditional Arrernte society. Women and the uninitiated are never allowed to see them, even though each is assigned one. Tjalkabota insisted that Altjira or God now manifested in a new set of symbols associated with the mission: biblical images and Lutheran songs and ceremony that everyone could see. His battle against tjurunga was essentially a revolution about symbols, not cosmology or the sacred. But it was also a battle about politics and power, as the tjurunga confer authority on the old men. Tjalkabota led a democratic movement aimed at shifting power from the old men to the congregation of men and women of all ages. In this respect, he truly was a revolutionary in the modern social sense of the term. Tjalkabota’s obsession with tjurunga is very evident in his autobiography. In one of his many rants against them and the claims of the old men, he related his initiation, which occurred in the summer of 1892–93. As well as circumcision and other painful ordeals, the ceremony involved the presentation of MODERNISM AND THE ART OF NAMATJIRA 

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each initiate’s tjurunga. The rukata (novices), said Tjalkabota, believed that the tjurunga were made by men, rather than “uncreated.” As well, the rukata were not impressed by their iconography. “We spoke like this. ‘These are not pictures. We have seen God’s picture. We have also seen Jesus’s picture, and that of the Holy Spirit. But this [tjurunga] isn’t a picture. This is of no real consequence.’ . . . I held onto God’s word and the Christian songs more than onto the tjuringa and heathen songs.” Only Tjalkabota challenged the old men, much to their annoyance. “Stop arguing with us,” they said, “or we will harm you.” 38 While Tjalkabota rejected the tjurunga, he did not reject ancestral power or its manifestation as images. Rather, ancestral power (Altjira) had returned in a new aesthetic form, which brought with it a new politics. Like the old men, Tjalkabota used pictures and songs as his central pedagogical tools: “Then they said, ‘How is it that you two have come with so much paper?’ I said, ‘To show you pictures. God in heaven is alive. We have brought you this to show you.’ They were amazed when they saw Jesus dying on the cross, Jesus suffering. I also showed them God’s creation. The two of us also sang in front of them.” 39 Throughout Australia Aborigines understood that European law was in­ scribed on paper and not on stone, wood, or the land.40 Tjalkabota chose paper, or pepe — ​­the Bible and missionary teaching pictures for biblical stories printed on paper — ​­over the tjurunga stone. To this day, Western Arrernte Christians see themselves as the people of pepe.41 The converts never did defeat the old men (i.e., their fathers). They had to wait for them to die. This had largely occurred by the mid-­1920s, when the new Christian generation assumed leadership. A terrible drought gripped the land, as if the very country was mourning the death of the old men and the gathering silence of the corroborees, the performances they had led on the Finke riverbed. Carl Strehlow, who died in 1923, had supported the old men, not the young converts. When F. W. Albrecht, Strehlow’s replacement, arrived in 1926, the converts pushed him to take a hard line against the tjurunga, “Here we praise God,” they said, “not tjuringas.” 42 Namatjira’s uncle and classificatory father, Titus Renkaraka, was counted among the converts.43 He had inherited the role of traditional ceremonial leader of Ntaria and the nearby Manangananga tjurunga storehouse after the death of his father, Loatjira, in 1924. As one Arrernte man said of Titus, “He might be Christian, but still in charge of the place.” 44 In 1928, Titus convinced Albrecht to desanctify the Manangananga cave. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, that is, in

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Untitled (Landscape with Two Snakes and a House), 1938. Drawing in charcoal and color pastels, 9.9 × 14.6 in. (25.2 × 37.1 cm). Frances Derham Collection, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Gift of Frances Derham, 1976–86.

F I G U R E 7 . 3  Collin,

the name of Altjira, the tjurunga were brought out and shown to the uninitiated, thus breaking the age-­old taboo. The drought broke in the next year. According to Paul Carter, this was followed by an equally epochal event. To guard against future droughts, a pipeline was constructed from the nearby sacred Kaporilja Spring to the mission. It altered, said Carter, “not only the physical but the metaphysical landscape,” as the “efficacy of the totemic ancestor lodged there drained away.” 45 Yet manifestly, its efficacy had been increased not decreased, even if the totemic ancestor — ​­in this case, the Rainbow ­Serpent — ​­now seemed to speak in a new voice and with new symbols. The tjurunga and the spring were not simply deterritorialized. Their ancestral power was reterritorialized, or literally rechanneled. When the water first gushed down the pipes on the first day of October in 1935, it shot six to seven meters in the air, like two Rainbow Serpents leaping upward, as one schoolboy vividly remembered in his drawing (figure 7.3). That moment remains imprinted on the collective memory of the place as if it were a miracle, an ancestral event. Water is the most important resource in

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central Australia and the principal element about which the Dreaming stories revolve. Altjira was revitalized; the Rainbow Serpent had stirred. As if to ensure its continued potency, a ceremony occurs every October in an amphitheater marked, somewhat like a tjurunga design, in concentric circles of stone surrounding a large white cross on a pedestal. Does the cross transcend the tjurunga design, as one non-­Aboriginal pastor suggested, or have both been incorporated into a new hybrid liturgy?46 One answer is found nearby, on the bed of the Finke River, where there reputedly is a flat piece of stone with indentations in its surface, something like a tjurunga. It is, say the Arrernte, the footprint of Jesus, who walked this way before the missionaries. In this ancestral story, “The missionaries came not to bring a new story, but rather to remind the Arrernte of a story . . . that was already there.” 47 After witnessing the desanctification of the Manangananga cave, Namatjira  — ​­who with his father was part of the Christian faction — ​­volunteered to proselytize among the bush missionaries. He found his true calling a few years later, however, when the mission established an artifact workshop. These momentous events were also associated with visits of modernist artists from Melbourne, who around this time began to show an interest in the mission. They had been stirred by Spencer’s writings on the Arrernte, an impressive Indigenous art exhibition in Melbourne in 1929, and a newfound interest in the Australian outback as the new nation-­state sought to delineate the essential character of its identity. The recent completion of the railway to Alice Springs also helped. From the early 1930s, several artists (and other dignitaries), including Battarbee, began visiting the mission. Battarbee’s paintings of the area elicited much interest from the Aborigines, and the pipeline was the idea of a group of Melbourne-­based artists, who helped raise money for it by selling their paintings to ensure Hermannsburg had permanent water and thus insulate it from future drought. Thus, the miracle of water was a direct gift of Melbourne modernism, of which Battarbee was the most prominent representative at the mission. Further, the mission had begun to develop links with the Western art world at the very moment that it had embarked on a new post-­tjurunga era under the auspices of a Western aesthetic system — ​­the Lutheran teaching pictures favored by Tjalkabota. In this new climate, Namatjira convinced himself that he could make Western-­type paintings in the manner of Battarbee’s pastoral modernism, completing his first effort in May 1935 while the pipeline was

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being laid. With the tjurunga now dethroned, he gave the Western Arrernte a new set of pictures made from water and paper. More than one commentator has noted how closely Namatjira’s landscapes emulate the look of the Lutheran teaching pictures that Tjalkabota, the evangelist, held dear to his heart, especially the pictures for biblical stories set in the desert.48 This, in part, explains Namatjira’s attraction to pastoral modernism, which employed the sacral intentions of picturesque composition and light. When painting this desert landscape, Heysen said that he “was made curiously conscious of a very old land where the primitive forces of Nature were constantly evident.” 49 Similarly, the iconic forms and shimmering tones of Namatjira’s compositions animate the presence of Altjira, which in traditional body and ground painting was also produced through such visual effects. As Heysen painted a melancholy loss in which the animating forces of the landscape are old and weary, however, Namatjira’s painted a country alive and fully animated, as if Altjira still stirred beneath the ground (figure 7.4). This was his gift to his own people: he provided them with a tangible alternative to the tjurunga, one that spoke directly to this place and its ancestral sites. Altjira was written not only in the tjurunga but also in the land. Tjalkabota may have waged war on the tjurunga, which he believed were manmade, but he respected the sanctity of the land, which was God made. Like the tjurunga, Namatjira’s landscapes are totemic-­scapes. In this respect, like the pipeline, Namatjira’s art reterritorialized the tjurunga in the form of an Arrernte modernism. The central importance of land as the bearer of cosmological meaning is evident in the widespread Western Arrernte belief that God’s law is not everywhere, but only in their country. “God had given his country to a particular people and they were the Western Arrernte. . . . In these Arrernte Christian eyes, the mission had retrieved this law for the Western Arrernte, and the Arrernte had realized it as pepe,” rather than tjurunga.50 In other words, God’s law worked in the same way as the traditional law of the ancestors. It was embedded in a particular place. Like Tjalkabota, Namatjira was a practicing Christian. He belonged, however, to a later generation that softened Tjalkabota’s radical aspirations. Like many converts, Namatjira retained an allegiance to the local totemic sites and their stories, and he liked to relate the Dreaming or tjurunga stories of the sites he painted. He did not, like some of his followers, paint Christian scenes or embed tjurunga designs in his landscapes. His art offers a compromising

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Albert Namatjira, Whispering Hills, 1952. Watercolor on paper, 14.3 × 20.5 in. (36.3 × 52 cm). Newcastle Region Art Gallery Collection. Purchased by the Newcastle Region Art Gallery Foundation, the Newcastle Gallery Society, and public donation, 2009. © Namatjira Legacy Trust, 2018.

FIGURE 7.4 

position that accepts Tjalkabota’s modernizing ideology but without its iconoclastic divisiveness. Today Namatjira’s art is the most visible legacy of the Arrernte revolution at Ntaria. A collection of his and his followers works hangs in a makeshift gallery at Hermannsburg on the old mission site, and recently a large gift of his paintings to the National Gallery of Australia has cemented his legacy. The style of painting he pioneered continues to be practiced by Arrernte artists and has become the brand of Arrernte identity, as if it offered a modern pictorial language in which the eternal inscriptions of Altjira in the land are repeated in fugitive washes of color on paper. In this way Namatjira distilled the eternal in the present, thus accomplishing what the old men had always sought: continuity. In his paintings the conflict between Tjalkabota and the old men achieved a workable truce. The revolutionaries never did succeed in stamping out the tjurunga. The Manangananga cave was made a taboo site again in the mid-­1950s, and a vast number of the old tjurunga are now stored in restricted access in the Strehlow Research Centre in nearby Alice Springs — ​­a new type of cave regulated by the bureaucratic procedures of modernity — ​­and the old ceremonies continue. The art world has also significantly changed, in part because of the sort of conundrums posed by artists such as Namatjira. The founding principles of Western modernism and its war with tradition no longer hold. Today traditionalism — ​ ­or “neotraditionalism” (the use of traditional Indigenous iconography and art styles in the context of modern media and formats) — ​­is a dominant feature of Aboriginal contemporary art, especially in the so-­called Western Desert school of painting that originated at Papunya, where Namatjira spent his last days. Today’s Namatjira school of painting is now the traditional Arrernte way. Nonetheless, in Namatjira’s time, his watercolors appeared as anything but traditional. Despite modernity’s claims of temporal rupture, tradition continuously reappears as a sort of return of the repressed, in both the current neotraditionalism of Western Desert acrylic paintings and in the earlier primitivism of Western modernism. Modernism was Janus faced. It could take on the guise of the past and the future, but each is a window onto the eternal present. Given the imperative of Indigenous artists to retain continuity with Dreaming, it makes sense that Aboriginal contemporary art tends to be neotraditional. Yet, Dreaming demands continuity with the future as well as with the past. Perhaps, when the future begins to offer more promise and takes on a shape that Indigenous artists feel they can own — ​­as is beginning to happen in some MODERNISM AND THE ART OF NAMATJIRA 

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quarters — ​­Indigenous contemporary artists will, like their Western counterparts, flirt more promiscuously with the future and worry less for tradition. Notes Epigraph: Vic Hall, Namatjira of the Aranda (Adelaide: Rigby, 1962), 13. 1. Rex Battarbee, Modern Australian Aboriginal Art (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1951). 2. Ian Burn, National Life and Landscape: Australian Painting 1900–1940 (Sydney: Bay Books, 1990); Clement Greenberg, “The Plight of Our Culture,” in Affirmation and Refusals, 1950–56, vol. 3 of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 122–52. 3. Philip Jones, “Namatjira: Traveller between Two Worlds,” in The Heritage of Namat­jira: The Watercolourists of Central Australia, ed. Jane Hardy, J. V. S. Megaw, and M. Ruth Megaw (Port Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1992), 98. 4. Battarbee, Modern Australian Aboriginal Art, 10. 5. “Albert Namatjira Mobbed by Autograph Hunters in Melb.,” Barrier Miner, February 27, 1954, 11. 6. Ernestine Hill, Australia, Land of Contrasts, ed. Sydney Ure Smith (Sydney: J. Sands, 1943). 7. Ian Burn and Ann Stephen, “Namatjira’s White Mask: A Partial Interpretation,” in Hardy, Megaw, and Megaw, The Heritage of Namatjira, 265. 8. Burn and Stephen, “Namatjira’s White Mask,” 265. 9. Lionel Lindsay, quoted in Colin Thiele, Heysen of Hahndorf (Adelaide: Rigby, 1968), 203. 10. Bernard Smith and Terry Smith, Australian Painting, 1788–1990 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991), 115. 11. Harold Herbert, “Aboriginal Art: Albert Namatjira,” Argus, December 5, 1938, 2. 12. Paul Haefliger, “Technique of Namatjira: Water Colours by Aboriginal,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 15, 1945, 8. 13. Paul Haefliger, “Aboriginal Artist’s Work on Show,” Sydney Morning Herald, November 25, 1947, 9. 14. Mary Durack, “Art and Aboriginal,” West Australian, December 14, 1946 15. Battarbee, Modern Australian Aboriginal Art, 19. 16. Battarbee, Modern Australian Aboriginal Art, 23. 17. Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (London: Macmillan, 1899). 18. Nelson H. H. Graburn, “Introduction: The Arts of the Fourth World,” in Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World, ed. Nelson H. H. Graburn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 7.

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19. Sylvia Kleinert, “The Critical Reaction to the Hermannsburg School,” in Hardy, Megaw, and Megaw, Heritage of Namatjira, 243. 20. Jones, “Namatjira,” 112. 21. Burn and Stephen, “Namatjira’s White Mask,” 270. 22. Burn and Stephen, “Namatjira’s White Mask,” 267–68. 23. Burn and Stephen, “Namatjira’s White Mask,” 269. 24. Burn and Stephen, “Namatjira’s White Mask,” 271. 25. Burn and Stephen, “Namatjira’s White Mask,” 270. 26. Burn and Stephen, “Namatjira’s White Mask,” 270. 27. Burn and Stephen, “Namatjira’s White Mask,” 278–79. 28. Burn and Stephen, “Namatjira’s White Mask,” 276. 29. Diane Austin-­Broos, Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past: Invasion, Violence, and Imagination in Indigenous Central Australia (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), 95. 30. Tjalkabota, in Paul G. E. Albrecht, From Mission to Church, 1877–2002: Finke River Mission (Ntaria [Hermannsburg]: Finke River Mission, 2002), 242–43. 31. See Albrecht’s report in From Mission to Church, 307–40. Also see John Strehlow, The Tale of Frieda Keysser: Frieda Keysser and Carl Strehlow, an Historical Biography, vol. 1, 1875–1910 (London: Wild Cat Press, 2011), 563. 32. Tjalkabota, in Albrecht, From Mission to Church, 244. 33. Tim Rouse made a similar argument: Rouse, White Flour, White Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7–8. 34. Claude Lévi-­Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1966), 89. 35. See Anna Kenny, “From Missionary to Frontier Scholar: An Introduction to Carl Strehlow’s Masterpiece, Die Aranda-­und Loritja-­Stämme in Zentral-­Australien (1901–1909)” (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2008), ch. 5. 36. See Sam D. Gill, Storytracking: Texts, Stories, and Histories in Central Australia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 87. 37. Jones, “Namatjira,” 122. 38. Tjalkabota, in Albrecht, From Mission to Church, 274–75. 39. Tjalkabota, in Albrecht, From Mission to Church, 286. 40. See Penny Van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006). 41. See Austin-­Broos, Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past. 42. Barbara Henson, A Straight-Out Man: F. W. Albrecht and Central Australian Aborigines (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1994), 48. 43. Jones, “Namatjira,” 122. 44. Henson, A Straight-­Out Man, 53. 45. Paul Carter, The Lie of the Land (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 49.

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46. Diane Austin-­Broos, “Translating Christianity: Some Keywords, Events and Sites in Western Arrernte Conversion,” Australian Journal of Anthropology 21, no. 1 (2010): 27. 47. Austin-­Broos, “Translating Christianity,” 27. 48. For example, see Jones, “Namatjira,” 110–11. 49. Hans Heysen, “Some Notes on Art,” Art in Australia 3, no. 44 (June 1932): 18. 50. Austin-­Broos, Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past, 81.

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NORMAN VORANO

8 

CAPE DORSET COSMOPOLITANS Making “Local” Prints in Global Modernity

Vogue magazine, May 15, 1954: Tucked inside this handbook of jetset consumption, sandwiched between elegant willowy women in Mainbocher prints, an advertisement sponsored by the Canadian government travel bureau, and dapper men with chiseled jawlines, is an effusive review article by the art critic and cultural writer Aline B. Saarinen: “Canada: Contemporary Eskimo Stone Carvings” (figure 8.1). Saarinen, the former critic at Art News and current art critic at the New York Times (as Aline Louchheim), was captivated by the first traveling exhibitions of contemporary Inuit sculpture to tour the United States. Beginning in the fall of 1953, nearly two dozen American venues offered contrasting ways of contextualizing the presentation of Inuit carving; from the ethnographic setting of the Cranbrook Institute of Science in Bloomfield, Michigan, to the august high modernism of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the contradictory discourses of “modernist primitivism” featured prominently in the promotion and in audience responses. Spellbound by the “extraordinary quality” of the “vigorous and engaging” carvings, Saarinen described the works as being “startlingly sympathetic to our most sophisticated modern aesthetics,” reminiscent of “early Lipchitz or . . . the genius of Henry Moore and John Flannagan [sic].” 1 Vogue entreated its nearly 400,000 style-­conscious American readers to their first glimpse of Inuit art with a potent narrative linking global tourism, Canada’s North, the anxieties of consumption, and the presumed links between “the primitive” and “the modern.” “The thrill of discovering contemporary Eskimo stone carving today,” wrote Saarinen, “is akin to the excitement people must have felt at the beginning of our century when they first looked at African Negro sculpture.” 2

F I G U R E 8 . 1 

Aline B. Saarinen, “Canada: Contemporary Eskimo Stone Carvings,” Vogue, May 15, 1954, 64. Copyright Conde Nast.

This complicated intersection of modern aesthetics and worldly objects, mass consumption and travel, and the contradictory discourses of modernist primitivism are the preconditions to the emergence of a fine-­art Inuit printmaking movement that began in the Canadian Arctic in the late 1950s. This chapter tracks the origins of fine-­art printmaking in the eastern Arctic and situates the production of Inuit stone-­cut relief and stencil prints within broader discourses of a colonial modernity, Cold War politics, and government-­ sanctioned assimilation policies. I argue that Inuit artists, working with the assistance of non-­Indigenous cultural intermediaries, made aesthetic and artistic decisions that strengthened their “local” identities in an increasingly interconnected world by strategically deploying familiar tropes of modernist primitivism in ways that implicitly challenged the culturally reductive assumptions of a universal modernism and the inherently colonial politics of primitivism. Entangled in conflicting art world discourses, including a Cold War cultural nationalism, and drawing from a cosmopolitan array of global artistic references and mass print journalism, Inuit print studios became an arena in which Inuit identities could be explored, reconfigured, and negotiated in the modern world. The success of Inuit printmaking in southern markets and the development of Arctic print studios provided the economic and 210 

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organizational impetus for the establishment of Inuit-­owned business cooperatives that contributed to broader sociopolitical autonomy.3 This case study further serves to illustrate a broader point concerning the intercultural history of aesthetic modernism itself, foregrounding its capacity to bring together disparate cultures, classes, and political orientations under a common visual field, but frequently based on mutual misunderstandings, unshared meanings, and (mis)appropriations, a point that I develop in the concluding remarks of this chapter. To date, while there have been numerous chronicles of Inuit printmaking as well as monographs on graphic artists and studios, relatively few scholars have attempted to situate the emergence of Inuit graphic arts within larger art historical narratives of postwar modernism and modernity.4 For a little over fifty years, fine-­art printmaking studios have operated in the eastern Canadian Arctic where they have had a profound effect on the lives of Inuit. In northern communities suffering from chronically high unemployment coupled with the legacy of government-­orchestrated assimilationist policies, the print studios provided a meaningful intergenerational connection and sense of cultural stability, as well as a vehicle for individual and collective expression.5 Printmaking has launched the careers of three generations of Inuit graphic artists (many of whom are female) and has also provided broader opportunities for community-­based cooperative entrepreneurship and professional development in business management.6 After five decades of print production, Arctic print studios are enmeshed in a sprawling global supply chain that includes traditional washi makers in Japan, wholesale distributors in metropolitan centers, a coterie of business and technical advisors — ​­and, of course, a set of scholars. From a modest start in the late 1950s, annual releases of Inuit prints have become an autumn ritual for many high-­end commercial art galleries across North America, while public museums around the world increasingly acquire Inuit graphic arts to explore Inuit ethnology, history, and culture. While the number of print studios in the Arctic has peaked and waned over the last five decades, the community of Cape Dorset has remained the most prolific and, as such, is the focus of the study here. Not only is Cape Dorset the “birthplace” of Inuit printmaking, consistently releasing annual collections of prints since its inaugural 1959 catalog, but artists from this community, such as Kenojuak Ashevak, Pitseolak Ashoona, Kananginak Pootoogook, and Pudlo Pudlat, among many others, have won national and international acclaim for their graphic works. Early attempts to historicize Inuit printmaking are attributed to James C ape D orset C osmopolitans 

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Houston, the artist and cultural intermediary who introduced printmaking to Cape Dorset in the late 1950s while employed as an area administrator for the Canadian government.7 From 1949, Houston worked tirelessly in the Arctic to establish the formal marketing structure for Inuit sculpture and handicrafts.8 When the markets for Inuit sculpture across North America expanded in the mid-­1950s, the federal government supported a slate of new northern arts and crafts endeavors to broaden the commercial potential of Arctic arts through diversification into other media.9 By 1956, Houston and a small group of Inuit men in Cape Dorset — ​­Osuitok Ipeelee, followed by Lukta Qiatsuk, Kananginak Pootoogook, Egyvudluk Pootoogook, and Iyola Kingwatsiak — ​­began experimenting with rudimentary hand-­block fabric and paper printing, with the intent of selling northern-­themed gift cards and wrapping paper in southern markets. While fabric printing continued into the 1960s (without much financial success), the leap from gift paper to “fine art” limited edition printmaking was made possible after Houston spent three months studying hand-­block printing in Japan in late 1958. He returned to Cape Dorset armed with the technical and artistic knowledge of sophisticated modern printing techniques, and the studio blossomed.10 Around this time, Houston published his first article on the start of Inuit printmaking, “Eskimo Graphic Art,” which appeared in the pages of the journal Canadian Art. Timed to coincide with the release of Cape Dorset’s first annual collection of prints in early 1960, the article was republished as a stand-­alone government-­issued pamphlet to promote Inuit graphic arts as an important art form that would allow Inuit to “better express themselves” in a rapidly changing world. Citing the artists’ “remoteness from outside art training,” the article presented printmaking as a “new and natural development” that grew out of the “traditionally Eskimo” art of sealskin clothing applique.11 The article strategically downplayed Houston’s complicated role as the cultural intermediary who introduced printmaking to Cape Dorset, an omission that foreshadows Houston’s canny ability to navigate the rigid strictures of “authenticity” in the 1950s art world, and to creatively explore themes that would resonate with or at times challenge the desires and expectations of audiences. Enlarging on this in his 1967 book, Eskimo Prints, Houston spun a more engaging yarn about the start of printmaking that would be repeated for decades to come: In winter 1957, wrote Houston, Osuitok Ipeelee, a notable carver, noticed the identical designs of two cigarette packages and remarked that it must have been tiresome for someone to repeatedly paint the same image. Unable to sufficiently explain the method of mechanical printing used to create the packag212 

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ing, Houston demonstrated the intaglio process by rubbing lamp soot into an incised walrus tusk and then pulling a few reasonably clear reproductions on tissue paper. Like a flash of lightning, the idea of printmaking was thus born: “ ‘We could do that,’ [Osuitok] said, with the instant decision of a hunter. And so we did,” wrote Houston.12 While his article assured readers — ​­not without some basis in fact — ​­that Inuit graphic arts drew from vibrant graphical traditions in ivory incising and sealskin appliqué dating back millennia, Houston’s historical account glossed over the government’s long-­standing interest in developing “Eskimo crafts” and the complicated global influences that Inuit artists were navigating. Quite possibly to burnish the image of the brand-­new Cape Dorset print studio with a more long-­standing and “authentic” pedigree, or to play into the ancient links and presumed affinities between Inuit and East Asian cultures, Houston did mention having studied in Japan, a point that he furtively discussed in earlier newspaper interviews.13

Digesting Modernism — ​­Magazines in the Arctic Houston’s captivating anecdote about Ipeelee’s “discovery” of printmaking belies a constellation of influences, including the global forces of modernity as well as the diffusion of an aesthetic modernism and modernist primitivism, notably through mass print culture. As noted by other scholars, popular magazines have played an invaluable role as carriers and incubators of artistic modernism around the world, including the formation of a “taste culture” for Native American modernist arts in the early and mid-­twentieth century.14 Popular magazines and art journals — ​­particularly Canadian Art and London’s Studio Magazine, the latter being distributed and read across the ­Commonwealth — ​­helped key cultural brokers shape an effective domestic and international marketing strategy for Inuit sculpture in the 1950s.15 It is no surprise, then, that the birth of printmaking in the Canadian Arctic owes a debt to several key magazine articles, which created a texture of explicit reference about modernism and primitivism that “activated” the print studio. In Houston’s 1996 memoir, he recalled that after initial experimentation with printmaking in Cape Dorset, he sought more training in Japan after reading a “British art magazine that had mentioned and shown the work of several contemporary Japanese printmakers and discussed their techniques.” 16 The identity of this magazine remains a mystery, although evidence strongly suggests that he encountered the widely available article “Japanese Print Revival,” published in the July 23, 1956, edition of Time magazine.17 Among the Japanese C ape D orset C osmopolitans 

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artists discussed, all of whom were on the cutting edge of Japan’s sōsaku hanga, or “creative print” movement, was Shikō Munakata, who had gained considerable international exposure after receiving prizes at the 1955 São Paulo Biennial and the 1956 Venice Biennale. The article acknowledged Munakata’s role as one of the principle revivers of the “neglected” art of printmaking in Japan, which according to the Time reviewer was previously composed of “cheap prints of almond-­eyed prostitutes, grimacing kabuki actors and brawling porters,” a tradition that became an “early victim in Japan’s Westernization drive.” 18 One of the latent messages of the Time article — ​­that contemporary printmaking can be a bulwark against the perceived homogenizing effects of social modernity while simultaneously having the capacity to “recharge” enervated artistic traditions — ​­would have undoubtedly appealed to Houston’s sensibilities and, more important, his desire to find a new medium for Inuit creativity. The Time article highlighted Munakata’s interest in and engagement with Western modern painting, lauding his break with Japan’s established ­ukiyo-­e print tradition through a twofold process of adopting a more expressively individual style and eliminating the division of labor that characterized the ukiyo-­e process (in which a separate draftsperson, block cutter, and printer were used to make prints). Such appropriations of modernist visual styles, working methods, and processes were not deemed incompatible with Munakata’s identity as a Japanese artist, at least not in the international arena of art biennales and the world press. Rather, they endowed his and other contemporary Japanese printmakers’ works with a worldly sensibility, poetically captured by James Michener who described this amalgam of Eastern and Western aesthetic compulsions as existing “between the inner world of Japan and the outer world of Paris,” a cosmopolitan metaphor that calls to mind the French modernist interest in Japanese prints in the late nineteenth century.19 At a time of unprecedented level of interest in Japanese prints, the Time reviewer made the apt pronouncement that “hanga [block printing] is beginning to bloom again.” Redolent with the possibilities of combining elements of Western aesthetic modernism and “traditional” non-­Western arts to create a hybrid form that resonated in the contemporary world, the Time article clearly opened a conceptual door for Houston. But it was likely just one catalyst of many. An earlier source of inspiration is strongly implied by a 1955 memo Houston wrote to his superiors in Ottawa, in which he revealed his intention to “successfully introduce [in the Arctic] a graphic art of native concept like they have in the Congo or Haiti.” 20 This furtive comment invites more questions than can be addressed here concerning the identity of the art in question. Nonetheless, 214 

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Ellis Wilson, To Market, Haitian Peasants, ca. 1954. Oil with turpentine on panel, 22.4 × 28.8 in. (56.8 × 73.2 cm). North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. Purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina, 69, 29.1.

FIGURE 8.2 

the memo was drafted shortly after a 1954 trip Houston took to New York City with his wife, Alma, to publicize the first traveling exhibition of Inuit carving to the United States, and the Houstons could very well have seen the celebrated exhibition Impressions of Haiti, by the African American painter Ellis Wilson, then on view at the New York Contemporary Arts Gallery (figure 8.2).21 Given Houston’s capacious interests in non-­Western arts (but limited exposure to African or Haitian graphic arts), it is plausible that he mistook Wilson for a Haitian graphic artist when he spelled out his ambitions for Inuit graphic arts some months later in his government memo. Regardless, Houston bore witness to the widespread institutionalization of non-­Western arts in North American museums under the rubric of “primitive arts” and clearly saw an opening for Inuit graphic art. Houston’s decision to study in Japan was rooted in his genuine appreciation for the Japanese modern printmakers then fashionable in the art world. As he recalled, “I decided that since the best printmakers in the world were in Japan, I should go there and learn from them, and pass on what I learned to C ape D orset C osmopolitans 

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my Inuit colleagues.” 22 A 1958 newspaper report, published as Houston was readying for his departure to Japan, confirmed his intention to tap “Japan’s vast fund of knowledge of hand-­block printing . . . for methods whereby prints can be made of Eskimo-­incised carvings.” 23 Yet this decision to study in Japan suggests a more complicated interest in “the primitive” that imagined essentialized racial links between Inuit and Asian civilizations in both ancient and contemporary times. Such links were explored by scientific anthropologists and physical archaeologists, such as Smithsonian-­based Henry Collins and Aleš Hrdlička, yet they also had a more dubious place in popular expressions of Alaskan Eskimos and, to a lesser degree, Canadian Inuit, through the reductive imagery of Hollywood films, in a process Anne Fienup-­Riordan describes as an “Eskimo Orientalism.” 24 A fulsome account of Houston’s three-­month visit to Japan, between late October 1958 and late January 1959, is beyond the scope of this chapter, but some details are warranted. He did not, as he initially wanted, study with Munakata (who was busy preparing for his first American solo exhibition) but rather studied five nights a week with Un’ichi Hiratsuka, an eminent and senior printmaker who had been Munakata’s teacher in the 1930s and was revered in Japan as one of the principle founders of the sōsaku hanga movement in the twentieth century. As Hiratsuka later recalled, Houston was a capable student, and they had a productive relationship, which included many discussions about Inuit art.25 Houston learned hand-­block direct printmaking as well as hand rubbing, kappazuri stencil printing, and tool and paper (washi) making. He made short visits to the studios of many other sōsaku hanga artists around Tokyo, including Munakata, Kichiemon Okamura, Yoshitoshi Mori, Keisuke Serizawa, and Sadao Watanabe. He became acquainted with Japan’s popular mingei, “folk crafts,” scene — ​­then regarded as a national movement — ​ ­by meeting its principal philosopher, Soetsu Yanagi. Like Houston, Yanagi reveled in the antimodern possibilities of craft and Indigenous arts and came to appreciate ancient Korean wares and Ainu cultural expressions through the problematic lens of an “Oriental Orientalism,” or Japan’s “other.” 26 While Houston wrote sparely about his travels through Japan, his oft-­repeated claim that he returned to the Arctic bringing the “tools, the papers and the techniques” he learned in Japan omits an important detail: he returned to Cape Dorset with more than a dozen Japanese prints.27 These Japanese prints were framed and exhibited around the Houstons’ Cape Dorset residence and pinned to the walls around the print studio, remaining visible during the Houstons’ duration in the community over the next several years. 216 

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The prints by Hiratsuka, Munakata, Okamura, and Mori were pedagogical and inspirational, as the Inuit printmakers in Cape Dorset began to create new prints in limited editions for wide release. By juxtaposing several of the Japanese prints brought to the Arctic and the Inuit prints created afterward, we can better understand how Inuit printmakers navigated a range of external influences to establish their identities as Inuit artists in an increasingly interconnected world system. While the Inuit artists undoubtedly drew from their own cultural traditions, the comparisons underscore the degree to which aesthetic modernism provided the visual field on which these intercultural borrowings took place. In terms of their convergences, the Cape Dorset printmakers admired the stark flatness and the bold, expressive style of the Japanese prints, among other features discussed in the examples below. The Inuit artists clearly adopted the Japanese method of adding a name seal, or “chop,” to identify the artist, printer, and studio, but they reconfigured their name seals to use syllabic Inuktitut rather than Japanese characters. Given that the retail prices of Cape Dorset prints were in the same range as the prints by Munakata, “$6–$55 each,” and had a comparable edition sizes, the Cape Dorset studio likely gleaned fundamental aspects of their own business model from modern Japanese printmakers.28 Yet there are striking differences between the Japanese and Cape Dorset prints as well, showing that Inuit printmakers selectively or strategically borrowed and adapted influences, actively trying visual elements of the Japanese prints but abandoning those they deemed incompatible with their aesthetic or cultural values. Because of the lack of wood in the Arctic, the Cape Dorset print studio resourcefully used the few materials at hand, creating print blocks with locally quarried stone rather than wood, as the Japanese artists used. The Cape Dorset artists also pursued their own set of thematic concerns, basing their prints exclusively on drawings created by men and women from the community, depicting Arctic animals, Inuit myths, and a variety of Inuit cultural practices, all of which steadfastly avoided the intrusion of modernity. Hiratsuka’s woodcut print Katsura Rikyu Amano Hashidate [Stone lantern] (figure 8.3) is a typical example of the unmodulated black-­on-­white prints he had begun to produce almost exclusively since the late 1930s, after he eschewed color and tonal variation. This work, acquired by Houston directly from the artist and then taken to the Arctic, can be productively compared to Lukta Qiatsuk’s Owl, the first stone-­cut print produced in Cape Dorset after Houston’s return from Japan (figure 8.4). Hiratsuka’s development toward stark black on white emerged from his interest in sumi-­zuri (black ink) C ape D orset C osmopolitans 

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painting as well as his admiration of the jagged but flat black-­on-­white prints of German expressionists Ernst Kirchner and Emil Nolde, to which he was exposed through circulating art magazines. Hiratsuka saw that the perfect harmony of tones was to be found in this excruciatingly restrictive combination of black on white — ​­no gray, no shading — ​­which, he felt, could permit every artistic effect. While Inuit women had a comparable graphic tradition in silhouette-­like appliqued “skin pictures” sewn on bags and garments using bleached (white) and unbleached (dark) sealskin, the work by Hiratsuka and Munakata must have enlarged the aesthetic and artistic possibilities of this restricted aesthetic.29 Qiatsuk’s Owl demonstrates a far more sophisticated approach toward positive and negative space than the experimental Cape Dorset prints created prior to Houston’s visit to Japan, which typically overlaid simple silhouette-­like shapes on a colored background. By contrast, Qiatsuk flattens and animates the owl’s plumage by rendering it as a series of rhythmically interlocking jigsawlike shapes that dance on the surface of the picture plane, akin to Hiratsuka’s treatment of pebbles and water on Katsura Rikyu Amano Hashidate. In both cases, the artists use black and white not to evoke static, concrete forms but to create the appearance of shimmering movement over an indeterminate space and to break the solidity of objects. Roughly one-­quarter of Cape Dorset’s first annual collection is black on white, in keeping with the aesthetic philosophy expressed in Hiratsuka’s monotone prints. Though Qiatsuk was the draftsperson, block cutter, and printer for Owl, it would be erroneous to believe that the Cape Dorset print studio adopted the sōsaku hanga “self-­printing” production method, which eliminated the division of labor in the execution of a print to emphasize the individuality of the printmaker. After attempting then rejecting the self-­printing method, the Cape Dorset studio adopted clear distinctions between draftsperson and printer, a process that reflected the nineteenth-­century ukiyo-­e method that Hiratsuka regarded as being antithetical to the modern. Nevertheless, that the Cape Dorset studio rejected this form of modernist production while continuing to find value in the modernist “look” of sōsaku hanga demonstrates that in the peripheries of the art world, aesthetic modernism can take on vastly different meanings, with at times apparently contradictory ideological commitments. In Cape Dorset, the ukiyo-­e division of labor was a more flexible method that satisfied local needs, permitting the widespread participation of women in the graphic arts program as designers (while men cut the print blocks and pulled the prints), as well as the possibility of interrupting a print run mid-­edition in order to hunt as the season or weather permitted.30 This 218 

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F I G U R E 8 . 3 

Un’ichi Hiratsuka, Katsura Rikyu Amano Hashidate [Stone lantern], 1958. Woodcut print on paper, 15.7 × 13.7 in. (40 × 35 cm). Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, Quebec. Gift of Alice W. Houston. Copyright Keiko Hiratsuka Moore. F I G U R E 8 . 4  Lukta Qiatsuk, Owl, 1959. Stone-cut print, 12 × 14 in. (30.6 × 35.9 cm). Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, Quebec. Copyright Dorset Fine Arts.

reordering of a modernist production method into a locally oriented system that reinforced the Inuit traditional value of pijitsirniq (to serve) speaks to the processes by which, as Daniel Miller identified in another context, a local culture is produced by the “consumption” of a global institution, in this case, global modernism.31 A second comparison yields yet another instantiation of how Inuit printmakers attempted and rejected a Japanese technique. Man Carried to the Moon (figure 8.5), based on a drawing by Kellypalik Mungitok and printed by Qiatsuk in 1959, depicts a shamanic scene possibly associated with an incest taboo. Stylistically, Man Carried to the Moon calls to mind many of Munakata’s prints, which were brought to the Arctic, such as The Sand Nest (figure 8.6), which comprises similarly angular, flat, and expressive contours with a strong emphasis on a bold central motif. But Man Carried to the Moon was published as an inked monotone in an edition of thirty, and as a much rarer rubbing in an edition of ten, both editions printed from the same low-­relief stone print block. Documentary research reveals that Houston had learned a hand-­rubbing technique while studying in Hiratsuka’s studio in Japan several months before returning to Cape Dorset.32 That Man Carried to the Moon was printed in both formats suggests that Houston encouraged Inuit printmakers to attempt a variety of techniques he had learned in Japan. The Inuit printmakers essentially rejected the rubbing technique, however, in favor of the “cleaner” inked technique, which permitted no tonal variation. Cape Dorset printmaker Kananginak Pootoogook explained that the Cape Dorset studio attempted only two “rubbings” (both in 1959) in more than fifty years of printmaking because the technique “looked messy” to the printmakers, and an Inuk would never want to have a messy page because it would be seen as a mark of bad workmanship.33 As with the sōsaku hanga approach, the rejection of rubbing illustrates a highly selective appropriation of certain modernist modalities and a rejection of others that are deemed incompatible with Inuit traditional values, such as “good workmanship.” As those working at the Cape Dorset print studio came from a culture of subsistence hunters who lived in an unforgiving environment, where “messy” work, such as an improperly sewn seam or a poorly carved harpoon tip, could mean the difference between a successful hunt or starvation, life or death, it is understandable that they rejected the spontaneous expressive effects of a frottage-­like rubbing technique. Just as Houston came to appreciate Japanese prints through the lens of Time magazine, Inuit printmakers also digested and made use of representations of their own culture reproduced in popular magazines. Qiatsuk’s 1959 Cape 220 

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F I G U R E 8 . 5  Kellypalik

Mungitok, Man Carried to the Moon, 1959. Stone-cut rubbing (block cut and printed by Lukta Qiatsuk), 17.9 × 23.4 in. (45.5 × 59.5 cm). Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, Quebec. Copyright Dorset Fine Arts. F I G U R E 8 . 6  Shikō

Munakata, The Sand Nest, 1938 (printed 1958). Woodcut. Private collection. Copyright Shikō Munakata.

Dorset print Eskimo Whale Hunt (figure 8.7) was clearly modeled after the incised sculptural image that had been featured prominently in Saarinen’s Vogue article, published five years earlier. Evidently, Inuit printmakers took a great interest in globally circulating magazines, and although neither Qiatsuk nor Houston ever discussed the Vogue connection in their own published recollections, we may speculate on possible motivations and meanings behind the studio’s sourcing of this image from the pages of a glossy American magazine. The Vogue link suggests how the imprimatur of authenticity offered by mass print media can be a powerful component of the iterative process of image making for artists in the peripheries of modernism, who have little or no access to the museums, galleries, and other instruments of a taste culture found in major cities. The barriers of geography and language in these peripheries suggest that magazines play an inordinately valuable role in the dialectical process of dramatizing and communicating cultural difference in a global setting, finding what Richard Wilk describes as a “structure of common difference” in the arena of arts and culture.34 While photo-­laden magazines such as Life and Time were widely distributed across the North (the pages were frequently stuck to the insides of igloos as decorative wallpaper), the Vogue review was “culturally dense” for the artists in Cape Dorset; published on occasion of the first American tour of Inuit carving, it provided an index of American tastes as it signaled the penetration of Inuit carving into a massive new export market. Success in the American marketplace provided an enormous morale boost for Inuit artists, giving clear evidence of the long-­term viability of Inuit carving and printmaking as an economic and social enterprise. Qiatsuk’s artistic appropriation from the pages of Vogue may have been a purposeful attempt to demonstrate the studio’s cosmopolitanism, an expression of a shared comodernity with Vogue readers, and as such, a deliberate challenge to prevailing primitivist discourses that situated Inuit art out of modern time and in an ethnographic present. Sourcing an image directly from Vogue quietly invalidates the assumed “remoteness” of the artists, central to the primitivist myths frequently deployed by the promoters of and commentators on Inuit art, and well-­rehearsed in Saarinen’s Vogue review. Such inversions point to what Harald Prins labeled the “primitivist perplex,” describing the ambiguous and at times paradoxical quality of representations that allow otherwise damaging stereotypes of Indigenous culture to have socially or politically redeeming values when strategically deployed by Indigenous peoples themselves.35 The Vogue link reveals an approach to commoditization in Cape Dorset 222 

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Lukta Qiatsuk, Eskimo Whale Hunt, 1959. Stone-cut (block cut and printed by Lukta Qiatsuk), Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, Quebec. Copyright Dorset Fine Arts.

FIGURE 8.7 

that would have rubbed uneasily against notions of value in the primitive art world, in which the commercial motivation of the non-­Western artist challenges the work’s authenticity. In the 1960s, the financial motivation behind the Cape Dorset print endeavor was acknowledged on a limited basis under the morally recuperative banner of productive entrepreneurship, but such C ape D orset C osmopolitans 

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discussions were attenuated. In a 1988 interview, Houston reflected on having to explain to the artists the principles of a cash economy, since previous Inuit-­ settler trade was based on cashless exchange. After telling the printmakers “two white fox equals one print,” the following morning Houston returned to the studio to find a drawing of a large dollar bill, “in line with an Eskimo belief that bigger is better.” 36 Under such a lens, the Vogue quotation can be read as a pragmatic use of a publicly authenticated (through commoditization) expression of “culture.” The financial motivation to create commoditized images of Inuit culture is only part of the picture, of course. Beyond this, we must also keep in mind the human need for cultural reproduction — ​­a desire for stability and continuity that takes on a distinctly political imperative during the enormous rupture of colonial modernity.37 As a result of the federal government’s assimilation policies, a shifting economy, and a mandatory residential school system that culturally dislocated generations, Inuit were increasingly moving off the land and into settled communities in the late 1950s, changing a way of life known since precontact times. These transformations caused tremendous social and cultural upheavals, throwing into disarray the previous systems of Inuit authority, social life, and patterns of subsistence hunting. During this maelstrom of oftentimes painful change, the production of Inuit art helped to define a repertoire of symbols and motifs, or nalunaikutanga, that contributed to shared yet malleable concepts of an Inuit identity.38 As Nelson Graburn argued, Cape Dorset prints have made an unprecedented contribution to an emerging historical consciousness in the North, as images of a remembered past have been supplanted by images of “somebody else’s remembered past.” 39 Such images of Inuit life were also exploited, in the interests of Arctic sovereignty, economic development, and nation making, by the federal government’s publications, films produced by the National Film Board of Canada and the Hudson’s Bay Company, as well as a host of other endeavors that reflected private and public interest in Canada’s Arctic.40 These various strategies of appropriation, invention, and reconfiguration proved wildly successful, even as the prints registered as “authentic primitive” for audiences. The financial impact of the print studio in Cape Dorset was immediate and profound. Test marketed at an exhibition in Stratford, Ontario, in summer 1959, the prints were officially shown to the public at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in February 1960, then released for general sale through galleries across Canada and the United States later that summer.41 Sales of the 1959 collection netted $20,000 (unadjusted for inflation) for the studio, 224 

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a tremendous source of income during a time of economic hardship; just one year later, a representative of the Department of Northern Affairs reported to distinguished guests at Ottawa’s Quota Club (including Prime Minister John Diefenbaker) that the second annual Cape Dorset print collection in 1960 brought $63,000 to the community.42 The print studio officially incorporated as a community-­owned business cooperative and hired its own artistic director, Canadian artist Terrence Ryan. With Houston leaving the Arctic to begin another career in 1962, Ryan guided the studio over the next four decades, weathering the many ups and downs of the art world with surprising resilience as the co-­op expanded into other business sectors. The hiring of Terry Ryan was the first time in history that an Inuit-­owned business hired a settler-­Canadian (Qallunaat), and it marked the start of a new era of greater Inuit participation in the management over Arctic resources and development through the cooperative movement. While these examples demonstrate that Inuit printmakers were finding inspiration in and navigating through a panoply of global sources, the ever-­ presence of cultural intermediaries and the magazines they brought north remain a distinguishing feature of these engagements. These complicated linkages provide a stark contrast to the promotional texts produced by the principal promoters of Inuit prints  — ​­ the federal government, galleries, ­journalists — ​­who frequently obscured the degree to which contemporary Inuit were entangled in a world art system and at the crossroads of deep cultural change. As the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts director Evan Turner wrote in the 1963 Cape Dorset print catalog, “Because the Eskimo are fundamentally naïve or ‘primitive’ artists and consequently, as is the case with all such artists, their work emerges full blown and has little or no subsequent evolution.” 43

Visions of the North for “A Northern Vision” Houston’s interest in Japan underscores the ever-­present geopolitical forces that brought Japanese prints into the North American consciousness during Japan’s postwar reconstruction, when the sale of Japanese prints helped revitalize Japan’s economy and promote cultural understanding between the West and Japan.44 While the fear of communism in the East figured into American policy toward postwar Japan, Canada’s own brand of Cold War cultural nationalism shaped in the 1950s had a central focus on Arctic sovereignty and subsequently influenced the development and popularity of Cape Dorset prints. Not only was the federal government interested in making and exC ape D orset C osmopolitans 

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porting symbols of Canada as a “northern power” in the 1950s and 1960s — ​­a job well suited to Inuit art — ​­but the government was interested in sponsoring traveling art exhibitions that would advance its ideological Cold War objectives in Eastern Europe. Cape Dorset prints played a modest role in realizing Canada’s Cold War cultural ambitions, enlisted to carry out a variety of “information activities” behind the Iron Curtain. In what follows, we can see that shortly after Cape Dorset prints were released to the public in 1960, the federal government quickly introduced Arctic prints into new contexts, inviting their further recontextualization and appropriation. In 1958, the military and political value of Canada’s North became a topic of enormous public interest and rhetoric during Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s snap federal election. With his populist and fiery oratory, Diefenbaker hammered the same slogan across Canada: “A Northern Vision.” 45 As much an ideological as an economic platform, the “Vision” countered anxieties about Arctic sovereignty with the ambitious promise of remaking Canada’s North into a resource-­rich beacon of national development. While critics, then and now, saw the vision as more rhetoric than reality, its political potency was undeniable: Diefenbaker returned to power on March 31, 1958, with the then-­largest majority government in the history of Canada’s Parliament. Canadians were indeed looking north with a newfound confidence and unbound optimism. Yet, concern about the Canadian Arctic had been steadily growing in administrative and policy circles since the World War II. The federal government’s laissez-­faire approach to Arctic administration, which characterized Canada’s interwar years, shifted dramatically in 1952 when Liberal Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent adopted a centralized and inherently colonial Eskimo Affairs Committee to oversee a slate of new policy initiatives.46 Composed of senior bureaucrats, arctic scientists, and military officers, as well as other agencies with a vested interest in the North, such as the Catholic and Protestant Churches, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the committee attempted to orchestrate a methodical and orderly transition to modernity in the Arctic. For the next ten years, from 1952 until early 1963, the Eskimo Affairs Committee drafted and implemented sweeping public policy and development programs that attempted to tackle the varied problems in the Arctic, from the health and welfare of its Indigenous population, resource extraction, and infrastructure development, to high Arctic security, and a welter of other issues that were appearing with greater frequency in the pages of newspapers and news magazines. Houston’s employment in 226 

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the North was as a result of the Eskimo Affairs Committee recommendation to create the position of northern service officer as an extension of the civil service in the Arctic. In this context, the government sponsored traveling exhibitions of Inuit art around the world, including venues in the United States, Western Europe, South America, the Middle East, and, most surprisingly of all, Communist Europe. During the tour through Communist Europe starting in 1960, the Cape Dorset prints entered new receptive contexts and took on contradictory and varied meanings, at a great remove from the intent of the artists. The head of the External Affairs Information Division, Archibald Day, was the main architect behind this tour, enlisting Houston to pick artworks and draft exhibition texts. Given Day’s professional background, it is understandable why he would see Inuit art as a useful instrument to foment a Canadian identity abroad while advancing foreign policy objectives: from 1949 to 1950, Day was a secretary to the influential diplomat and statesman (and soon governor general of Canada) Vincent Massey during the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Science. This commission released a series of recommendations in 1951, known later as the Massey Report, for strengthening a national identity through the arts (although the report made no mention of Inuit art). In addition to Houston, Day enlisted the services of his colleague Robert Ford — ​­a poet, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, and a specialist in Russian literature — ​­to help script the main didactic messages of the exhibition and navigate the cultural complexities in Communist Europe. Paradoxically, the initial impulse to use Inuit art as a diplomatic tool was because of its perceived “apolitical” character. As early as 1954, John McLaurin Teakles, Canada’s chargé d’affaires in Prague, optimistically noted to Ford and Day that the Czech government had recently organized exhibitions of French nineteenth-­century painting and Chinese art — ​­“neither of which have any political message.” He believed that an Inuit art exhibition would be a step toward establishing more reasonable relations with the Czech government, yet one “which they would find difficult to exploit.” 47 External Affairs acknowledged that such exhibitions could be effective propaganda, provided their narratives were tailored to reinforce the value of the individual small-­ scale entrepreneurship, and the importance of multiple cultural traditions within the nation-­state — ​­messages that would have had a distinctly political potency in Communist Europe, which was then actively suppressing expressions of “folk” and national cultures. By late 1959, the exhibition Canadian C ape D orset C osmopolitans 

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Eskimo Art crossed into Poland and wove through eight cities, followed by three stops in Czechoslovakia and six more in Yugoslavia before concluding in the Soviet Union in 1962. The exhibition included twenty-­five brand new prints from the Cape Dorset 1959 annual release, along with some ninety stone and ivory carvings. Photographs from exhibition openings suggest they were well-­attended diplomatic events, with television and radio reporters watching the tour at every stop. Much like the first tours of Inuit sculpture through the United States in 1953–54, the installation styles varied from the starkly modern display at Palác Dunaj Exhibition Hall in Prague to more “ethnographic” orientations. Films such as Angotee, Land of the Long Day, and The Living Stone were shown, and a prodevelopment pamphlet written by External Affairs titled “Land of the Eskimo” was translated and freely distributed. From venue to venue, Canadian embassies engaged their host communities by enlisting the services of trusted “locals” to help the exhibition integrate comfortably with local customs. On several occasions throughout the tour, the Canadian embassies intentionally wove Inuit carvings and prints into debates about modern and primitive arts — ​­debates that had distinctly political overtones. When the exhibition toured Prague in May 1961, the Canadian legation hired Josef Flejšar, one of Czechoslovakia’s most important twentieth-­century graphic artists, noted for his theater posters and incorporation of folk-­life in his modern linear designs, to lay out the exhibit and design an advertisement. Flejšar, then associated with the Czech avant-­garde group Balance, at times found himself at odds with official government monitors.48 In the poster for Uméní Kānādských Eskymáků (figure 8.8), Flejšar recontextualized designs from Kellypalik Mungitok’s print Blue Geese on Snow (figure 8.9) by simplifying the goose forms into abstract linear elements collapsed into a single plane floating over an indeterminate field, a stylistic device the artist frequently exploited. While Flejšar’s group, Balance sought to incorporate new technical advances in printmaking with modernist innovation and Western styles, many of the group members were seen as “inherently subversive” because they actively worked against the state-­supported socialist realism.49 Continuing this effort to encode Cape Dorset prints as “modern” across Eastern Europe, the Canadian embassy turned to Stanislaw Zamecznik, another modern graphic artist, along with the local Society of Art Historians, to coordinate the installation Canadian Eskimo Art in Warsaw in October 1960. At considerable professional risk, Zamecznik had organized a major Henry

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FIGURE 8.8 

Josef Flejšar, Uméní Kānādských Eskymáků, 1961. Serigraph on paper. Library and Archives Canada. Copyright Josef Flejšar.

FIGURE 8.9 

Kellypalik Mungitok, Blue Geese on Snow, 1959. Stencil. Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, Quebec. Copyright Dorset Fine Arts.

Moore exhibition in Warsaw the preceding year. Through the coordinated efforts of the embassy and Zamecznik, numerous visitors readily saw affinities and parallels between Inuit and European modern art, notably Henry Moore, as can be gleaned from the visitor responses registered in the exhibition guest book.50 The Canadian government’s selection of Flejšar and Zamecznik as “cultural brokers” in Czechoslovakia and Poland was not a coincidence but rather a carefully coordinated effort to exploit the presumed affinities between Inuit and modern art, and in so doing, discredit Communist governments’ officially sanctioned repressive aesthetic programs. Canada’s ambassador to Poland, Jean Delisle, ruminated on the possible benefits of bringing Inuit art behind the Iron Curtain:

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One might argue that Eskimo art is not the most refined and representative type of Canadian art to show in these parts. I suggest, nevertheless, that it would call attention to a more interesting and praise-­worthy phase of Canadian art development. It would impress the Poles favourably, I think, to learn that we are not only drawing minerals and material wealth from our northerly territories but also a valuable form of cultural enrichment. They might even not fail to reflect that this is a rather superior sort of achievement to the ones with which northern Siberian waste remains associated in terms of labour and concentration camps.51 The prints from Cape Dorset were thus thrust into Canada’s Cold War propaganda efforts, and served to inspire graphic artists in Eastern bloc nations, who acknowledged the value of the prints through the lens of modernist primitivism, and who saw in these works a shared human experience not unlike their own struggle for freedom and individualism.

Modernism as Intercultural “Attractor” Andreas Huyssen acknowledged, “In the most interesting ways, modernism cut across imperial and postimperial, colonial and decolonizing cultures.” 52 The start of printmaking in Cape Dorset is but one rather extreme instantiation of Huyssen’s point: that in complicated and scarcely predictable ways, modernism’s aesthetic ideologies as well as the artistic forms typically associated with Western modernism opened spaces of intercultural encounter across vastly different socioeconomic, cultural, political, and nationalist lines — ​­Inuit graphic artists in Cape Dorset established a “new” tradition of printmaking in the face of radical upheaval; Japanese sōsaku hanga modernists combined their nineteenth-­century print traditions with Western currents; modern European artists in Eastern bloc states found new avenues to pursue anti-­ Communist political struggles. The accumulation of such details is now setting the stage for a broader theorization about the persistence of modernism as a catalyst of artistic self-­invention in cross-­cultural contexts. The network of actors involved in the history of Cape Dorset printmaking suggests that modernism — ​­that set of aesthetic ideologies, plastic forms, and critical attitudes toward modernity and tradition — ​­operated as a type of cross-­cultural “attractor” in colonial and postcolonial contexts, conjoining different cultures under a common visual field. But the common visual field was marked by major disjunctions, whereby 230 

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different agents drew wildly disparate and often incommensurable meanings from such modernist appropriations, political orientations, and social agendas. I borrow the word “attractor” from Serge Gruzinski’s study of the intellectual and cultural dynamics that underlie the mixing of Indigenous and settler cultural productions in sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century Mexico.53 While tracing the widespread adoption by Mexican Indigenous painters of two ostensibly European artistic genres, mythological paintings and grotesques, Gruzinski explains these “attractors” as the result of a combination of material objects and ideas that allow disparate components to fit together and take on layers of different and oftentimes contradictory meanings in intercultural contexts, while triggering movements of conjunction and disjunction. Aesthetic modernism operated in a similar way to the grotesques and mythological paintings in the early colonial era in the Americas: acting as a type of attractor, it provided a set of aesthetic and visual ideas that opened the door to cross-­cultural artistic exchanges. These exchanges were often with unshared meanings, creative misunderstandings, gross asymmetries of colonial power, and little or no common ideological platform. With its extraordinary capacity to integrate multiple cultural meanings and objectives, as though it were endowed with its own energy and organizational abilities, the birth of printmaking in the Canadian Arctic would auger aesthetic modernism as one of the quintessential intercultural attractors of the twentieth century. Notes 1. Aline B. Saarinen, “Canada: Contemporary Eskimo Stone Carvings,” Vogue, May 15, 1954, 64–65, 104–5. 2. Saarinen, “Canada,” 104–5. In the 1970s, the term “Eskimo” came to be replaced by the endonym “Inuit” in the eastern Arctic. Although “Eskimo” remains used in parts of Alaska, it will be used here only when citing historical sources. 3. Nelson H. H. Graburn, “Commercial Inuit Art: A Vehicle for the Economic Development of the Eskimos of Canada,” Inter-­Nord, no. 15 (December 1978): 131–42. 4. For chronicles of Inuit printmaking, see James Houston, “Eskimo Graphic Art,” Canadian Art 17, no. 1 (January 1960): 8–15; James Houston, Eskimo Prints (Barre, MA: Barre, 1967); Richard C. Crandall, Inuit Art: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000). For monographs on artists or the studio, see Jean Blodgett, Kenojuak (Toronto: Firefly Books, 1985); Jean Blodgett, In Cape Dorset We Do It This Way: Three Decades of Inuit Printmaking (Kleinburg, ON: McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 1991); Leslie Boyd-­Ryan, ed., Cape Dorset Prints: A Retrospective of Fifty Years of Printmaking at the Kinngait Studios (San Francisco: Pomegranate Communications, 2007); Helga Goetz,

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The Inuit Print: A Travelling Exhibition of the National Museum of Man, National Museums of Canada, and the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs (Ottawa: National Museum of Man, National Museums of Canada, 1977). For Inuit graphic arts in the context of art historical narratives of postwar modernism and modernity, see Norman Vorano, ed., Inuit Prints, Japanese Inspiration: Early Printmaking in the Canadian Arctic (Gatineau, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2011). 5. Nelson H. H. Graburn, “Inuit Art and the Expression of Eskimo Identity,” American Review of Canadian Studies 17, no. 1 (1987): 47–66. 6. Nelson H. H. Graburn, “Traditional Economic Institutions and the Acculturation of the Canadian Eskimos,” in Studies in Economic Anthropology, ed. George Dalton (Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association, 1971), 107–21; Marybelle Mitchell, From Talking Chiefs to a Native Corporate Elite: The Birth of Class and Nationalism among Canadian Inuit (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1996), 177–78. 7. Houston, “Eskimo Graphic Art”; Houston, Eskimo Prints. 8. Nelson H.  H. Graburn, “The Discovery of Inuit Art: James Houston, ‘Animateur,’ ” Inuit Art Quarterly 2, no. 2 (spring 1987): 3–5; James Houston, Confessions of an Igloo Dweller (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996); Virginia Watt, “The Beginning,” in Canadian Guild of Crafts, Quebec: The Permanent Collection, Inuit Arts and Crafts, c. 1900–1980, edited by Virginia Watt (Montreal: Canadian Guild of Crafts Quebec, 1980), 11–15. 9. Susan Gustavison, Arctic Expressions: Inuit Art and the Canadian Eskimo Arts Council, 1961–1989 (Kleinburg, ON: McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 1994), 12–28; Helga Goetz, “Inuit Art: A History of Government Involvement,” in In the Shadow of the Sun: Perspectives on Contemporary Native Art, ed. the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Hull, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1993), 367–70. 10. Vorano, Inuit Prints, Japanese Inspiration. 11. Houston, “Eskimo Graphic Art,” 9. 12. Houston, Eskimo Prints, 11. 13. McKeown, “New Art from the North,” Ottawa Citizen, weekend magazine, February 27, 1960, 36–37; “Japanese Influence Sought for Canadian Eskimo Art,” Montreal Gazette, October 16, 1958, 49. 14. Bradford R. Collins, “Life Magazine and the Abstract Expressionists, 1948–1951: A Historiographic Study of a Late Bohemian Enterprise,” Art Bulletin 73, no. 2 (June 1991): 283–308; Ian Gordon, “Mass Market Modernism: Comic Strips and the Culture of Consumption,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 14, no. 2 (December 1995): 49–66; Elizabeth Hutchinson, The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 97. 15. Norman Vorano, “Creators: Negotiating the Art World for over Fifty Years,” Inuit Art Quarterly 19, nos. 3/4 (fall/winter 2004): 10–11. 232 

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16. Houston, Confessions of an Igloo Dweller, 270. 17. “Japanese Print Revival,” Time 68, no. 4 (July 23, 1956): 64–65. 18. “Japanese Print Revival,” 64. 19. James Michener, The Modern Japanese Print: An Appreciation (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1968), 12. 20. As quoted in John Ayre, “Review: Confessions of an Igloo Dweller,” Inuit Art Quarterly 11, no. 1 (spring 1996): 43. 21. Steven H. Jones and Eva F. King, “Ellis Wilson, a Native Son,” in The Art of Ellis Wilson, by Albert F. Sperath et al. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 19. 22. Houston, Confessions of an Igloo Dweller, 270. 23. “Japanese Influence Sought,” 49. 24. Ann Fienup-­Riordan, Freeze Frame: Alaska Eskimos in the Movies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995): xi–xii. 25. Un’ichi Hiratsuka, “Mr. Houston, Who Acquired the Print Techniques,” Readers Digest [Japan], November 1962, 52–53. 26. Yuko Kikuchi, “Hybridity and the Oriental Orientalism of ‘Mingei’ Theory,” Journal of Design History 10, no. 4 (1997): 343–54. 27. Houston, Confessions of an Igloo Dweller, 270. See also Houston, Eskimo Prints, 18; Mary D. Kierstead, “Profiles: The Man,” New Yorker, August 29, 1988, 40. 28. “Japanese Print Revival,” 64. 29. James Houston, “Skin Appliqué and Stencil Prints,” in Arctic Clothing: Alaska, Canada, Greenland, ed. J. C. H. King, Birgit Pauksztat, and Robert Storrie (Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2005), 139–41. 30. Leslie Boyd-­Ryan, “Sanaunguabik — ​­The Place Where Things Are Made,” in In Cape Dorset We Do It This Way: Three Decades of Inuit Printmaking, edited by Jean Blodgett (Kleinburg, ON: McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 1991), 14. 31. Daniel Miller, introduction to Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local, ed. Daniel Miller (London: Routledge, 1995), 12. 32. Journal of Alastair Grant, 1958–1959, private collection. 33. Kananginak Pootoogook, personal communication with the author, March 26, 2009. 34. Richard Wilk, “Learning to Be Local in Belize: Global Systems of Common Difference,” in Miller, Worlds Apart, 118–19. 35. Harald Prins, “Visual Media and the Primitivist Perplex: Colonial Fantasies, Indigenous Imagination, and Advocacy in North America,” in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-­Lughod, and Brian Larkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 58–74. 36. Kierstead, “Profiles,” 40. 37. Pierre Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction,” in Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change, ed. Richard Brown (London: Tavistock, 1973), 71–112. C ape D orset C osmopolitans 

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38. Nelson H. H. Graburn, “ ‘Nalunaikutanga’: Signs and Symbols in Canadian Inuit Art and Culture,” Polarforschung 46, no 1 (1976): 1–11. 39. Nelson H. H. Graburn, “Weirs in the River of Time: The Development of Historical Consciousness among Canadian Inuit,” Museum Anthropology 22, no. 1 (1998): 29. 40. Peter Geller, Northern Exposure: Photographing and Filming in the Canadian North (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004). 41. Leslie Boyd-­Ryan, “Titiqtugarvik: The Place to Draw,” in Cape Dorset Prints, 28. 42. McKeown, “New Art from the North,” 36. 43. West-­Baffin Eskimo Co-­operative, Eskimo Graphic Art (Cape Dorset: West-­ Baffin Eskimo Cooperative, 1963), n.p. 44. Asato Ikeda and Ming Tiampo, “The Transnational History of Japanese Woodblock Prints,” in Inuit Prints, Japanese Inspiration: Early Printmaking in the Canadian Arctic, ed. Norman Vorano (Gatineau, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2011), 19. 45. Kerry Abel and Ken S. Coates, Northern Visions: New Perspectives on the North in Canadian History (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2001). 46. Peter Clancy, “The Making of Eskimo Policy in Canada, 1952–62: The Life and Times of the Eskimo Affairs Committee,” Arctic 40, no. 3 (September 1987): 191–97. 47. John McLaurin Teakles to the Under Secretary of State for External Affairs, Ottawa, July 28, 1954, file 9703–4-­40, pt. 1.2, vol. 8290, rg25, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa. 48. Lenka Sykorova, “Český Divadelní Plakát, 1968–1989: Vizuální Semiotika” (master’s thesis, Charles University, Prague, 2008), 22–24. 49. James Aulich and Marta Sylvestrova, Political Posters in Central and Eastern Europe, 1945–­1995: Signs of the Times (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 34, 7. 50. A. D. Small, “Entries in the book of visitors to the Exhibition of Canadian Eskimo Art,” memorandum, Department of External Affairs, March 15, 1961, 3, 4, 9703–4-­ b-­40, rg25, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa. 51. Jean Delisle, charge d’affaires, Warsaw, to the Secretary of State for External Affairs, Canada, “Canadian Exhibition of Eskimo Art in Europe,” January 17, 1956, file 9703–4-­40, pt. 3.1, vol. 7210, rg25, Library and Archives Canada. 52. Andreas Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World,” New German Critique 34, no. 1 (winter 2007): 6. 53. Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization, trans. Deke Dusinberre (New York: Routledge, 2002).

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9  

NATURAL SYNTHESIS

Art, Theory, and the Politics of Decolonization in Mid-­Twentieth-­Century Nigeria

In the late 1950s, a group of students at the Nigerian College of Art, Science and Technology (ncast), Zaria, formed the Art Society with the goal of grounding their work in imagined local Nigerian artistic and cultural traditions. Given students’ colonial-­era art training and experience, the reclamation of traditional, or indigenous, Nigerian arts and visual cultures was an unprecedented move, which raised the stakes on debates about the relationship between modern art and politics, culture and colonization, tradition and innovation, collective aspirations and individual visions. Inspired by the momentous atmosphere of decolonization, as well as the earlier ideological and cultural perspectives of francophone Negritude and international pan-­Africanism, the Art Society proposed natural synthesis as a theoretical framework for a modernist art that both acknowledged its members’ rigorous Western-­style academic training and recognized the value of Nigerian artistic traditions as resources for their formal experimentation and conceptual interests. This chapter offers a close reading of Uche Okeke’s primary text on natural synthesis and the artworks it enabled. It argues that the Art Society understood form and style as substantial grounds for articulating a politics of art and culture in the postcolony, and that in the context of decolonization, nationalism became a catalyst for new formal experimentation, which eventually led to the making of postcolonial modernism.

Nationalism, Decolonization, and the Artistic Avant-­Garde While nationalism has frequently been seen as having compromised or, worse, antagonized the project of the European modernist avant-­garde, especially in the wake of the Russian Revolution and the Nazis in Germany after World War I, it played a largely catalytic role in the emergence of modernism in societies under colonial rule. Moreover, as Benedict Anderson has argued, nationalism’s radical potential in the colonies was not a given, nor did it offer the counter­offensive against the universalizing tendencies of imperialism, which had led, for example, to the transformation of early intellectual elites in India and elsewhere into champions of Victorian values, or what Anderson calls, “Anglicized colonial subjects.” 1 However, as Partha Chatterjee has argued, nationalism’s role in the making of anticolonial and, ultimately, postcolonial modernity is indexed in the work of Indian nationalists who remobilized the praxis and rhetoric of European modernity in their bid to chart an alternative, postcolonial Hindu modernism.2 Chatterjee’s argument is relevant not least because, from the beginning of the twentieth century, India’s struggle with empire and transformation as a modern state was seen by African nationalists as a viable model for postcolonial African political and cultural modernity.3 Moreover, just as the intellectual elite in Nigeria looked to India in its struggles against the British colonial regime, there were parallels also in the cultural manifestations of these forms of political engagement in the two countries.4 One thing is certain: whether seen through the eyes of the Anglicized colonial subject, or through those of the cultural nationalist, the view of the modern among colonial-­era Africans was anything but singular. And the uses of inherited traditions as well as those imposed by or appropriated from Europe were always multilayered, complex, labile, and even paradoxical, reflecting the shifting grounds of modern and postcolonial subject making during the twentieth century. But how, specifically, did nationalism fund a theory of artistic modernism that became ascendant in Nigeria by the mid-­twentieth century? We can trace a path that began with the work and ideas of the early portrait painter Aina Onabolu in the first decades of the twentieth century, through to ideologies of modern black / African subjectivity, and finally to the modernist theory laid out in Uche Okeke’s foundational text “Natural Synthesis,” presented days after Nigeria gained independence from Britain on October 1, 1960. This chapter thus constructs a historical context for Okeke’s theory and argues that it authorized a modern, postcolonial aesthetic and artistic subjectivity that was 236 

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invariably part of a wider project of cultural self-­assertion and nationalist resistance to colonialism during the 1950s and 1960s. In May 1920, just before Onabolu traveled to England for training at London’s St. John’s Wood School of Art, he published a pamphlet in which he laid out his vision of artistic modernism in colonial Nigeria.5 As the only recognized black artist working in Lagos, Onabolu’s text is remarkable in its apology for a realist-­modern art in Lagos and Nigeria and for its rejection of past indigenous artistic traditions. While he identified studio photography as an appropriate medium for a resolutely modern artistic practice, he was also concerned with its limitations as an artistic rather than a documentary form. Photography to him was a thoroughly modern medium, its representational possibilities unprecedented, particularly in a west African context, dominated, as it then was, by what he saw as impoverished indigenous traditions of nonmimetic imagery. Yet, as the product of the mechanical action of the camera — ​­what he called “science or skill” — ​­photography could only result in rigid, lifeless representation. It lacked the power to create the pictorial drama that painting and “Art” could produce with the aid of one-­point perspective and such compositional devices as tonal gradation, harmony, focus, and emphasis.6 His attraction to portraiture as a modern form was determined by the need to create visual biographies and testimonies to the historic lives of men and women in the vanguard of imagining a new, modern black subject and society (figure 9.1). No other task was more important for the modern artist than to seize and redeploy the unprecedented representational facility of portraiture in the academic style. It would mark a decidedly progressive shift away from the crude figuration of ancestral arts that had failed to yield effective and accurate visual testimonies to the modern lives of Africans. Moreover, Onabolu’s portrait painting was an artistic response to the prevailing European racism. He was aware that the near absence of pictorial naturalism — ​­which required sophisticated technical skills and an intellectual apprehension of the relationship of forms in space — ​­in traditional African art was seen by European philosophers, scientists, travelers, clerics, and ordinary folk as proof that African people lacked the mental capacities of civilized peoples of the North Atlantic. Onabolu’s insistence on demonstrating mastery of naturalistic portraiture was his counter­argument to claims about the African’s antipathy to reason and logical thinking, understood to be manifested by his inability to master a realistic mode of representation. In the hands of the black man, Onabolu believed, this pictorial mode was a powerful antiracist statement, a strident gesture demonstrating his intellectual sophistication, N atural S ynthesis 

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Aina Onabolu, Sisi Nurse, 1922. Oil on canvas. 25.2 × 16.1 in. (64 × 40.8 cm). Photo courtesy Art House, Lagos. Copyright Estate of Aina Onabolu.

FIGURE 9.1 

technical refinement, and perhaps more important, his manifest humanity. Moreover, if civilization is measured by the ability of artists to master realistic representation, Onabolu was convinced that his portraits constituted a form of radical action meant to demolish a fundamental basis of racism and colonialism. The elite Lagosians who were laying the groundwork for a nationalist decolonization movement after World War I read the artist’s work in this light, recognizing its artistic merit and, more crucially, its ideological and political value.7 Onabolu’s portrait painting of black men and women, as a pictorial reconstitution of their subjectivity, is thus both an archive-­making project and an antiracist humanist argument. Here, then, is the paradox of modernist art in Nigeria at the moment of its invention: in relation to the trajectory of the contemporaneous European modernist turn toward semantic abstraction in the work of Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, and others, Onabolu’s practice and theory of modern art could be seen as an anachronistic attempt to recuperate a discredited, or passé, mode of seeing or imagining the world pictorially. His naturalistic portraiture is thus anything but modern and modernist. Yet Onabolu’s work was a logical and radical response to tradition by an artist whose encounter with colonial modernity compelled his rejection of traditional Yoruba masks and sculptures as “still crude destitute of Art and Science” and belonging to a moribund ancestral order.8 While he, like many black Africans of his day, accepted the unflattering view of African artistic traditions held by Europeans outside the narrow circle of artists and scholars prepared to acknowledge its value as “primitive art,” Onabolu wished to assert his modern subjectivity by adopting the pictorial mode most compatible with the experience of modernity: photography’s realism. But given what he saw as photography’s creative and artistic inflexibility, academic portraiture recommended itself as modernity’s quintessential visual mode.9 Discredited as it was among the European avant-­garde, academic portraiture helped him recalibrate and articulate a position distinct from his ancestral arts as well as dissociate himself from colonial Europeans’ disparaging views about Africans’ artistic and intellectual capabilities. The colonial encounter, one might say, brought with it the resources with which Onabolu and his European counterparts could develop a pictorial language that spoke to their particular, even discrepant, experiences of modernity; the antithetical direction of their aesthetic speaks to the specific historical contexts from which their work emerged. To put it baldly: academic portraiture was the pictorial language of early colonial modernity in the same way that abstraction was for Europe’s imperial modernity. The N atural S ynthesis 

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crucial point here, beyond the anachronistic status of naturalistic figuration as a modernist formal language in the early twentieth century, is that Onabolu asserted his right to determine what artistic form, mode, or language was appropriate to his project of articulating the experience of colonial modernity and of representing its agents and arbiters. More broadly, his work suggests that the will-­to-­abstraction associated with the European avant-­garde was not the only mode through which their contemporaries in other parts of the world expressed their experience of modernity. Onabolu’s appropriation of academic portraiture as the pictorial mode of early twentieth-­century modernism in Nigeria is important to our consideration of Uche Okeke’s understanding of the stakes of postcolonial modernism at the midcentury, and his attempt to articulate its relationship to anticolonialist ideology and politics. My point is not to claim a correspondence between the two artists’ formal choices; rather, I suggest that they both recognized their place within the larger process of sociopolitical transformation of their society and the shifting grounds of artistic subjectivity in Nigeria. It is their total immersion in the changing dynamics of nationalist politics that connects artistic projects that can seem vastly different and even radically antithetical if their work is examined strictly at the level of its formal style or its relationship with indigenous Nigerian art traditions. As I have suggested in my reading of Onabolu, during the early decades of the twentieth century, academic portraiture simultaneously marked a decisive break from traditional Yoruba art and indexed the emergence and self-­assertion of Africans thoroughly grounded in the practices and politics of colonial modernity. At the same time, the midcentury politics and ideology of decolonization funded Okeke’s theory of natural synthesis, which advocated a vigorous and reflexive reclamation of indigenous art forms to establish a critical distance from European political, cultural, and artistic hegemony. Both Onabolu and Okeke formulated and argued for what they considered the appropriate direction of new work that would represent progress in the art, culture, and society of their time. In this sense, they can be considered important members of the intellectual and artistic vanguard of, respectively, the early colonial and immediate postindependence era in Nigeria. As I have argued in an earlier study, Postcolonial Modernism, Sylvester Ogbechie and Osa Egonwa are in error in suggesting that the work and ideas of Okeke and his Art Society group were inspired by the teachings of Kenneth C. Murray, the most significant antagonist of Onabolu’s modernism.10 The problem is the misrecognition of the different politics motivating these important players in the history of the modern in Nigeria, as well as an easy, 240 

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if ultimately unsustainable reading of their uses of and relationships with “the traditional.” Murray, hired to establish art education in colonial secondary schools following the release in 1925 of a memorandum on education in the British colonies, was convinced that the primary goal of formal education was to train a generation of artists who would update and sustain African traditional arts and crafts for the new age. His vision for art in Nigeria was thus antimodern because of its disavowal of the prerogative of Nigerians to embrace modernity and to fashion artistic forms according to their own experiences and sensibilities. Whereas Murray’s pedagogy presupposed the primacy of native artistic traditions despite — ​­or because of — ​­their admirable incompatibility with the colonial present, Onabolu called for a total break from the art of the past. Okeke, armed with a modernist sensibility, saw traditional arts and crafts only as formal and conceptual resources for the new work called for in the era of decolonization. Onabolu and Okeke are thus joined by their emphasis on an artistic practice and on pictorial modes expressive of their experience of modernity and by their assertion of the modern artist’s freedom to determine to what extent, if at all, ancestral artistic traditions should figure in their work. This very question — ​­the value estimation of these traditions in the p ­ resent — ​­that made the difference in how they imagined artistic modernism in Nigeria. As suggested earlier, their responses to this problem were themselves informed by the changing contexts of sociopolitical subjectivity in early and mid-­twentieth century Nigeria.

Uche Okeke and Natural Synthesis In August 1960, while preparing work for the Nigeria Exhibition, a fairlike event at Victoria Island, Lagos, organized to celebrate Nigeria’s independence, Okeke, Nwoko, and fellow Art Society member Bruce Onobrakpeya discussed their art and their vision for Nigerian art after independence in a nationally broadcast Federal Radio of Nigeria interview with ace journalist Deinde George. This interview is significant not least because Okeke used it, as his diary notes indicate, to publicize his initial ideas about the theory of post­ colonial modern art he was formulating at the time: “We are faced with alien artistic medium of expression in painting and have continued to experiment with them [sic], thereby giving new expression to our art forms. Thus by way of natural synthesis of old and new we strive to evolve what may well be New Nigerian Art.” 11 This statement indicates that Okeke’s ideas about postcolonial modernism in Nigeria, elaborated in his well-­documented speech to the Art N atural S ynthesis 

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Society soon after the Nigerian Exhibition opening on October 1, emerged gradually. And though the radio interview was the first time he used the term “natural synthesis” to describe the procedural tactic of postcolonial modernism, he had already proposed its basic outline in September 1959 when, as the newly elected president of the Art Society, he presented to the group a speech he would later title the “Growth of an Idea.” 12 This earlier text situates Okeke’s emergent aesthetic theory within the politics of decolonization and makes clear the political stakes of modern art in postcolonial Nigeria. It also shows the expanded ideological and discursive field within which he envisioned his soon-­to-­be formulated theory of natural synthesis. Framed as an evaluation of the Art Society’s first year of activities within and beyond the college, “Growth of an Idea” anticipated the group’s transformation into a “great organisation of national significance,” a collective that must, by dint of hard work and despite what he called the inadequate colonial educational system, “champion the cause of art” in independent Nigeria. Citing José Clemente  Orozco and the early twentieth-­century Mexican modernists as an inspiration, Okeke associated political sovereignty — ​­just twelve months away — ​­with cultural independence and artistic originality. In one of the poignant moments of this short text, he described the task awaiting the Art Society and its generation: “This great work demands will power, originality, and above all, love for our fatherland. We must have our own school of art independent of European and Oriental schools, but drawing as much as possible from what we consider in our clear judgment to be the cream of these influences, wedding them to our native art culture.” 13 The direct and impassioned mixture of nationalist fervor catalyzed by imminent political independence and an incipient aesthetic theory inspired by cultural pride echoes the controversial arguments made by Frantz Fanon during the Second International Congress of Black Writers and Artists in held Rome in 1959. Fanon’s unprecedented critique of Negritude, later published as the essay “On National Culture,” took aim at what he saw as Negritude’s politically indefensible and naïve focus on international race-­based solidarity at a time when the sovereign nation-­state was, indisputably, the operational framework for the modern world’s economic and political systems.14 According to him, “This historical necessity of men of African culture to racialize their claims and to speak more of African culture than a national culture will tend to lead them up a blind alley.” 15 In fact, Fanon’s memorable claim that “Every culture is first and foremost national” is at the root of Okeke’s thoughts about artistic modernism in decolonizing Nigeria and specifically his call for artists to par242 

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ticipate in the making of a new culture — ​­developed from the amalgamation of “native” and “alien” traditions — ​­for the new nation.16 Nevertheless, Fanon’s view of Negritude’s racialism and its apparent failure to articulate a clear relationship among its cultural ideas, national identity, and political sovereignty is absent in Okeke’s own understanding of Negritude and national culture as elaborated in his “Natural Synthesis” text of 1960, to which I now turn. The tone of this text, theatrically upbeat and exhortatory, says much about Okeke’s personal estimation of both the Art Society and art’s importance in the life of a newly independent nation, as well as, more generally, about the widespread euphoria felt by Nigerians for whom the future promised nothing but infinite possibilities. The Art Society’s well-­publicized performance at the ongoing Nigeria Exhibition, however, undoubtedly had much to do with his tone of address. He was clearly convinced about the pivotal cultural role he and his group had been entrusted with as the new stars on the national scene: “Our new nation places huge responsibilities upon men and women in all walks of life and places much heavier burden on the shoulders of contemporary artists.” 17 Even so, Okeke characteristically punctuated his seemingly boundless optimism with cautious references to the daunting obstacles the emergent artistic and cultural avant-­garde must confront. Paying as much attention to the promise of sovereignty as to its attendant anxieties reveals Okeke’s intellectual realism, which constitutes the foundation of his cultural ideology and aesthetics. Consider, for instance, the embrace of newness implied in his assertion at the beginning of “Natural Synthesis,” that “young artists in a new nation . . . must grow with the new Nigeria . . . or perish with our colonial past.” Yet at the same time, he seeks a return to an imagined past, “our old special order,” in which the artist performed ritual acts to resolve social problems.18 In another instance, he aligned himself with Fanon’s anti-­Negritude call for a national culture, yet argued that Nigerian artists must lead the cause of both Negritude and African personality: “Whether our African writers call the new realization, Negritude, or our politicians talk about the African Personality, they both stand for the awareness and yearning for freedom of black people all over the world.” 19 Clearly, Okeke’s estimation of Negritude’s value to decolonizing Africa was far more positive than Fanon’s. Okeke read the movement’s Afrophilia not merely as racial indulgence, as Fanon had implied, but as a radical political act of building vital emotional structures of feeling that would guarantee and sustain the idea of collective belonging within the context of a newly independent Africa. Moreover, in the Art Society’s focus on the specific arts and cultural practices of Nigeria’s diverse ethnic groups, it went beyond N atural S ynthesis 

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Fanon by recognizing the truth of the “national” in Africa, which is often regarded as not just a less authentic basis of identity politics than the ethnos, but also conditioned by the competing interests of its powerful constituent ethnicities. Surely then, for Okeke, the theoretical and ideological propositions of Negritude and Fanon’s critique of them were not to be taken at face value; rather it was important to extract from both positions elements that might be useful in addressing the concerns of artists confronted with the need to articulate the formal conditions and cultural ambitions of new Nigerian art. Although Okeke’s description of what he meant by the term “natural synthesis” is surprisingly short, he offered one of his poems as capturing its essence: Okolobia’s sons shall learn to live from father’s failing; blending diverse culture types, the cream of native kind adaptable alien type; the dawn of an age — ​­the season of salvation20 While Okeke describes the kind of synthesis he imagined as “natural,” because it “should be unconscious not forced,” his poem belies the intellectual nature of the artistic endeavor he effectively called for. Consider the first two lines of the poem. He urges Okolobia’s sons — ​­stand-­ins for present-­day people — ​ ­to learn, to examine and process both the burdens and the benefits of their ancestral heritage, with the objective of deciding what elements from that heritage must be combined with relevant elements from the West to develop a progressive modern and postcolonial art and culture. What Okeke is asking for is not unreflexive and unconscious action. Rather, the poem suggests a rational process made possible only through readiness to acknowledge — ​­against the natural pressures of social conditioning — ​­that not everything ancestral is useful or should be celebrated as heritage in the present. Okeke also dwells on the purpose of the modernist work resulting from the process of natural synthesis. Scornful of the notion of art for art’s sake, which he ascribes to the “international art philosophy” of European artists, he argues, quite puzzlingly, that postindependence Nigeria calls simultaneously for “functional art and art for its own sake.” 21 He does not explain the conditions under which a self-­reflexive modernist art could exist in post­colonial society but focuses, rather, on the task of functional art, noting that it ought to do work similar to that of great religious art. This ritual functionality, ac-

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cording to him, “could constitute the base line of most rewarding creative experience.” 22 He does not indicate whether he had in mind European traditions of religious art, ranging from medieval iconolatry to the art commissioned by the Catholic Church during the Renaissance, or ritually efficacious ancestral African arts. He did, however, compare the work of postcolonial modernists with artists of the “old order,” who solved social problems with “religious ardour.” In other words, he does not necessarily imagine a modernist art in the political-­instrumentalist mode of Russian constructivism in the wake of the October Revolution or of communist realism during China’s Cultural Revolution. Instead, he demands that it address the psycho-­spiritual needs of citizens in an increasingly secular modern society. This paradoxical insistence on a new art that derives its raison d’être from an old religious order as an antidote to the mechanistic and materialist ethos of the postcolonial age recalls the spiritualist ambitions of the Blaue Reiter and other European avant-­garde groups during first decade of the twentieth century, at the onset of high industrialization and the first mechanized global war. More important, perhaps, this argument for a neoreligious modernism in the face of a new, largely secular sociopolitical order is indicative of its aporia and vaunted ambitions in a society quite unsure of art’s place as an important contributor to the task of nation building or societal regeneration. All these considerations, crucial as they are to our understanding of Okeke’s theory of modernist art in the postcolonial society, ought not displace the broader significance of his natural synthesis as an argument for a melding of tradition and the new that should result from the colonial encounter. The idea of mixing as an active process of choice making might have been seen as a pathology of colonialism or neocolonialism, resulting in an inability to live authentically in either the inherited indigenous realm or in the alien Western world that was much caricatured in colonial writing and discourse. In Okeke’s reframing of this process as natural synthesis, however, he returns agency to the postcolonial artist and subject, and he locates authenticity in the very act of a dispassionate and combinatory mining of the useful elements of both traditions. Only this approach, his poem implies, could yield the glorious new age of the sovereign nation. In artistic terms, it would produce a modernism embedded in the long artistic traditions of Nigeria and Africa and yet seamlessly tied to the experimental rigor and formal ambitions of the twentieth-­century modernism inaugurated by the Parisian avant-­garde. Natural synthesis is Okeke’s attempt to argue and account for this unprecedented brand of work,

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inspired by the rhetoric and experience of political sovereignty, at once unapologetically new in terms of its formal language and assertive about its diverse, allegedly contradictory indigenous and alien cultural referents.

Postcolonial Modernism and Primitivism How, then, did the theory of natural synthesis translate into particular formal expressions in Nigeria during the 1960s? Although emerging modernist work in Nigeria and elsewhere on the continent during that decade clearly reveals similar attitudes to formal experimentation and cultural orientation, I touch here only on the work of Okeke and his Art Society colleague Demas Nwoko.23 In their work, I argue, the artists assert their status as modernist artists by simultaneously mining the archives of ancestral and appropriated/Western traditions of image making, achieving the blending of the “native kind” and “alien type,” anticipated by Okeke’s poem. Their work, unlike Onabolu’s, announced its debt to “our old order” yet was not beholden to it; although borrowing the experimental sensibilities of the European avant-­garde, natural synthesis could not be reduced to its rampant formalism and self-­reflexivity. I conclude this chapter with some thoughts on how this modernist turn to the art of the past, which can seem to resemble primitivist art, is, in fact, its negation. A few months after delivering his “Natural Synthesis” speech to the Art Society, Okeke began to seriously consider what might constitute, in art, “the cream of the native kind,” as expressed in his 1960 poem. He began research on uli, the traditional body drawing and mural painting exclusively done by Igbo women, even taking lessons from his own mother. One painting, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art’s Ana Mmuo (1961), is the only work in which he clearly, though tentatively, explores the behavior of organic line and shapes, as well as the abstract pictorial language similar to those features of uli.24 Unlike anything he had painted before or during his final year at art school in Zaria, this work suggested new stylistic possibilities to him, encouraging him to train himself in the ways of uli drawing. The result was the total transformation of his personal style. By late 1961, he had produced his remarkable Oja Suite. The Oja Suite consists of several small ink on paper drawings, which are based on Igbo mythology, fauna and flora, and genre scenes, all well-­rehearsed themes in his previous work. The Oja drawings feature the abstract patterns and hatched lines deployed in the wildly imaginative, phantasmagorical forms 246 

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of his better-­known Igbo Folk Tales drawings of 1958. In contrast, however, the organizing formal elements in the Oja drawings are the spiral and the organic line that Okeke associated with uli body drawing. This form of body art, rendered traditionally with nonpermanent dark ink extracted from various tropical plants, features numerous abstract linear motifs adapted from natural flora and fauna as well as from cosmic bodies.25 Excellence in uli art practice is measured by an artist’s inventiveness, her ability to deploy both a large range of stock motifs and to create new ones, her competence in marking lines of great lyrical elegance, and the extent to which her compositions show a dynamic balancing of negative and positive space. The extent of Okeke’s internalization of uli aesthetics, its design and compositional sensibilities, and his translation of the lessons of this art form into his own decidedly modernist practice are in full display in the Oja Suite and in other pen and charcoal drawings from 1962 and after. In Owls, From the Forest, and Head of a Girl (all 1962), the dramatic stylistic transformation that occurred that year is unmistakable.26 His previous drawing series — ​­Igbo Folk Tales — ​­was defined by the use of delirious patterning to compose fantastical figures set against a plain background, thus marking a clear boundary between figure and ground. In the drawings of the Oja Suite, in contrast, singular lyrical lines negotiate sinuous paths across the picture plane, often ending in spirals that stand in simultaneously for decorative marks and for anatomical or structural features of his subjects. The Oja drawings show Okeke’s newly acquired sensitivity to the poetic organization of negative and positive space. Art historian Chike Aniakor’s memorable description of traditional uli drawing and painting is equally applicable to Okeke’s Oja drawings: “The line dances, spirals into diverse shapes, elongates, attenuates, thickens, swells and slides, thins and fades out from a slick point, leaving an empty space that sustains it with mute echoes by which silence is part of the sound.” 27 While Okeke’s experiment with uli yielded its most compelling pictorial language in pen and charcoal drawings, his painting was no less deeply transformed in 1962. His Zaria-­period painting — ​­perhaps with the exception of Ana Muo and a mural of a similar style he painted in the courtyard of the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, in Ibadan — ​­reveals what one might call his formal meditation on various trends in early twentieth-­century expressionist painting; the works feature strongly modeled, highly stylized figures combined with flat areas of color and very subtle brushwork. After the Oja Suite he used the paintbrush as if it were a drawing tool loaded with paint. In Crucifixion and Primeval Forest (1962), the calm compositional certitude and well-­formed N atural S ynthesis 

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elements and color shapes of his earlier paintings have given way to a roiling surface of thick arching lines of color. In the drawings, the pen, gliding over the paper surface, seems compelled by independent centripetal forces to form elegant spiral lines; in the paintings, the brush lines seem more determined to form spirals or segments of spirals but fail because of the relative clumsiness of the brush as a drawing tool. Okeke based the spiral form and arcing lines that proliferate in his drawings and paintings on the agwọlagwọ (the coil motif symbolic of the sacred python) and the okala isinwaọji (the abstracted dorsal view of the gaps in a trilobed kola nut). But he strips these motifs of their uli lexical contexts, investing them with his own formal polysemy. In other words, the agwọlagwọ in Okeke’s pictorial system can simultaneously represent eyes, tendrils, and moon (in Owls), as well as hair locks, mouth, and eyes (in Head of a Girl). Besides this play with the lexical possibilities of his uli-­based forms, the drawings and paintings testify, in the poetry of their constituent lines, to his interest in the lyrical gestures associated with traditional uli art. As his research in the traditional form revealed, the visual expressiveness of uli kinesthesia — ​­deportment of the body while making the art — ​­invoke the poetry of melodic song and dance. Thus, following Okeke’s experimentation with uli, the act of drawing or painting becomes a complete gestural performance that nevertheless leaves traces of the action on paper or board, like the indexical marks left by a dancer or python on sand. By engaging in this lyrical mark making, Okeke not only arrived at a modernist and articulate personal style, but also contributed to the perpetuation of uli art’s mythopoesis, which for him was crucial to securing his sense of an Igbo and, by extension, Nigerian cultural and artistic identity. Whereas natural synthesis authorized Okeke’s experimentation with uli in 1962, Nwoko’s style evolved more gradually, culminating in his terra-­cotta sculptures of 1965. In late 1964, Nwoko began to research ancient and surviving Nigerian terra-­cotta traditions, especially those of ancient Nok and Ife, as well as traditional kiln technology from north-­central Nigeria. These projects brought his work into alignment with that of Okeke and the theory of natural synthesis. Nwoko had a particular interest in built structures as part of the total manifestation of a people’s art and cultural experience. His research into terra-­cotta led him to investigate the technological inventions responsible for the structural and surface qualities of different pottery traditions in Nigeria, so that he could understand how an apparently rudimentary clay building and firing processes resulted in the sophisticated formal qualities associated with Nok 248 

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FIGURE 9.2 

Demas Nwoko, Titled Woman, 1965. Terra-cotta. Artist’s collection. Photograph by the author.

and Ife terra-­cotta, and then extract aspects that could influence his own modernist practice. In 1965 Nwoko designed and constructed a kiln that attained higher temperatures while producing surface textures and coloring similar to those found on Nok terra-­cotta. Although Nwoko failed in his goal of turning the new kiln design, born from Nigeria’s indigenous traditions, into a viable model for contemporary kilns in the new nation, he nevertheless used it to produce the remarkable series of sculptures that arguably marked the height of his artistic achievement. Despite Nwoko’s study of Ife terra-­cottas, Nok provided the stylistic model for his sculptures, which reflect the characteristic large perforated pupils, tubular and highly simplified anatomical parts, and stump-­like hands and feet of the Nok style. In works such as Adam and Eve, Philosopher, and Titled Woman (figure 9.2), all 1965, Nwoko seems to have successfully unlearned both the academic figuration taught in Zaria and the post-­Zaria stylization based on Igbo sculpture. The result is a kind of figural archaism shorn of the technical and compositional refinements of modernist sculpture, even in its most “primitive” moments — ​­for example, in the work of Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti. While Nwoko’s use of the terra-­cotta medium no doubt encourages our perception of these series as products of an ancient culture, N atural S ynthesis 

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the relatively small scale and lack of decorative elements on the figures’ simplified and archetypal attires readily remind us of antiquities recovered from archaeological fieldwork. This is key to understanding Nwoko’s ideological investment in this corpus, for although most of his terra-­cottas depict contemporary Nigerian and African subjects, his use of this archaic style places modern Nigeria within a time-­space coextensive with its prehistoric cultures. In other words, rather than depict figures or characters from Nigeria’s imagined past, as normative nationalist mythmaking frequently does, he archaizes the present to make an even more effective claim. Against any charges that Nigeria is a colonial invention of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, Nwoko’s figures declare, “We are an old people.” Once Nwoko developed the 1965 terra-­cotta sculptures and thus effectively realized the theory of natural synthesis that had inspired Okeke’s experimentation with Igbo uli, he began to make his own demands of his medium, testing its technical bounds. In his 1968 sculptures, with their strangely baroque figuration, he introduced surface textures and embellishments that emphatically mark them as products of a modernist imagination. These innovations seem also to mark a darker response to the outbreak of civil war. For whereas the classic simplicity of the 1965 figures still have a strong echo of Nok, works such as Soldier (Soja) (figure 9.3) and Dancing Couple (Owambe), both from 1968, show advanced disfiguration, as if the artist’s vision of postcolonial Nigeria, still effectively positive in 1965, had turned to a nightmare populated by characters with strange bodily deformations. They are denizens of the imagined community riven by the Biafra War of 1967–70. Even when he attempted a light-­hearted subject such as Enuani Dancers (1968), the angled limbs and squished facial features of the two figures lost in the rhythm of the dance suddenly seem like bodies in rigor mortis. In these sculptures, mastery of the medium through formal experimentation runs in parallel with critical commentary about the fate of the postcolonial nation torn by military intervention, pogroms, and civil war. As these examples show, postcolonial modernists identified indigenous cultures and arts as important sources for ideas, theories, aesthetics, and techniques needed for the invention of new art that could meaningfully articulate the experience of modernity after colonialism. This process was neither as unconscious nor as natural as Okeke’s theory implied. Given the long history of twentieth-­century modern art, however, and particularly the phenomenon of primitivism in colonial Europe — ​­infamously described by William Rubin as the product of an “affinity of the tribal and the modern” — ​­scrutiny of the 250 

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FIGURE 9.3 

Demas Nwoko, Soldier (Soja), 1968. Terra-cotta. Artist’s collection. Photograph by Demas Nwoko. Copyright Demas Nwoko.

uses that African modernists like Okeke, Nwoko, and their contemporaries made of “indigenous” art is inevitable.28 Did they not indulge in a form of primitivism when they, resolutely modernist and immersed in the experience of modernity, were attracted to art forms and ideas that predated the modern age? Might we even regard them as postcolonial primitivists, not just modernists? The simple answer is no. On the contrary, their postcolonial modernism is antiprimitivism. This is not the place to rehearse decades-­old debates and analyses of primitivism, which has come to mean many different things, ranging from the cultural and historical primitivism that resulted from social Darwinist ideas informed by the ideology of colonialism and slavery before it, to the aesthetic primitivism that emerged from the European avant-­garde attraction to so-­ called primitive societies and arts in the age of empire.29 My concern is with the latter sort of primitivism, which has been recognized as fundamental to the aesthetics and ideology of Parisian modernism, and often cited as the precursor of all twentieth-­century modernisms.30 The primitivism of the historical avant-­ garde was defined first by dissatisfaction with Western modernity overtaken by a cataleptic crisis, and second, by the yearning for the savagery and premodern N atural S ynthesis 

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lifeways ascribed to expressive cultures and peoples from the farthest reaches of empire and civilization. Aesthetic primitivism begins with alienation from Western society and is followed by attraction to/appropriation of the other, the not-­self — ​­all within what Sieglinde Lemke calls “the dynamics of cultural difference from the perspective of the West.” 31 I would argue that the postcolonial modernism of Okeke, Nwoko, and other midcentury artists in Morocco, Sudan, Ethiopia, Egypt, and elsewhere on the continent had little if anything in common with this form of aesthetic primitivism. These African modernists saw in the indigenous arts and cultures of their imagined communities sites for cultural self-­assertion in the wake of what Paul Tiyambe Zeleza described as the “violence of intimate histories” of the colonial encounter.32 That there can be instances of othering — ​­the primary condition for primitivism — ​­outside European modernist contexts, is demonstrated by the Indian modernists of the Santiniketan School, including Nandalal Bose, Ramkimkar Baij, and Zainul Abedin, who, as Iftikhar Dadi has noted, believed that “the natural inheres in the rural landscape of Eastern Bengal and the primitivist identity with the Santhal tribes.” 33 An unmistakable aesthetic (and cultural social) primitivism also appears in the work of South African modernist Irma Stern, who went on numerous expeditions into the African hinterland in search of exotic natives in Namaqualand, the Congo, and Zanzibar to find subjects for her own anthropo-­expressionist paintings. These two examples, however diverse, show the dynamics of veiled condescension and exoticization of the represented native other at the heart of the historical avant-­garde’s primitivism. In contrast, the Art Society artists did not celebrate in their work the naturalness of the indigenous peoples or their lack of access to modernity’s resources and ciphers. Rather, they subjected the artistic assets provided by Nigerian cultures past and present to the process of synthesis, or combinatory refinement, with the goal of producing a visual language appropriate to the period and experience of political sovereignty. Looking back to the projects of Onabolu and Murray reveals that, as an apologist for experiential modernity, Onabolu’s rejection of the past and indigenous arts and cultures was so total that he excluded any subject that might insinuate them. Murray, on the other hand, as an admirer of the theory of indirect rule promulgated for Nigeria by the archcolonialist and racist Lord Lugard, promoted Nigerian indigenous cultures and designed a curriculum for government schools that was meant to revive the carving, weaving, and other traditional crafts of Nigerian peoples.34 The task of the painting produced under his tutelage was to celebrate authentic native life — ​­the closest 252 

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thing in modern Nigerian art to the Santiniketan primitivism — ​­but without the technical sophistication Murray associated with Western corruption of the African’s natural artistic abilities. Natural synthesis, then, was an argument against Murray’s pedagogical and aesthetic primitivism, as it shifted modernism’s task from that of representing the cultural difference or native authenticity of Nigerian peoples to demonstrating how the postcolonial artistic imagination can develop new visual language from the productive synthesis of the “native kind” and the “alien type,” as part of a wider process of symbolic self-­assertion. Notes 1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 2. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Similarly, Lagos Victorians, by the turn of the twentieth century, became the early anticolonialists, using legal means to check the powers of the colonial regime, for instance, on the question of land tenure in Lagos. In fact, black Victorians such as the leading nationalist Herbert Macaulay “had mastered European education, techniques and culture so that he was capable of meeting the colonial masters and beating them at their own games.” See G. O. Olusanya, “Henry Carr and Herbert Macaulay: A Study in Conflict of Principles and Personalities,” in History of the Peoples of Lagos State, ed. Ade Adefuye, Babatunde Agiri, and Akinjide Osuntokun (Lagos: Lantern Books, 1987), 282. 3. See “Amritsar and Ijemo: A Parallel and Suggestion,” Lagos Weekly Record, August 7, 1920, 5. 4. Modernism in India was no doubt much more complex in part because of the scale and longer history of Indian encounters with Western modernity, and India’s much more elaborate class, caste, economic, and political differentiation. And although I argue in the last section of this chapter that the primitivism of Bengal’s Santiniketan School ran counter to the antiprimitivist sensibility of the Art Society, the Mumbai-­based Progressive Artists Group, led by Francis Newton Souza, shares some similarities in art and ideas with the Art Society. 5. Aina Onabolu, Short Discourse on Art (Lagos: privately printed, 1920). 6. Clearly, he was either unaware or uninterested in the work of pictorialist photographers, from Margaret Robinson in England to the Stieglitz circle in the United States, who aimed to deploy these painterly techniques to their photographic work. 7. The leading nationalist Herbert Macaulay, after seeing Onabolu’s work in an exhibition by students of St. John’s Wood, described it as a “clear, marvellous vindication of our struggle — ​­a manifestation of our much repeated feelings that Africans are capable

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politically, intellectually and creatively.” Quoted in Ola Oloidi, “Art and Nationalism in Colonial Nigeria,” in Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, ed. Clémentine Deliss (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), 193. 8. Onabolu, Short Discourse, 14. 9. Onabolu was particularly concerned about what he believed to be the photograph’s impermanence and instability as a medium. 10. See Chika Okeke-­Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-­Century Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 41–42. 11. Quoted in Okeke-­Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism, 141. 12. Uche Okeke [Christopher Uchefuna], “Growth of an Idea,” in Art in Development  — ​­A Nigerian Perspective (Nimo, NG: Asele Institute, 1982), 1. 13. Okeke, “Growth of an Idea,” 1. 14. This is also what Ian McLean meant when he described the nation-­state as “the characteristic sociality of modernity.” See Ian McLean, “Aboriginal Modernism in Central Australia,” in Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers, ed. Kobena Mercer (London: InIVA, 2008), 76. 15. Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture,” in The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 173. 16. Fanon, “On National Culture,” 174. 17. Uche Okeke [Christopher Uchefuna], “Natural Synthesis,” in Okeke, Art in Development, 2. 18. Okeke, “Natural Synthesis,” 2 19. Okeke, “Natural Synthesis,” 2. 20. Okeke, “Natural Synthesis,” 2. 21. Okeke, “Natural Synthesis,” 2, my emphasis. 22. Okeke, “Natural Synthesis,” 2. 23. I examine this wider field of postcolonial modernism in my book Postcolonial Modernism, particularly in chapters 4–6. 24. See Okeke-­Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism, 104. 25. The mural painting was made with earth pigments that produced red, yellow, and white, with black made from charcoal, and occasionally blue from washing blue. For more detailed analysis of uli art and process, see Obiora Udechukwu, “Ọgwụgwa Aja Iyiazi, Nri 1984,” Uwa ndi Igbo 1 (1984): 55–60; Obiora Udechukwu, “Lyrical Symbolism: Notes on Traditional Wall Painting from Agulu” (bachelor’s thesis, University of Nigeria, 1972). 26. See Okeke-­Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism, 190–91. 27. Chike Aniakor, “What is Uli?: The Emergence of a Modern Art Idiom,” in Uli Art: Master Works, Recent Works (New York: Skoto Gallery, 1995), n.p. 28. William Rubin, ed., “Primitivism” in Twentieth-­Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984).

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29. Kingsley Widmer once described aesthetic primitivism as “primitivistic,” while he identified cultural and historical primitivism with primitivism proper. Following Robert Goldwater, he argues, as have many scholars since, that both primitivisms have little to do with each other. See Widmer, “The Primitivistic Aesthetic: D. H. Lawrence,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 17, no. 3 (1959): 344. To me, these are all strained attempts to absolve and distance artists and writers from the culture of racism and colonization that provided the material and many of the ideas that informed their own perspectives on the world outside Europe. 30. Ruth B. Phillips recently summed up this view: “Aesthetic primitivism served, I would argue, as the primary engine of modernism’s global dissemination.” See Phillips, “Aesthetic Primitivism Revisited: The Global Diaspora of ‘Primitive Art’ and the Rise of Indigenous Modernisms,” Journal of Art Historiography 12 (2015): 1–25, https:// arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/phillips.pdf. 31. Seiglinde Lemke, “Diaspora Aesthetics: Exploring the African Diaspora in the Works of Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence and Jean Michel Basquiat,” in Mercer, Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers, 140. 32. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “The Violence of Intimate Histories: Africa and the European Colonial Encounter,” in Who Knows Tomorrow, ed. Udo Kittelmann, Chika Okeke-­Agulu, and Britta Schmitz (Cologne: Walther König, 2010), 583–95. 33. Iftikhar Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 105. 34. I do not suggest that Murray’s pedagogical investment in Lugard’s political ideology meant that he shared the latter’s well-­known racism. Indeed, accounts of Murray’s life in Nigeria indicate that he was quite at home with life and cultures of the peoples among whom he lived and died.

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PART III

MODERN MOBILITIES

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W. JACKSON RUSHING III

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BEING MODERN, BECOMING NATIVE George Morrison’s Surrealist Journey Home

To the best of my knowledge, the first Native American artist to form a significant response to expressionism, cubism, and surrealism was the celebrated Chippewa modernist George Morrison, who was born in 1919 in Chippewa City, Minnesota, a now vanished Indian fishing village along the North Shore of Lake Superior.1 After a long and fruitful career as a teacher and a practicing artist, he died in 2000 at Red Rock, the home and studio he and his second wife, the artist Hazel Belvo, built on the Grand Portage Reservation, overlooking the lake. As a child he spoke only his Native language until he began grade school at age six. While attending an Indian boarding school in his youth, he took up reading, drawing, and carving, and he was supported subsequently by appreciative teachers.2 After graduating from high school, he attended the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design) on a scholarship from 1938 to 1943, where he began making regionalist images, as did both Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache) and Jackson Pollock. In 1941, however, Morrison was impressed with a Pablo Picasso retrospective at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, later recalling that he “had a tendency to like more modern concepts.” 3 Having heard the call of modern art — ​­he liked to describe himself as a “liberal person” — ​­Morrison continued a journey that took him, first, from the American woodlands to Minneapolis, and then to New York, Paris, the south of France, and to academic appointments on the U.S. East Coast and elsewhere. In his youth Morrison dreamed of the bohemian life in Manhattan, which he ultimately lived, and with gusto at that; he also relished his time in France in the early 1950s and wished he had stayed longer.

From 1943 until 1963, when he joined the faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design for seven years, Morrison led an itinerant life, mostly based in New York, but punctuated with fellowships and visiting teaching appointments in France, Minnesota, elsewhere in the Midwest (at the Dayton Art Institute, for example), and on the East Coast. He was simultaneously a willful expatriate, whose work was keenly responsive to place, and a Chippewa native son of Minnesota, longing to be in his own country, to which he returned in 1970 to be near his people.4 How to explain this paradox: journeying away from home for greater cosmopolitanism, only to experience psychological and spiritual homesickness? As the poet Robert Hass has written, “Longing, we say, because desire is full of such endless distances.” 5 It helps if we see Morrison as part of an American tradition, in which young men and women from the “provinces” (such as Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, and Janis Joplin) seek greater artistic freedom for themselves in urban centers (on Broadway, in Greenwich Village, or on the Left Bank in Paris). Of Morrison’s wanderlust in particular, Adelheid Fischer wrote, “An aspiring artist, he observes, needs not only the resources of his roots, but also ‘a looking at the world in a broad sense.’ ” 6 And what of that homeland, in which he was so deeply rooted? Being born Chippewa in 1919 meant many things, surely, and no doubt what it meant varied from person to person and place to place. As Morrison grew up, to him it meant a mixture of loss and survival, and an ever-­increasing consciousness of class and ethnicity. Although he had “many recollections of a happy childhood with families and neighbors,” he and his siblings experienced poverty, hunger, and poor health in a declining village.7 They spoke “Indian,” he noted, until they began grade school and began to be “Americanized.” He had virtually no access to traditional forms of art and remembered that Indigenous crafts were disappearing, along with the “smattering of Indian stories” that remained. And although his grandmother practiced herbal medicine, which, he speculated, might have been “a spiritual thing, like a fetish,” his “family never did have many Indian customs.” 8 As I look back on my childhood, it was a time of transition. Indians had lost the best of the old world and could not fully cope with the new one. White civilization was encroaching on our lives. We attended white schools and were taught to imitate white people’s ways. Our old mystical rites were no longer being performed because they conflicted with church teachings. Our people viewed the church, I think, as a substitute for what they’d lost. People will take spiritual consolation wherever they 260 

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can find it. Remnants of the old life survived, however. Fragments of the superstitions and lore I heard as a child stayed with me.9 As poor survivors of the Great Depression, he and his siblings knew racial prejudice as well, which rose on occasion to belligerent discrimination. “For many years,” he stated, “Indians lived hard.” In the face of such colonial duress, is it any wonder that his parents, who understood “their situation,” wanted their children to behave like white people? “In other words,” he recalled, “not be too Indian. But how can one change his color?” In the face of all this, he found it remarkable that various tribes survived: “I think that their strong art and philosophies gave the people strength. You can’t kill that.” 10 Even today it takes nearly five hours to drive from Grand Marais, where Morrison attended high school, to the Twin Cities, where he began to study at the Minneapolis School of Art in 1938. In the late 1930s, the cultural and psychological distance between the two places must have felt substantial. Given his experience up to that point, it seems highly unlikely that he would have imagined any advantage in being an Indian artist. On the contrary, besides discovering he had a natural predilection for expressionism, cubism, and surrealism, he had an equally natural urge, triggered by the poverty and racism he had known in the rural woodlands on the North Shore, to trade provincialism for cosmopolitanism, especially in terms of aesthetics. The art historical analysis of the influence of so-­called primitive art on modernism in general and on surrealism in particular is well established. And if it is not exactly a closed sequence in the Kublerian sense, for some readers, at least, it may lack the critical urgency it once had.11 Less well known or understood, in some quarters, is the history of the conscious absorption and subsequent transformation of modernist principles and aesthetic strategies by Indigenous artists.12 This was a global phenomenon, but my training and interests have been focused on modern and contemporary Indigenous art produced in the United States and Canada, and in this instance I am concerned with surrealism in particular. And yet, I want to acknowledge the consistent dialogue in his art over decades between intellect, order, and structure (cubist imperatives) on the one hand, and visions, emotions, and improvisation (characteristics of expressionism and surrealism) on the other. From 1943 to 1946 Morrison studied at the Art Students League (asl) in New York City, where his “conversion” to a modernism that synthesized expressionism, cubism, and surrealism was swift and complete. He was aware also of the influence of non-­Western traditions on modernist ­primitivism, recalling

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with specificity the impact of African, Polynesian, Inuit, and American Indian art on “modern painters, particularly the cubists.” 13 He arrived in Manhattan in the midst of a world war, when the mythmakers of abstract expressionism, including Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Richard Pousette-­Dart, Pollock, and Mark Rothko, were experiencing a crisis of subject matter, which they resolved in part by turning to ancient and tribal myths and imagery, drawing especially on Native American objects found in books and accessible in New York museums.14 His fellow students at the asl included Peter Busa and Helen DeMott, who formed part of New York’s so-­called Indian Space Painters, a group of white artists, including Oscar Collier and Steve Wheeler, both of whom Morrison knew, who were quite clear about their debts to Native American forms, images, and plastic principles.15 Working parallel to the emerging abstract expressionism, the Indian Space Painters represented a competing paradigm of avant-­garde abstraction, but they, too, drew inspiration and sustenance from Northwest Coast, Pueblo, and Peruvian art. Although Morrison recalled being flattered that in this group of artists “everyone knew I was Indian,” he did not share their depth of interest in Native American art.16 He had not had any particular exposure to it back in Minnesota, so like his New York contemporaries, he encountered it in books and museums. That much they had in common. And although he looked with them at the volumes of the Bureau of American Ethnology, with an eye for texts and images about Native art, at that time Morrison did not incorporate such material into his own work, even though it fascinated him.17 Morrison “was keenly aware of the low regard extended by the professional art establishment to Native American ‘artifacts’ in his youth,” and he told Ann Gibson in 1991, “I never thought Indian art could measure up — ​­although now I think just the opposite.” 18 Clearly, in the 1940s and for many years thereafter, he felt he could not (in Richard West’s words) “be a major American artist and Indian artist at the same time.” 19 I expect there was another issue at work in Morrison’s refusal to participate in the primitivists’ use of Native American–derived images and designs or to assert his Indian heritage as a component of either his art or his artistic identity. What if his peers had asked him to recount Chippewa myths or to share esoteric knowledge about rituals, shamanism, or ceremonial objects, all of which interested them? He, whose grandfather James Morrison Sr. was an elder and founder in 1895 of St. Francis Xavier Church, and whose father, Jim Morrison, translated French hymns into Chippewa, led prayer ceremonies, and sang at wakes in the church? Even if he had wanted to, he could not share that which had not been given him.20 The dominant culture, which often envisions Na262 

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tive Americans in an ethnographic present, has a way of making Indigenous people feel inauthentic for not being and living exactly like their ancestors. Did he sometimes feel, in those New York years, not Indian enough? Perhaps. But this much is certain: with his sharp taste in clothes and his cosmopolitan passion for jazz and modern art, he hardly embodied the raw, mythic spirit that primitivists identified in Native American art, especially since they had no demonstrable interest in contemporary Indian art, preferring instead museum objects whose patination invoked for them primal nature and atavistic memory. It was not his style to write a defiant manifesto. Instead, he quietly refused to construct himself or be constructed as a “primitive.” Not only was Morrison averse to being primitivism’s “other,” he was determined to be fully in and of artistic modernity.21 Thus we see precious little overt primitivism of the tribal kind in Morrison’s work in this period. With a couple of notable exceptions, he did not use overtly totemic forms until the late 1970s, after his return to Minnesota. And yet, images or figures did not need a direct tribal correspondence for him to conceive of them as being totemic. In 1960, looking back on the 1940s, he stated that the “content, stemming from my initial stimulus,” included “totemic images of animate objects.” 22 Even so, the rarity of tribally inspired primitivist imagery in his work testifies to the fact that Morrison was not interested in either veristic or ethnographic surrealism.23 What he did know of surrealism he often learned firsthand. Living in New York during the war years, Morrison haunted the 57th Street galleries, where he encountered the surrealism and expressionism of émigré artists he admired.24 What he chose to embrace was the productive radicality of surrealism’s creative principles, especially the idea of creating out of the subconscious via psychic automatism (the painterly equivalent of automatic writing) and frottage (rubbing). For example, expressionist figuration and linear energy are especially intriguing in Three Figures (1945), one of several psychologically charged pictures about a wartime love triangle in which he was involved. Morrison remembered that the work emerged out of the process of drawing and painting, that “it was all very subconscious,” and that a “dreamlike Surrealism [was] creeping in.” 25 Similarly, an untitled ink on paper drawing from 1945 (figure 10.1) reveals just how thoroughly he understood the strain of surrealism issuing from André Masson, Joan Miró, and Arshile Gorky, which emphasized freely generated organic forms. Characterized by intuitive freedom and aesthetic resolution, it represents a sophisticated engagement with the kind of abstract surrealism produced by Masson, Miró, and Gorky. In fact, close inspection suggests it might actually be a reproducB eing M odern , B ecoming N ative 

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tion of a Miró drawing to which Morrison added his own spontaneous marks. His response to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dream of Calamity (1945), shown in the Walker Art Center’s First Biennial Exhibition in 1947, is similarly au courant in terms of international style (in this instance, a mix of expressionism and Picassoid surrealism). Like his friend, the Dutch-­born American abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning, Morrison had his first solo show in Manhattan in 1948, which included Whalebone (1948), a compelling and intriguing still life. As an adolescent artist exploring the interstitial zone between woodland and water, Morrison had harvested found objects along the shoreline of Lake Superior, including driftwood, bones, and other organic materials, so he accepted easily the surrealist practice of cognitively dissonant juxtapositions. Thus Whalebone, whose intense color remains as fresh and vivid as the day it was made, is perhaps, with the exception of his Starfish (ca. 1943–45), the only school of Paris-style still life in captivity to feature whalebone.26 The wine bottle, the driftwood, and the whalebone, which reads as a sculptural objet d’art, are situated ambiguously in a cubist space generated by oil-­rich planar patches of color in the background. From the mid-­1940s onward, Morrison made numerous works on paper featuring surrealist landscapes that reflect an awareness of the art of both Gorky and Gottlieb. In later years he recalled that he felt “charged” being in New York in this transitional moment, when cubism and surrealism were shifting into abstract expressionism (as in Gottlieb’s work).27 His watercolor Abstract Composition is dated 1950, but in terms of form and content, it clearly belongs to what Robert Rosenblum called the surrealist phase of abstract expressionism, or even better, what Lawrence Alloway called the “biomorphic 40’s.” 28 According to Alloway, one of the primary sources for the importance of biomorphism in New York painting in the midforties (when Morrison was enrolled in the asl) was the surrealism of such artists as Masson and Miró. Biomorphic art “emerged in New York,” Alloway wrote, “as the result of a cluster of ideas about nature, automatism, .  .  . and the unconscious.” 29 The primacy for Morrison of these subjects, sources, and processes — ​­nature, the unconscious, and automatism — ​­is demonstrated by his near constant reference to them over six decades in interviews, artist statements, and his memoir, Turning the Feather Around (1998). The jam-­packed (or “manic”) cluster of organic shapes in Abstract Composition is generated freely and then structured loosely by a linear web, evoking the vertical face of a rocky shoreline or the earth’s strata. Again, Alloway has 264 

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F I G U R E 1 0 . 1   George Morrison, Untitled, 1945. Ink on paper, 7.6 × 5 in. (19.3 × 12.7 cm). Collection of Dr. Robert and Frances Leff.

  George Morrison, Black and White Patterned Forms, 1952. Ink on paper, 10.75 × 8.38 in. (27.3 × 21.3 cm). Collection of the Minnesota Museum of American Art. Gift of George Morrison, 96.10.14. FIGURE 10.2

observed, “Crowded and manic biomorphism is directly linked to automatism, which was cultivated by the Surrealists as a means of direct access to the Unconscious mind. The ideal of direct action was most clearly recognized in drawing.” 30 Morrison noted of this period in his work, “Surreal elements, images from the subconscious, began to appear in my drawings and paintings.” 31 Vital, irregular, and elemental, Abstract Composition, with its pleasing interplay of colors, including lemon yellow, pale plum, and rusty brown, reminds us that modernist primitivism can be biological as well as tribal. Morrison’s awareness of European modernism deepened when a Fulbright Fellowship in 1952–53 enabled him to study, work, and exhibit in Paris (at Galerie Jeanne Bucher) and in the south of France, where he made numerous small works on paper that often started with automatic drawing. He observed, however, that the work became “more formal in the end. Not haphazard; it’s all organized . . . making little cubistic sections.” 32 Black and White Patterned Forms (1952), a synthetic cubist pen and ink drawing made in Paris (figure 10.2), has a sharp, flat clarity that suggests a cognizance of Henri Matisse’s cut-­outs (originally published in 1947) or the surrealists’ fascination with the “decorative” patterns they admired in Oceanic relief sculpture.33 Overall, these images are abstract, playing with positive and negative space in a provocative 266 

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way, even as their flatness is akin to that of a decal. Stacked vertically, the configurations, especially the central one, hint at totemic art and may reflect the inspiration modernist primitivism found in African sculpture. In this, Black and White Patterned Forms has a curated or collected quality, which explains why we cannot identify any particular model, either ethnographic or modern, that it emulates specifically. Robert Goldwater, who authored the first scholarly study of modernist primitivism in 1938, discussed this phenomenon in terms of African art and the primitivist sculptures of Constantin Brancusi, and his conclusions are instructive in the context of Morrison’s mysterious drawing. According to Goldwater, an African sculpture might gather in visual form the idea, notion, or memory of a human, divine ancestor, or god of some sort. Searching for a single discursive referent (narrative prompt for object or image making) is pointless because “these overlapping meanings inherent in the African sculpture exist simultaneously and thereby give the sculpture its total significance.” Goldwater was convinced that Brancusi appreciated this “collecting of meanings [in an object], some of which can be determined because . . . they are the reason for its creation, whereas other meanings cannot be traced because they come into being with the fact of its creation.” Thus, although we can relate Black and White Patterned Forms indirectly, at least, to examples of African, Oceanic, and modern art, its overriding originality — ​­the filtering of collected meanings through Morrison’s consciousness — ​­allows us to accept our inability to “pin down any precise formal derivation” even as we recognize the production of new meaning in its totality. To borrow, then, from Goldwater, we understand Black and White Patterned Forms as a “symbolic object that is at once allusive and self-­sufficient.” 34 Similarly, the curious menagerie of pictographs and pictorial fragments seen in a related work, Geometric Vertical Forms (1952), drawn at Cap d’Antibes, recalls Morrison’s explanation that in imaginative studio art, “you let your subconscious suggest.” 35 The overt primitivism of Morrison’s drawing New York (1954) is a curious anomaly in his oeuvre. The totemic personnages are atypical for Morrison, and they may suggest an interest not only in the sharp, jagged, violent forms of certain surrealists in the late 1940s (e.g., the Chilean Roberto Matta and the Cuban Wifredo Lam), but also in Louise Bourgeois’s totemic sculptures, such as The Winged Figure (1948).36 Bourgeois was married to Goldwater, New York’s leading authority at midcentury on tribal art and modernist primitivism. Morrison might have seen The Winged Figure installed at the Peridot Gallery in Manhattan in 1950, or given that he was living in Duluth in 1954 B eing M odern , B ecoming N ative 

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and exhibiting in Minneapolis, perhaps he saw her personnages in the Walker Art Center’s 1954 exhibition Reality and Fantasy, 1900–1954.37 In an artist statement published by the Walker in Design Quarterly (1954), Bourgeois described works such as The Winged Figure in terms applicable to Morrison’s New York: “The look of my figures is abstract, and to the spectator they may not appear to be figures at all. They are the expression, in abstract terms, of emotions and states of awareness.” Given the mix of sex and violence — ​­or at least the potential for both — ​­in Morrison’s New York, perhaps he understood and appreciated what Bourgeois meant when she wrote, “My sculptures might be called ‘confrontation pieces.’ ” 38 The one-­off quality of New York and the time and place of its creation affirm the likelihood that it is an homage to Bourgeois, even as its dense hatching, crosshatching, and linear entanglements link it to his earlier surrealist explorations. Morrison came of age artistically in the emergent abstract expressionist milieu in New York in the mid-­1940s. By the mid-­1950s his paintings often consisted of spontaneously generated, thickly impastoed, scintillating surfaces that synthesize action/gestural and color field painting. In terms of style, subject matter (the existential act of painting), and aesthetic results, his work was a constituent element of the diverse yet unified community known as the New York school.39 Furthermore, if we apply the three criteria of intentionality, process, and quality, which I believe are often used in judging the merits of artwork, Morrison’s painting should never be excluded from serious, substantive discourse on abstract expressionism. Morrison was only a few years younger than first-­generation abstract expressionists Richard Pousette-­Dart and Robert Motherwell. He was six years older than Joan Mitchell, whose first solo exhibition in 1950 at what is now the Minnesota Museum of American Art came two years after his (and de Kooning’s) in 1948. Although the first-­ and second-­generation nomenclature is somewhat artificial, it has had staying power, and I rehearse this fragment of lineage to underscore, as Ann Gibson has done, that canon formation is shaped, intentionally or otherwise, by ethnicity (“race”), gender, and sexual orientation.40 In short, quality alone cannot account for Morrison’s exclusion from major exhibitions and books that survey abstract expressionism, especially since contemporaneous critical reviews of his art were typically laudatory, and major museums acquired his work. His first solo show, for example, was reviewed positively in both Art Digest and the New York Sun. The former characterized Morrison as a promising “painter of mysteries and tensions.” Describing the work as having both “sensuous and intellectual appeal,” the unnamed critic (JKR) noted the “boldness and clarity” 268 

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of his “strong and curiously evocative landscape” paintings.41 And Helen Carlson wrote in the New York Sun, “Unconsciously or otherwise, these figures and forms derive from the ideography of Morrison’s forebears.” She added that “even the crude compelling harmonies of [his] earth tones . . . might have been fired to the canvases centuries ago in the primitive kilns of his ancestors.” 42 Recalling this review nearly half a century later, Morrison commented, “Critics will refer to my Indian background to try and make sense of the work. I wasn’t pushing it, but they found it anyway.” 43 The critical reception of Morrison’s work continued to be strong throughout the fifties. Some of the paintings in his 1954 exhibition at Grand Central Moderns, his dealer in Manhattan, were featured in a solo show in November that same year at the Tweed Gallery of Art (now the Tweed Museum of Art) at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Reviewing the show favorably for the Duluth News-­Tribune, Earl Fineberg called the work “magical modernism.” Marrying his perception of the work’s elemental magic with his knowledge of Morrison’s origins, Fineberg constructed the artist as either a sophisticated primitive or a primitive sophisticate. The “formal abstract elements fall into landscape patterns that suggest a primitive identification of spirit and world. That Morrison is a Chippewa Indian may have something to do with his view of the visible world, if one remembers that through travel, education, and influence the artist is among today’s most sophisticated abstract composers.” Reflecting the impress of Sigmund Freud, Fineberg wrote, “Phrases like totem and taboo, mana and magic leap to mind as one sees construction after construction that share a primitive formalism with nature, but are anything but illustration.” 44 The fact of Morrison’s Chippewa ancestry seems to have limited the possibility of recognizing in the work a modern identification of spirit and world. In 1957 Morrison was included in the James Gallery Invitational in New York City that also included de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Mitchell, Motherwell, and Rothko. That same year, he had another solo exhibition at Grand Central Moderns from which the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired The Antagonist (1957), a major painting. Eventually he had twelve solo shows in Manhattan — ​­a remarkable feat for any artist in any generation. In 1959 Morrison had a one-­person exhibition at the Kilbride-­Bradley Art Gallery, which was an important space for advanced art in Minneapolis, and John K. Sherman’s review in the Minneapolis Star-­Tribune was positive and astute. Describing Morrison as a “Minnesotan-­turned-­New Yorker,” Sherman, who wrote drama, music, and arts criticism for more than forty years, noted B eing M odern , B ecoming N ative 

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the artist’s national reputation and the acquisition of his work by “the most important collections in this country and abroad.” Morrison’s paintings, he observed, revealed “an experienced skill in setting up the counterpoint and tensions which induce you to gaze for a long time, seeking out the secrets there.” Curiously, the word “abstract” never appears in the review, even as Sherman repeatedly ascribes musical value to Morrison’s art, which touches viewers deep inside, inviting them to consider carefully the secrets beneath the surface.45 Wanting the work to stand on its own terms without any special pleading, Morrison was pleased that the review did not make any reference to his Indian background in positing the significance of the exhibition.46 Like many other New York school artists with whom Morrison socialized and occasionally exhibited, particularly Franz Kline, surrealist automatic drawing evolved in Morrison’s hands into the freely improvised gestures of so-­called action painting. Even modestly scaled works on paper could embody the exuberance, exhilaration, and openness of this method of working. Indeed, it was his contention “that even a small drawing can be an important work of art.” 47 Part of the abstract expressionist ethos was the existential and autonomous quality of each studio encounter with process and materials; this partly explains the variety of moods and effects Morrison was able to generate with his jazzlike improvisations, which could result in intimate works on paper, such as Grey, Black and White Lines (1959; figure 10.3), created in Provincetown on the Atlantic shore, where he often spent the summer. Brushy, open, and linear, the work hints at Chinese calligraphy and the bold black-­ white-­gray dramas he admired in the work of his friend Franz Kline. In such works Morrison was seeking to capture an “inner thing”: “That was part of the Action Painting school, where you begin with the act of painting itself, then images began to emerge. Almost like subconscious painting.” 48 Morrison had long been a conflicted expatriate yearning to go home. After teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design for seven years, he returned to Minnesota and his Native roots in 1970, when he joined the University of Minnesota to teach studio art and American Indian Studies. This homecoming only intensified his commitment to nature, automatism, and the unconscious, as in seen in Surrealist Landscape (1985), a mixed-­media work on paper. The abstracted landforms, water, and high horizon line visible in this large quirky drawing are essential components of Morrison’s iconography of the North Shore of Lake Superior. The spontaneous linear entanglements witnessed here are explicated by his comment that much of his work “emerged out of scribbles,” which he related to French automatic drawing, “influenced by the 270 

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F I G U R E 1 0 . 3   George Morrison, Grey, Black and White Lines, 1959. Gouache and ink on paper, 14 × 10.8 in. (35.5 × 27.3 cm). Collection of the Minnesota Museum of American Art. Gift of George Morrison, 96.10.20.

associative thinking deriving from psychoanalysis.” 49 These image-­producing scribbles, he explained, combined frottage and automatic drawing and resulted in arbitrary patterns. Along with the Horizon series paintings and drawings he started in the 1980s, Morrison is best known, perhaps, for a series of monumental wood collages (and a series of totems as well, discussed below), including Cumulated Landscape (1976; plate 6). Puzzled together from found objects harvested on the beach at Provincetown, the first collage began in summer 1965. Although they are gridded, like Gottlieb’s pictographs, and have a latent cubist structure, he made them intuitively, without preparatory drawings. They all have a clear sense of proportion, with a horizon line approximately one-­fourth of the way down from the top. I am tempted to call them the sculptural equivalent of automatic drawings, but Morrison described them as “paintings in wood . . . derived from nature, based on landscape.” And even though the first was made on the Atlantic shore, he recognized that the collages “may have been inspired subconsciously by the rock formations on the North shore” of Lake Superior.50 These award-­winning wood collages symbolize the whole of Morrison’s career, in which memories of specific places, in nature or in the mind, are realized in a visual language based on mastery of international avant-­garde paradigms. Cumulated Landscape characterizes the series in its dynamic balance of part and whole. The collages are analogies for the self, a society, or the natural world. Almost immediately the wood collages found a wide and welcoming audience, including curators and museum directors, corporate and private collectors, art award jurors, and the general public.51 The honesty and plainspoken quality of the collages were surely key to their popularity. The subject matter, on the surface at least, no pun intended, would seem to be the materials and processes of art itself. The audience is thus given a direct encounter with aesthetic form — ​­no iconographic analysis required. Indeed, the collages announce themselves without pretension or conceptual difficulty. Nothing needs to be demystified. Cumulated Landscape, for example, is typical in that it is not really the abstraction (reduction, concentration) of anything. It is exactly what it appears to be: carefully composed pieces of found wood. And therein lies part of the appeal of the collages for corporate culture, especially in Minnesota: they are inspiring, not threatening, and they speak directly of the relationship between art and natural resources.52 Morrison presumed that their initial appeal was the tactility of the wood itself, “since the grain is always important.” 53 The grand wood collages were time and labor intensive, so Morrison ex272 

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trapolated their aesthetic principles in numerous exhibitions of drawings, rubbings, and lithographs. Two such drawings from 1982 are especially interesting in the context of surrealism. Brown and Black Textured Squares (1982) is inscribed in Morrison’s hand: “Brown and Black Textured Squares — ​­Started By Placing At Random — ​­Changing In Shape & Direction As Progression To End  — ​­Landscape  — ​­Minneapolis-­11-­14-­82.” A perhaps unfinished drawing, 9 Black Squares, 11 Brown Squares (1982), has its process documented at the bottom also: “9 Black Squares, 11 Brown Squares — ​­Partly Frottage — ​­After Arp — ​­MPLS-­8-­25-­82.” Morrison’s admiration for the surrealist Jean Arp is revealed in his sketches as well. In the latter part of his career, Morrison was given to detailed inscriptions on his drawings, not only dating them but indicating also where they were produced and sometimes commenting on the process, frequently using such words as surrealism, automatism, and frottage. In doing so he balanced improvisation and abstraction, which signal the subconscious, with the specificity of place and archival documentation, which suggest order and structure. When drawings similar to these two were exhibited at the University of Minnesota in 1983, he emphasized their immediacy: “Drawing became an intimate source of personal expression — ​­first as a means of social narration and place description, then progressing toward a probing of the subconscious through surrealist automatic techniques to record an inner solitude and loneliness.” 54 In short, surrealist automatism may have given him a way to express his alienation (modernist subjectivity), in general, and his deracination from, and reconnection with, traditional Chippewa culture in particular. The series of monumental vertical totems Morrison began making in the mid-­1970s signified a shift in his intentions regarding the potential for Indigenous content in his work. The context for this shift included his participation in urban Indian culture in the Twin Cities, such as his limited role as a fund raiser for the emerging American Indian Movement. The first totem, the regal Red Totem I (1977), resulted from a commission from the curator Evan M. Maurer for The Native American Heritage: A Survey of North American Indian Art (1977), a watershed exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Like all Morrison’s standing totems, Red Totem I is a wood mosaic appliqué that imitates carving. Morrison explained that he had been thinking on the one hand about totem poles as a kind of public art that announced history, and on the other about the possibility of turning his horizontal wood collages into four-­sided vertical forms. Furthermore, he recalled, “I chose a red earth color called Indian Red to assimilate a certain Indianness because, otherwise, it’s B eing M odern , B ecoming N ative 

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just a modern, abstract version of a totem pole.” Plus, he felt the earthy red gave the totem “potency and Indian feeling.” 55 He had multiple sources of inspiration for his totems. Always sensitive to words and language, the origin of the word “totem” must have surely held special significance for him, since he identified increasingly with his own heritage after his homecoming in 1970, even as he continued to evolve an anthropological consciousness. He stated, for example, “Totem is a Chippewa word that means ‘family mark.’ Totemic imagery may be common to native peoples all over the world. Such vertical structures are found in the Taula forms in Minorca, linga structures in India, Stonehenge in England, and those of the ancient Olmecs in Mexico.” 56 Thus, although each totem is unique, like the wood collages, they all clearly belong to the same “clan.” But his ethnographic desire to revisit ancient art forms (manifest in studious notes and images in his sketchbooks) was synthesized with a mastery of modernist formalism, which was immediately self-­evident. When Red Totem III and Red Totem IV (both 1978) were included in a groundbreaking traveling exhibition of contemporary Native art in 1981, Confluences of Tradition and Change/24 American Indian Artists, the art historian and critic Allan M. Gordon, a specialist in African American aesthetics, praised them for indicating “new directions for a distinctive type of Native American sculpture” that aligns with “Constructivist-­ Minimalist systems.” 57 Poor health from the mid-­1980s onward generally, although not exclusively, kept Morrison from working on anything large scale, and many of his most poignant objects from that period are intimate and prismatic drawings that are proof positive of his unwavering commitment to a surrealist process and content. In an untitled drawing from 1995 (plate 7), the three bands of a hard-­ edged color field do double duty as the abstraction of land, water, and sky, on top of which float totemic, biomorphic, surrealist forms. Their glyph-­like character reminds us of Morrison’s keen interest, documented many times in his sketchbooks, in pre-­Columbian relief sculpture and other ancient and tribal forms, reflecting both a modernist universalizing anthropological impulse and his increasing articulation of a Native identity. The shapes seen in yet another untitled drawing from 1995 might be parts of a cryptic alphabet, the abstraction of elemental biological critters, or the liberated fragments of a visionary map. And the clarity of the shapes fails to mask their thematic and organic connection to the biomorphic forties. Indeed, Mark Rothko’s 1947 description of his multiforms seems appropriate here:

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They are unique elements in a unique situation. They are organisms with volition and a passion for self-­assertion. They move with eternal freedom, and without need to conform with or to violate what is probable in the familiar world. They have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them one recognizes the principle and passion of organisms.58 In 2004, the Anishinabe literary critic Gerald Vizenor proposed that the quirky shapes in drawings such as these might refer to the spirits of Chippewa cosmology, such as Mishapishoo, the underwater panther (which was the subject of a woodlands-­themed mosaic Morrison created for the Daybreak Star Center, Seattle, in 1977).59 The artist had indicated as much in 1998 when he noted, “Individual titles often use the idea of spirit forms. All those shapes and things that come from the images . . . can relate to spirits. The shapes might suggest objects in the lake coming out of the water. Often they’re irregular, shaped like an amoeba — ​­organic forms that relate to clouds or puddles.” 60 In using the underwater panther as a sculptural theme to represent woodlands culture, and in referring to spirit forms rising up out of the lake, Morrison was interlacing (modernist) artistic practice with oral traditions. He believed that the “original meaning of Indian art begins with tribal meanings” and that many Native “sculptures had a religious or spiritual meaning.” 61 In discussing Morrison’s Native modernism, art historian Bill Anthes has invoked the philosopher Scott Pratt’s idea of emplacement, in which the Indigenous homeland is the fundamental ground out of which oral traditions derive their meaning.62 For Morrison, emplacement meant “a natural attraction to where you were born, your locale. Like the lake or woods for me.” Building a home and studio at Red Rock was to be rerooted in his place of origin — ​­the literal ground of his Chippewaness: “The lake has certain magical qualities for me in the sense that I like to be near it. To be part of it.” 63 The constant reiteration of land, shoreline, water, horizon, and sky at Red Rock in the Horizon series paintings and related drawings gave form to an indivisible bond between self and place. Because he made so many of them over two decades, collectively they function like a visual mantra: I am home again, I am home again, I am home again. By the time of his death in 2000, Morrison was a much-­celebrated artist with a compelling exhibition history, including a dozen solo shows in New York City. In 1990 he had been the subject of Standing in Northern Lights, a retrospective organized by the Tweed Museum of Art and the Minnesota Mu-

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seum of American Art that was also shown at the Plains Art Museum (then located in Moorhead, Minnesota). The title of the exhibition is an English translation of Wah Wah The Go Nay Ga Bo, a name dreamed for Morrison by his cousin Walter Caribou, an elder of the Grand Portage Chippewa, as part of a healing ceremony.64 In the late 1980s, as Morrison struggled with illness, he was pleased with the results of an exhibition he had longed for: sixty-­seven works in a wide variety of media spanning forty-­four years of artistic practice. He had also been claimed by a younger generation of Native artists as a founding father of Native modernism and was thus featured prominently in several important group exhibitions, including Our Land/Our Selves: American Indian Contemporary Artists, an exhibition of 375 works of art by thirty artists representing thirty-­one tribes. Curated by Jaune Quick-­to-­See Smith and organized by Nancy Liddle for the University of Albany Art Gallery, the show had a dozen venues (1991–1993). In 1999 Morrison was named the inaugural Master Artist in the new Fellowship for Native American Fine Art established by the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis. When in 2004 he was honored posthumously in a two-­person exhibition with Allan Houser that helped inaugurate the new National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., founding director W. Richard West Jr. (as noted above) wrote that Morrison had in fact proved that it was “possible to be a major American artist and Indian artist at the same time.” 65 Part of what makes these accolades and achievements so compelling is that they are prompted by a lifetime of artworks that never made any concessions to the clichés of a market-­driven Native “style.” Because he had an unwavering commitment to a surrealist process that he practiced for almost sixty years, authenticity and integrity are the twin characteristics that unify Morrison’s diverse creations. As a card-­carrying modernist inspired by the natural world to probe the subconscious, he made abstract equivalents for a synthesis of perception, conception, feeling, and memory. As such his personal aesthetic philosophy was a poetic one: “I always see the horizon as the edge of the world. And then you go beyond that, and then you see the phenomenon of the sky and that goes beyond also, so therefore I always imagine, in a certain surrealist world, that I am there, that I would like to imagine for myself that it is real.” 66

After his homecoming in 1970, Morrison was re-­regionalized as a Native son of Minnesota — ​­a state in which he and his work are much beloved — ​­and was increasingly enmeshed in the “world” of Native American art. After leaving 276 

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both his New York gallery and his appointment at the Rhode Island School of Design, what we might call the mainstream East Coast memory of his significance gradually diminished as his importance as a Native modernist increased in equal measure. The old adage “out of sight, out of mind” might be applicable here. In a recent review of Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison, the traveling retrospective exhibition of his work I curated for the Minnesota Museum of American Art (2013–2015), the art critic Mary Abbe described him as “Minnesota’s best known and most successful American Indian artist,” when in fact, he is arguably Minnesota’s best known and most successful artist, no ethnic qualifier required — ​­especially if exhibition history is a key criterion.67 Even so, Abbe’s statement is true, although it reflects, intentionally or otherwise, the divide in Morrison’s critical reception and historiography: before and after 1970, he was a either New York school modernist or a cofounder of Native modernism (which was never his intention), but not both. As the growing awareness of multiple modernisms makes clear, this binary distinction is artificial and can no longer be tolerated. Notes 1. Although many Great Lakes Indigenous peoples now refer to themselves as either Ojibwe or Anishinabe, many still self-­designate, as did Morrison, as Chippewa. He was an enrolled member of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. This essay is based in part on a lengthier one in W. Jackson Rushing III and Kristin Makholm, Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), 11–62. See also W. Jackson Rushing III, “George Morrison’s Surrealism,” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 7, no. 1 (2013): 1–18. 2. Recalling his days as a boarding school student in Wisconsin, Morrison stated: “I had always worked with my hands — ​­drawing, copying, inventing — ​­and was interested in commercial art. I began reading history and art history, architecture, sculpture and music.” Quoted in Jane B. Katz, ed., This Song Remembers: Self-­Portraits of Native Americans in the Arts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 56. 3. George Morrison, Turning the Feather Around: My Life in Art, as told to Margot Fortunato Gault (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1998), 50, in which he recalls seeing a Picasso exhibition in 1939. The records of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts suggest, however, that Morrison was likely thinking of Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, organized by Alfred H. Barr for the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1939), which was on view in Minneapolis February 1–March 2, 1941. Stephanie Kays, e-­mail to the author, June 4, 2012. 4. In fall 1969 he wrote a letter to the federal Office of Economic Opportunity, expressing both an interest in a job on the Grand Portage Reservation and his willingness B eing M odern , B ecoming N ative 

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to give up his teaching position at the Rhode Island School of Design. “At this time,” he wrote, “nothing would suit me better than to be of help to my people and particularly to my own reservation.” George Morrison to Jim Wilson, November 10, 1969, George Morrison Archives, Minnesota Historical Society (gm/mhs). 5. Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas,” in Praise (New York: Ecco Press, 1979), 4–5. 6. Adelheid Fischer, “George Morrison,” arts Magazine 7, no. 2 (February 1984): 22. 7. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 23, and quoted in Katz, Song Remembers, 53. 8. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 29, 24, 37. 9. Morrison, quoted in Katz, Song Remembers, 55–56. 10. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 35, 31–32, 45, 56. 11. See, for example, the enlarged edition of Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1986); Elizabeth Cowling, “The Eskimos, the American Indians, and the Surrealists,” Art History 1, no. 4 (December 1978): 484–500; Evan Maurer, “Dada and Surrealism,” in “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, edited by William Rubin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 535–93; Susan Hiller, ed., The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art (New York: Routledge, 1991); W. Jackson Rushing III, Native American Art and the New York Avant-­Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch eds., Primitivism and Twentieth-­Century Art: A Documentary History. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Dawn Ades, ed., The Color of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art (Vancouver, BC: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2011). 12. See, for example, W. Jackson Rushing III, Allan Houser: An American Master (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004). 13. Morrison, quoted in Katz, Song Remembers, 56. 14. Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-­Garde, chapters 5 and 6. 15. For Indian Space, see Ann Gibson, “Painting Outside the Paradigm: Indian Space,” Arts Magazine 57 (February 1983): 98–104; Sandra Kraskin et al., The Indian Space Painters: Native American Sources for American Abstract Art (New York: Baruch College Gallery, 1991); and Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-­ Garde, 137–56. Of the Indian Space painters, only Steve Wheeler insisted, absolutely unconvincingly, that he had no interest in Indigenous sources. 16. Morrison, quoted in Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 64. 17. See Gibson, Abstract Expressionism, 64, 215n31. 18. Gibson, Abstract Expressionism, 64–65. 19. W. Richard West Jr., “Foreword: The Art of Contradiction,” in Native Modernism: The Art of George Morrison and Allan Houser, edited by Truman T. Lowe (Washington, DC: Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, 2004), 8. 278 

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20. According to Morrison’s friend and colleague Evan M. Maurer, except for a reference to red Jasper as his totem stone, the artist “never claimed any special knowledge” about Native spirituality; telephone interview, March 21, 2012. 21. In the wake of the Museum of Modern Art’s primitivism debacle in the mid-­ 1980s and in a critique of the equally, if differently, problematic Magiciens de la Terre exhibition in Paris (1989), Rasheed Araeen wrote that Western humanism had failed to recognize “the modern aspirations of the ‘other.’ ” See his essay, “Our Bauhaus, Others’ Mudhouse,” Third Text 3, no. 6 (spring 1989): 14. 22. George Morrison, artist statement, Dayton Art Institute (1960), Ryerson Library Pamphlet File, Art Institute of Chicago. 23. Veristic surrealism, associated in particular with Salvador Dali’s “critical paranoia,” is typified by meticulously represented images of nightmarish content (e.g., hand-­painted dream photographs). I am using the term ethnographic surrealism somewhat reductively here to stand in for surrealists such as Max Ernst, who appropriated Northwest Coast and Hopi imagery into his modernist primitivism. For a more expansive understanding, see James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-­ Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), especially chapters 4, 9, and 10. 24. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 63. 25. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 63. 26. The school of Paris refers to international modern art in Paris between the world wars. Often cubist/expressionist in orientation, it was characterized as having “a certain high level of professionalism with a modernist bent.” See H. Harvard Arnason and Daniel Wheeler, History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1986), 249. 27. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 59, 63. 28. Robert Rosenblum, Mark Rothko: Notes on Rothko’s Surrealist Years (New York: Pace Gallery, 1981), 5–9; and Lawrence Alloway, “The Biomorphic 40’s,” ArtForum 4 (September 1965): 18–22, reprinted in Topics in American Art Since 1945 (New York: Norton, 1975), 17–25. Page citations are from the 1975 edition. 29. Alloway, “Biomorphic,” 20. 30. Alloway, “Biomorphic,” 18. 31. Morrison, quoted in Katz, Song Remembers, 58. 32. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 90. 33. For Matisse’s cut-­outs, see especially Henri Matisse, Jazz (New York: George Braziller, 1985). On surrealism and Oceanic art, see Maurer, “Dada and Surrealism,” 546–57, and passim; Rosalind Krauss, “Giacometti,” in Rubin, “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art, 517–19. 34. Robert Goldwater, “Judgments of Primitive Art, 1905–1965,” which appeared first in Tradition and Creativity in Tribal Art, ed. Daniel Biebuyck (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 24–41, reprinted in Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art, 293. B eing M odern , B ecoming N ative 

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35. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 79. 36. For the primitivism of Matta and Lam, see Maurer, “Dada and Surrealism,” 582, 585. 37. See Josef Helfenstein, Louise Bourgeois: The Early Work (Champaign: Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign, 2002), 30, 143. 38. Bourgeois, “Artist’s Statement,” 18, quoted in Helfenstein, Louise Bourgeois, 34. 39. The New York school is an alternate designation for abstract expressionism that is style neutral and establishes the site of production, New York City. The downside of the New York school label is that it may overemphasize unity; we often teach and write not just about the commonalities of abstract expressionism, but also about its differences and discontinuities. See Sidney Simon, “Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School, 1939–1943: Interview with Robert Motherwell,” in Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, edited by David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 33–45. 40. Gibson, Abstract Expressionism, 59. 41. JKR, “George Morrison Debut,” Art Digest 22 (May 1, 1948): 19. 42. Helen Carlson, quoted in Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 81. 43. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 81. For a similarly primitivist reading (in the European press) of his first solo exhibition, see Rushing and Makholm, Modern Spirit, 14. 44. Fineberg, “Morrison Exhibit Hung in Tweed,” Duluth News-­Tribune, Novem­ber 7, 1954, Tweed Museum of Art Archives. 45. John K. Sherman, “George Morrison’s Art Lyrical and Subjective,” Minneapolis Star-­Tribune, February 13, 1959. 46. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 105. 47. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 99. 48. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 111–12. 49. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 99. In addition to his exposure to surrealist creative principles in New York and Paris, beginning circa 1954 Morrison underwent three years of psychoanalysis after the dissolution of his first marriage. 50. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 128. 51. Rushing and Makholm, Modern Spirit, 29–30. 52. Rob Silberman, “A Long Look at the Art of George Morrison,” Artpaper 10 (September 1990): 17. 53. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 146. 54. George Morrison, “The Artist’s Statement,” in George Morrison: Entries in an Artist’s Journal, ed. Lyndel King, exhibition catalog (Minneapolis, MN: University Art Gallery, 1983), n.p. 55. Morrison, quoted in Katz, Song Remembers, 58, 60. 56. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 154.

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57. Allan M. Gordon, “Confluences,” in Confluences of Tradition and Change/24 American Indian Artists (Davis, CA: Richard L. Nelson Gallery, 1981), 6. 58. Mark Rothko, “The Romantics Were Prompted,” Possibilities 1 (winter 1947–48), reprinted in Shapiro and Shapiro, Abstract Expressionism, 398. 59. Gerald Vizenor, “George Morrison: Anishinabe Expressionism at Red Rock,” in Lowe, Native Modernism, 45. 60. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 173. 61. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 154. 62. Bill Anthes, Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 90. 63. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 150, 149. 64. The other name Caribou dreamed for him was “Turning the Feather Around”; see Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 167. 65. West Jr., “Art of Contradiction,” in Lowe, Native Modernism, 8. 66. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 173. 67. Mary Abbe, “Hymns to the Horizon: Art of George Morrison at Minnesota History Center,” Minneapolis Star-­Tribune, February 19, 2015.

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PETER BRUNT

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FALLING INTO THE WORLD

The Global Art World of Aloï Pilioko and Nicolaï Michoutouchkine Every period has had its genuine travellers: I could quote one or two among those who enjoy public favour at the present time. But my aim is neither to condemn hoaxes nor to award diplomas of genuineness, but rather to understand a moral and social phenomenon which is especially peculiar to France and, even here, has made its appearance only very recently. C L A U D E L É V I -­S T R A U S S

| Tristes Tropiques

In 1946, at the age of seventeen, Nicolaï Michoutouchkine painted a still life of unusual violence (figure 11.1). It depicted a plucked cockerel splayed on a tabletop with its head cut, the knife nearby covered with the same blood-­ red pigment the artist used to sign his name. The signature has been twice transliterated, from its original Russian alphabet and from the Latin spelling (Mishutushkin) used by his parents in France. They were Cossack exiles who had fled the reprisals of the 1917 Communist Revolution, eventually settling in Belfort, France, where the artist was born. Although a teenage work, the painting was clearly of some personal importance to the artist, for he kept it his entire life. It still hung in the library of his studio-­home on the South Pacific island of Efate, in Vanuatu, the year of his death. Perhaps the image conveyed something of his sense of cultural displacement in the Cossack diaspora; or his adolescent disenchantment with European civilization, which he had just witnessed destroying itself during World War II; or perhaps his anxiety about his emerging sexual identity as a young gay man. Whatever the case, a few

Nicolaï Michoutouchkine, Cockerel with Its Head Cut, ca. 1946. Oil on plywood, 16.5 × 22.8 in. (42 × 58 cm). Collection of Aloï Pilioko. Image courtesy of Aloï Pilioko. FIGURE 11.1 

years later, he would leave France to embark on a traveling adventure that would traverse the globe and last the rest of his life. Michoutouchkine’s Cockerel with Its Head Cut might be set alongside another painting, Crucifixion of a Cockerel (1964; figure 11.2), by his partner and protégé, the Indigenous modernist Aloï Pilioko. Both paintings convey an image of the violence and transformation of their modern identities through a common motif — ​­a figure perhaps of the empathy or attraction that drew them to each other in a lifelong partnership. Cockerels, peacocks, doves, pigeons, and other birds are prevalent figures in Pilioko’s work. He is known for his fondness for these creatures and other animals. He grew up with them in his village of Alele on the island of Wallis, and they surround him today in the studio-­home he created with Michoutouchkine in Vanuatu. Pilioko feeds and observes the birds everyday, delights in their personalities and idiosyncrasies, and misses their company when he travels (in the past taking tape recordings of their clacking to keep him company and to remind him of home).1 They are his intimates and the inspiration for his art. Crucifixion of a Cockerel is thus a deeply felt painting that substitutes for the figure of Christ an image of the

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F I G U R E 1 1 . 2   Aloï Pilioko, Crucifixion of a Cockerel, ca. 1964. Oil on hardboard, 25 × 20 in. (64 × 51 cm). Private collection. Image courtesy of Aloï Pilioko.

artist’s avian friend and alter ego. The image is a kind of surrogate self-­portrait, which comments ironically on the historical and ontological transformations that underlie his modern identity as a Wallisian and a Catholic. This chapter is about the unique artistic partnership formed in the South Pacific between this unlikely pair from opposite sides of the world. Pilioko was one of the first Pacific Islanders to embrace self-­consciously an identity 284 

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as a modern artist in the late 1950s and early 1960s, contemporaneously with a handful of Māori modernists in Aotearoa New Zealand. But unlike other modernisms in the Pacific, which were framed in national or ethnically specific terms around contested relationships to place — ​­Māori modernism in Aotearoa New Zealand; Aboriginal desert painting in Australia; settler modernisms in both countries; indigenous modernisms in Papua New Guinea and Hawaii — ​­the project of Pilioko and Michoutouchkine was profoundly global. Both men were émigrés and travelers. Both were subjects of historical diasporas, Michoutouchkine of Russian Cossacks after the revolution, and Pilioko of Polynesian migrants after World War II. They met “on the road,” and for over four decades, they pursued interlinked careers of almost perpetual travel together, Michoutouchkine as a collector, exhibitor, and promoter of Oceanic art, and Pilioko as an “artist of the Pacific,” famous for the originality and exuberance of his drawings, paintings, and tapestries.2 In making this contrast, I do not mean to suggest that as travelers and émigrés, their project was not entangled with questions of place, home, nation, and indigeneity; it clearly was, although in different ways for each of them. But the nature of those entanglements cannot be understood apart from the mobile and cosmopolitan character of their lives together, and the global scope of the histories that brought them, serendipitously, into relation with each other — ​­a geography that became the social canvas of their project together. The two men met in 1959 in Nouméa, New Caledonia, on the outskirts of the French colonial empire. Michoutouchkine was an artist who had set out from Paris in 1953 on a traveling adventure that would take him through Italy, Greece, and the Middle East (Palestine, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan), then to India for two years from where he traveled to Nepal, Burma, Ceylon, Thailand, Vietnam, and finally, via Australia, to New Caledonia in 1957 (forced to return to French territory by obligations to fulfill military service). He would later call his travels in Asia his “pilgrimage to the East,” and there was indeed something of the spiritual quest about them. He visited Orthodox monks on Mount Athos in Greece and Buddhist monks in the Himalayas, made “pilgrimages” to sacred sites in India, Nepal, and Burma, and produced hundreds of sketches and paintings of temples, shrines, worshippers, sacred landscapes, and Buddhist and Hindu deities.3 But there was also something much more profane about his travels. Whatever charge he drew from the exoticism of other places and cultures, his travels were facilitated by his role, in part, as a travel reporter, armed with a camera and letters of introduction, and intermittently sending stories, sketches, and F alling into the W orld 

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photographs back to French newspapers and magazines, like the Belfortian Sun (his hometown paper) and Paris Match.4 He was also himself “news,” the subject of newspaper articles in the places he traveled through that rehearsed his interesting journey and commented on his exhibitions and travel plans. Importantly, his status as a quasi-­journalist gave him entrée to French embassies and diplomatic circles that in turn introduced him to local counterparts, politicians and social elites. He used these networks to garner support for exhibitions of his work — ​­sometimes including local artists as well — ​­improvised in venues like embassy rooms, local art societies, educational offices, faith centers for religious diplomacy, and the like. In India, unesco and the Ministry of Education sponsored an exhibition in New Delhi; the World Fellowship of Buddhists and the Ceylon Society of the Arts supported an exhibition in Ceylon (where newspaper reviewers commented favorably on his efforts as a Westerner to capture the authentic feel of Buddhist spirituality); the Australian ambassador attending an exhibition in Rangoon recommended Michoutouchkine’s enterprise to the Australian Ministry of External Affairs in Canberra — ​­events that opened further opportunities to travel and exhibit. Politicians, ambassadors, and religious leaders — ​­the Dalai Lama, King Mahendra of Nepal, Prime Minister Jawaharal Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi, the prime minister of Ceylon Bandaranaike, and many others — ​­visited or opened his exhibitions, signed his travel books, and posed for photographs.5 There is not space in this chapter to elaborate on these encounters or their relationship to the politics of regional decolonization, but suffice to say they tap a vein the artist would exploit for the rest of his life; namely, the willingness of cultural agencies and diplomatic organs of nation states to mount exhibitions of artworks and cultural objects that speak across their borders, demonstrate outside perspectives on their own traditions, or expose their own communities to the artistic traditions of others. The puzzle of Michoutouchkine is that he had no official mandate for these ventures; they originated entirely from his own initiative for reasons that remain within the realm of the personal, about which we can only speculate. But whatever those reasons were, his exhibitionary projects found fertile (if shallow) ground among public officials and political elites willing to host and stage them. Exploiting such relationships in future travel became his modus operandi. His sojourn in Nouméa, however, changed the context of his traveling adventure and shifted its focus in several important ways. First, it brought him back to French colonial territory at a time when his Frenchness represented the dominant colonial culture. Second, it brought him near the Indigenous 286 

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cultures of the Pacific, inciting further traveling ambitions and inaugurating a new passion for collecting and exhibiting Indigenous artifacts as “works of art.” Third, it brought him into a milieu of modernist practice in the French Pacific, part of the global dispersal and local cross-­pollination of artistic modernism, in which he would become an important agent. In this context, he established a makeshift art gallery in an old colonial villa on the Nouméa waterfront — ​­the first art gallery in the Pacific Islands outside large settler states like New Zealand and Hawaii — ​­attracting traveling artists and galvanizing a small heterogeneous community of local supporters: Francophone expatriates, “caldoche,” “demis,” and migrant Islanders. And finally, traveling to Nouméa brought him into contact with Aloï Pilioko, with whom he would form a lifelong friendship and artistic partnership. Pilioko was also a young man on the move, exploring the environs of the French Pacific. In 1957, at the age of twenty-­two, he left his home island of Wallis (in French Polynesia) to work on a copra plantation on Efate, in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), before moving again to find work in Nouméa, where he came upon Michoutouchkine’s art gallery.6 His travels to that point were part of a general outmigration of French Polynesians from small outer islands and rural villages to urban townships, made possible by the relaxation of colonial labor laws after World War II, one of the first moves toward decolonization. But Pilioko also had subjective reasons to depart: he wanted to explore the world and expand the horizon of his experiences and opportunities, previously confined to life on Wallis. Mobility in space was counterpart to freedom of the mind and imagination, the latitude to roam and wander having been suppressed under colonialism. Pilioko was also a gay man escaping — ​­or at least taking his distance from — ​­the domination of French Catholicism on Wallis, where Marist priests and nuns had effectively administered the territory and controlled the strict and often punitive education system since the early nineteenth century.7 The hegemony of colonial Catholicism on Wallis was not interrupted until World War II (when thousands of American troops were stationed there), and it only dissipated with emigration and decolonization after the war. Pilioko’s exit from Wallis and eventual arrival in Nouméa should not be interpreted, however, as a transition from “traditional” village life to modern town. As James Clifford cautions, we need to be “wary of binary oppositions between home and away, or a before/after progress from village life to cosmopolitan modernity.” 8 Wallis was already modern in the sense that modernity had transformed its way of life, though not by eradicating Indigenous culture, nor replacing it with something entirely in the image of France F alling into the W orld 

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or French Catholicism. As historians Robert Aldrich and John Connell have pointed out, of the island territories of French Polynesia, Wallis was “paradoxically the most quickly and thoroughly changed by Catholicism, yet also the one where other elements of French culture have been slowest to infiltrate.” 9 Many aspects of Indigenous culture continued to thrive on the island: Wallisians spoke their own language; they retained the authority of their hereditary “kingship” and system of titled chiefs; they had their traditional cuisine and medicinal knowledge; they still practiced art forms like house building and mat making. Moreover, emigration was a collective and cultural movement to neighboring regions of the French Pacific, in effect expanding the geography of Wallisian communities in various urban satellites. Travel back and forth was possible and commonplace. Pilioko’s movements in the 1950s retained his connection with migrant siblings and other Wallisians. His encounter with Michoutouchkine’s art gallery, on the other hand, exposed him to an unfamiliar but fascinating subculture of itinerant modernists in the milieu that I call “island modernism.” Modernism was a minor and marginal practice in the French Pacific in the 1950s and 1960s, but it was not absent, nor was it dissociated from the networks that were beginning to link contemporary artists as a global community.10 Nouméa, Port Vila, and Papeete were host to a small but active network of mainly French expatriate artists, a few Anglophones and other Europeans, and a smattering of urbanized Islanders. They worked, exhibited, and socialized within these townships, moved between them, and made traveling forays from them to visit other Pacific Islands. They were a loose and heterogeneous group of deterritorialized individuals, whose distance from the institutionalized art world of the “center” gave their activities a certain energy and freedom. Within this network Papeete was something of a hub. The advent of commercial air travel (the town opened a new airport in 1962) and French investment in the postwar development of a tourist economy brought an influx of expatriate professionals, contractors, administrators, entrepreneurs, military personnel, holidaymakers, pleasure seekers, and, of course, artists. The town hosted, for example, an abstract artists collective established in 1962 by French expatriate Frank Fay. The collective sponsored local exhibitions; facilitated the itineraries of traveling artists moving between Paris, Tahiti, and other islands; and published an independent journal, the Tahiti Centre for Abstract Art, distributed to subscribers in Port Vila, Nouméa, Honolulu, Auckland, Sydney, and Paris. The twelfth edition, published in 1965, illustrated works by Fay, Pierre Soulages, Mark Rothko, and Larry Poons, and announced 288 

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the group’s selection for participation in the Seventh São Paolo Biennale in 1967.11 The dominant aesthetic ideology within this milieu, not surprisingly, was modernist primitivism. Most artists carried stereotypical ideas about the South Pacific as the locus of idealized forms of life (simpler, easier, more natural), counterposed to the European cities they had “escaped,” and the source of “primitive art” traditions threatened by modernity but admired for their authenticity and emulated (by some) in their own artistic experiments. Michoutouchkine emulated Paul Gauguin in both his “escape” from Paris and his depiction of self-­possessed Islanders with languid brown bodies relaxing in the sun. So did his compatriot Robert Tatin, who also left Paris after the war, moving first to Papeete, then Nouméa, and finally Port Vila, painting everyday scenes of Islander families in a vaguely postimpressionist style, as they shared a meal at home or had a picnic at the bay, with modern yachts in the background. His paintings do not elide the modern life of the Pacific but nonetheless represent it in ways that convey the sense of communality and leisured living, which postwar modernity allegedly threatened.12 It would be easy to dismiss these clichés and attitudes as patently colonial, but the milieu of Island modernism was more complicated. On one level, it exemplifies what Daniel J. Sherman has described as “the continuing potency of cultural primitivism in French society [including its Pacific Territories] during the three decades after World War II, the period of its most intense and wide-­ranging embrace of the modern.” 13 That “potency” lay not simply in the persistence of irrepressible myths but in their postwar resurgence, recoded by the tourist industry, the art market, the museum and gallery world, the entertainment and leisure industry, and the fashion world.14 Island modernism was its own particular hotbed of cultural primitivism in all those ways. On another level, however, the locality of the discourse in the Pacific Islands rubbed it against the historical currents of local modernities, political decolonization, cultural resurgence, and Indigenous modernism. Pilioko’s encounter with Michoutouchkine’s gallery in Nouméa exposed him to a novel and exciting artistic subculture, which stirred a desire to make art himself in a similar manner. He was encouraged in this by Michoutouchkine, who later described Pilioko’s encounter with the “new world” of art as akin to that “experienced by the first people who had the chance to discover that they could make designs with mud and clay on the walls of caves, where our ancestors used to live.” 15 The analogy, of course, echoes modernist primitivist ideas about the primordial sources of authentic art making, but it infantilizes Pilioko and obscures his historical identity as a modern person. F alling into the W orld 

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It is true that Michoutouchkine’s art gallery and the subculture surrounding it were unlike anything Pilioko had seen before. But I would argue that the “scene” made sense to him; indeed it made sense of him. Most of the people in it shared a complicated relationship to France, as he did. Most had left “home,” as he had, and were “on the road,” as he was. They were strangers on other people’s land, as he was, land that had been colonized by France, as his had been. But what did “France” or “being French” mean beyond the limits of his experience of French Catholicism on Wallis? Where did these imperial dictates permitting him to emigrate and work come from? And what was the “Pacific” these artists were so interested in, full of Islanders like himself, a region he too was only beginning to discover? Pilioko entered that milieu of artists to explore his modern identity — ​­eventually to become its most original and accomplished exponent. His formation as a modernist, however, began not in Nouméa but on the island of Futuna.16 Michoutouchkine’s art gallery was a short-­lived affair; he closed it a few months after it opened to take a position as the manager of a trading store on Futuna, near Wallis. In doing this, he was continuing his travels, now directed toward the Pacific Islands, with the added intent of expanding his collection of Oceanic artifacts, begun during his time in New Caledonia. Soon after he left Nouméa, the story goes, Pilioko visited him in Futuna while en route to visit relatives in Wallis (its “sister” island). The visit turned into a two-­year sojourn together, painting, exploring, living with the locals, and consolidating their future partnership — ​­although its romantic phase was brief: “only at the beginning,” according to Pilioko.17 The time spent on Futuna changed both their lives. For Michoutouchkine, it shifted the tenor of his traveling adventure from its former aimlessness and escapism, and he acquired a sense of purpose. He would amass a collection of Oceanic artifacts with the idea of establishing a museum of Oceanic art in the Pacific Islands for Pacific Islanders, on the pretext that Islanders at the time did not (yet) recognize or appreciate the aesthetic and heritage value of their artistic traditions. The assumption was that the latter were either dying out or given to other purposes. Although never realized in the terms he originally imagined it, Michoutouchkine would pursue this goal in various ways for the rest of his life.18 A corollary objective was the role such a collection could play in his return to France, which he was already planning in the early 1960s.19 He would be the impresario of exhibitions of Oceanic art gathered by his own hands and exhibited in France and in other countries around the world. Pilioko, his protégé, would be an accomplice in these plans, a traveling 290 

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F I G U R E 1 1 . 3   Aloï Pilioko, Futunian Dancers, 1961. Oil on hardboard, 15 × 48 in. (38 × 122 cm). Collection of the artist. Image courtesy of Aloï Pilioko.

companion, a Pacific Islander who could open doors of welcome that might otherwise remain closed, and whose work could be exhibited alongside his own as a crucial part of these exhibitions. For Pilioko, the sojourn in Futuna marked his immersion into the ways of Western art making and consolidated his commitment to becoming a full-­time artist in the modern sense of the term — ​­unprecedented for a Pacific Islander at the time. Significantly, his “initiation” as such took place in Futuna, which is to say, in his own neighborhood, among his own people. His first oil paintings depicted things he knew from the familiar world of the village — ​­plants, flowers, birds, and animals. He painted them with an expressive immediacy that reflected their central place in his imagination, and they would become part of his permanent visual lexicon as his art developed. But he was also interested in observing and depicting people and the cultural life of the island, exemplified in a painting entitled Futunian Dancers (1961). In this somewhat awkward but ambitious little painting, he attempts to convey his impression of a costumed dance that he had witnessed during a local festival organized by the Catholic church (figure 11.3). In 1961 their project began in earnest. The two artists left Futuna and resettled on the island of Efate, where they managed to acquire a long-­term lease on a section of customary land near Port Vila. Calling it Esnaar, the property became their studio-­home, storage center, and base of operations. Between 1961 and 1967, the artists embarked on an intensive phase of traveling, exhibiting, collecting, and art making in the Pacific Islands before leaving for France and other parts of Europe. Their opener was a debut exhibition at the Port Vila Cultural Center, repeated in the hall of the French Institute of Oceania in Nouméa and (in 1962) the Papeete Museum in Tahiti. Staged within the urban network of artists discussed earlier, their exhibition — ​­especially Pilioko’s F alling into the W orld 

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F I G U R E 1 1 . 4  Pilioko

(second from right) with carvings, Santa Ana, Solomon Isles, 1963. Image courtesy of Aloï Pilioko.

F I G U R E 1 1 . 5  Nicolaï

Michoutouchkine (left) and Aloï Pilioko (right), Honiara, Solomon Isles, 1963. Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive. Image courtesy of Aloï Pilioko.

work — ​­commanded attention. Local newspapers immediately recognized the originality and cross-­cultural significance of his work as an Indigenous artist working in a Western mode in an art scene dominated by Europeans. Meanwhile, between these exhibitionary events, the artists made forays to various Pacific archipelagoes, traveling on passenger ships, interisland ferries, cargo boats, commercial airlines, private schooners (on which they hitched rides), and whatever other means of transportation could be co-­opted for their purposes. Relying on diplomatic contacts, church networks, personal referrals, and a sense of mission, they visited dozens of islands in the region, mounting ad hoc exhibitions in colonial museums, town halls, school rooms, airport lounges, churches, ship cabins, village plazas, hotel lobbies, and the like. They 292 

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made friends with the locals, shared meals in people’s homes, toured sights of interest, and acquired artifacts through trade, purchase, and gift. They ventured into rural regions in New Caledonia; they traveled through the rest of the Society Islands and parts of the Tuamotus; they made collecting forays into the New Hebrides (Efate, Espiritu Santo, Malekula, Vao, Atchin, Walla, Ambrym, and Rano.). In 1963 they ventured beyond the French Pacific, visiting the British Solomon Islands, including outer islands like Tikopia, Santa Ana, and Bellona (figures 11.4 and 11.5). The following year they exhibited in Adelaide, Sydney, Canberra, Tonga, and Fiji, and mounted a major collecting expedition to eastern New Guinea in 1964, visiting the Maprik region, the Sepik, and the Highlands (figure 11.6). In 1965 they visited Rotuma, Samoa, Wallis, Futuna,

FIGURE 11.6 

Snapshot from Michoutouchkine’s collecting expedition to northeastern New Guinea (exact location unknown), January 1964. Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive. Image courtesy of Aloï Pilioko.

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and every one of the Marquesan Islands (mounting exhibitions in each). In 1966, they returned to exhibit again in Papeete, Port Vila, and Nouméa. These were audacious undertakings, driven on one level by Michoutouchkine’s ambitions to create an Oceanic art museum and stage his return to France. His collecting activities, however, should not be misconstrued as some kind of rampant pillage, though they absolutely depended on his privileged position in island contexts at the time. The traffic in “tribal” artifacts has a long history in the Pacific, including the enormous boom during World War II. After the war, artifacts were readily obtainable for anyone who wanted them badly enough to travel to their source, whether that was a village, a local festival, a marketplace, or a tribal art depot. Private dealers and collectors were active in the region. Postwar development initiatives encouraged village cottage industries to produce local “arts and crafts” for sale to tourists and retail agents. Many anthropologists coupled fieldwork with acquiring collections. Furthermore, the recoding of Oceanic art as “art” by early modernists, radical and culturally challenging before the war, became increasingly normative after the war, legitimated by exhibitions like Arts of the South Seas (1946), at the Museum of Modern Art; 40,000 Years of Modern Art: A Comparison of Modern and Primitive (1949), at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; and Primitive Arts from Artists’ Studios (1967), at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. The universalization of art as a category across all cultures gave new impetus to institutional expeditions, like those of the Barcelona Museum and the Museum of Primitive Art in New York in the 1960s, and prompted the ambitions of private collectors and entrepreneurs like Michoutouchkine. His Pacific exhibitions were also innovative and generative. They were staged in places where art exhibitions were generally unfamiliar, but mounted for locals in a way that appealed to them, encouraging the revaluation of local arts and crafts.20 They inspired local artists, like Tivoa Vise in Tonga and Semisi Maya in Fiji, and were devoted to the cosmopolitan principle of exhibiting the artistic diversity of the region to itself. The exhibitions juxtaposed traditional items (like food bowls, spoons, masks, combs, pig tusks, mats, paddles, and tapa cloth) with contemporary works in Western formats by Pilioko (a modern Pacific artist), Michoutouchkine, and a couple of other artists who exhibited in this period with them: Frank Fay, who showed abstract sculptures; and a Tahitian woodcarver, Mara, originally from the Austral Islands. In this respect Michoutouchkine and Pilioko were “carriers” of a globalizing impulse at work in the very concepts of “art” and “exhibitions.” And local people demonstrated interest in the proposition. In Suva, for example, a Rotuman 294 

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artist who visited the exhibition at the Fiji Museum in December 1964 was taken by what he saw and invited Pilioko and Michoutouchkine to Rotuma for the Christmas-­related Fara celebrations. They went, staying with a local family and spending the days painting and sketching local sights so that their exhibition could reflect the place where it was staged. The show was hosted by local nuns — ​­the Sisters of Our Lady of Nazareth — ​­who sent out hand-­typed invitational leaflets announcing the display of “paintings and decorative work inspired by the people and scenes of Rotuma” by two “visiting artists” to be staged on a single day — ​­January 15, 1965 — ​­at St. Michael’s Primary School. The exhibition was a local event. Dignitaries gave speeches. The social elite dressed up. Lots of people came, interested to see works of art by a fellow Polynesian and the objects from the wider region in Michoutouchkine’s collection. Some brought examples of their own handicraft to show and compare.21 For Pilioko, the sheer heterogeneity of the cultures, histories, and modernities he encountered had a profound influence on how he saw his role as a modern artist. He came increasingly to identify as an artist of the Pacific, a painter of its “modern life,” a kind of Polynesian flaneur, at once immersed in and witness to the region’s complex modernity. This is not to say that he stopped being Wallisian or rejected his roots as a Wallis Islander. Rather, his gaze as a Wallisian was turned outward in every possible direction. Observing eyes were a signature motif in Pilioko’s work. Moreover, as a traveler in the Pacific, he came to apprehend the historical and geographic scope of his identity as an Islander. He met ancestral Polynesian cousins who lived in tropical villages like his own, and who had comparable languages, cultural practices, and colonial histories. In the Society Islands and the Marquesas, he met Islanders who spoke French as he did; in Tonga and Samoa, he was fascinated to see the islands and meet the people from whom Wallisians and Futunians had historically originated; in the New Hebrides, where he had become a recent resident, he was acquainting himself with Melanesian (and Polynesian) neighbors. In all these places, he was an artist conversing with locals about artifacts of interest to them from other parts of the Pacific. Tahitians, for example, were interested to see tapa cloth from Tonga and Wallis because they had stopped making it. As utopian as it may sound, Pilioko was discovering the Pacific’s cosmopolitanism and interconnections in the act of sharing it with his friend. The period was also one of intense artistic experimentation for Pilioko, as he began to search for more adequate formal means to represent his encounter with the Pacific and with himself as an Island modernist. He wanted to overcome the “dilemma” identified by Vilsoni Tausie between “traditionalism” F alling into the W orld 

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on the one hand and imitating Western art on the other.22 It was in Rotuma in 1965 that he made his artistic breakthrough in the invention of what he called his needle paintings: tapestries of colored wool embroidered on sacking from copra bales. The technique came from the modernity of the Pacific, colored wool having long been adopted by Island women and incorporated into customary textiles. Women in Wallis and Futuna used it to decorate the edges of woven mats, and Pilioko had witnessed similar techniques used by women in Tonga, Samoa, Nouméa, and Rotuma (and in many other places in the Pacific). This multilocality gave the technique a pan-­Pacific resonance that transcended any single location. The use of copra sacking was also a brilliant solution to the matter of his artistic identity as an Island modernist, alluding to his experience as a copra plantation laborer on Efate and signifying the centrality of the copra industry to the colonial Pacific as a region embedded in a system of world markets. It was a postcolonial masterstroke on Pilioko’s part to turn copra sacks — ​­metonymy of a declining colonialism — ​­into the signature medium of his new identity as an artist in a burgeoning new system of global art markets and world art display. Toward the end of 1966 Michoutouchkine and Pilioko were poised to depart for France and a new phase of their double act in the northern hemisphere. Works from Michoutouchkine’s collection and by Pilioko were to be included as part of a contemporary art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris called Comparisons 67, and two specifically Oceanic exhibitions featuring the collection and their contemporary work were lined up at the Abbey Prémontrés in Pont-­à-­Mousson and the Belfort Museum in Michoutouchkine’s hometown. Pilioko had been awarded a scholarship by the French government to study art in France, which he would use to train with the jewelry designer Line Vautrin. A gallery in Palm Springs in the United States expressed interest in exhibiting his tapestries, and other international opportunities were beginning to open up. In July 1966 the Tahitian newspaper Les Nouvelles announced a “world premiere” of Pilioko’s tapestries at the Baume, a small shop-­front gallery in Papeete.23 In many ways, the show marked the culmination of his formative years as an artist in the Pacific and the bridge to an expanded world of museums and exhibitions, which he and Michoutouchkine would each exploit on his own terms. A photograph of the Baume exhibition gives a sense of the vibrancy of Pilioko’s tapestries. They are presented as decorative wall hangings composed of patterns derived from tapa cloth designs and stylized images of birds, fish, and figures from Christ’s Passion rendered in flowing embroidered lines (figure 11.7). Not visible in the photograph but included 296 

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FIGURE 11.7 

Exhibition of tapestries by Aloï Pilioko, July 1966. The Baume, Papeete. Image courtesy of Aloï Pilioko.

in the exhibition was the tapestry Tattooed Women of Bellona, Solomon Isles (1966; plate 8), inspired by visits to the Solomon Islands and the drawings of nineteenth-­century Russian explorer and scientist Nikolai Miklouho-­Maclay. Michoutouchkine’s return to France with Pilioko was the beginning of a new phase of their exhibitionary project in other parts of the world. They exhibited in France, Switzerland, Sweden, and Mexico in the 1970s, as well as returning to locations in the Pacific like Fiji, New Zealand, Port Vila, Nouméa, and Papeete. From 1979 to 1987 they completed an extraordinary series of exhibitions in the former Soviet Union — ​­Michoutouchkine’s ancestral homeland — ​­supported by the USSR Academy of Sciences and Ministry of Culture and staged in primarily ethnographic museums in Moscow, Leningrad, Khabarovsk, Novosibirsk, Erevan, Sardarapat, Frunze, Samarcande, and Warsaw.24 In a sense their roles in this period were reversed, with Michou­ touchkine playing host to his Polynesian friend, showing him his regional “neighborhood,” while also discovering it for himself (figure 11.8). Michoutouchkine and Pilioko inhabit different positions, one might say, in the continuum — ​­or discontinuum — ​­between diaspora and indigeneity. In the case of Michoutouchkine, what is striking in the overall trajectory of his travels is the degree to which they were animated by what James Clifford calls a F alling into the W orld 

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FIGURE 11.8 

Aloï Pilioko and Nicolaï Michoutouchkine in Red Square, Moscow, 1980. From USSR photo album, Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive. Photographs by Peter Brunt. Images courtesy of Aloï Pilioko.

kind of “homing” or “indigenous desire.” 25 Home was never a straightforward place for the artist, born in the Cossack diaspora and opting for a life of continual travel. From 1961, however, those travels became more like looping returns toward different — ​­and equivocal — ​­sites of “home,” rather than the free wandering of the nomad. On the one hand, they were returns to the landscape of what he called “old Europe”: to the home of his youth, his parents’ exile, his Russian roots, his history.26 His tour through Russia reconnected him to an ancestral homeland he had never seen. He saw cultures and peoples who were both strange and strangely familiar to him, who spoke the language of his upbringing. He met a previously unknown brother, the child of his father’s first marriage, not heard from since his father’s exile (the message was “if you want us to survive, do not write”), as well as a niece, the grandchild of another of his father’s relationships.27 In multiple ways he discovered Russia and his “Russianness,” an identity that became increasingly important to him since 298 

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his permanent residence in Vanuatu. The irony of these returns is the role that collecting and exhibiting Oceanic art played in bringing them about. Whatever meaning those exhibitions had for Pacific Islanders, they were agents in Michoutouchkine’s reconnection with his own indigeneity and its turbulent history. On the other hand, his travels were also returns to the Pacific and his studio-­home at Esnaar, a “home” of his own construction, made over as a tourist destination and given to the rituals of hospitality to a constant stream of guests and visitors. Today it is a memorabilia museum of his travels with Pilioko, its gardens furnished with some of the remaining works from their collection. But it is also a place overshadowed by the decolonization of the New Hebrides during the span of his residence. Between 1961 and 1980, the New Hebrides went from a French-­British colony, where settlers and expatriates could make themselves “at home,” to the independent state of Vanuatu, in which political and cultural power shifted back to its Indigenous inhabitants. After independence and the fall of the Soviet Union, Michoutouchkine attempted to connect these disparate sites of home — ​­to suture, as it were, the wounds of history — ​­by positioning himself and his exhibitions as ambassadors of the new Oceania. He became a kind of cultural envoy for Vanuatu and recast his exhibitions to represent the postcolonial nation and its Pacific neighbors in Russia, France, and wherever else they traveled. His final effort in this vein was perhaps the most poignant. He commissioned a bronze bust memorializing Vasily Mikhailovich Golovnin, the first Russian navigator to visit the New Hebrides, who had landed in Tanna in 1809 and engaged in peaceful exchanges with the Natives. Sculpted and cast in Russia, the bust was erected in a formal diplomatic ceremony on the Port Vila waterfront in 2009, the year before Michoutouchkine died, and dedicated to the memory of his refugee parents.28 For Pilioko, by contrast, the connection to home was never existentially broken, despite migration and travel, despite modernity and becoming a modernist. As a traveler his sense of being Wallisian went with him. He became a “man of the world” precisely because he knew the place he came from, which was never in question. Pilioko embodies what Clifford calls, at the other end of the continuum, a “specifically indigenous kind of diasporism,” of “dwelling-­ in-­travel.” 29 Moreover, as a migrant in Vanuatu, Pilioko was actually not that far from home and by no means a new arrival. Regional connections predating European colonization by more than a thousand years linked the archipelago to a history of earlier Polynesian travelers and settlers, such that parts of VanF alling into the W orld 

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uatu are genetically, culturally, and linguistically Polynesian. Pilioko was not a stranger in the region, where these historical and genealogical connections are known and matter. He was in constant touch with family members and other Wallisians. And Esnaar for Pilioko was a completely island place, lushly planted, by the sea, full of roosters and other animals, hospitable, and adapted to the business of making art. From Pilioko’s origins in a church-­and custom-­dominated island colonized by France, he came to assert a radical autonomy over his own life, choosing to live it as an artist, an individual, a cosmopolitan, and an openly gay man. One work that might sum up the artistic authority he acquired over his own identity is Self-­Portrait with Bracelets (1974; plate 9), a joyous, exuberant tapestry that is the foil to Crucifixion of a Cockerel (see figure 11.2). Pilioko loves animals, but he also loves clothes and jewelry. One reporter in the 1970s described him as having “groovy taste in kofu, the Wallisian word for gear.” 30 Throughout his life, he has always been a fashionable and stylish dresser, and in ways that became increasingly flamboyant. In the tapestry he depicts himself as a figure dancing around the letters of his name, which have been disaggregated and “set free” to serve as decorative motifs in their own right, motifs that can be twisted, exaggerated, colored, and curled at the artist’s whim and pleasure. The portrait captures a lightness of being associated with camp self-­display, another dimension of his radical indigeneity. Pilioko may have always remained a Wallisian, but he was a Wallisian like no other. Notes Epigraph: Claude Lévi-­Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (London: Jonathan Cape [1955] 1973), 16. Many people have helped me in my research for this chapter. In particular I would like to thank Aloï Pilioko and his nephew George Pilioko for hosting me at Esnaar in 2013 and 2014 and allowing me access to Nicolaï’s scrapbooks and photo albums. I have referenced these as the Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive, Port Vila. I am also grateful to Max Shekleton in Nouméa for sharing his personal archive on the artists, referenced as the Max Shekleton archive, Nouméa. My perspective in this chapter is my own, but I have benefited enormously from conversations with Aloï Pilioko, Max Shekleton, Kirk Huffman, Chief Jerry Taki, Lissant Bolton, Elena Govor, George Pilioko, Emmanuel Kasarhérou, Nicholas Thomas, Leonie Brunt, Mark Adams, my colleagues in the Multiple Modernisms project, and the late Paul Gardissat. For help with translations, I thank Pauline Charrier, David Maskill, and Elena Govor; also Olga Suvorova of Russian Keys, Wellington. Research for this chapter has been supported by grants

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from the Research and Leave Committee, Victoria University of Wellington, and the Leverhulme Fund. 1. As he did on visits to the Soviet Union between 1979 and 1981, USSR scrapbook, Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive, Port Vila. 2. The artists’ story is recounted in dozens of newspaper articles and magazines. Three key sources for their general narrative are a biography of Michoutouchkine by Marie Claude Teissier-­Landgraf, The Russian from Belfort: Thirty-Seven Years’ Journey by Painter Nicolaï Michoutouchkine in Oceania (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, 1995); a short booklet on Pilioko by Michoutouchkine, Aloï Pilioko: Artist of the Pacific (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, undated [c. 1980]); and an exhibition catalog accompanying a 2007 retrospective of their work at the Tjibaou Cultural Center with essays by eight authors on various aspects of their life and work; see Gilbert Bladinières, ed., Nicolaï Michoutouchkine et Aloï Pilioko: 50 ans de création en Océanie, exhibition catalog (Nouméa, New Caledonia: Éditions Madrépores, 2008). The reference to Pilioko as an “artist of the Pacific” is from W. G. Coppell, “Pilioko, Creator of an Artistic Alliance,” Pacific Islands Monthly, July 1976, 45. 3. On Michoutouchkine’s travels in Asia, see Teissier-­Landgraf, Russian from Belfort, 1–6, 79–87; and the Asia scrapbooks, Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive, Port Vila. 4. Tessier-­Landgraf, Russian from Belfort, 81. 5. The details in this account are gleaned from newspaper clippings, exhibition posters, and invitations in the Asia scrapbooks, Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive, Port Vila. For general accounts of Michoutouchkine’s travels in Asia, see Teissier-­Landgraf, Russian from Belfort; and Gilbert Bladinières, “Nicolaï Michoutouchkine, amoureux de la couleur,” in Bladinières, Nicolaï Michoutouchkine et Aloï Pilioko, 13–23. 6. Michoutouchkine, Aloï Pilioko. This book has no attributed author but it is without doubt written by Michoutouchkine. 7. See Robert Aldrich, France and the South Pacific since 1940 (Hampshire: MacMillan Press, 1993); and Robert Aldrich and John Connell, France’s Overseas Frontier: Départements et Territoires d’Outre-­Mer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 8. James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-­First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 52. 9. Aldrich and Connell, France’s Overseas Frontier, 180. 10. There are no scholarly studies on this milieu as such. I posit it on the evidence of documentation in the Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive. For short biographies of artists active in the urban French Pacific, see Bernard Villechalane and Jean-­Jacques Syllebranque, Peintres de Nouvelle Caledonie du Vanuatu et des Wallis (Nouméa, New Caledonia: Les Editions du Cagou, 1981). For a general account of the art historical implications of coming to grips with global modernism, see Andreas Huyssen, “Geog-

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raphies of Modernism in a Globalizing World,” New German Critique 34, no. 1 (winter 2007): 189–207. 11. Tahiti Centre for Abstract Art, no. 12 (1965), Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive, Port Vila. 12. Villechalane and Syllebranque, Peintres de Nouvelle Caledonie, 97–104. 13. Daniel J. Sherman, French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945–1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3. 14. Sherman, French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, especially the final chapter, “Trouble in Paradise: Tourism and the Myth of Preservation in French Polynesia,” 153–90. 15. Nicolaï Michoutouchkine, interviewed by Marjorie Crocombe, “Aloi Pilioko and Pacific Art,” Pacific Islands Monthly, March 1973, 75–76. 16. See Christian Coiffier, “Futuna, catalyseur de la symbiose des deux artistes: Aloï Pilioko et Nicolaï Michoutouchkine,” Le Journal de la Société des Océanistes, nos. 122/123 (2006): 173–86; Christian Coiffier, “Le séjour à Futuna 1959–1961,” in Bladinières, Nicolaï Michoutouchkine et Aloï Pilioko, 79–81; and Teissier-­Landgraf, Russian from Belfort, 21–30. 17. Pilioko, personal communication, September 3, 2013. 18. Michoutouchkine first wanted to create a museum in Futuna (see Teissier-­ Landgraf, Russian from Belfort, 29), then in Wallis, and finally on his property at Esnaar near Port Vila. Architectural plans for an ambitious purpose-­built structure were prepared in the early 1970s in collaboration with Professor Jean Gabus, director of the Museum of Ethnography, Neuchâtel, Switzerland, but the project was never realized. The collection of several thousand pieces is today widely dispersed, with only a fraction remaining in Esnaar. Since the 1960s, works were loaned to hotels, airports, and friends in the French Pacific. Some works have been gifted to museums in Europe and Russia, and some 350 works are on long-­term loan to the Museum Pasifika in Bali, Indonesia (which opened in 2006). But none of this constitutes the museum Michoutouchkine originally envisioned. 19. Correspondence with the Belfort Museum, Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive. Further, Pilioko had been awarded a scholarship in 1964 by the French government to study art in France. 20. Exhibition brochure, Honiara, Solomon Islands, 1963, Pacific scrapbooks, Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive, Port Vila. The brochure described Michoutouchkine’s collection as “a travelling private collection for the revival of local arts and crafts and not for sale.” 21. Pacific scrapbooks, Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive, Port Vila. 22. Vilsoni Tausie, Art in the New Pacific (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies and the South Pacific Commission, 1980), 58. 23. Les Nouvelles, July 30, 1966, Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive, Port Vila.

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24. On their exhibitions in the Soviet Union, see Ludmilla Ivanova, “Souvenirs de Russie,” in Bladinières, Nicolaï Michoutouchkine et Aloï Pilioko, 141–42; Ludmilla Ivanova, “N. N. Mishutushkin and Exhibition: Ethnography and Art of Oceania,” Ethnographic Quarterly, no. 2 (2010): 97–110 (English translation courtesy of Olga Suvurova, Russian Keys, Wellington); Teissier-­Landgraf, Russian from Belfort, 51–64; Ethnography and the Art of Oceania, exhibition catalog (Moscow: Ministry of Culture of the USSR/Academy of Science of the USSR, 1989); and numerous newspaper articles and photographs in the Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive, Port Vila. 25. Clifford, Returns, 76. 26. “Old Europe” is a phrase used on a postcard, dated July 28, 1978, Max Shekleton archive, Nouméa. 27. See Teissier-­Landgraf, Russian from Belfort, 51–64; and Ivanova, “N.  N. Mishutushkin and Exhibition,” 108. 28. Ivanova, “N. N. Mishutushkin and Exhibition,” 110. 29. Clifford, Returns, 52. 30. “A Picasso of the South Pacific,” Sydney [?] Daily Telegraph, April 26, 1973. Clipping in Max Shekleton archive, Nouméa.

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ELIZABETH HARNEY

12 

CONSTELLATIONS

AND COORDINATES Repositioning Postwar Paris in Stories of African Modernisms

Deep in the bowels of the South African National Gallery, archival traces of the life of Gerard Sekoto are now held in orderly rows of identical cabinets. A painter of remarkable talents, Sekoto’s best-­known oils and pastels focused on both intimate and routine moments of modern life in the storied multi­ racial, multireligious communities of urban South Africa that were destroyed or forever altered by the encroachment of apartheid policies. Born in a small mission station in the Transvaal in 1913, Sekoto studied to be a teacher at Grace Dieu, a Diocesan college near Pietersburg. He then joined the teaching faculty at Khaiso High School in Polokwane, where, by good fortune and fate, he befriended emerging modernists such as Nimrod Ndebele, Louis Makenna, and, most importantly, Ernest Mancoba, a painter well ensconced in the burgeoning New African Movement at Fort Hare University.1 Most accounts agree that Sekoto’s connections with Mancoba afforded access to liberal white art circles, where he received training and steady patronage while living in Sophiatown, Johannesburg (1939–42); District Six, Cape Town (1942–45); and Eastwood, Pretoria (1945–47).2 Mancoba’s bold relocation to Europe soon provided impetus for an adventurous and restless Sekoto to follow suit. He left his homeland in 1947, living out an often penurious life in Paris, where he died in 1993 (figure 12.1). Encouraged by a devoted biographer in his later years, Sekoto recounted his

F I G U R E 1 2 . 1   Gerard Sekoto, Street Scene, 1942. Oil on board, 12.9 × 17.7 in. (33 × 45 cm). Iziko Museums of South Africa. Copyright the Gerard Sekoto Foundation/dalro.

thoughts and experiences in a series of letters, making his story particularly familiar to historians of African modernism.3 But even before that biographical volume appeared in 1988 (and an equally engaging biography in 2001), the artist had shared his thoughts on art and life in the pages of Présence Africaine (1959, 1969) and Time magazine (1949).4 In published form, these poignant writings reveal a life spent juggling the melancholy of exile and the demands of creativity. As a long-­time resident in Paris, he became well known within the itinerant communities of African expatriates, many of whom frequented his home or joined him in the bars and cafés of Saint Germain.5 Though absent from South Africa for most of his life, by the time of his death, the University of the Witwatersrand had awarded Sekoto an honorary degree (in 1989), and within a decade, he had been given no fewer than three retrospectives, the latest occurring in spring 2014.6 In the hushed and musty silence of a museum storeroom in Cape Town, C onstellations and C oordinates  

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however, the sharp contours of this life are blurred, the weight of his absence made most palpable in the heft of a battered suitcase, placed high atop one of the cabinets. Numerous accounts from those close to the artist cited the centrality of this suitcase in his quotidian life. For years, he stashed many a receipt, review, sheet of music, snapshot, letter, or sketch within it.7 After he died, it was found beneath his bed. Perhaps no greater symbol of mobility exists in our modern age of migrations. An object replete with spiritual and material resonance, a piece of luggage is a symbol “either of utopian new beginnings or of endings deemed tragic,” a temporary, make-­do place of belonging and an embodiment of unfulfilled homecomings.8 Irit Rogoff has argued that the “suitcase is seen as the moment of rupture, the moment the subject is torn out of the web of interconnectedness that contained him or her through an invisible net of belonging.” 9 For Sekoto, it marked the literal and emotional journey outward to a life of exile, where he broke free of the strictures that constrained his artistry and circumscribed his modernity.10 Sekoto’s recollections bear a telling resemblance to those of another pioneering African modernist, Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian, a painter of Armenian-­Ethiopian parentage who spent over a decade in Paris in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In contrast to Sekoto, Boghossian arrived with funding, knowledge of French, and a ready-­made community of Armenians that sheltered him in the city. After a brief sojourn in London, he chose Paris to attend classes at the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts and La Grande Chaumière (1957–66). Over his many years of practice, he testified to the critical role his time in Paris played in the shaping of his work.11 More precisely, it was his introduction to the inner circles and salons of black modernism and politics, including acquaintance with Sekoto, that proved most educational. These two artists surely knew one another in Paris, as evidenced by a photo held within Sekoto’s archive (figure 12.2) and in interviews with the younger Boghossian, who referred to the senior South African as the “elder.” But the nature of this relationship, and of those forged among many other artists in postwar Paris from former colonies within the crumbling French empire and beyond, has yet to be adequately examined.12 In this chapter I look at the overlapping experiences of these two modernists, both residents in Paris in the immediate postwar era and subsequently claimed as pioneering modernists in new African nations, from which they had lived in exile for most of their lives. Through the lens of two overlapping yet divergent practices, I ask fundamental questions about how we write the histories of the circuitous and constellated relations that characterized mo306 

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F I G U R E 1 2 . 2   Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian (left) and Gerard Sekoto (right) in a Parisian café, 1965–1967. Photographer unknown. Iziko Museums of South Africa. Copyright the Gerard Sekoto Foundation.

dernity at mid-­twentieth century. I build on well-­established conversations about the “trans­modernity” of black Paris in the preceding interwar years, when black students, artists, performers, and writers from the continent, the Caribbean, and America advanced counter­discursive models of modernist subjectivity in response to the established European epistemes of “the Other.” 13 The artistry of these two painters speaks to the pleasures and pains of exile, so poignantly detailed by Edward Said as a condition that is “strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience.” 14 While each arrived in Paris and stayed for various reasons, displacement and migrancy brought forth “awareness” and a “plurality of vision” that enabled them to view the world “contrapuntally.” 15 A tight focus on these two pioneers is intentionally C onstellations and C oordinates  

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“biographical,” highlighting enunciation and place making as radical, anticolonial, and antiprimitivist efforts. Though their work is viewed as “outmoded” in some art historical quarters, documenting the lives of these modernists is a critical step in understanding the complex, contradictory, and contested constitution of colonial modernity and its aftermath. Rather than assuming a singular modernity bracketed or tempered by a set of alternative modernities, this chapter envisions a multisited, entangled set of coordinates, wrought by the unevenness of imperial capital and characterized by the possibilities of cosmopolitanism.16 It seeks to recognize different and often overlapping registers of belonging — ​­to nation, race, or ethnicity; ideological or political space; generation or profession; cosmopolitan, diasporic, or exilic communities. This focus might encourage further reflection on how the repatriation of Sekoto’s archive from France to South Africa has shaped contemporary tellings of South Africa’s modernism (and those of his modernity and indigeneity).17 What does it mean to repatriate his legacy to a national space that he lived away from for most of his life, and that did not recognize him as a citizen, yet one that figured large in his imagination? How does the historical narrative change when we view Skunder Boghossian’s works from Addis Ababa circa 1960 rather than or in addition to the lens provided by postwar African American or Parisian arenas? Within the growing scholarship on nationalist and postcolonial modernisms, has the revaluation of these modernists’ legacies threatened to erase their contributions to cosmopolitan modernist networks in postwar Paris, London, or Dakar? Perhaps we could reimagine or resituate Sekoto as a great observer of postwar French culture, “subjecting Paris to the gaze and the commentary of the Black African outsider,” as writers in the literary genre of “Parisianism,” or “migritude fiction,” chose to do, delineating the complicated site of black modernity within the Hexagon.18 Perhaps, through his sketches, he was able to reverse the colonial gaze, critique a deeply flawed French modernity, and, at the same time, clear a space for himself within an imaginable decolonial humanism.19 It has been more than thirty years since Serge Guilbaut wrote his now famous work on How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1985).20 With the passage of time, the intrigues of international Cold War politics may have shifted, but the general assessment of the decline of artistic practice in Paris in the wake of the war’s horrors and the rise of American power has been slow to change. Even the growing art historical scholarship in response to his writings, with its revised attention to nouveau réalisme, lettrism, art brut, the 308 

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Situationist International, and the visual cultures around 1968, has repeatedly failed to assert a more textured and subtle view of the cosmopolitan realities in which their subjects operated.21 Indeed, despite many years of postcolonial and postmodernist theoretical challenges, the scholarship, market, and popular understandings of postwar European art are only just beginning to register the presence and intellectual labors of these artists. Achille Mbembe’s efforts to recharacterize postwar French history as inherently transnational, and Hannah Feldman’s masterful volume From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962 (2014), in which she argues that postwar culture should be approached “as equally rooted in the experiences of the colonies as it is in those of the metropole,” have gone some way in rectifying this lacuna.22 In Okwui Enwezor’s groundbreaking exhibition The Short Century (2001), he encouraged his audiences to reassess the influence of the Algerian revolution on the tenor of later liberation movements, civil rights activism, anti-­Vietnam protests, and student strikes. Here, in the exhibitionary world detailed by Enwezor, Africa and its migrants are not marginalized but, rather, central to twentieth-­century intellectual and political history.23 Similarly, Paul Gilroy has recently insisted that we need to recognize the long-­standing “pockets of South in the West” to better understand the valences of contemporary diaspora.24 Yet, even Gilroy’s paradigm shift fails to make sufficient room for the connective tissues of the postwar moment that sees artists moving between and across hitherto impenetrable divisions of empire. Historian Tony Ballantyne’s work on the social formation of the British Empire is helpful here in its highlighting of the circulation of ideas and individuals through modes of “horizontal mobility.” 25 By identifying forms of movement and cultural traffic that linked colonies within the “periphery,” he breaks the multiple modernities and postcolonial models with their center-­periphery axes. While he envisions this lateral movement as occurring within the arc of the British Empire, it is becoming increasingly apparent that a closer examination of connections in places like postwar Paris, Mexico City, Havana, or Moscow will show imperial borders to be porous and movements to be categorically inter-­and trans­national as well as tricontinental.26 A peripatetic artist such as Skunder Boghossian, for example, was present and active in more than one modernist hotspot, participating in the Negritude circles of Paris, then contributing to the black arts movement in Atlanta and Chicago, while looking toward philosophical and formal practices emanating from Latin America. He was what theorist Nestor Canclini might call a modernist “cross-­pollinator.” 27 C onstellations and C oordinates  

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A South African in Paris Before leaving South Africa, Sekoto harbored ambitious plans for a life of travel, later noting, “I had worked out a programme but kept it to myself since I was not sure what lay ahead. My intention was to work for a couple of years, make a rapid tour of Europe and return to Paris to digest the tour. Later, I wanted to make a slower tour through certain African countries and then come back again to France to make a synthesis of my personal feelings and then finally settle in one part of Africa.” 28 In 1983, after close to forty years of life in Paris, he recalled the details of his early days in Europe, writing, When I was in London, I stayed in a youth hostel with a piano and I used to amuse myself with it. An Indonesian man said “look, if you are going to Paris, and it does not matter that you are a painter, I have a friend who owns a restaurant. I will give you his address and you go and see him. . . . And that is where I struck on the job of piano player. . . . It was easy at the time. . . . [I]t was then that a Martiniquan chap, a medical student, advised me to come and live in the Saint Michel area. . . . I wandered by chance into a club on rue Jacob with a Jamaican photographer friend of mine — ​­they had a piano and I started playing, I landed another job.29 What is remarkable about this anecdote is not the easy manner in which a black painter from South Africa slips into employment as a jazz pianist on the Left Bank of Paris, but the extent to which his story of exile within a highly cosmopolitan, postwar milieu is not unique. Here, in one short paragraph, modernity’s cross-­cultural character and networked nature is on display. While we do not know the identities of the Jamaican photographer, the Indonesian man, or the Martiniquan student, their overlapping worlds remind us to pay close attention to what Eric Wolf called the “bundles of relationships” at the heart of history.30 Gerard Sekoto and Skunder Boghossian were not the only ones to make their way to Europe. They soon found companionship with Brazilian Wilson Tiberio, Ivoirian Christian Lattier, Senegalese Papa Ibra Tall and Iba Ndiaye, and many others from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and the Near East, all of whom immigrated to the city of light, supported by a mix of state and private sponsorship, and driven by ambition or obligation, curiosity or wanderlust. They shared sidewalk cafés, drawing studios, dance clubs and gallery spaces with African American artists like Herbert Gentry, Ed Clark, Harold 310 

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Cousins, and Beauford Delaney, whose better-­known presence abroad was sponsored by the GI Bill or supported by white American philanthropy.31 Some salons are well known to have nurtured cross-­cultural exchanges in this critical era of decolonizing modernity — ​­those of Madame Rousseau, an avid collector of “tribal” materials, who gathered surrealists and colonial artists alike; of the Nardal sisters from Martinique, who hosted African, Caribbean, African American, and Middle Eastern writers; of André Breton, whose weekly café meetings attracted European, Caribbean, and Latin American modernists; and of Ossip Zadkine’s atelier, held within the walls of La Grande Chaumière, which was a gathering point for African, Latin American, Native American, and African American artists — ​­the last group having met him during his stay over the war years at the Art Students League in New York.32 As their biographies attest, all these artists had linkages (some solid, some tenuous) with a plurality of avant-­gardist and political and cultural activist circles; most frequented the École des Beaux Arts, or less conventional art schools such as Académie Julien or La Grande Chaumière. The latter school poses a fascinating set of possibilities for the study of overlapping, intersecting, and mutually synthesizing modernist practices, as it hosted so many sojourning artists in its daily live-­model open-­sketching classes. Anyone with a few centimes could attend. This practice of rotating and undocumented attendance, of course, makes tracing the threads of relationships formed within its halls opaque and, therefore, all the more intriguing. As historian Arlette Farge observed more generally of the archive, “The physical pleasure of the rediscovered trace is followed by the doubt mixed with impotence caused by not knowing what to do with it.” 33 Yet reexamining this postwar archive, reimagining Paris as a deeply trans­ national space of shared desires, allows one to position these artists as cocreators of a modernism that was consciously international, albeit locally framed within their diasporic networks. They developed their practices in the shadow of the Algerian revolution, within the psychic and political struggles of decolonization and “third-worldism,” and against the backdrop of postwar sociocultural revolutions and developing Cold War politics. These sociopolitical factors demanded consideration of art’s potential for action and efficacy.34 Poignant accounts of life in immediate postwar Paris left by expatriates and exiles such as James Baldwin and Es’kia Mphahlele, and later by photographer Gordon Parks, paint a picture of a rough yet invigorating place, where a shared sense of survival (along the breadlines or in the unheated flats) fostered a certain openness toward cosmopolitanism.35 Sekoto notes, “In the city of C onstellations and C oordinates  

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Paris, everybody has the right to make himself at home, without being ordered about or told what to do. The individual is not encircled by barbed wire, which might attract the attention of the intruder. It is this unguarded ‘togetherness’ which has always drawn people who desire personal freedom. The presence of this wisdom has thus strengthened my self-­confidence and increased my respect for this great metropolis, which I now consider and feel to be my second home after Africa.” 36 Skunder Boghossian recounts a similar response to his decade in Paris: “At the time, Paris was a cultural centre, a place where cultures intersected. It was a part of one’s normal growth to go there to get caught in these currents, and they would in turn bring you to other currents, and so on. One could make out a definition for oneself, the world, and the universe right there in Paris. You had the brightest minds from Africa and the diaspora at the time. There they would come together and talk for the first time about their various experiences.” 37 Thus, while this chapter tells the story of just two men making their way through the circuitry of modernity, it also, inevitably, provides glimpses into histories big and small, central and peripheral, interconnected and overlapping. Indeed, this story enables us to question how empire figured within the character of postwar European artistic practices and philosophical debate (even as a denial or a willful forgetting) and stands in contradistinction to the received narratives of postwar art history. But, I argue, the associations that these exiled and “colonial” artists made with one another within the spaces of diaspora and the orbit of emergent midcentury nationalisms are as relevant to our reframing of modernity as any rewrite of European modernism.

The Coordinates of Pan-­Africanism and Transmodernity Soon after their arrivals in Paris, both Gerard Sekoto, in 1947, and Alexander Boghossian, in 1957, were swept into the circles of black intellectuals debating decolonization, pan-­Africanism, and cultural revaluation. Sekoto, like many other young artists at the time, attended the first and second Negro Artists and Writers congresses, held in Paris (1956) and in Rome (1959), while Skunder made it to the second. These critical events, organized by Alioune Diop, founder of the cultural journal Présence Africaine, gathered a formidable array of intellectuals from the black Atlantic to “create the inventory of black cultures and to analyze the responsibilities of western culture in colonization and racism.” 38 Pablo Picasso was asked to design the poster for the first conference in 1956. 312 

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F I G U R E 1 2 . 3  Gerard

Sekoto, poster for the Second Conference of Negro Writers and Artists, Rome, 1959. Iziko Museums of South Africa. Copyright the Gerard Sekoto Foundation/dalro.

As self-­consciousness around modern international blackness continued to shift, however, at the end of the decade, the organizers asked Gerard Sekoto to design the advertisement for the second gathering in Rome (figure 12.3). At that conference, he also delivered a thoughtful testimony on the plight of the South African modern artist. In language that drew on pan-­Africanist precedents, he told his audience, “While the South African Negro artist is being exposed from day to day to scenes that have taught him to close his eyes and hide his tears . . . [i]n art, the colour line is a lie, and could be a crime when it is imposed upon the minds of human beings.” 39 Christine Eyene has asserted, “To place Sekoto’s art within the time frame of, and in relation to, Negritude is important in grounding the relevance of his oeuvre within a French and pan-­ African narrative. But it also exposes it to the criticism and contradictions that affected and characterised the Negritude movement.” 40 Her attempt to recuperate his legacy within a broader pan-­African milieu is tinged with disappointment as she grapples with Sekoto’s seemingly uncritical stance. Much has been written on the limited criticality and self-­primitivizing of Negritude’s proponents, by contemporaries and more recent critics, but surely the most C onstellations and C oordinates  

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interesting questions she can now ask have to do with how Sekoto’s growing exposure to black internationalism, engagements in pancolonial circles, and Negritude discourse manifested themselves in his work.41 As is well known, in 1966 Sekoto ended his exile from Africa, traveling with his friend, Brazilian painter and activist Wilson Tiberio, to Senegal for the Premier Festival mondial des arts nègres, an occasion positioned as the successor to the congresses in Europe and now seen as a key antecedent to the multiple biennials on the continent today. Sekoto was invited at the request of president Léopold Sédar Senghor (in part through the connections the artist had made with Senghor’s nephew in Paris), and his presence was documented in the local press.42 Taken by the colors and rhythms of Senegalese life, particularly in the southern rural region of Casamance, Sekoto stayed on after the festivities, as a guest of the president. Notes from the period indicate that he relished the experience of living among blacks who moved about freely in their daily lives and who, after recent struggles of decolonization, could dream of postcolonial futures. Yet because of the prevalence of Islam and the unfamiliar local customs and languages (not much French was spoken in rural areas), Sekoto remained an outsider, sketching from the sidelines, as he had often felt himself to be within his adopted home of Paris. The copious sketches Sekoto made in the Casamance region suggest a continuing reliance on the medium of drawing, whose succinctness and speed allowed him to chronicle the everyday (figure 12.4). Until quite recently, critics opted to see the works of his Senegalese sojourn, if they have considered them at all, as romanticized, perhaps misguided mediations of an authentic Africa rather than as insightful observations of a modern milieu.43 This period represents perhaps the most understudied part of the migrant nature of Sekoto’s work. Both the artist and Senghor characterized his output from this period as a “return to sources,” if not quite a return home.44 In several detailed sketches, Sekoto seems to synthesize his multisited modernist experiences. The masquerades, whose choreography and composition he had studied, coexist with or are superimposed over urbane Toucouleur market women and the classical bridges that span the Seine (figure 12.5). So, like other aesthetic practices emerging out of the discursive space of Negritude, Sekoto’s sketches are consciously hybrid — ​­presenting a whimsical, reimagined heritage and a compelling look at the modes of Senegalese modernity. Multiple accounts have read the sheer volume of Sekoto’s sketches in the village squares of Senegal and in local Parisian bars and jazz clubs as evidence of an unfocused mind, a weakening of purpose, and a lack of grand artistic gesture — ​­pen 314 

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F I G U R E 1 2 . 4   Gerard Sekoto, Senegalese Women, 1966. Gouache on paper, 14 × 22 in. (36 × 55 cm). Iziko Museums of South Africa. Copyright the Gerard Sekoto Foundation/dalro.

or pencil replaces the brush, Left Bank bohemia supplants the social realism of the black townships.45 While South Africa continued to be a central muse in Sekoto’s choice of subject matter, particularly in the poignant watercolor series Memories of Sharpeville (1960; figure 12.6) and in his many writings, the recent publication and exhibition of a wider array of his work has made it clear that local Parisian life consumed much of his attention. Even in his days in South Africa, sketching had always been a part of his process. In his letters he noted, Although much of the time I would feel scared to enter too deep into the most dangerous seeming hide-­outs of District Six, I hovered within arm’s length, observing and making sketches in a very acrobatic style. This meant making quick sketches in such a manner that an observer would imagine I was noting down some forgotten names of articles I needed to buy or notes I had to attend to. But shortly I would go to the studio to work upon these sketches on pieces of paper, which were reminders to me.46 This early and repeated reliance on sketching must also be attributed to questions of safety and access. A black man remaining in one spot, deeply conC onstellations and C oordinates  

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F I G U R E 1 2 . 5   Gerard Sekoto, Untitled, 1969. Drawing in ink, 4.7 × 7 in. (12 × 18 cm). Iziko Museums of South Africa. Copyright the Gerard Sekoto Foundation/dalro.

templating his surroundings, was a prime suspect for security forces. He had to show correct papers even to traverse sections of his city for inspiration, let alone in pursuit of materials or markets. And by Sekoto’s account, the prevalence of sketching during his Parisian days was intentional. “Throughout all these years I have been in a lot of places drawing street-­scenes, café-­scenes, metro-­scenes, market-­scenes and dance-­scenes but I am going to revise all these in time. At first, I deliberately economized my Johannesburg and District Six bright colours and applied them later after having thoroughly observed my new surroundings and being in better command of construction.” 47 The existing literature on Sekoto’s long career has favored a narrative arc that moves from mastery of material, technique, and vision in his early years in South Africa to waning talent and stagnation caused by hardship, heartbreak, and isolation in his Paris years, yet key interventions by friends and colleagues, such as Christine Eyene, George Hallett, Es’kia Mphahlele, and Noel Chanbanyi Manganyi, focus on his enduring humanity, his critical engagements with other exiles, and his commanding painting practices.48 Repositioning our reading of postwar France (as Hannah Feldman might have it) as a waning colonial power still at war, and Paris as a colonial space in which “the specter of ‘empire’ guided the self-­identification of its residents as well 316 

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F I G U R E 1 2 . 6   Gerard Sekoto, Memories of Sharpeville, 1960. Watercolor on paper, 12 × 19.3 in. (30.5 × 49 cm). Iziko Museums of South Africa. Copyright the Gerard Sekoto Foundation/dalro.

as their social and political interactions,” may enable us to envision Sekoto’s repeated engagement and fascination with his adopted capital’s quotidian life as an agency “embedded in the act of occupying and utilizing city spaces.” 49

“Falling under the Influence” — ​­Surrealism and the Politics of Postwar Blackness Barely out of his teenage years, the Ethiopian painter Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian, son of a well-­connected Armenian family in Addis Ababa, received a generous bursary from Emperor Haile Selassie to study in London at St. Martin’s School of Art and the Central School of Art (1955–57). Though he remained there only briefly before heading to Paris, he often credited his short time in these formal academies as critical to finding “a visual grammar to apply to his heritage.” 50 In particular, his well-­developed drawing skills remained central to his imagining of compositional space. The young painter enjoyed a successful solo exhibition at Galerie Lambert in 1964. But despite early acclaim and wide renown (his works were first collected by the Musée de l’art moderne in 1963 and the Museum of Modern Art soon thereafter), critical understanding of the place of his work within broader histories of modernism remains nascent and speculative.51 C onstellations and C oordinates  

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Boghossian’s story is typical of a generation of Ethiopians educated largely abroad through government bursaries during the 1950s and repatriated to form the backbone of Selassie’s civil service and creative class.52 Son of a close-­ knit immigrant community of professionals, who were multilingual, educated, and cosmopolitan, he was also privy to the spirituality and artisanship of the Orthodox Armenian and Ethiopian churches.53 Skunder’s father was a member of the Imperial Guard who fought against and was later imprisoned by the Italians for much of the artist’s early childhood. His father’s imprisonment left an indelible antiimperialist mark on the young boy. Boghossian’s early art training in Ethiopia is not unlike that of others in early to mid-­twentieth-­century colonial environments.54 He found a mentor first in Stanlislaus Chocknajki, a Polish-­Canadian art historian and amateur watercolorist who became a key figure in the workings of the local art world, and later in French-­Canadian writer and filmmaker Pierre Goubet, who provided Boghossian with access to a library of reproductions of European modernist works.55 Skunder moved to Paris in 1957 and spent almost a decade there, studying, networking, and teaching at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where he worked under the maître d’atelier surrealist, Henri Goetz.56 Though he returned to Addis Ababa for a mere three years to teach in the art academy and to exhibit in embassies and fledgling galleries before departing permanently for the United States, Boghossian’s influence on the art scene in Addis Ababa was profound. He is still remembered as one of the three pioneering Ethiopian modernists (the other two were Aferwerk Tekle and Gebre Kristos Desta).57 As one critic argued, “Skunder’s work came to be regarded not as an individual’s creation, but as simply Ethiopian.” 58 Skunder’s time in Paris in the company of Madame Rousseau and Negritude circles (which included prominent anthropologists and exponents of existentialism and leftist politics) encouraged him to explore the riches of African heritage. Unsurprisingly, the visual language in which he chose to describe this awakening drew from vanguardist and reigning ethnographic theories of mentalité primitive, which emphasized the mystical, the irrational, and the fetishistic. He remembered, Most important (in Paris) I discovered two things: first African Art and then Paul Klee. For a year I made daily visits to the African section of the Musée de l’Homme, studying the masks, the totems, and fetish dolls. This wasn’t a study of forms for me, I was discovering African 318 

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Art, apart from my Ethiopian tradition; and all that I absorbed became part of me as well as my painting. After this, came Klee. In his work, I found everything — ​­magic, poetry, humour, mysticism. His language of significant signs spoke to me, and I began to see a range of possibilities in a line and how much it could convey. In his masks, I also saw a soul in close communication with the roots of Africa.59 Under the circumstances of colonial modernity, artists from outside Europe often appraised local aesthetic forms, materials, or genres through the mediation of modernist primitivism. Skunder’s reflections recall those of Nigerian modernist Uche Okeke, with his concerted efforts to reimagine local available forms to suit an antiprimitivist and anticolonial politics needed for the moment of decolonization and nation building.60 They also bring to mind the musings of George Morrison or Bill Reid, both of whom, under very different circumstances, harnessed silenced or reenvisioned Indigenous heritage for their own modernist practices.61 For Boghossian and Sekoto, these reflections were refracted through the lens of black Paris and the distinctive European bundling of ethnography and vanguardism. As Skunder stayed in Paris, he increasingly aligned himself with the politics and practices of surrealism, drawn particularly to its Caribbean translations in the works of Léon Damas, Etienne Léro, Aimé Césaire, and Wifredo Lam.62 While the radical anticolonialism and antiracism of European surrealists like Breton, who had famously co-­organized, with the Anti-­ Imperialist League, the Truth about the Colonies exhibition in 1931 and, thirty years later, drafted the Manifeste des 121 (1960) to protest the treatment of Algerians by the French during the war, surrealism in the hands of black modernists could act as a weapon of the culturally dispossessed. The political freedoms brought into play through surrealist fragmentation, imaginative reassembling mixed with humanist sentiment spoke strongly to Boghossian, whose own sense of belonging to pan-­African circles rested on a dissection and reassertion of multiple measures of heritage. As one critic argued, “Skunder reinterprets the aesthetic function with a happy mingling of antiquity and modernity, using modern materials (acrylic, gouache, spray paint, etc.) upon surfaces employed by his ancestors (animal skin).” 63 Notably, critics see Boghossian’s modern imagery not as a diminishment of authentic traditions but rather as a modern play on ancient heritage. “Antiquity” used here implies a knowable and venerable history of artistic practice, while the use of the term “tradition” in the literature refers primarily

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F I G U R E 1 2 . 7   Skunder Boghossian, Spring Scrolls, 1983–1984. Acrylic on canvas, 50.3 × 71.7 in. (128 × 182.2 cm). Photograph by Franko Khoury. National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution. Museum purchase, 9-18-1.

to ahistorical practices. The reception of Boghossian’s canvases skirts, to some extent, the labels of “primitive” and “tribal” — ​­this unique positioning, coupled with the lack of colonial rule in Ethiopian modern history, afforded him a place apart. Some authors have described Boghossian’s surrealist proclivity as an instance of “falling under the influence” of the movement, while others suggest that it aligned “naturally” with the mystical aesthetics inherent in Ethiopian magical scrolls, to which the young painter might be linked through a primordial relationship (figure 12.7).64 For example, in an early review of his works in America, critic Tritobia Benjamin argued that Skunder “drank from the succulent substance of creativity. . . . [T]he spirits of his ancestors embraced him and formed the basis of an art, significant and enriching, imbued with power.” 65 In Boghossian’s painted hide scrolls, which seem to be arrested at the moment of unfurling, as if about to offer guidance or solace, one can glimpse iconographic and formal references to long-­established visual traditions (figure 12.8). And yet, according to friend and critic Solomon Deressa, the artist’s concerted investigation of these forms probably took place not in Addis, but in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.66 320 

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Skunder Boghossian, Ju ju’s Wedding, 1964. Tempera and metallic paint on cut and torn cardboard, 21 × 20 in. (53.5 × 50.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund. FIGURE 12.8 

Perhaps Boghossian furthered his relationship to surrealism through a friendship with Max Ernst and his work under Henri Goetz. Skunder’s engagement with the ideas of this movement is best illustrated by his magnificent and densely crafted work Night Flight of Dread and Delight (1972), where fantastical cosmic spirits seem to hover within a crystalline structure between C onstellations and C oordinates  

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F I G U R E 1 2 . 9   Skunder Boghossian, Night Flight of Dread and Delight, 1964. Oil on canvas with collage, 56.6 × 62.6 in. (143.7 × 159 cm). North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. Purchased with funds from the North Carolina State Art Society, Robert F. Phifer Bequest.

our world and theirs (figure 12.9). Like many of his masterpieces, the characters in this work reside only temporarily in the spaces they inhabit and are in danger of shifting or reforming before our eyes. Other works, such as Time Cycle III (1981), are influenced by ritual objects made in bark that Skunder encountered during one of his west African sojourns (plate 10). In Time Cycle III, the artist seems intent on destabilizing narrative time, presenting a cosmic arena that questions the permanence of our memories and our hold on time’s passing. Though Boghossian’s work is often compared to that of Afro-­Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, there are conflicting accounts as to whether the two ever met. Certainly, however, they shared a number of friends within the Parisian art world, notably André Breton, Amedeo Modigliani, and André Masson. Boghossian’s recollection of his stirring encounter with a small piece by Lam, 322 

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exhibited in the window of a London gallery, reads as a classic modernist epiphany.67 He wrote, In passing I just happened to look in a small gallery. I saw a drawing in the window that actually gave me a bodily shock. So impressed by the dramatic play of forces and the supernatural quality in the work, I really couldn’t move. I don’t know how long I stood there. That was Lam. When I finally went inside, I was startled again by Matta. In his paintings there was cosmic coordination in space and time and his metallic rhythms vibrated in such a way that the canvases seemed to move. The effect of all this was confusion about my work but eventually that confusion became a suggestion.68 In Boghossian’s account of his encounter with Lam’s work, we have further evidence of the productive and generative possibilities brought forth by the cross-­pollination of visual forms and mythologies available to him as a modernist in Europe at midcentury through the works of other sojourning artists, refracting experiences of oppression and resistance. For artists from areas long relegated by art history to be “beyond the pale” of the modern, “influence” is read as a mark of “derivativeness” and therefore a stain their proponents must continue to expunge.69 The kind of encounter Boghossian describes, in which an artiste-­flâneur experiences both intellectual and somatic effects in front of a work of art produced by another modernist from outside the metropole, goes some way toward rescuing his work from this assumption.70 As Benjamin argued in her early review of his works for an American audience, “His stay abroad did not produce a mime of foreign models; instead, those trends of modern art were digested, massaged, and molded into his own style.” 71 In a similar vein, Solomon Deressa labored to explain comparisons between Boghossian’s and Paul Klee’s oeuvre, writing, “It is strange that this erroneous tracing of an artistic family tree should have proceeded, if not with Skunder’s active encouragement, definitely with his acquiescence. Nor is this the first time that Skunder has let stand a misreading of the pedigree of his work. It is possible that he reads all comments on his work as irrelevant. It is also possible that he feels out of his element in the realm of words.” 72 At pains to explain the manner in which the artist contributes to narration of his place in modernism, Deressa finally argues on grounds of coincidence, noting that both modernists appear to be “tapping from the same well but with very different motivations.” 73 In such instances, one is struck by the richness contained C onstellations and C oordinates  

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within the web of modernity. We know, for instance, that Boghossian read Klee’s published journal, and we also know that Klee credited his time in Tunisia as the moment that pushed him toward true abstraction. Under the weight of entangled French primitivist and orientalist imaginaries, a North African sojourn could “stand in” for other parts of the continent. On a purely formal level, Klee’s interest in language and inscription, music and notation, design and detail seemed to parallel the aesthetic pursuits of the Ethiopian painter. During this fruitful decade in Paris, Skunder also made important links to America, befriending Merton Simpson, the well-­known African American painter, collector, and gallerist.74 Through overlapping expatriate circles, which often came together in Parisian jazz clubs, Boghossian arrived with introductions to communities of African American modernists. After a mere three years in his post in the School of Fine Arts in Addis, in the late-­1960s he moved to Atlanta, a site that the artist remembered in his later writings as the Paris of African American culture.75 He recalled, “Atlanta was very transitional period for me. It allowed for a continuation of my own efforts in finding my heritage. I was in another part of the world among African people who were experiencing self-­discovery.” 76 In America, Skunder’s developing practice intersected and engaged with the Chicago AfriCOBRA movement. Eventually, his interactions with abstractionist Jeff Donaldson led him to a long-­term post at Howard University. When Ethiopia underwent its socialist revolution, followed by the Red Terror, Skunder’s expatriate meanderings became those of a permanent exile. At Howard University and in his Atlanta circles, he was considered “a real brother” — ​­hailing from a place never colonized, with a strong history of black monarchy and Christianity.77 From that time, his works have been received broadly and largely uncritically as visions of lost heritage and the mysteries of the spirit. From his base in Washington, D.C., Skunder continued to circulate within a pan-­African sphere, making numerous long trips to Nigeria and parts of central Africa, from which he drew material and spiritual and visual inspiration. And though the artist had first become acquainted with Latin American arts and artists in Paris and London, a subsequent life of multiple migrations aided him in deepening the linkages he envisioned between the shared histories of capitalist oppression and cultural struggle that informed their arts. Contextualizing his works within a larger African American or tricontinental sphere presents interesting challenges of translation and misreading. These relationships and his sustained attention to the modernist

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expressions of Latin America suggest intriguing possibilities for transmodern scholarship and invite our further attention.

“Vantage Points from which the World Appears Black”: Migrant Artists in Paris in the 1950s Several elements unite the stories of Boghossian and Sekoto. Both received their first artistic training with expatriates or European-­educated mentors. Both asserted a fervent connection to jazz, the consummate pan-­African art form of the twentieth century — ​­Sekoto was an acclaimed pianist and composer, while Boghossian demonstrated a long and dedicated invocation of the musical form in his canvases and statements.78 Both demonstrated considered and varied engagements with École de Paris aesthetics, which were solidified, in part, by their extended sojourns or settlement in Paris. And finally, both experienced lifelong exile from their homelands and enjoyed long-­standing presence in cosmopolitan expatriate circles. But perhaps most striking is how both suffer from a kind of hypervisibility within the emerging canon of African (or indeed global) modernisms, seen as responsible for “sketching a new African destiny into being.” 79 Their ascendancy rests on different, local historical narratives, but their intellectual and visual legacies feed a widely held nostalgia for modernist projects and economies of desire cut short or derailed by political, economic, and social strife. Sekoto’s social-­realist paintings of the mid-­1940s have been read not simply as a singular creative practice but rather as documentary evidence of or witness to a vanished life in Sophiatown or District Six — ​­a captured vision of what a successful multiracial South Africa might have been. A newspaper editorial of 1989 illustrates the shift toward nationalist reclamation, asserting, “When the Van Wouws and the Coertsers and the Pierneefs are turfed out of the state and municipal galleries (or at least taken down a peg or two), Sekoto and a few other neglected artists will take their place. Sekoto will be elevated to the status of the Giotto of the people’s tradition in South African painting.” 80 Similarly, Boghossian’s whimsical, highly poetic canvases, with their modernist nods to local artistic vocabularies (particularly Ethiopian liturgical manuscripts, scrolls, and paintings), helped define the tenor of the Addis Spring, a brief era of cultural renaissance in the 1960s in which young intellectuals, often fresh from studies abroad, dreamed up a modern cultural framework for their nation. These creative freedoms and utopian visions were cut violently

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short by the socialist revolution of 1974. As Solomon Deressa (who purportedly coined the term) lamented, “Ethiopia picked its way through darkness into spring that turned out to be an all-­too-­short Indian summer.” 81 Of course, these localized modernisms are always already hybrid in nature, and certainly within urban centers like Johannesburg and Addis, they rested on a syncretic set of diverse ideas, images, objects, and peoples. In the developing literature on African modernisms, the focus has tended to center on national art schools and movements, rather than on the practices of migrant modernists, whose peripatetic lives made them hard to pin down, and whose studies, either in the academies and art schools of former empire or in institutions of a growing cold war divide, did not easily support the exigencies of decolonial politics.82 And yet, the foment of cultural awakening occurring in postwar Paris was such that one could declare, “There are indeed vantage points from which the world appears black — ​­and not half-­bad at that. Paris of the mid-­sixties was it.” 83

Heterochronologies and Archipelagoes In his recent writings on the politics of visual time, Keith Moxey briefly considers Sekoto’s early oil paintings but struggles to place them within a familiar time and space of modernism. He writes, “Sekoto belongs to another temporality. His time was not synchronous with that of metropolitan modernism and never can be. . . . [H]e was a contemporary of Jackson Pollock, yet these artists’ circumstances could not have been more different. If Sekoto worked in the period known as modernity, yet did not belong to it because he was prevented from participating in one of its characteristic features, artistic modernism, how do we negotiate the time that separates them?” Moxey concludes, “Modernity, along with modernism, is a distinctly western affair. If the colonized globe took on many of the economic and industrial, not to mention the political and cultural trappings, of the colonizers, there remains little doubt as to where the center of artistic life shines brightest.84 Purportedly advanced in the spirit of a new global art history that seeks to uncover the antecedents of our contemporaneity and calls for a sensitive reading of the heterochronologies of global modernity, this perspective and others like it confirm just how much work we have ahead of us. Moxey’s wider argument calls Sekoto’s temporal relationship to modernism into question, in part because of his chosen medium and “style” — ​­a purposeful adherence to painted figuration and social-­realist readings of the everyday in a period when 326 

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abstraction was coming to dominate European and North American modernisms. As we have seen, Sekoto’s aesthetic choices were tied to his need to make visible the challenges of African subjects during the era of decolonization. This struggle is modern and modernist. While synchronous with the postwar abstraction of Pollock and the New York avant-­garde, Sekoto’s work does not fall within the narrow stylistic and conceptual parameters Moxey, Hans Belting, and others maintain for their putative “modernism.” The inclusionary tactics of the global contemporary and its presumed antecedents in the age of multiple or alternative modernisms still leave little space for narratives that position canonical modernism as always already cosmopolitan, accumulative, and emulative. The currency of heterochronology, in other words, has yet to fully acknowledge that measures of time are produced through encounter and interaction, rather than primordial difference. Although these two African modernists undoubtedly figured largely in the modernist histories that defined our short century, their influence in the countries from which they hailed is a matter of speculation and revision. How deeply their practices shaped the teachings of local art academies in Africa, the imaginations of a youthful generation of artists at the heart of modernist nation building, or the habits of potential collectors is extremely difficult to measure. As neither spent significant time in their postcolonial nations, a study of their artistry requires a rereading of the contours of African modernisms, pushing critics and scholars to take account of diasporic practices and the international movements of the postwar moment. Notes Funds for this research were generously provided by the Jackman Humanities Research Institute, University of Toronto. I also would like to thank Sepadi Moruthane at the Iziko National Gallery in Cape Town and Barbara Lindop at the Sekoto Foundation for their generosity, and Diane and Chuck Frankel for their support. 1. The definitive text on Ernest Mancoba’s life in South Africa remains that of art historian Elza Miles, Lifeline out of Africa: The Art of Ernest Mancoba (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 1994). 2. During the 1940s, Sekoto took lessons in oil painting from Judith Gluckman and found support and friendship with Brother Roger Castle (CR), a teacher at St. Peter’s School, who made connections for him in the gallery world. Judith Gluckman had studied with Ossip Zadkine, within the Académie de la Grande Chaumière during her time in Paris before the war. 3. Barbara Lindop, Gerard Sekoto, ed. Mona de Beer (Johannesburg: Dictum, 1988).

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4. Noel Chabani Manganyi, Gerard Sekoto:” I Am an African” (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2004); Gerard Sekoto, “A South African Artist,” Présence Africaine 5, nos. 14/15 (1957): 281–98; Gerard Sekoto, “La responsabilité et la solidarité dans la culture africaine,” Présence Africaine 27 (1959): 263, translated as “Responsibility and Solidarity in African Culture” in Manganyi, Gerard Sekoto, n.p.; Gerard Sekoto, “Autobiography,” Présence Africaine, no. 69 (1969): 188–94; Gerard Sekoto, “The Present Situation of a Non-­White Artist in South Africa,” Présence Africaine 80 (1971): 134–36; Barbara Grace, “Touring Africans,” Time, August 8, 1949, 29. 5. Despite writing from an academic post, in Gerard Sekoto, friend N. Chabani Manganyi elects not to footnote his sources, many of whom could provide key archival evidence of the linkages of intellectuals within lively expatriate communities. Manganyi argues, “Biography is crossing the boundary between fiction and non-­fiction. . . . I have deliberately avoided using a style that burdens the narrative with references and matters that have little to do with the unfolding story. One has to accept that the majority of readers are not researchers. Their primary concern is the unfolding drama of the life that is being put before them.” Manganyi, Gerard Sekoto, n.p. With this choice, however, he obscures the broader sociopolitical framework of Sekoto’s cosmopolitanism. 6. Song for Sekoto: 1913–2013 (Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg, April 25–June 2, 2013); Joe Dolby, Gerard Sekoto: ­From the Paris Studio, exhibition catalog (Cape Town: Iziko South African National Gallery, 2005); Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties  — ​ ­Retrospective Exhibition, exhibition catalog (Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1989). 7. Manganyi, Gerard Sekoto, 72. 8. Irit Rogoff, “Luggage,” in Terra Infirma: Geography’s Other Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2000): 37. 9. Rogoff, “Luggage,” 38. 10. Sekoto had a robust musical practice in the clubs and bars of postwar Paris, composing, singing, and playing piano and guitar. In 1950, he landed a job at the nightclub L’échelle de Jacob, on rue Jacob in St. Germain, and performed to support himself and his painting career. Three of his original songs were published in 1956 in Les Éditions Musicales but the rest remained unknown until his estate was repatriated in 2002. His musical talents ensured a breadth to his social circles — ​­taking in expatriates, tourists, and locals. 11. Valerie Cassel, “Convergence: Image and Dialogue — ​­Conversations with Alexander ‘Skunder’ Boghossian,” Third Text 7, no. 23 (1993): 23. 12. Christine Eyene begins to rectify this situation in regard to South Africa in her chapter on exiles in Europe, “Yearning for Art: South African Exile, Aesthetics and Cultural Legacy,” in Visual Century: South African Art in Context, 1907–2007, vol. 2, 1945–1976, ed. Lize van Robbroeck (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2011), 96–119. 13. Transmodernity is a term coined by Enrique Dussel to refer to a kind of “re-

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bellious modernity” in sites “outside” the purview of enlightenment Europe. Enrique Dussel, “World-­System and ‘Trans’-­Modernity,” Nepantla: Views from the South 3, no. 2 (2002): 221. 14. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Writings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 173. 15. Said writes, “Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that — ​­to borrow a phrase from ­music  — ​­is contrapuntal.” Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 186. 16. Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002); Kobena Mercer, introduction to Discrepant Abstraction: Annotating Art’s Histories: Cross-­Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts, ed. Kobena Mercer (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2006), 6–29; Susan Stanford Friedman, “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies,” Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 3 (2006): 425–43; Partha Mitter, “­ Interventions — ​ ­Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-­Garde Art from the Periphery,” Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (2008): 531–48. 17. His works have featured prominently, for instance, in the South African Constitutional Court Trust. See “Artworks,” Constitutional Court Trust, accessed January 5, 2016, http://www.concourttrust.org.za/content/page/artworks. Other accounts of Sekoto’s place within South African modernism include Richard Powell, Black Art: A Cultural History (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002); John Peffer, Art and the End of Apartheid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 1–10. 18. Pius Adesamni, “Redefining Paris: Trans-­Modernity and Francophone African Migritude Fiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 51, no. 4 (2005): 965. For Parisianism, see Bennetta Jules-­Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). The term “migritude” brings together migration and ­Negritude — ​­combining experiences of mobility with radical black practices that seek new forms of subjectivity. Jacques Chevrier, “Afrique(s)-­sur-­Seine: Autour de la Notion de ‘Migritude,’ ” Notre Librairie 155/156 (2004): 13–17. 19. For discussion of the term “decolonial,” see Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). See also “Decolonial Aesthetics (I),” Transnational Decolonial Institute, accessed January 5, 2016, https://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress .com/decolonial-­aesthetics/. 20. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 21. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1995); Debra Kelly, “Loss and Recuperation, Order and Subversion: Post-­war Painting in France, 1945–51,” French Cultural Studies 8,

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no. 22 (1997): 53–66; Jill Carrick, Nouveau Réalisme, 1960s France, and the Neo-­​avant-​ garde: Topographies of Chance and Return (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). 22. Achille Mbembe, “Frantz Fanon’s Oeuvres: A Metaphoric Thought,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 32 (2013): 8–16; Achille Mbembe, “La république dés­ oeuvrée: La France à l’ère post-­coloniale,” Le Débat 5, no. 137 (2005): 159–75; Hannah Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945– 1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 8. See also the multiyear research project Post-­war: Between the Atlantic and the Pacific, 1945–1965, organized by Okwui Enwezor at Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2014; Cold World Cultures, University of Texas at Austin, September 30–October 3, 2010; Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken, eds., Africa in Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013); and multiple articles, such as Laura M. Smalligan, “The Erasure of Ernest Mancoba: Africa and Europe at the Crossroads,” Third Text 24, no. 2 (2010): 263–76. 23. Irit Rogoff, “Hit and Run — ​­Museums and Cultural Difference,” Art Journal 61, no. 3 (2002): 69. 24. Christine Eyene and Paul Gilroy, “Nouvelle topographie d’un Atlantique noir: Entretien avec Paul Gilroy,” Africultures 72 (2008): 82–87. 25. Tony Ballantyne, “Race and the Webs of Empire: Aryanism from India to the Pacific,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 2, no. 3 (2001): 3. 26. Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 15. 27. Nestor Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 28. Sekoto, “Autobiography,” 191. 29. “Interview with Jimi Matthews,” African Impact (October 1982), as quoted in Manganyi, Gerard Sekoto, 55. 30. Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 3. 31. Asake Bomani, Paris Connections: African American Artists in Paris (San Francisco: qed Press, 1992). 32. Jennifer Anne Boittin, “In Black and White: Gender, Race Relations, and the Nardal Sisters in Interwar Paris,” French Colonial History 6, no. 1 (2005): 120–35; Carole Sweeney, “Resisting the Primitive: The Nardal Sisters, La Revue du Monde Noir and La Dépêche Africaine,” Nottingham French Studies 43, no. 2 (2004): 45. Madeleine Rousseau was a museologist and collector, who, with Chiekh Anta Diop, published special issue of Le Musée Vivant (1948) on African cultures entitled “1848 Abolition de l’esclavage — ​­1948 Évidence de la culture nègre.” See Danielle Maurice, “Le musée vivant et le centenaire de l’abolition de l’esclavage: Pour une reconnaissance des cultures africaines,” Conserveries mémorielles, June 1, 2007, http://cm.revues.org/127. Skunder

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Boghossian also mentions Rousseau’s influence in his Third Text interview, calling her Madeleine Rousseux. See Skunder in Cassel, “Convergence,” 55. A number of artists have listed their apprenticeships within Zadkine’s studios: Iba Ndiaye, African American Harold Cousins, Japanese American Shinkichi Tanjiri, and numerous Latin American artists. See Elizabeth Harney, “Prismatic Scatterings: Global Modernists in Post-­War Europe” (forthcoming). 33. Arlene Farge, quoted in Brent Hayes Edwards, “A Taste of the Archive,” Callaloo 35, no. 4 (2012): 946. 34. Tyler Edward Stovall and Georges Van Den Abbeele, ed., French Civilization and Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race, After Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003). 35. See Gordon Parks, To Smile in Autumn: A Memoir (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); Es’kia Mphahlele, Afrika My Music: An Autobiography, 1957–1983 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1984), 31–79. 36. Sekoto, “Autobiography,” 194. 37. Cassel, “Convergence,” 54. 38. Alioune Diop, “Opening Remarks, First Congress of Negro Artists and Writers, Paris, 1956,” Présence Africaine nos. 8–10 (1957): 9–19. For an illuminating firsthand account of this conference, see James Baldwin, “Letter from Paris-­Princes and Power,” in Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 52–60. 39. Sekoto, “A South African Artist,” 287. 40. Christine Eyene, “Sekoto and Négritude: The Ante-­room of French Culture,” Third Text 24, no. 4 (2010): 432. 41. Elizabeth Harney, In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-­Garde in Senegal, 1960–1994 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Souleymane Bachir Diagne, African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude (London: Seagull Books, 2012). 42. “Peintre sud-­Africain qui reside à Paris, Gerard Sekoto est venu renouveler ses sources d’inspiration à Dakar,” Dakar-­Matin, April 20, 1966. 43. Christine Eyene and Barbara Lindop, Exiles: Drawings by Gerard Sekoto (Johannesburg: Afronova Gallery, 2008). 44. “Return to sources” is a favored phrase Senghor used in his writing on reclamations of pan-­African aesthetics and motifs. See Léopold Sédar Senghor, Négritude et civilisation de l’universel (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1977). 45. Lesley Spiro, Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties (Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1989). In the Johannesburg Weekly Mail, March 4, 1988, Ivor Powell writes of these later works, reflecting, “the tragedy of the artist cut off from his subject matter,” as quoted in Barbara Lindop, “Gerard Sekoto: A Perspective on His Work,” Staffrider 7, no. 1 (1988): 11.

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46. Gerard Sekoto, as quoted in Lindop, “Gerard Sekoto,” 23. 47. Sekoto, “Autobiography,” 13. 48. A close look at the details of the artist’s own writings makes clear that the move to Paris was far from disastrous for his career. He details his early and broad success in the first years of his European settlement, exhibiting a number of works at the French Overseas Colonial House, Académie Populaire, Ambassade du Sénégal, and at local galleries Else-­Clausen, Saint-­Placide, Jean Castel, Colin, and Marthe Nochy, in addition to traveling shows throughout Europe. But for writings about the effect of exile on his creativity, see Gerard Sekoto, “Alone in a Paris Ward: The Father of Black Art,” Johannesburg Weekly Mail, March 3, 1988. 49. Jennifer Anne Boittin, introduction in Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-­Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), xiv–xv. 50. Skunder Boghossian as quoted in Cassel, “Convergence,” 57. 51. Tritobia Benjamin argued that Boghossian was the first African artist to exhibit at the Paris Biennale, in 1965, and the Salon de Comparison in 1966. Although a body of literature focuses on Boghossian’s life, no definitive book on his work exists to situate it within the overlapping black Atlantic modern spheres to which he contributed so greatly. See Tritobia Benjamin, “Skunder Boghossian: A Magnificent Difference,” African Arts 5, no. 4 (summer 1972): 22–25. 52. Gebre Kristos Desta, a masterful painter and poet, trained in Cologne. Solomon Deressa, known as an important poet, art critic, and social activist, and Tesfaye Gebre Medhin, a playwright, both trained in Paris and America. 53. During a royal visit to Jerusalem in 1924, Emperor Selassie encountered a marching band made up of orphans from the Armenian genocide. He gave asylum to these young men and their musical director, Kevork Nalbandian. Considered by many to be the father of Ethiopian music, Nalbandian composed the national anthem and directed the imperial jazz band that played on all official state occasions. Though always a small minority in Ethiopia, Armenians dominated many of the professions, particularly architecture, pharmacy, and medicine. See Ani Aslanian, “In the Company of Emperors: The Story of Ethiopian Armenians,” Armenite, October 6, 2014, http://thearmenite .com/2014/10/company-­emperors-­story-­ethiopian-­armenians/. 54. Ethiopia was never colonized but was occupied by the Italians from 1934 to 1941. 55. Achamyeleh Debela, “Alexander (Skunder) Boghossian: A Jewel of a Painter of the 21st Century,” Blen Magazine (2005), accessed November 5, 2014, http://www.blen grafix.com/blenmagazine/skunder_jewel.htm. See also Solomon Deressa, “Letter from Addis Ababa,” African Arts 2, no. 2 (winter 1969): 42–62. 56. Solomon Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” Ethiopian Bir 3, no. 1 (January/February 1997): 19. 57. He left for an invited lecturer position at the Atlanta Center for Black Art in 1969. 58. Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” 23. For an interesting overview of the intellectual 332 

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scene in Addis during this fruitful period, the 1960s, including reference to operating galleries, important journals, and sites of exchange, see Shiferaw Bekele, “A Modernising State and the Emergence of Modernist Arts in Ethiopia (1930s to 1970s) with Special Reference to Gebre Kristos Desta (1932–1981) and Skunder Boghossian,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 37, no. 2 (December 2004): 11–44; and Bawru Zewde, The Quest for Socialist Utopia: The Ethiopian Student Movement, 1960–1974 (Oxford: James Currey, 2014). 59. “Skunder Boghossian ‘Afro-­Metaphysics on Canvas,’ ” Menen, May 1966, 25–26, as quoted in Bekele, “A Modernising State,” 31. 60. Chika Okeke-­Agulu, “Natural Synthesis,” this volume. 61. W. Jackson Rushing III, “Being Modern, Becoming Native,” and Karen Duffek, “An Intersection,” both in this volume. 62. Michael Richardson, ed., Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean, trans. Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski (New York: Verso, 1996). 63. Benjamin, “Skunder Boghossian,” 22–25. 64. Benjamin, “Skunder Boghossian,” 23. 65. Benjamin, “Skunder Boghossian,” 22. 66. Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” 21. 67. Bekele, “A Modernising State,” 32. 68. “Skunder Boghossian ‘Afro-­Metaphysics on Canvas,’ ” as cited in Bekele, “A Modernising State,” 32. 69. Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 70. Simon Gikandi, “Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference,” Modernism/ Modernity 10, no. 3 (2003): 455–80. 71. Benjamin, “Skunder Boghossian,” 22. 72. Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” 21. 73. Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” 21–22. 74. Simpson was a founding member of the Spiral Group — ​­a collective of African American painters, including Romare Bearden, Emma Amos, and Hale Woodruff, who gathered to discuss civil rights and aesthetics, and who worked broadly in the vein of modernist abstraction. 75. The state of Boghossian scholarship is such that chronologies are still unsettled, connections between the artist and others a matter of speculation. Deressa claims that Skunder returned to Ethiopia in 1966 and stayed for six years. Sidney Kasfir places him in Addis Ababa from 1965 to 1969, migrating to the States in the “early 1970s.” Skunder remembers leaving for a post in Atlanta in 1969. There is dispute as to whether the young painter ever met Lam (Deressa claims he did, in Rome in 1959) or Max Ernst. Any and all of these encounters were clearly possible in the cosmopolitan circles in which he mixed. 76. Cassel, “Convergence,” 67. C onstellations and C oordinates  

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77. Elizabeth Harney, Ethiopian Passages: Dialogues in the Diaspora (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 2003). 78. Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” 20. 79. Dayo Olopade, “The Meaning of Modernism in Two Transitions: What a Homonym Can Teach Us,” Transition 106, no. 1 (2011): 45–61; David Crary, “Two Black Artists Earn Kudos at Last,” Globe and Mail (Canada), November 20, 1989, 10. 80. “The Sadness of Sekoto — ​­That of Art in Isolation,” review of Gerard Sekoto exhibition at the Cassirer Fine Art Gallery in Rosebank, Johannesburg, in Johannesburg Weekly Mail, March 4, 1988. See also notes on Gerard Sekoto in Revisions: Expanding the Narrative of South African Art, November 5, 2014, 21–22, http://www.revisions .co.za/. 81. Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” 17. 82. An exception to this rule is surely Leon Wainwright’s Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). 83. Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” 21. 84. Keith Moxey, “Is Modernity Multiple?,” in Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 15–16.

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CONDITIONS OF ENGAGEMENT Mobility, Modernism, and Modernity in the Art of Sydney Kumalo and Jackson Hlungwani

To understand its various vectors, we need to provincialize modernism, that is, to spatialize it as a series of local modernisms rather than one big universal modernism. If there is no one lineage of modernism or, for that matter, of contemporary art, then to fully grasp its qualities of historical reflection requires a heterotemporal understanding.  ​­ O K W U I E N W E Z O R

| “Questionnaire on the Contemporary”

Two South African artists, Sydney Kumalo and Jackson Hlungwani, both black, both descendants of rural dwellers, engaged with the twentieth-­century art world of South Africa in very different ways. Although their lives were coeval, their artistic careers barely overlapped. In exploring their careers and work, I peel back some of the assumptions made about modernity and modernisms in relation to the urban and rural as they are mapped on a local, a national, and a global terrain. In doing this I explore modernity as a phenomenon or a condition of art production, as distinct from the unique historical “moment” of a singular European modernism. What follows in this chapter, then, is perhaps best described as a response to Arjun Appadurai’s identification of the need to study “cosmopolitan cultural forms of the contemporary world without logically or chronologically presupposing either the authority of the Western experience or the models derived from that experience.” He argues that we should be studying these cultural forms in the contexts of “the transnational flows in which they thrive.” 1

To investigate the differing experiences of the modern, modernism, and variant expressions of modernity within twentieth-­century South Africa, I have taken Kumalo and Hlungwani as case studies because, while they were of the same generation and thus contemporaries in a wide sense, they engaged with modernity at very different times and under startlingly different conditions. They were both members of indigenous African communities, and both traveled overseas.2 Their engagement with the transnational flows that Appadurai sees as the bedrock of globalization were also qualitatively distinct, to the point that it could be argued that Kumalo was a modernist by intention, whereas Hlungwani was a modernist by recognition.3 I argue that such variable conditions of engagement are crucial to a wider understanding of multiple modernities, and to an unseating of the modern, and its corollary modernism, as exclusively Western phenomena. One of the discourses used in dividing contemporary African artists from those of both the African past and the Western contemporary is that of the “authentic,” especially as it qualifies the “African.” Authenticity is deeply embedded in notions of origins and beginnings, of belonging and “truth.” As a discourse, it is fundamentally a product of European high modernism, but it is simultaneously at odds with discourses of modernity. Authenticity is also inimical to admission of movement, travel, diaspora, and hybridity, all of which are central to a discussion of multiple modernisms and modernities. It is, significantly, the discourse that various commentators and critics used to write both Sydney Kumalo and Jackson Hlungwani into the history of twentieth-­ century South African art.4 I explore the representation of indigenous modernists as I draw my comparison, but note that, while biographies of artists are generally invoked to establish the “authenticity” of their work, in African arts, biographies are instead used to establish the authenticity of the African artist, rather than of his or her work. This deployment of “authenticity” in the canon of historical African arts has been thoroughly debunked.5 I demonstrate that Kumalo’s and Hlungwani’s biographies confound categories of the authentic and the modern. Jackson Hlungwani was born in 1923 at Kanaana (Limpopo Province), in a deeply rural community, and he received only elementary Western-­style education: he could read and write. He had a rural youth’s induction into manhood, herding goats and learning wood carving from his father and grandfather. He briefly worked as a farm laborer in Mpumalanga, followed by industrial jobs in Springfield and Turffontein in Johannesburg. After he lost his left index finger in an industrial accident in 1944, he returned to his 336 

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F I G U R E 1 3 . 1   Jackson Hlungwani, Altar for Christ, 1970–84. Wood, stone, metal, dimensions variable. Christ and Gabriel (center left); Cain and Jonah’s Fish (right). Installation shot, Wits Art Museum, 2015. Photograph courtesy of Wits Art Museum. Standard Bank Collection of African Art, Wits Art Museum.

rural home, where he married and spent the rest of his life. When Hlungwani started carving sculptures is uncertain, but he engaged in sustained carving only from the late 1970s onward.6 He attended a silk-­screening workshop, Tiakeni, at Elim in the “homeland” of Gazankulu in the late 1970s but had little contact with the urban art world prior to 1984–85, when Ricky Burnett included his work in the Tributaries exhibition.7 From 1985 to 1989 Hlungwani was lionized by the art world at home and abroad, traveling to the Edinburgh Festival in 1992 and to Gallery Watari-­Um, in Tokyo, Japan, in 1994 with his Altar for Christ (figure 13.1).8 During these experiences, he, as an “authentic” African artist, seems to have been on display with his artworks, rather than being engaged in a purposive exchange with other artists. After 1996, he was increasingly abandoned by the high-­art world, partly because he used assistants to produce works in multiples.9 Kumalo’s and Hlungwani’s paths crossed for the first time at the Tributaries exhibition. Intending to reflect the contemporary state of South African art, C onditions of E ngagement 

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Burnett, in an innovative curatorial move, took the “contemporary” to mean “of the moment” and thus as inclusive of artists (largely black) who had never before exhibited their works.10 This opened up the contemporary to works beyond commonly exhibited variants of the late international modernism, among which Kumalo’s work had been admitted as representative of urban black art. Burnett’s show linked this art, largely made by urban artists, to another art, imagined as authentic, rural, and traditional. Unlike Kumalo, representative of the urban category, with a reputation in the art market for twenty years before Tributaries, Hlungwani, almost unknown outside his own rural community, was among artists of the second category.11

Sydney Kumalo Sydney Kumalo was born in 1934 to isiZulu-­speaking residents of Soweto. His links to rural areas were limited to visiting a traditionalist family of royal lineage, and he was very aware of Zulu history.12 Kumalo received secondary education at Madibane High School, Soweto, but had no formal art education. In an interview in Drum Magazine, he recalled being impressed by paintings he saw in white people’s houses, which he visited with his house-­painter father.13 He also related that his teachers encouraged him to join the art classes at the Polly Street Art Centre in 1958. Here he received instruction from two white South African artists, Cecil Skotnes and Edoardo Villa, who became a lifelong friends and collaborators. They had both received formalist, modernist art training, Skotnes at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and Villa at Scuolo d’Arte Andrea Fantone in Bergamo, Italy.14 Kumalo’s training in formalist traditions of composition, balance, harmony, and the qualities of texture, line, and shade did not match the technical and theoretical grounding that Villa and Skotnes had received, but was nevertheless very different from Hlungwani’s apprenticeship to his father and grandfather as a woodcarver. Kumalo’s work was thus developed and articulated within a discourse that Hlungwani could not have encountered. Working in many mediums, in a studio and with professionals in the foundry, Kumalo participated in the established art world. His education included study of both reproductions and original modernist works, which his mentors showed to him.15 If an education based on knowledge of art history was central to the formation of a consciously modernist artist, then Kumalo clearly qualified, while Hlungwani worked in isolation in the deeply rural homelands of apartheid South Africa, where no such opportunities were 338 

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available. Yet the two artists were separately, and at different times, incorporated under the same arts discourses of South Africa. The sculptors Sydney Kumalo and Ezrom Legae were among the best known to emerge from Polly Street, one of the few places in apartheid South Africa of the 1950s where black artists could go for lessons. Other Polly Street artists, including Durant Sihlali, Louis Maqhubela, and Ephraim Ngatane, were primarily painters, although Sihlali also made some sculptures. The fame attained by the sculptors betrays an assumption in the earliest critical reception of these artists’ works; contemporary black artists needed to confirm the understanding of African art as almost exclusively stylized sculpture.16 This bias was confirmed in Sihlali’s reminiscences about the teaching at Polly Street and in gallery owner Egon Guenther’s stated expectations of art produced by African artists.17 That this idea was tied to Africa as the site of the “authentic,” the “primitive” and the “origin” is also visible in art critics’ writing around these artists’ works at the time.18 Some came perilously close to portraying Kumalo as a “primitive” African.19 As a result Kumalo’s modernity was sometimes cast in doubt, subordinated to his supposed “recall” of a primitive past. Even Polly Street instructors were implicated: Susanna Jansen van Rensburg cites Skotnes’s initial attempt to retain something “tribal” in the works of black urban artists attending the workshops, and his admission that they were not in touch with the “tribal” at all.20 Kumalo’s collaborations with white members of the Amadlozi group, initiated by Egon Guenther in 1962 and revived by Linda Givon of Goodman Galleries in 1984, suggest that he saw past the racial nature of that definition of Africanness. Kumalo’s integration into the world of high art in South Africa happened when he resigned from teaching in 1964 to pursue a career full time as an artist. One of the first black South Africans to succeed as a professional, he traveled abroad, to Britain, Europe, and the United States, despite the restrictions imposed by the apartheid regime on black people’s mobility.21 He became a regular on both national and international fine arts circuits, in biennials and competitions.22 As a black South African, a isiZulu-­speaking native of Soweto, his African identity was never in doubt. Separating Kumalo’s work from his crudely Africanized biography, I argue, shows that his work followed an internationally available formalist abstraction most clearly related to the works of Henry Moore and Marino Marini. Kumalo never forsook the figurative, always invoking the universal rather than the particular. So, Reclining Figure: Ndebele Woman (1980s) is, by its title, evocative of ethnic specificity, but the form is abstracted and thus universal.23 C onditions of E ngagement 

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F I G U R E 1 3 . 2 

Photograph of Sydney Kumalo in his studio, ca. 1969–1970. Courtesy the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

Miles and others suggest that both Skotnes and Guenther provided African art sources similar to those used by European modernists, to familiarize Kumalo and others at Polly Street with historical forms.24 They were shown modernist works in the form of journal and book illustrations. Guenther showed works by some European modernists where he saw synergies with works by black (and white) artists in his stable, and he suggested that Kumalo’s favorite among the European modernists whose works he studied was Ernst Barlach.25 Guenther was insistent that the African quality he saw in Kumalo’s work was rooted in an African ethos, environment, and ambience, rather than in what Miles claims to was a “neo-­African idiom,” shared by Kumalo, Ben Arnold, and Ezrom Legae.26 While Guenther also claimed that Kumalo never copied African forms directly, Jansen van Rensburg identified several African motifs and their sources in Skotnes’s sketches for the ceiling paintings at St. Peter Claver in Kroonstad, which were reinterpreted by Kumalo in the final paintings.27 In his sculpture, Kumalo rarely resorted to direct quotation, even though he drew on general stylistic principles gleaned from historical African sculptural forms, some pieces of which he owned himself, as is evident in photographs of the artist in his study (figure 13.2). 340 

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Sydney Kumalo, Killed Horse, 1962. Bronze, 14.2 × 25 × 9.9 in. (36 × 64 × 25 cm). Wits Art Museum. FIGURE 13.3 

Works like Killed Horse (figure 13.3) and Seated Woman employ simplicity of form and the qualities of material surface in evocative ways. Elizabeth Rankin and Elza Miles have discussed the political meanings of Killed Horse, showing that Kumalo’s subject matter was not polemic-­free.28 Its visual impact results not only from the horse’s supine position, but also from the pitted surface and green bronze patina, showing Kumalo’s manipulation of the expressive potentials of the materials. This is not just a killed horse, but one whose death has been ignored. Its political connotations derive from Kumalo’s encounters with such corpses in the townships, where horses were used for transport until the 1960s. Its Africanness is situated in this biographical association more than in its formal configuration. By contrast, in the small Seated Woman (plate 11), the surface texture is smooth, flowing from the head and elongated neck to the angular knees and feet. Here, the emotion suggested by the figure’s raised arms and hands clutching the head, which could index the grieving wives and mothers of those lost in the growing struggle against apartheid, is less clearly reflected in the material. Political readings of this work are in some ways anachronistic, because although the sculpture was executed in the year C onditions of E ngagement 

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of the Sharpeville massacre (1961) and undoubtedly related to it, associations sparked by other memories are also possible. The abstracted treatment of the subject gives it an apparent universality and places it squarely within a modernist frame. Most of the academic interest in Kumalo’s work has centered on works like these, produced in the 1960s while he was working at Polly Street Art Centre with Skotnes and exhibiting at the Egon Guenther Gallery. Very little real cognizance remains of the directions his art took after Guenther closed his gallery and Kumalo joined the Goodman Gallery, partly because of a perception that the quality of his work declined. Guenther attempted to maintain quality control over the work of artists in his stable and required that they destroy works that he considered not up to standard.29 Thus, while the similarities between Kumalo’s and Legae’s works in the late 1960s and early 1970s have been explained through Kumalo’s instruction of Legae, they were also a consequence of Guenther’s interventions. These also resulted from the vision Guenther had of what the works should look like. Kumalo, Legae, and Arnold worked and had critique sessions together at Guenther’s house, with emphasis on how they reflected Africanness in particular forms.30 This is explicitly visible in the clarity of formal construction and angular masklike facial features of Kumalo’s Seated Figure (figure 13.4). The use of a single foot, evocative of Lega, Lulua, or Songye figures, enhances its African identity, with a possible side glance at Alberto Giacometti. That Kumalo came to his abstracted figurative forms thirty years after Moore and Marini place him, in the Euro-­American master narrative, in a position of latecomer, an out-­of-­date modernist brushed aside by the metropolitan art world as irrelevant, because apparently not part of the avant-­garde. The formal abstraction pursued by Moore and Marini appears to have been couched in universalist terms, based in subjects that did not invoke any form of social critique, something that made them innocuous, even if not appreciated, in conservative contexts.31 If, following Renato Poggioli, the avant-­garde is both political and aesthetic because it unseats entrenched aesthetic norms and challenges the political status quo, then Kumalo’s works are not avant-­garde because, at first sight, they do neither.32 James Elkins’s suggestion that finding “values in these works that are recognizably European or North American” will not decide the relevance of the works of “local” modernisms, for a larger history could be reversed by searching for the factors that differentiate them from the North American or European modernism.33 This would yield a different assessment of their relevance, one concerned not with the avant-­garde 342 

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FIGURE 13.4 

Sydney ­Kumalo, Seated Figure, ca. 1967–68. Bronze, 24 × 12 × 14 in. (60 × 30 × 35 cm). Private collection, Johannesburg.

bias of the master narrative of global art history, but with their contribution to trajectories of art’s modernisms. Thus, in South Africa in the 1960s, Kumalo’s work formed part of a local avant-­garde, which, in its direct engagement with things modernist and African, was also quite heavily political. Contesting the conservatism of Afrikaner nationalism, this avant-­garde challenged apartheid’s construction of African cultures and peoples as inferior. Yet, while Kumalo’s works made a claim for modernity, his strongly developed formalist abstraction was interpreted by writers in the 1960s and early 1970s as evidence of his primitiveness, rather than of his sophisticated primitivist modernism. It is almost as though, even among those white writers and art historians who knew him well, he could not, by virtue of his being black (and African), be considered a modernist.34 This prejudice has been discussed elsewhere, but it is central to how Indigenous modernism is positioned.35 In South Africa the black artists’ praxis was construed as primitive, not primitivist, not as self-­primitivizing and definitively not as part of mainstream modernism. These black artists saw themselves as modernists, drawing on African traditions, as were their white counterparts C onditions of E ngagement 

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who drew on African sources. But their separation, as followers of an existing “own” (rather than an “othered” African) tradition, was enforced as racially rather than historically defined, and thus as ethnically determined, by legislated apartheid in South Africa. In effect, while modernist artists who were white could claim a form of African modernity with some degree of autonomy, black artists were simply cast into a mold of Africanness through which their autonomy was denied. Guenther considered neither these black artists as traditionally African, nor their work to be African art, but rather saw them as modern/contemporary artists from Africa.36 Whether black artists also thought this about their work seems likely but difficult to prove. While Kumalo’s personal style developed and changed over time, his artistic self-­identity remained firmly situated: an African making African modernism. Yet, because the construction of an African identity nearly always refers to the past in the form of specific cultural practices, languages, and beliefs, the possibility of an African being a modernist becomes oxymoronic when viewed from an outside perspective. Further, Kumalo’s “pioneer” status in South Africa is itself indicative of the modernist teleologies at play in writing art’s histories: it points to a tradition that the artist apparently leaves behind. After the closure of Guenther’s galleries in 1970, the paths of “his” artists separated, but all continued to claim African identity. Legae and Kumalo, however, exhibited together with Villa and Skotnes in reconstituted Amadlozi group shows organized by Linda Givon of Goodman Galleries more than ten years after Guenther closed his gallery.37 Kumalo’s later works focused on thematics of Africa, on themes identifiable as African by their cultural content and difference, more than his generic subjects of the early 1960s. The themes were historical, often mythological, as in the many Mythological Rider(s), made over several years, drawing on African sculptural forms and his own cultural traditions. The Praise Singer, executed on commission for the Cape of Good Hope Centre, and produced in a smaller bronze edition, follows a Western convention of heroic male figures with toga-­like robes and firm stance, but Africanized by its title. Such works are modern, modernist, and monumental, elevating African tradition, but they lack the overt political content or reference to suffering and struggle necessary to Kumalo’s resurrection in the postapartheid context.38 Kumalo’s legacy has been ignored compared to that of other black artists–contemporaries of Kumalo — ​­such as Dumile Feni, Peter Clark, George Pemba, and Gerard Sekoto, all of whom have received large-­ scale, nationally traveled celebratory exhibitions. These nationally recognized 344 

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artists, concerned with the social and political evils of apartheid, espoused a naturalistic or narrative style and content, easily regarded as modern and political, but unconcerned with abstraction or Africanness. Kumalo’s work was generically African, and in his later career, he positioned himself within Afrocentric modernity, spending time in the 1980s at Emory University among African American peers involved in reconstruing black histories and philosophies.39 At this time Kumalo worked on a series of drawings, inspired by African American performance and literary sources, that explored a slightly more naturalistic style.40 Inherent in the predication of European modernism on the principle of a universal understanding of form is a claim that it could be taken up anywhere and at any time: that it could travel, but in traveling would implicate temporal and cultural as well as physical distances. Kumalo received a form of modernism via mentors whose position as settlers, and claims to Africanness, is testament to the kinds of “flows” that Appadurai argues constitute the movements of cultural material across boundaries.41 Kumalo’s travels, especially his time in the United States, opened political and artistic ethnoscapes that were not available to him in the apartheid state. Being able to mix freely with other artists, visit museums and galleries in urban centers, and in various countries, was a privilege not open to blacks under apartheid. Kumalo’s residence in the city, his disjuncture from any of the stereotypical and nostalgic constructions of Africa as tribal and rural, which upheld the apartheid system of separate development, constituted a kind of personal deterritorialization for him as an isiZulu speaker. Such deterritorialization enabled Kumalo to claim citizenship in a wider art world, one of Appadurai’s “scapes.” In view of this, modernism’s precepts of universality would have been enabling, but, as I have shown, in need of adaptation to an African modernity. Kumalo died in 1988 at the age of fifty-­three, and his memorial exhibition at Goodman Gallery included sculpture as well as a number of two-­dimensional works, made over the course of his career. Yet the drawings hardly ever appear in the record of his work. In this way, his Africanness is preserved as purely sculptural, and his work is, in the minds of some collectors and connoisseurs, still “primitive” and outside history rather than modernist.

Jackson Hlungwani Jackson Hlungwani, born in 1923, was more than ten years older than Kumalo and lived much longer, dying in 2010. He left an oeuvre executed largely in the C onditions of E ngagement 

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last thirty years of his life. His direct engagement with work in modern urban Africa was short but significant in understanding his identity as a modern subject. His rural (but still modern) lifestyle, and his knowledge of, and respect for, his ancestral heritage, was read as a “primitive” or “tribal” habitus, one that would have answered Skotnes’s expectations of the tribal in ways that Kumalo’s urban life could not. Hlungwani started sculpting consistently only in 1978, without any engagement with the art world, and almost exclusively for his own religious shrine. His church, an individual offshoot of the apostolic Zion Christian Church of South Africa, served a local community: he was its chief preacher, healer, and seer. His independent interpretations of the Bible and his Christian teaching were inflected with inversions of power challenging the ideological and political supremacy of white people.42 Working with local wood, fallen tree trunks washed up on riverbanks, he sculpted ensembles for the altars at New Jerusalem at Mbokhoto, in Limpopo Province, for sites around the shrine, as well as figures and bowls for sale to visiting (mostly white) patrons in search of the African “primitive.” Hlungwani used the shrine carvings to explain his theology to congregants, and he claimed that his theological discourse would be spread among more people through the sale of sculptures.43 As a result, much of his work was documented in relation to its religious aspects: only Burnett engaged with the formal and sculptural aspects of the works as art.44 The literature implicitly acknowledges of Hlungwani’s Indigenous and in­nate Africanness, made explicit in his ties to a Tsonga ethnic identity. Yet Hlungwani’s Africanness is not traditional or premodern but a result of transnational flows of the type identified by Appadurai.45 He had experienced the establishment of imagined “homelands” within the South African context, in which black Africans belonged and were separated according to ethnolinguistic categories, being designated as only temporary inhabitants of the urban spaces. He worked both in the cosmopolitan space of the city and in the rural homeland, following his inherited traditions as well as embracing the trans­ national in the form of Christianity. The works that Hlungwani produced for his Christian shrine at Mbokhoto drew on established African traditions insofar as they were wood carvings.46 Attempts to tie Hlungwani’s style to Tsonga carving traditions have not been particularly convincing because Hlungwani’s “style” appears to be random.47 Some works display an intense attention to detail, while others involve mere suggestions carved into the wood.48 Very few of these forms can be related to Tsonga carvings of the past and certainly cannot have been learned from a 346 

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preceptor or from formal training. Hlungwani arguably worked without rigid adherence to the external codes that, according to Appadurai, constitute “traditions.” 49 Hlungwani embarked on making works, both for his church and for sale, as an individual modern subject in a process of indigenizing his work’s Christian and modernist elements.50 His exhibition history started with Tributaries in 1985 and peaked in a solo show at Bree Street Gallery (a short-­lived venture newly opened by Ricky Burnett and Mary Slack) in Newtown, Johannesburg, in 1989.51 There is no precedent for the forms, scale, or use of sculptures on shrines in his local habitus; he was also not acquainted with other historical African shrines.52 He was, however, familiar with forms of Christian art found in conventional church buildings. Among his earliest works are two crucifixes, and he possessed color lithographic prints of religious subjects, including of John the Baptist.53 These popular religious prints are based on baroque typologies and could be acquired even in small towns, part of an entirely modern world impinging on rural Africa before the turn of the twentieth century. Yet Hlungwani’s work never emulated their naturalism: his style was expressionistic, and in it the modernist precept “truth to material” appeared, fully formed, at the beginning of his carving career in 1978. The Christ from Altar for Christ (see figure 13.1) is a good example, with minimal but purposive interventions in the original appearance of the tree trunk from which the figure appears. Even the more detailed working of the figure of Cain from the same altar is attuned to the original shape of the branch. Hlungwani’s work has been explained through an invocation of the seer, of a shaman producing visions, rather than of a professional sculptor presenting considered and calculated images.54 Many of Hlungwani’s works invoke the idea of function, a reminder that the Western category of “primitive” art includes functional objects. Hlungwani produced, for example, many “bowls,” but they might merely act as vessels metaphorically, and they vary from intricately carved to minimalist forms.55 This production of metaphorically functional objects as art can be paralleled to modernist transformations of functional objects into carriers of aesthetic and connotative “meanings.” Once Hlungwani’s art entered the high-­art world, the discourse shifted from the anthropology of religion and the shaman to his realization of ideas or beliefs in sculpture, including relationships between form and content, truth to materials, context, installation, and chance, all central themes in histories of avant-­garde modernism.56 So, for example, God’s Antenna and Cain’s Aeroplane (figure 13.5) invoke aspects of the modern world and modern technolC onditions of E ngagement 

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ogy, in the use of industrial detritus in the former, as well as in their titles. Cain’s Aeroplane closely resembles Hlungwani’s bowls but is more like a canoe than a flying machine, with the forms coaxed out of the matrix. This is very different from, but no less modernist than, the calculated qualities of material engagement in Kumalo’s work. Not surprisingly, therefore, Hlungwani’s praxis is treated as though it were a manifestation, not of a modernism that results from being in touch with the primitive, but of the primal response itself. His primitiveness, thus presented as different from Kumalo’s, nevertheless raises the question of whether it/he was “genuinely primitive” and thus “authentic,” as opposed to a revivalist/ primitivist/modernist as argued in Kumalo’s case.57 Examples of Hlungwani’s sculptures made between 1984 and 1989 are held in many major South African and some European and American museum collections and are still regarded as important. Produced largely for outside patrons and increasingly for the art exhibition circuit, they are recognized as contemporary works by an individual artist, something that would cause some difficulty in the last part of his life. These works carried not only the trace of the artist’s hand, but also both visible patina in the wear on the wood and an invisible patina of having a place in a world for which his audience was demonstrably nostalgic. Appadurai argues that this quality of patina and the nostalgia that it evokes are indices of a way of life that the owner cannot have, and that this nostalgia affected the reading of Hlungwani’s work.58 Thus, while Jameson argues that modernism is inevitably, in global terms, a temporal category, he nevertheless offers an understanding of modernity as a “frozen allegory” in which there is a “palpable contradiction between the absolute claim for novelty and the inevitable repetition and inevitable return.” 59 A temporal category is thus upset by its own implicitly cyclical nature and by its confusion with the contemporary and the new. Some such confusion was evident in the removal of Hlungwani’s shrine pieces from a sacred space in the bush to the hallowed halls of urban art museums as part of the pieces’ modernization, of the process of domiciling them within the modern habitus of the art world. It set a standard for recognition of works as original Hlungwanis and started him on a course of production for the market. Despite the view that Hlungwani carved only religious subjects or with a religious message, many of the works that he sold, such as Lion (figure 13.6), had limited or very obscure reference to religious themes.60 These works point to a fundamental difference from Kumalo’s praxis as a modernist. Kumalo’s animal images capture an essence; for example, the slouch of Leopard indicates a self-­conscious modernism, trying to capture the essence of 348 

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F I G U R E 1 3 . 5   Jackson Hlungwani, Cain’s Aeroplane, detail from Altar for Christ, 1978–84. Wood. Photograph by A. Nettleton. Standard Bank Collection of African Art, Wits Art Museum.

F I G U R E 1 3 . 6   Jackson Hlungwani, Lion, pre-1989. Wood and metal. Standard Bank Collection of African Art, Wits Art Museum.

the ­African animal.61 Hlungwani, on the other hand, viewed and made his creatures as part of a single creation that was simply African in that he was African. Perhaps the difference lies in that Kumalo, the urban dweller, had to retrieve a mythology, while Hlungwani lived and made mythology in a place that was a “homeland.” The attempt to be visibly African was a self-­conscious dimension of Kumalo’s use of African mythology and subjects, taken from a position of deterritorialization. Hlungwani, however, never seems to have suffered that degree of alienation from his rural habitus. Hlungwani, in a masterstroke of freeing his mind from colonial shackles, invented his own church, his own iconography, and established a theological world in sculptures without concern about his own modernity. Perhaps he was never asked the question, but in none of the interviews with him did Hlungwani make claims to being a modern artist. His work, however, could never have become part of the artistic canon without the modernist frameworks, which traveled globally, allowing the removal of objects from contexts of use to the space of the aesthetic. Kumalo, on the other hand, was a modernist from the time he first started making work, even when he made work for churches, because he understood and developed his identity within the context of an African modernity expressly discussed by his mentors. 350 

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The ways in which Kumalo and Hlungwani engaged with modernity can be encapsulated in relation to how they traveled. Kumalo traveled broadly, but within a circuit of galleries, artists, and exhibitions. He was constituted as a contemporary subject whose understanding of modernism and production of art forms was situated within a discourse in which he was a participant. Hlungwani, on the other hand, traveled from rural homelands to the city and back. Settled in the rural context for some forty years before his engagement with the art world, he was taken up by its denizens as a seer and a shaman, at the receiving end of their nostalgia. Burnett, with whom he traveled to Edinburgh, recalls Hlungwani’s amazement at and eager absorption of the new and complex world into which he was flung.62 Yet little of this is visible in his work after his return to Kanaana in the mid-­1990s. Kumalo and Hlungwani could thus be seen as inhabiting one of the polythetic spaces of overlap that characterize the flows of culture outlined by Appadurai.63 They both had one foot in some version of the African, and the other in the world of modernisms — ​­in effect, theirs were both indigenized African modernisms, but approached from different positions. Notes Epigraph: Okwui Enwezor, “Questionnaire on the Contemporary: Enwezor,” October Magazine 130 (2009): 36. 1. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 49. 2. Indigenous is a disputed term in South African identity politics. The people who were in Southern Africa first were the Khoi-­San speakers; they were followed by Bantu speakers from farther north, around the beginning of the common era. These migrant Bantu speakers were however, Indigenous to Africa as a continent. 3. Appadurai, Modernity at Large. 4. A short, critically coherent account of Kumalo’s work, by Elizabeth Rankin, escapes many of the flaws that I attribute to the writing on Kumalo later in this chapter. See Images of Metal: Post-­War Sculptures and Assemblages in South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1994). While this lays much of the groundwork, it does not specifically engage with issues raised by modernism as a style or as a mode of art production. Ivor Powell’s short essay on Kumalo also broaches the issue but does not follow it through. See Ivor Powell, “Sydney Kumalo,” in Revisions: Expanding the Narrative of South African Art, edited by Hayden Proud (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2006), 144. Elza Miles’s history of Polly Street deals with the narrative of Kumalo’s early career. Miles, Polly Street: The Story of an Art Centre (Johannesburg: Ampersand Foundation, 2004). There is no equivalent body of literature on Hlungwani. C onditions of E ngagement 

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5. See Shelly Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, “African Art and Authenticity: A Text without a Shadow,” African Arts 25, no. 2 (1992): 41–53; Christopher Steiner, African Art in Transit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 6. See Ricky Burnett, “Sparks of Recognition,” in Jekiseni Hlungwani Sangani: An Exhibition, ed. Ricky Burnett, exhibition catalog (Johannesburg: Communications Dept., bmw South Africa, 1989), 4–7; and Jane Duncan, “Factors Affecting the Positive Reception of Artworks: A Case Study of Selected Artists Sculptures from Venda and Gazankulu since 1985” (master’s thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1994). 7. Ricky Burnett, Tributaries: A View of Contemporary South African Art, exhibition catalog (Johannesburg: Communications Dept., bmw South Africa, 1984). 8. Ivor Powell, “Gazankulu’s Wounded Shaman Sculpts His Strange Temples,” Johannesburg Weekly Mail, November 3 to 9, 1989, sec. Arts, 22; Marilyn Martin, “Jackson Hlungwani — ​­The Prophet of Mbokota,” sa Arts Calendar 12, no. 3 (1989): 9; Elza Miles, “Hlungwani se Goddelike Speelding,” Die Beeld, November 17, 1989, 30; Miles, “Met Eerbied vir ’n Oeuvre,” Die Beeld, November 20, 1989, 29. 9. Nielen van Kraayenberg of Gallery 181, interview by the author, September 2010, Johannesburg, Kya Sands. Van Kraayenberg had particular expectations of what these works would look like and clearly regarded Jackson Hlungwani and his workshop primarily as producers of work that appealed to corporate buyers. See Anitra Nettleton, “Home Is Where the Art Is: Negotiating the Urban Art Market — ​­Six Rural Artists from the Northern Province, South Africa,” African Arts 33, no. 4 (2000): 26–39, 93; and Anitra Nettleton, “Jackson Hlungwani’s Altars: An African Christian Theology in Wood and Stone,” Material Religion 5, no. 1 (2009): 50–69. 10. Ricky Burnett, interview by the author, Johannesburg, September 29, 2009. 11. Kumalo’s and Hlungwani’s works were on the same exhibition only once more — ​ ­after Kumalo’s death in 1988. See Steven Sack, The Neglected Tradition: Towards a New History of South African Art, 1930–1988 (Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1989). 12. These views were recorded in note form after a conversation I had with Mzilikaze Khumalo (noted academic linguist and composer) and Sydney Kumalo at Jean Kennedy’s house in Johannesburg in July 1973. 13. This is repeated by Miles, Polly Street; Rankin, Images of Metal; and Susanna Jansen van Rensburg, “Sydney Kumalo en Ander Bantoekunstenaars van Transvaal” (master’s thesis, University of Pretoria, 1970). 14. Frieda Harmsen, “Artist Resolute,” in Cecil Skotnes, ed. Frieda Harmsen (Johannesburg: South African Breweries, 1996), 11–63; Nessa Leibhammer, A Tribute to Maria Stein Lessing and Leopold Spiegel: L’Afrique (Johannesburg: David Krut, 2009). 15. Egon Guenther, interview by the author, April 23, 2012.

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16. Interviews and visits to the collections of Cecil Skotnes (1971) and Egon Guenther (1972, 2009–2014). Both emphasized the importance of the sculptural legacy of African artists. 17. Sihlali cited by David Koloane, “The Polly Street Art Scene,” in African Art in Southern Africa: From Tradition to Township, edited by Anitra C. Nettleton and William D. Hammond-­Tooke (Johannesburg: ad Donker, 1989), 211–19; Guenther interview, April 23, 2012. Guenther was an immigrant from post–World War II Germany. A jeweler by profession, he founded an important art gallery in Johannesburg and promoted a particular late-­modernist aesthetic among the artists he showed. He was known particularly for his promotion of black modernist artists from Polly Street. 18. For example see Jenni Basson, “Sydney Kumalo, Beeldwese van Afrika uit,” Die Brandwag, January 21, 1977, 88–91; Jenni Basson, “Sydney Kumalo,” Bantu 24 (1977): 114; Elize Jacobs, “Sydney Kumalo,” Artlook (December 1973): 8–15; Jansen van Rensburg, “Sydney Kumalo.” 19. Eda Marcus, “S. Kumalo, Zoeloe Beeldhouer,” South African Panorama 6, no. 1 (January 1961): 38–39; Marilyn Martin, “Kumalo vang gees van Afrika,” Die Transvaler, October 29, 1982, 8; Naomi Nowosenetz, “Spirit of Tribal Art in Kumalo,” Pretoria News, November 4, 1976; Lola Watter, “Kumalo,” in Our Art III, ed. Georges Duby and Heine Toerien (Pretoria: Foundation for Education, Science and Technology, n.d.), 67–73. 20. Jansen van Rensburg, “Sydney Kumalo.” Miles, Polly Street, citing Anthony Krell, “Urban African Art in South Africa” (master’s thesis, University of Cape Town, 1972), raises this issue only at the end of her discussion of Skotnes’s time at Polly Street. That it was probably central to many of the decisions he made about pedagogy is not acknowledged. This is also discussed in Elizabeth Rankin, “Teaching and Learning: Skotnes at Polly Street,” in Harmsen, Cecil Skotnes, 65–81. 21. This history is complex. Under apartheid, some black South Africans were given passports if they were useful to the regime — ​­allowing Kumalo to go overseas, for example, enabled the South African government to claim that apartheid was not so bad. He was not as politically engaged as others like Ernest Mancoba, Dumile Feni, or Miriam Makeba, who went into exile. 22. Many of Kumalo’s works are archived in the Goodman Gallery, but the best source is the fuba archive at the Johannesburg Art Gallery Library. Thanks to Jo Berger, the librarian, for her ongoing support in maintaining and facilitating access to these archives. 23. Illustrated in Esmé Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa: An Illustrated Biographical Dictionary and Historical Survey of Painters, Sculptors and Graphic Artists since 1875 (Cape Town: Balkema, 1983), 404. 24. Miles, Polly Street; Jansen van Rensburg, “Sydney Kumalo”; Rankin, “Teaching and Learning”; Watter, “Kumalo.” 25. Guenther interviews, April 23, 2012; Berman, Art and Artists. Guenther (inter-

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views by the author, September 16, 19, and 23, 2009) explained how he chose modernists to show to these artists. 26. Guenther interviews 2009; Miles, Polly Street, 126. 27. Guenther interview by the author, April 20, 2012. 28. Rankin, Images of Metal; Miles, Polly Street. See also, for example, Watter, Sydney Kumalo; and Edward J. de Jager, Contemporary African Art in South Africa (Cape Town: Struik, 1973). 29. Rankin, “Teaching and Learning”; Guenther interviews 2009. 30. Guenther interviews by the author, November 15, 2010, and July 17, 2014. 31. A Henry Moore work was offered to the University of the Witwatersrand in the late 1960s as a memorial for the fallen of two world wars. The offer was rejected because the university did not think the public would understand the work. 32. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-­Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981). 33. James Elkins, “Writing about Modernist Painting outside Western Europe and North America,” in Compression vs. Expression: Containing and Explaining the World’s Art, ed. John Onians (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 195. 34. For example, Jansen van Rensburg, “Sydney Kumalo”; Watter, Sydney Kumalo. 35. See Lize van Robbroeck, “Race and Art in Apartheid South Africa,” in Visual Century: South African Art in Context, 1907–2007, vol. 2, 1945–1976, ed. Lize van Robbroeck (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2011), 79–95; Anitra Nettleton, “Primitivism in South African Art,” in van Robbroeck, Visual Century, 2:121–63. 36. Guenther interviews 2009, 2010, 2014. The modern black artists did not qualify as African artists in the same way as the makers of “traditional” pieces of African art that he had in his collection, sold at Sotheby’s in 2000. 37. Guiseppe Cattaneo and Cecily Sash, two of the original Amadlozi exhibitors, did not participate. Ezrom Legae was added to this new Amadlozi, which thus included largely sculptural or carved forms, and some drawings. (Thanks to Neil Dundas for access to the Goodman Gallery archive in September 2009). 38. Many others have had posthumous retrospective exhibitions that toured South Africa. See Anitra Nettleton, “Writing Artists into History: Dumile Feni and the South African Canon,” African Arts 44, no. 4 (2011): 8–25, for a discussion of the Feni exhibition. 39. Neil Dundas, Goodman Galleries, personal communication, Johannesburg, October 21, 2009. 40. I have found photographs of these works in the Goodman Gallery archives but have not been able to trace, as yet, their actual whereabouts. 41. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 45–46. 42. These interpretations were extensively recorded by Marcelle Manley, “Jackson Hlungwani: A Contemporary Prophet” (Unpublished manuscript, University of South

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Africa, Dept. of Religious Studies, 1991); Jameson Maluleke, “Jackson Hlungwani,” unpublished manuscript, 1991, University of the Witwatersrand Art Museum Archive, Johannesburg. 43. Maluleke, “Jackson Hlungwani.” 44. Burnett, “An Introduction to the Sculpture,” in Burnett, Jekiseni Hlungwani Sangani, 31–37. 45. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 49. 46. See Anitra Nettleton, “The Professional, Authentic Artist,” in Authentic Woodcarver, ed. Vuyani Biya and Mark Waller (Polokwane, ZA: Timbila, 2012), 7–22, for a discussion of Hlungwani’s status as a professional artist as opposed to a shaman. 47. Karel Nel, “Shangaan: In Search of a Genealogy,” in Dunga Manzi / Stirring Waters: Tsonga and Shangaan Art from Southern Africa, ed. Nessa Leibhammer (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2007), 149–67. 48. For example, his thrones are made up of several found pieces of wood, constructed into seats, with carved elements visible only in some details. See Anitra Nettleton, “Homeland Artists and the Contemporary Artworld: The Politics of Authenticity,” Double Desire: Transculturation and Indigenous Contemporary Art, ed. Ian McLean (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014), 264–86. 49. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 90. 50. For a discussion of the subjectivities of contemporary African artists, see Chika Okeke-­Agulu, “Modern African Art,” in The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, ed. Okwui Enwezor, 29–36 (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2001). 51. Burnett, Tributaries. 52. Discussed in Anitra Nettleton, “In Search of a Tsonga Style: Figurative and Abstract Woodcarving,” in Leibhammer, Dunga Manzi, 123–37; Nettleton, “Jackson Hlungwani’s Altars.” 53. See Rayda Becker, “Visions and the Viewer,” in Burnett, Jekiseni Hlungwani Sangani, 20–23; Ricky Burnett, interview by the author, September 29, 2009; Peter Rich, “The New Jerusalem,” in Burnett, Jekiseni Hlungwani Sangani, 27–30. 54. For a discussion of these, see Nettleton, “Professional, Authentic Artist.” 55. See Nettleton, “Homeland Artists.” 56. See, for example, Herbert Read, The Origins of Form in Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965). 57. By Miles, Polly Street, for example. 58. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 76. 59. Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 125. 60. This view is strongly maintained by his family, and his daughter expressed it in a speech at the Hlungwani seminar in Polokwane on March 9, 2012.

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61. A signed cast of this sculpture was sold recently on auction at Bonhams in London (http://www.bonhams.com/auctions/18788/lot/93/). I have not traced a cast in a public collection thus far. There are several posthumous casts on the market, with significant differences between some of those and the originals. 62. Burnett interview, 2010. 63. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 50.

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ERIN HANEY

14 

THE MODERNIST LENS

OF LUTTERODT STUDIOS

Two Gold Coast gentlemen array themselves in front of the camera, elegant and comporting with a serene intimacy. Modulated light contours the young men’s faces and angles of repose. Behind them, expansive trompe l’oeil windows and the airy dimensions of an interior scene suggest the fine residences of Elmina, Cape Coast, and Accra. This inscribed carte de visite, a portrait by the Lutterodt Brothers and Cousin of Accra, circa 1880, indicates the medium’s felicitous mobility: its subjects iteratively regarded, kept in albums, dispatched by post. Willie L. Pine of McCarthy Hill, Cape Coast, sent two cartes (figure 14.1) as message tokens to a distant friend — ​­tracing new and future circuits of photographs throughout the West Coast of Africa (wca) and the Atlantic world.1 Despite long awareness of the global flows of photographic objects and ideas, self-­fashioning for the camera in the nineteenth century has been dismissed as mimicry of European models — ​­substandard and lacking in ­“authenticity” — ​ ­rather than the product of deliberate creative decisions by west African sitters and photographers.2 Of these subjects, one observer noted, “These are poses late 19th century Victorian sitters would have assumed in Europe or North America, whereas the proper etiquette for self-­presentation in that region of West Africa (as we know from sculpture as well as from other photographs) would have required both men to frontally face the camera, rest their hands on their knees or in their laps, and sit erect and still.” 3 This kind of statement echoes others concerned with posing in particular ways as an affectation, regularly noted of Seydou Keïta’s subjects, who recline or pose on a motorcycle, for example. It suggests a particular unfamiliarity to

FIGURE 14.1 

Carte de visite, two unidentified men, Ghana, before 1886. Lutterodt Brothers and Cousin, Accra, Gold Coast. Private collection.

imply that non-­European people were obliged to sit or pose like sculptural objects, or to dress in a way somehow indicative of an essential geographic or cultural location.4 In a photo studio, any sitter had the prerogative to affect his or her appearance, and a portrait was thus a collaboration with the photographer and the shadow of all other portraits seen or enacted. Personal dress and public display were essential projections enacted in elite coastal West Africa, and imported clothing was among the most visible signs of belonging to a larger elite coastal society.5 Such self-­fashioning signaled cosmopolitan savoir ­faire and personal and familial financial attainment.6 Photography utterly transformed the coastal coordinates of the visible: reaching west African audiences who appreciated and equally indulged in such lavish investment in their personal appearances. Their exchange within these networks illuminates a larger constellation of ideas throughout the wca and 358 

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beyond, signaling independence, educational preferences, abiding material wealth, marriages and business partnerships, and a measure of advocacy and authority in the conflicting and changing spheres of indigenous and colonial power.7 Such portraits became the self-­conscious creation of a visible record of lives and social standing, and their complex subjectivities constituted a larger, visual west African modernity. This photo from the latter part of the nineteenth century is evidence that the visual representation of African modernity has a much deeper history than is usually recognized. We must look to the early history of photography in Africa to understand the particularly mobile nature of the modern and the agencies of these visual forms. An overzealous attention, largely market driven, on the work of one or two Malian photographers from the independence era has had the unintended consequence that important precursors in West Africa, the true pioneers of photography and its modernities, have been largely ignored. In this chapter I consider the Lutterodts’ studios and photography on the wca in the mid to late nineteenth century. The Lutterodts were an Accra family, whose generations of photographers operated pop-­up and permanent studios along the coast from the 1870s to the 1940s. As creative entrepreneurs, this family created a performative visual zone, extending studio practices and flows of photographs rhizomatically to the coast’s cities. In doing so, they linked cosmopolitan centers and bridged cultural, linguistic, political, and colonial contexts. A border-­crossing logic inheres in their photographic ­subjects — ​­not occupied with marking origins, city, or state belonging, but rather creating images wherein land, space, and people illuminate the measure of public biography and records of personal and political achievement. The Lutterodts established entirely new positions as artists and entrepreneurs, sparking a diverse and booming transborder market for photography on the wca from the 1870s.

Itinerant Agents of Modernity West Africa’s coastal cosmopolitanisms began much earlier than the advent of the camera. In Accra and other Gold Coast towns, a new indigenous elite began to emerge in the early nineteenth century, merchants who were independent, educated, and traded in new commodities following the Atlantic slave trade’s decline. These elite communities had ties to Creole (Krio) societies in cities from Europe to Freetown to Fernando Po, as well as strong family ties to indigenous communities in the Gold Coast.8 Finally, these elite M odernist L ens of L utterodt S tudios  

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forged alliances with the long-­standing Euro-­African communities that had grown around the Gold Coast’s Danish, Dutch, and English trading forts from the eighteenth century. For example, in Accra’s Osu, the town around the Danish fort Christiansborg, a sizeable and self-­conscious community of mulatofoi (Ga: mulatto), descended from Danish soldiers and Ga women, was long established and encouraged by the Danish trading administration. Children were schooled at the Danish fort, and some were employed in its trade and government. Of these Accra and other Gold Coast Euro-­African communities, some were Christian, others secular or tied to indigenous royal and military lineages, and many were educated in Europe. Into this milieu George Lutterodt arrived in Accra, coming from Germany with a Danish relative in 1805. George would become a merchant and trader who married, had many children, and owned a plantation north of the city. George’s son Wilhelm attended the Danish school at Osu, later tying into a notable Euro-­African lineage with his marriage to Mary Cleland. Wilhelm and Mary built their house, Lutterodt Hall, in 1854 on Lutterodt Street in Dutch Accra (Ussher Town) after the British bombing of Osu. George’s grandsons, William, George, and Gerhardt, referred to in contemporary English sources as “educated natives” and “Danish mulattoes,” were the founding brothers of the photographic dynasty. The Lutterodts’ business models and network of family ties, status, and wealth across class lines and origins along the coast was no small feature of their company’s lasting success. From 1876, they created what would become the most enduring business model for photographers in the region: combining itinerant pop-­up studios that advertised from town to town in advance and on arrival with permanent studio operations in Freetown, Accra, and Fernando Po, and extending their traveling photography as far south as Angola. From their earliest advertisements, it became clear that they occasionally worked together and other times traveled itinerantly, working under their own names or studio names. Gerhardt operated along the coast from the 1870s, circulating in Freetown, Cape Coast, and Accra; his brother William joined the circuit but moved separately, perhaps ensuring periodic access to customers while early patronage was still expanding. All family members benefited from the capital provided by their affluent family, but cameras, supplies, studio backdrops, and furniture were periodically imported, and they advertised these events as a way of drawing new patronage. Several studios became well established in Accra during this decade, with family apprentices and commissions

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abroad, including work for colonial and academic explorers, despite tightening access to credit during the economic downturn of the 1890s, which strengthened European commercial interests at the expense of west African businesses. The Lutterodts traveled on steamers, which carried scores of educated workers and laborers from the Gold Coast along the Gulf of Guinea — ​­the migration of labor rising with the demand for empire building particularly in Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, the Congo, and Angola. During their perambulations, they trained others who sought instruction in the trade of photography. Their tutelage also squarely drew from family, and historical accounts indicate that any young man in the family might be sent to Fernando Po for training with Gerhardt, where he had established a farm in his later years. The nature of this family practice had several benefits. One, it expanded public knowledge of their practice, their family name, and photography more generally; two, it created a secondary market in images — ​­where a commissioned portrait would be reprinted and shown as an example to convey the styles and appearances of people from far away; and three, it built up anticipation in places where permanent studios had not yet been established. As with their contemporaries Fred Grant of Cape Coast and J. P. Decker who worked in Freetown and Accra in the 1870s, the Lutterodts and other photographers in West Africa saw the benefit in keeping their studio practices mobile and offering views and portraits from far away places. Yet more than those of their colleagues, the Lutterodts’ temporary studios and their thorough itinerancy underscore the advantages offered by these patterns of mobility.9 Their particularly wide coverage from Freetown to Fernando Po suggests that despite the cumbersome equipment and glass plate negatives, the Lutterodts more than any other west African studio were the most successful in carrying these ideas, as well as those “secondary images,” long distances. They incorporated examples of their oeuvre as they went and created new portraits with clientele in the next town on the circuit. Their portraits, such as that of Chief Ayevie with his court musicians, Little Popo, on the Slave Coast (Republic of Benin), were commissioned, then reprinted to sell, or given to other interested viewers (figure 14.2). It is likely that once several images were printed and sold on studio card mounts or singly, very few of the negatives survived such lengthy journeys intact; the emulsion would often be scraped off so that the plates could be reused.10 The Lutterodts were among the first to forge an entirely new social role as artists and entrepreneurs across the wca. In tracing their efforts, in spite of their now scattered and mostly lost oeuvre of work in the region, we

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F I G U R E 1 4 . 2   [Gerhardt Lutterodt?], Slave Coast: Chief Ayevie of Little Popo with His People, ca. 1880. Albumen print. From Conrad Bullnheimer Album. Courtesy the Walther Collection, New York and Neu-Ulm, Germany.

can still arrive at a more nuanced and polycentric remapping of photography and modernity along the coast.11

Biographies Will Stay with Us Elite Gold Coast sensibilities were shared and recognizable in other parts of the wca.12 Many families had blood ties to Europe and sent children to school in England. Overseas travel was an increasing priority for education, business, and the new growing internationalist political class.13 The display cultures of Gold Coast modernity were not limited to imports from Europe, but were also embedded in earlier notions of mercantile success and business acumen rooted in preexisting Atlantic circulations. Before British imperialism’s encroachment and systemic economic advantages over Gold Coast merchants became significant, mercantilisms as evidence of intellectual prowess, business acumen, and ambition drove forms of economic development that ran through local societies for centuries.14

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Gold Coast families who had accrued resources through the eighteenth-­ century Atlantic slave trade kept much of this wealth and deep investment through the decline of the human trade in the 1830s. Later, two economic surges revivified Gold Coast wealth: the palm oil boom of the 1850s, and growth in the market for rubber, timber, gold, and cocoa in the 1880s; both buoyed merchant incomes in coastal towns.15 During this later time, growing numbers of Gold Coast businessmen, educated in Europe, began creating entirely new demonstrations of their success. They commissioned new architectural projects, personal homes in Elmina, Cape Coast, and Accra, designed and styled by Brazilian architects and builders.16 These ostentatious buildings were both business dwellings and family house compounds, and they became new focal points of accomplishment and prestige in the urban landscape (plate 13). Likewise, merchant families used disposable income in commissioning photographs, from intimate portable images like the cartes de visite to grand large-­scaled formal portraits to decorate the central meeting rooms in these new houses. Thus, the public rooms of these houses and the displays of family portraits inside were integrated elements of this modern display culture, commingling the visual in public and private, mobile and geographically rooted creative forms. In the same way, imported clothing was an important signifier of success, though it was never an either/or choice, but a deliberate personal selection made based on contexts of public and private vision. Rather than indicating some instrumental switch of cultural allegiance, wearing imported clothing was but one of many visible signs of wealth, and more important, individual style (figure 14.3). The ladies and gentlemen gathered at a pop-­up merry-­go-­ round could afford these sartorial choices — ​­men in suits, a soldier, and perhaps the photographer himself on the right, frame a cluster of women and children seated in the center. On this minimally observed imported holiday, the photographers were drawn to the many wealthy citizens partaking in the city’s diversions — ​­teas, fairs, rides, and horseraces. By the 1880s, the visible display of luxury items and consumerism was becoming a matter of considered local debate, as Gold Coast contestation of European political and cultural influence grew in response to British colonial consolidation. Those who adorned themselves with tailored clothes at times came under criticism from various levels — ​­from scorn heaped on people who were accorded a misplaced high status, to a broader accusation of the unthinking assimilation of English ideas and blind love of foreign imports.17 There

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[Gerhardt Lutterodt?], Gold Coast, Merry-Go-Round, Accra, Christmas 1887, ca. 1887. Albumen print. From Conrad Bullnheimer Album. Courtesy the Walther Collection, New York and Neu-Ulm, Germany. FIGURE 14.3 

were also those who decried these as trappings of a pervasive and ostentatious materialism.18 Not surprisingly, the cities, with their density of grand houses and increasing parades of luxurious bodies and imported clothing, were also the sites of heated debate on the meanings and effects of such ostentation. As was the case in other trading entrepôts, the relatively ready flow of cash underpinned the commercial apparatus and mobility of photography. In much of the wca, this wealth came in part from the deep pockets that slavery, and later, rural exploitation of people from the interior provided. For the Lutterodts and their cohort, mercantile imperative and entrepreneurialism drove their itinerant studios. Even competition among the family members seems to have spurred on their enduring and widespread expansion (see plate 12). Photographers like the Lutterodts illuminated aspects of this showy spending in Accra and other coastal cities. They were poised to create images that would capture personal and familial achievement at important events like marriages, or even small public events like a festival for Christmas, the periodic debut of young women eligible for marriage, or another holiday gathering in town. Yet circulation of those images later on could be a random and 364 

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F I G U R E 1 4 . 4   [Gerhardt Lutterodt?], Almeida Brothers, Little Popo, Republic of Benin, ca. 1880. Photograph. From Conrad Bullnheimer Album. Courtesy the Walther Collection, New York and Neu-Ulm, Germany.

somewhat felicitous affair, guided by what the photographers had just photographed, and what new audiences were offered at the next stop. For example, a portrait of the Almeida brothers of Little Popo, Republic of Benin, suggests how readily the appearance of the photographer was the impetus for taking a fine portrait (figure 14.4). Adorned in frock coats, the brothers of this Afro-­ Brazilian community might have sent this portrait to family members down the coast (to Ouidah or Porto-­Novo), or given them as gifts to visitors, as was likely the case with this image, which ended up in a private German album.19 As the Lutterodts traveled farther afield, their sitters grew to use photography as part of a more thorough-­going initiative, one that helped create a permanent and visible record tied to a much broader concern with personal biography, family, and public memory. Certainly in southern Ghana, photographic portraiture became a potent form of biography and selective record of personal achievement. It drew from M odernist L ens of L utterodt S tudios  

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imperatives informed by the prerogatives of the elite citizenry, but also for any person, regardless of status or birth, who was full of ambition. Like other kinds of semipublic display, portraits would be displayed and used over time to evoke individual glory: a portrait might be a visual metonym for a political success; a triumph measured in land, goods, or a house; or even travel for work and adventure portrayed as lionized engagements with the world beyond one’s home. One of many key actors in the exchanges of intellectual and creative capital along the wca and the Atlantic during this era was Tackie Tawia. During his long reign as a king in Accra, Tackie ruled over important political shifts and advocated for the avant-­garde transfer of ideas and skills between cities. He commanded a renowned military force and had fought in several Gold Coast wars; his successes were also attributed to his position in the spiritual domains of Ga supernatural belief. Through his four decades’ reign, King Tackie stood resolutely as an oppositional force against British colonial encroachments on his political control in the city.20 Tackie’s role as an agent of intercultural negotiation was one part of his heroism. The export and appropriation of ideas and the expansion of technologies during this era of solidifying colonial rule are hallmarks of his biography. The Lutterodt studios photographed this king, to whom they were related, fairly often.21 Tackie’s death in 1902 was a momentous event in the political and supernatural life of colonial Accra. The funeral had caused uproar in the city, with ten thousand mourners coming from Accra and its environs to mourn, wearing the color of blood, and firing muskets and guns in tribute. On the anniversary of his death, mourners held a month-­long Great Lamentation (Ga: yalafemo) in Accra and created a new custom of parading to his mausoleum, on the outskirts of town, every year thereafter. Frederick Lutterodt’s studio photographed mourners on the commemorative anniversary. This portrait of his close mourners, carefully marked 1903, was printed plentifully enough that copies were given and bought by Accra’s community, including a member of the city’s Basel Mission (figure 14.5). Taken in the courtyard of a family house, men of all ages and a few boys are assembled in front of an expansive painted backdrop. They wear dark-­colored mourning cloth, simple and free of patterns. Many wear cloths as armbands as well, and their elaborate head ties signify that these are particularly senior members of the family, to distinguish them from mourners of the larger bereaved family and community. Three men pose with their hands on faces and one finger pointing to the eye: this seemingly casual move is a charged gesture meaning “Have you seen?,” which 366 

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F I G U R E 1 4 . 5   Frederick Lutterodt, The People of the Deceased King Tackie in Accra (with their temples bound as a sign of mourning), Gold Coast, 1903. Albumen print. FRC Lutterodt Studio, Accra, Ghana, Gold Coast. Permission of Basel Mission Archive, qw-30.007.0008.

references the importance of this event and tells all spectators that this moment is being deliberately and consciously made or noted. The gesture alerts the present audience, and the photographer, and all future viewers, about the gravity of the occasion, social and photographed. Portraits and photography around the biographical events of important people are deeply imbricated in the local and the cosmopolitan regional senses of the political world. Portraiture was inevitably an ongoing visual negotiation between photographers or artists and their subjects and patrons over their interpretations of local histories and traditions. This is how there came to be such considerable photographic attention to portraits of the deceased, their funerals, their chief mourners, of women dressed and adorned for the various stages of mourning, and of graves. This photographic attention expanded in the late nineteenth century and became widespread along the coast, creating new visualities of family, private and public observation and performance. Not only does this photograph of Tackie’s mourners inscribe and underline loM odernist L ens of L utterodt S tudios  

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cal determination to perform, to remember and iterate Tackie’s political legacy and triumphs, it marks the emergence of an entirely new kind of monument to Tackie’s importance in colonial Accra’s political and spiritual spheres. It is one of many performative and intermedial images, which extends modern personal and political biography into the future.

Photography and the Colony The Lutterodts’ seven decades of studio practice effectively bookend the rise and decline of British colonialism in West Africa. Yet neither British intervention nor other European imperialist projects much undermined the ability of these entrepreneurs to traverse borders for their own ends. Rather, the long-­standing trade networks and the thorough mercantilism of the region supported their expansion into the rapidly changing terrain of the wca and beyond. The Lutterodt family was secure in Accra as its business hub and ancestral home, and the itinerancy of the brothers, sons, and nephews was not only tenable but successful because of the management of other income streams. As Érika Nimis and others have pointed out, colonial rule in coastal entrepôt cities was quite distinct from those in the west African interior. It was far easier than in other regions for those in English protectorates and colonies to travel and trade on their own behalf; in contrast, French photographers dominated in Saint-­Louis, Senegal, and later Dakar for decades before the first African-­owned studios would appear.22 Photographic subjects and patronage reflected these different orders, where oppressive labor extraction was the norm, as in the aof (French West Africa). The freedom of independent Accra families to move, and the means to do it, was a symptom of the relative wealth of Gold Coast families, and the entrepreneurial spirit and wherewithal to travel for work along the coast was a long-­standing and highly regarded tradition with deep roots in the elite classes along the wca. In some ways, Gerhardt Lutterodt best exemplifies the benefits of itinerancy as a strategy against the shoring up of colonial consolidation. Of the family’s three founding photographers, Gerhardt’s movements along the Bight of Biafra to Fernando Po and along the southwest coast down to Angola suggest that he was probably the most well traveled of the studio photographers. In this capacity, Gerhardt trained generations of family members, as well as other photographers in the region. A. Accolatse of Lome, Togo, was taught by Gerhardt, and Lutterodt family records indicate that many of the young sons in the Accra family were sent at some point to Fernando Po to apprentice with 368 

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F I G U R E 1 4 . 6   Unknown photographer, Two Men Standing in a Field Cleared for Cocoa Plantation, Bioko, Equatorial Guinea [Probably Gerhardt Lutterodt and his employee on Lutterodt’s farm, Fernando Po], ca. 1900. Albumen print. From the Basel Mission Album, Accra, Ghana, eepa 1997-011-0148. Courtesy Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution.

him.23 Many of the Lutterodt men around the turn of the century joined the ongoing waves of migration from the Gold Coast to other parts of the coast to seek their fortunes. Members of the family advertised their services as agents to bring new skilled labor to new cities in Nigeria, Gabon, other parts of the Bights, as well as the Congo.24 Upon retiring, Gerhardt bought land on the island of Fernando Po to start a cocoa farm, riding the wave of new opportunities in changing access to land ownership and new introductions to the agricultural economy. In family accounts, it was Gerhardt, rather than the noted nationalist Tetteh Quashie, who introduced the all-­important crop of cocoa to the Gold Coast from Fernando Po. The few landscape photographs of this area in the late nineteenth century survey the dramatically changing environs. They frame the growing numbers of vessels at the port and the build-­up of infrastructure, such as men stringing telegraph wires and road building. Among these are a series of GerM odernist L ens of L utterodt S tudios  

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hardt with multiple laborers who have recently cleared a forested area (figure 14.6); other photographs of this field show newly planted cocoa trees. There is a very personal sense in the way these images were formulated in relation to land, ownership, new forms of agricultural experimentation, and personal accomplishment. These are both modest and proud gestures — ​­connecting the accomplishment of land ownership and its transformation to cash crop with the Lutterodt family’s successful migrations back and forth from Accra. Also imbricated is the depicting of different statuses — ​­the changing authority of people as landowners and paid laborers against a new backdrop — ​­here set up in a British-­held area where African entrepreneurs tried their hands in new ventures and captured those successes in images.25 The range of commissions offered by Gerhardt’s strategic positioning at Fernando Po underlines the photography of the time as indifferent to genres. They traded on the breadth of their experience, which anchored their expertise. As the most experienced, skillful, and mobile of wca photographers, their commissions held portraiture, landscape photography, and colonial and commercial assignments. Gerhardt photographed many of the islands off that coast for the Portuguese explorer and naturalist Francisco Newton in the 1890s, at a time when Spanish and Portuguese protectorates were particularly prime for land grabs by the other, stronger colonial powers in the region. Unfortunately, many of the images from these expeditions were lost in a fire in Spanish archives. Frederick Lutterodt, part of the second generation of Lutterodts, was directly commissioned for various colonial expeditions, including by the British and the Germans. His Accra Studio, established 1904, touted his experience abroad, such as in Cameroon from 1909 to 1913, and with the British governor through northern Ghana and Togoland in 1919–20; Frederick’s formative years in the 1890s, it was widely noted, were spent in Cameroon, French Gabon, Fernando Po, San Tome, and Principe.26

Overburdened Alex Lutterodt, a descendant who worked in the family business until the Second World War, observed that by far, most of the studio clients were women, continuously coming in to capture fleeting pleasures — ​­a new ensemble made of spectacular cloth, a birthday, a return to good health, the reception of good news.27 Taken on the spur of the moment, the demand for updated portraits — ​ ­combined with holidays, births, funerals — ​­meant that the flow of beautiful women was such that it overwhelmed the young photographer, who was too 370 

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inclined to give away his services in the presence of such stunning patrons. He left the business to ensure that it would survive the hazard of his own financial and aesthetic recklessness. The flood of beauty coming into the studio was just too great to bear. In Lutterodts’ pop-­up migrations along the coast, they blazed along the corridor of the wca, extended the views of west African and European traders, women and men, missionaries, “returnees” from the Americas and the UK, sailors, laborers, clerks, and cocoa pioneers from up and down the coast, the free born, slaves, and the newly freed.28 They were agents of modernity, and framed this standard as practice in photographing the cosmopolitan, mercantile, and outward-­looking citizens and subjects. As objects and as process, their photographic events were local, creative, iterative, and participatory. As photographers, each negotiation of making a photograph was an essential transformation of ideas about location, the creating of tradition, and the constant updating that photography enabled and demanded. The Lutterodts made portraits that now could be interpreted as ethnographic moments, caught as if in amber, wherein lovely women’s portraits seem flattened by labels in personal albums because we are missing their stories (figure 14.7). Terms like “Krobo” or “Yoruba,” “native” or “educated” cue a longed-­for sense of authenticity and atemporality but were, I think, a kind of shorthand to mark the naming and flow of people passing through the cities of the wca, occurring in those moments in the late nineteenth century, and that were anything but timeless.

Aporias Because Lutterodt studios were so widely arrayed, and very little was published in postcards or in commercial albums in other locations, much of this image legacy is now lost, or rests in private family collections. Even the descendants of the Lutterodt family have seen great losses of these archives after the close of operations. The early heyday of their work from the late 1870s to the 1890s, a particularly momentous era, was before the development of technology to transfer photographic images into prints for books or newspapers. Only from the 1890s is it possible to trace their work in travel publications. Still, much more has been lost over time, decaying in private family collections. For these reasons, relatively little is known of their oeuvre. The Lutterodts’ photographic practice amounts to an unprecedented west African dynasty, which tirelessly expanded the circulation of the medium, even to the detriment of the longevity of their communal archive. They formalized the enactment of the photograph M odernist L ens of L utterodt S tudios  

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F I G U R E 1 4 . 7   Unknown photographer, Accra-Mulattin, ca. 1880. Photograph of unidentified woman, Accra, Ghana. Unattributed Gold Coast studio. From Conrad Bullnheimer Album. Courtesy the Walther Collection, New York and Neu-Ulm, Germany.

itself within performative scenes of public display and political life in West Africa, and marked the triumphant and ephemeral contexts of self-­fashioning and display in the distance from home. The Lutterodts’ photographs and histories utterly upend the notion that the camera’s introduction in the nineteenth century was a hegemonic tool used primarily for the colony. The Lutterodts were agents of the modern, working in cosmopolitan milieux and anchored in wca social, political, and creative worlds. To iterate their histories as merely reactions to colonial photographic fictions reflects an ignorance of the depth and complexity of local and transnational west African artistry. Their work fundamentally centered the camera in West Africa, far earlier than has been supposed by Okwui Enwezor, André Magnin, and others who have assumed the medium was superfluous or even reactionary until the independence era. The artistry of unintended consequences is all the more valuable, and the Lutterodts’ photographs reinscribe the substances of African modernity from those utterly mobile early days. Notes 1. West Coast of Africa (wca) was a regional term employed by many photographers in the nineteenth century. Writing from other points on the wca are Patricia Hickling, “Bonnevide: Photographie des Colonies — ​­Early Studio Photography in Senegal,” Visual Anthropology 27, no. 4 (2014): 339–61. doi:10.1080/08949468.2014.91 7252; Xavier Ricou on Saint-­Louis, Senegal, Sénégalmétis, last updated June 10, 2013, http://senegalmetis.com/Senegalmetis/PHOTOGRAPHES_1.html; Vera Viditz-­Ward, “Photography in Sierra Leone 1850–1918,” Africa 57, no. 4 (1987): 510–18; Julie Crooks, “Alphonso Lisk-­Carew: Early Photography in Sierra Leone” (PhD diss., University of London, 2014); Jürg Schneider, “Exploring the Atlantic Visualscape: A History of Photography in West and Central Africa, 1840–1890” (PhD diss., University of Basel, 2011). 2. Stephen Sprague, “Yoruba Photography: How the Yoruba See Themselves,” African Arts 12, no. 1 (1978): 52–59; Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (London: Reaktion, 1997); Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Christraud Geary and Virginia-­Lee Webb, eds., Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998); Erin Haney, Photography and Africa (London: Reaktion, 2010). 3. Christraud Geary, “Roots and Routes of African Photographic Practices: From Modern to Vernacular Photography in West and Central Africa (1850–1980),” in Companion to Modern African Art, ed. Gitti Salami and Monica Blackmun Visona (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2012), 81. 4. Jean Allman, ed., Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress (Bloomington: M odernist L ens of L utterodt S tudios  

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Indiana University Press, 2004); Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 2, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 5. Simon Gikandi, “The Embarrassment of Victorianism: Colonial Subjects and the Lure of Englishness,” in Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 157–85. 6. Richard Rathbone, “West Africa: Modernity and Modernization,” in African Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debate, ed. Jan-­Georg Deutsch, Peter Probst, and Heike Schmidt (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), 18–30; Kristin Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); Michael Echeruo, Victorian Lagos: Aspect of Nineteenth Century Lagos Life (London: Macmillan, 1977); Michel R. Doortmont, “Producing a Received View of Gold Coast Elite Society? C. F. Hutchison’s Pen Pictures of Modern Africans and African Celebrities,” History in Africa 33 (2006): 473–93, doi:10.1353/hia.2006.0010. 7. Changing identities through travel, education, intermarriage, and the diverse cosmopolitan communities on the Gold Coast littoral are discussed in John Parker, Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), 33–45; and in Paul Jenkins, ed., The Recovery of the West African Past (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 1998). 8. Creole (Krio) refers to Anglophone communities in myriad settler towns; Euro-­ African refers to communities in Ghana of European and African parentage, known in nineteenth-­century usage as “mulatto,” or in Ga (the language of Ghana), mulatofoi. Indigeneity is so varied and contingent on the wca that it must be considered precisely in local contexts as well as in internationalist terms. There is considerable fluidity between groups of so-­called traditional or natural rulers and cosmopolitan Gold Coast elite. Larry W. Yarak, “A West African Cosmopolis: Elmina (Ghana) in the Nineteenth Century,” Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, February 12–15, 2003, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, History Cooperative, http://www.history​ cooperative.org/proceedings/seascapes/yarak.html; Kwabena O. Akurang-­Parry, “ ‘Dis­ respect and Contempt for Our Natural Rulers’: The African Intelligentsia and the Effects of British Indirect Rule on Indigenous Rulers in the Gold Coast, c. 1912–1920,” International Journal of Regional and Local History 2, no. 1 (2006): 43–65. 9. See discussions of the ebb and flow of different centers, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Biran Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Centers of photographic practice along the coast were constantly in flux: Gambian photographer Francis Joaque moved to Cameroon from Fernando Po in 1865; see Jürg Schneider, “Portrait Photography: A Visual Currency in the Atlantic Visualscape,” in Portraiture and Photography in Africa, ed. John Peffer and Elisabeth Lynn Cameron (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

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2013), 35–65. J. P. Decker from Cape Coast worked itinerantly from 1867; Haney, Photography and Africa, ch. 1; Hickling, Bonnevide, passim. 10. A. P. K. Lutterodt, interviews by the author, Accra, November 23, 2001, and May 3, 2002. The images shown in this chapter were found in of a series of albums held by the Walther Collection, Neu-­Ulm, Germany, exhibited in Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive. 11. Additionally, Ann Shumard, A Durable Memento: Portraits by Augustus Washington, African-­American Daguerreotypist (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1999); Erin Haney, “Film, Charcoal, Time: Contemporaneities in Gold Coast Photographs,” History of Photography 34 (2010): 119–33; Jürg Schneider and Erin Haney, eds., “Early Photographies in West Africa,” special issue, Visual Anthropology 27 (2014); Crooks, “Alphonso Lisk-­Carew.” 12. Parker, Making the Town; Roger Gocking, Facing Two Ways: Ghana’s Coastal Communities under Colonial Rule (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999); Yarak, “West African Cosmopolis.” 13. Doortmont, “Producing a Received View.” 14. J.  F. A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder, A History of West Africa, vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1985). 15. Raymond E. Dummett, “African Merchants of the Gold Coast, 1860–1905 — ​ ­Dynamics of Indigenous Entrepreneurship,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 25, no. 4 (1983): 661–93, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500010665. 16. Two-­story buildings of brick and stone contained grand living spaces, warehouses and outbuildings, courtyards, rooms for servants, and buildings for doing business all within one family compound. See Doortmont, “Producing a Received View”; Alcione M. Amos, “Afro-­Brazilians in Togo: The Case of the Olympio Family, 1882–1945,” Cahier d’Études Africaines 162 (2001): 293–314. 17. “Indians, Chinamen and Maoris rejoice in their native names, and are proud of their countries and their own institutions, but we groan under the weight of foreign names and habits, hence all our misery and woe. . . . The home-­loving English mind cannot think with out associating us with slavery and savagism. . . . And let us ever bear in mind, that to be thoroughly convinced that ‘Civilization does not necessarily mean The Aping of European Manners and Customs.’ ” Kwamina Tawiah, “No Pseudo-­ Englishmen,” Gold Coast Express, November 19, 1888. Another noted that the British borrowed from Greek and Roman civilization, but they themselves accused the African of being “too readily imitative.” Janus, “The Inventive Faculties of the European and the African Races,” Gold Coast Aborigines, February 26, 1898. 18. A Citizen, Cape Coast, Gold Coast Aborigines, April 23, 1898. 19. The Afro-­Brazilian family d’Almeida included former slaves, free born, and slave traders in Agoué, Ouidah, and Little Popo, Dahomey (now Republic of Benin); Silke Strickrodt, “ ‘Afro-­Brazilians’ of the Western Slave Coast in the 19th Century,” in

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Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slavery, edited by Jose C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy (Amherst, MA: Prometheus, 2004), 212–44; Adam Jones and Peter Sebald, An African Family Archive: The Lawsons of Little Popo/Aneho (Togo), 1841–1938 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port,’ 1727–1892 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005). 20. Shortly after Tackie came to the throne in 1862, the British consolidated their holdings along the coast and banished two of the three Accra kings, Tackie of Kinka and Kojo Ababio of Jamestown. Both returned to Accra in 1869, prompting the British to change their policy toward Accra’s leaders. By 1875 Tackie led the Ga-­Adangme people in battle in the southeastern part of the Gold Coast and cemented his reputation for bravery as a military leader. 21. Tackie referred to his Lutterodt “uncle.” King Tackie interview by Col. White, October 12, 1887, adm 11/1/1086, National Archives of Ghana, Accra. See Parker, Making the Town, 77. 22. Érika Nimis, Photographes d’Afrique de l’Ouest: L’expérience Yoruba (Paris: Karthala, 2005); Érika Nimis, “Yoruba Studio Photographers in Francophone West Africa,” in Portraiture and Photography in Africa, ed. John Peffer and Elisabeth Lynn Cameron (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 102–40; Hickling, Bonnevide. 23. Philippe David, “Photographer-­Publishers in Togo,” in Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography, ed. Pascal Martin Saint Leon, N’Goné Fall, and Jean Loup Pivin (Paris: Revue Noire, 1999) 42–46; A. P. K Lutterodt, interviews by the author, Accra, November 23, 2001; April 3, 2002; and May 3, 2002. 24. Advertisement by the Royal Photographic Gallery’s G.  A. G. Lutterodt, Gold Coast Chronicle, October 21, 1899. 25. Erin Haney, “Going to Sea: Photographic Publics of the Free and Newly Freed,” Visual Anthropology 27, no. 4 (2014): 362–78. 26. Allister Macmillan, The Red Book of West Africa: Historical and Descriptive, Commercial and Industrial Facts, Figures and Resources (London: F. Cass, 1968), 211. 27. A. P. K. Lutterodt, interviews by the author, Accra, November 23, 2001; April 3, 2002; May 3, 2002; and February 16, 2005. 28. These migrations and the statuses of free and unfree people in Haney, “Going to Sea.”

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CONTRIBUTORS

B I L L A N T H E S  is a professor in the Art Field Group at Pitzer College. He is author of Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960 (2006) and Edgar Heap of Birds (2015), both published by Duke University Press. He has received fellowships and awards from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University, the Rockefeller Foundation/Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program. He lives in Pomona, California.

is senior lecturer in art history at Victoria University of Wellington, where he teaches the visual arts of the Pacific with a research emphasis on the postcolonial era. He received his doctorate from Cornell University and is coeditor of Art in Oceania: A New History (2012), winner of the 2013 Author’s Club Art Book Prize (UK), and Tatau: Photographs by Mark Adams: Samoan Tattoo, New Zealand Art, Global Culture (2010). His publications have appeared in Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture, the Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Art New Zealand, and the Journal of Pacific History. He is currently cocurating (with Nicholas Thomas and Adrian Locke) the exhibition Oceania for the Royal Academy of Arts, London, due to open in 2018.

PETER BRUNT

D U F F E K is the curator of Contemporary Visual Arts and Pacific Northwest at the ubc Museum of Anthropology. Her research focus lies both in the history of Northwest Coast Indigenous collections and in the relationship of contemporary art to cultural and institutional practices. Among her exhibitions and publications are Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Territories (with Tania Willard, 2016), Projections: The Painted Art of Henry Speck, Udzi’stalis (with Marcia Crosby, 2012), Border Zones: New Art across Cultures (2010), Robert Davidson: The Abstract Edge (2004), and The Transforming Image: Painted Arts of Northwest Coast First Nations (with Bill McLennan, 2000).  KAREN

is a research associate with Visual Identities in Art and Design at the University of Johannesburg; she holds a doctorate in the history of art from soas, University of London. She recently curated Sailors and Daughters: Early Photography and the Indian Ocean for the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution (indian-­ocean.africa.si.edu). She partners and teaches in several arts collaborations in the United States, the UK, and west Africa, including Resolution (www.resolutionphoto.org), and has published widely on photography, media, and arts institutions on the African continent and the diaspora. Erin co-­curated the inaugural exhibition of Kenyan photographer Priya Ramrakha, A Pan-­African Perspective, 1950–1968, in South Africa in 2017; and is co-­editor of the forthcoming volume Priya Ramrakha (2018). ERIN HANEY

is an art historian and curator in the Department of Art, University of Toronto, where she teaches modern and contemporary African and diasporic arts. She is the author of In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-­Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995 (2004) and Ethiopian Passages: Contemporary Art from the Diaspora (2003), and coeditor of Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art (2007). Harney has published in Art Journal, African Arts, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, the Art Bulletin, New Literary History, Third Text, South Atlantic Quarterly, and the Oxford Art Journal. She was the first curator of contemporary arts at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian (1999–2003). As a Commonwealth Scholar, Harney received her doctorate from the University of London. She has two books in progress, “The Retromodern: Africa in the Time of the Contemporary” and “Prismatic Scatterings: Global Modernists in Post-­War Europe.” ELIZABETH HARNEY

(Inuk, Nunatsiavut) is an associate professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, where she holds a  Concordia University Research Chair in Indigenous Art History and Community Engagement. Heather has published extensively on Inuit and other Indigenous arts  in  academic journals such as PUBLIC, Art Link,  TOPIA, Art Journal,  and  RACAR and in texts such as Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada (ed. Lynda Jessup, 2014), Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism  (2011), and  Curating Difficult Knowledge (2011). She recently cocurated the world’s first circumpolar night festival, iNuit blanche (2016); curated the reinstallation of the permanent collection of Inuit art at the Musée National des Beaux-­Arts du Québec, Ilippunga (2016); and launched the nationally touring exhibition SakKijajuk: Art and Craft from HEATHER IGLOLIORTE

410 

C ontributors

Nunatsiavut (2016–19). Igloliorte is also the Guest Curator for the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Inuit Art Centre, opening 2020. is a former deputy-vice chancellor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She has written extensively on the art of traditional communities in southern Africa; on the expressive culture of other marginalized groups, including the urban homeless; on various aspects of South African youth culture; and on the art of several contemporary South African artists. Klopper is the author, most recently, of Irma Stern: Are You Still Alive? Stern’s Life and Art Seen through Her Letters to Richard and Fred Feldman, 1934–1966 (2017). Her research interests include the proliferation of alternative modernisms that emerge through the interface between rural and urban communities in present-­day KwaZulu-­Natal. SANDRA KLOPPER

I A N M c L E A N is Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History at the University of Melbourne and research professor of contemporary art at the University of Wollongong. He has published extensively on Australian art and particularly Aboriginal art within a contemporary context. His books include Indigenous Archives: The Making and Unmaking of Aboriginal Art (with Darren Jorgensen, 2014), Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art (2016), Double Desire: Transculturation and Indigenous Contemporary Art (2014), How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art (2009), White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art (1998), and The Art of Gordon Bennett (with a chapter by Gordon Bennett, 1996).

was director of the Centre for the Creative Arts of Africa and academic head of Wits Art Museum at the University of the Witwatersrand from 2012 to 2015. Having earned the first PhD in African art studies in South Africa, she subsequently published on Indigenous arts of southern Africa in books, journals, and edited volumes. Her essays consider the works of both historical and contemporary African artists. In association with Wits Art Museum, she has curated and cocurated exhibitions and was responsible for a section of UCLA Fowler Museum’s fiftieth anniversary show. She has presented papers at numerous international conferences in the United States, Europe, and Japan. She is author of the book African Dream Machines: Style and Meaning in African Headrests (2007). Her current concern with modernity in its wider aspects is reflected in her concurrent work on modern traditions and traditions of modernism in South African art. She is now professor emeritus at Wits.

ANITRA NETTLETON

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411 

is professor of African and African diaspora art history at Princeton University. His books include Contemporary African Art Since 1980 (2009), Who Knows Tomorrow (2010), Ezumeezu: Essays on Nigerian Art and Architecture, a Festschrift in Honour of Demas Nwoko (2012), Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-­Century Nigeria (2015), and Obiora Udechukwu: Line, Image, Text (2016). His curatorial projects include the Nigerian Pavilion at the First Johannesburg Biennale, 1995; Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1995); The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 (Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 2001); The 5th Gwangju Biennale (2004); Who Knows Tomorrow (Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2010); and Life Objects: Art and the Lifecycle in Africa (Princeton University Art Museum, 2010). Okeke-­Agulu is coeditor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, a columnist for Huffington Post, and a blogger at Ofodunka. CHIKA

O K E K E -­A G U L U

is a Canada Research Professor and Professor of Art History at Carleton University, Ottawa. Since completing doctoral research on Mende women’s masquerades from Sierra Leone, her research has focused on the Indigenous arts of North America and critical museology. Her books include Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (2011), Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (1998), and Native North American Art (2014). She has served as director of the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology and president of ciha, the International Committee on the History of Art. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

RUTH B. PHILLIPS

was educated at the University of Texas at Austin. He is Eugene B. Adkins Presidential Professor of Art History and Mary Lou Milner Carver Chair in Native American Art at the University of Oklahoma. His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Howard Foundation at Brown University, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and an ou Arts and Humanities Faculty Fellowship. His major publications include Native American Art and the New York Avant-­Garde (1995), Native American Art in the Twentieth Century (1999), and Allan Houser: An American Master (2004). He was curator, editor, and principal author of Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison (2013), a traveling retrospective exhibition organized by the Minnesota Museum of American Art and Arts Midwest. His most recent W.

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JACKSON

RUSHING

C ontributors

III

exhibition and catalog is Generations in Modern Pueblo Painting: The Art of Tonita Peña and Joe Herrera (Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, 2018). is a Pākehā New Zealand art historian and curator. He was a Newton International Fellow at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, in 2012–13. He received his PhD in art history from Victoria University of Wellington in 2006 for a thesis exploring the dynamic relationship between customary and modern Māori art in the twentieth century. This was later published as The Carver and the Artist: Māori Art in the Twentieth Century (2008). He has published a number of books about Māori art, including Ihenga: The Evolution of Māori Art in the Twentieth Century (2007) and The Passing World, The Passage of Life: John Hovell and the Art of Kōwhaiwhai (2010). He is a contributor to the book Art in Oceania: A New History (2012). His most recent book is The Māori Meeting House: Introducing the Whare Whakairo (2015). DAMIAN SKINNER

has written extensively on art, empire, and Pacific history. He has curated exhibitions in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, many in collaboration with contemporary artists. His books include Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (1999); with Peter Brunt and other colleagues, he coauthored Art in Oceania: A New History (2012), which was awarded the Authors’ Society’s Art Book Prize. Since 2006 he has been director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

NICHOLAS THOMAS

is a Queen’s National Scholar and associate professor of Indigenous Art and Visual Culture in the Department of Art History and Art Conservation at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, and curator at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s. His research and publishing focus on historical, modern, and contemporary Indigenous arts of North America and museum studies. He was a cocurator and author of Inuit Prints, Japanese Inspiration: Early Printmaking in the Canadian Arctic  (2011) and curator of the traveling exhibition  Picturing Arctic Modernity: North Baffin Drawing, 1964 (2017–19). From 2005 to 2014, he was the curator of Contemporary Inuit Art at the Canadian Museum of History He received his PhD from the University of Rochester’s Program in Visual and Cultural Studies.  NORMAN VORANO

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INDEX

Page numbers followed by f indicate figures. Abbe, Mary, 277 Abedin, Zainul, 252 Abelam artists, 163–65 Aboriginal art, Australian. See Australian Indigenous and Western Arrernte art Abstract Composition (Morrison), 264–66 abstract expressionism: first- and second-generation, 268; Indian Space Painters and, 262; Morrison and, 262, 264, 268–69, 270; New York school, 268, 270, 277, 280n39 abstraction, formalist, 339–40, 342–43 abstract surrealism, 263–64 Académie La Grande Chaumière, 311, 318 Accra-Mulattin (Lutterodt), 372f Achebe, Chinua, 166 action painting, 270 Acutt, Lynn, 33, 40, 54 Adam and Eve (Nwoko), 249 Advancing American Painting exhibition (1946), 96 aesthetic primitivism, 251–53, 255nn29–30 Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (aoa) grouping, 3, 13

African American modernists, 324–25 African modernisms in Paris. See Paris, postwar African modernisms in AfriCOBRA movement, 324 agency, 56, 82–84, 245 agwọlagwọ (Nigerian coil motif), 248 Akeeaktashuk, 80, 81f Akis, Timothy, 166–69, 173, 182; Man i hait namil long tupela ston (Man hiding between two stones), 169f; Untitled, 168f Alaskan Native Arts and Crafts (anac) catalogs, 75, 87n31 Albrecht, F. W., 200 allochronism, 7 Alloway, Lawrence, 264–66 Almeida Brothers, Little Popo, Republic of Benin (Lutterodt), 365, 365f Altar for Christ (Hlungwani), 337, 337f, 347 altermodern, 2 “alternatively modern” approach, 113 Altjira (Dreamtime or Dreaming), 198–206 Amadlozi group, 339, 354n37 Amidilak (Amidlak), 80, 81f Amos, Emma, 333n74 Amulda Gorge (Pareroultja), 193 Ana Mmuo (Okeke), 246, 247 Anderson, Benedict, 236

Andrew, Brook, 165, 184n3 Ango, 182 Aniakor, Chike, 247 Anima (Duff), 156f Antagonist, The (Morrison), 269 Anthes, Bill, 275 Aotearoa. See Māori art Appadurai, Arjun, 20, 335–36, 345, 346, 348, 351 Araeen, Rasheed, 279n21 Arlidge, Clive, 144 Arnold, Ben, 340, 342 Arp, Jean, 273 Arrernte. See Australian Indigenous and Western Arrernte art Art Gallery of South Australia, 179–81, 190 artifact vs. art, 138, 149, 158. See also craft vs. art Arts of the Raven exhibition (Vancouver Art Gallery), 110–12, 115, 121, 131, 137n72 Art Students League (asl), New York City, 261–62 Ashevak, Kenojuak, 211 Ashoona, Pitseolak, 211 assimilation: Australia and, 192; Inuit and, 211, 224; Native Americans and, 94, 95–96; Northwest Coast art and, 115 attitudes, modernist, 10 Auckland City Art Gallery, 155, 156f Augustine, Magdalena, 103, Plate 2 Australian Indigenous and Western Arrernte art: Aboriginality and modernism, 187–95; Altjira (Dreamtime or Dreaming), 198–206; Edwin Pare­ roultja, 192–93; Hans Heysen, 190–91, 193–94, 203; Hermannsburg Mission, cosmology, and Arrernte modernism, 188–89, 195–206; middlebrow taste 416 

INDEX

and indigenization of Australian culture, 188; pastoral modernism, 190–91, 195–96, 202–3; Spencer and Gillen’s study of Arrernte and prototypical primitivism, 193; temporal rupture of modernity, neotraditionalism, and, 195–96, 205–6; tjurunga concept, 189, 199–205. See also Namatjira, Albert Australian Museum, Sydney, 174, 185n16 authenticity: “African,” 336, 339; decolonizing societies and, 18; Inuit art and, 65, 79, 88n45; Lutterodt photography and, 357–58, 371; primitivism as generator of, 5; “traditional Indian painting” and, 95 autoethnography, 91, 106n2 automatism, 263, 266, 270, 273 Autumn Exhibition, Auckland Society of Arts, 155 avant-garde: aesthetic primitivism and, 251–52; Kumalo and, 342–43; local, 342–43; Okeke and, 245; in Paris, 311; Sekoto and New York avant-garde, 327 avant-garde abstraction, 262 Baij, Ramkimkar, 252 Baldwin, James, 311 Ballantyne, Tony, 309 Bantu Agricultural Show, 53–56, 55f Barclay, Philip, 155 Barkan, Elazar, 14 Barlach, Ernst, 340 “Basket Makers of the Coachella Valley” (Steffa), 99–100 basketry, 93, 98–106, 102f, Plate 2 Battarbee, Rex, 187, 188, 189, 191–92, 202; Central Australian Landscape, Plate 5 Beadle, Paul, 155 Bearden, Romare, 333n74 Beier, Georgina, 166–70, 174, 179, 182–83, 184n9

Beier, Ulli, 165–70, 174, 180f, 182–83, 184n9, 185n16 Belting, Hans, 1–2, 327 Belvo, Hazel, 259 Benjamin, Tritobia, 320, 323, 332n51 bighouse (gukwdzi), 126, 127f, 131–32 biomorphism, 264, 266 Biting the Doctor’s Arm (Kauage), 176, 177f, 181 Black and White Patterned Forms (Morrison), 266–67, 266f Blue Eagle, Acee, 92 Blue Geese on Snow (Mungitok), 228, 229f Boghossian, Alexander “Skunder,” 307f; about, 306, 318; in America, 324–25; Ju ju’s Wedding, 321f; Klee and, 318–19, 323–24; Lam and, 322–23; in London, Paris, and Ethiopia, 317–20; Night Flight of Dread and Delight, 321–22, 322f; Sekoto, commonalities with, 325–26; Spring Scrolls, 320f; surrealism and, 319–22; Time Cycle III, 322, Plate 10 Booth, John, 151 Bose, Nandalal, 252 Botha, Louis, 42, 44 Bourgeois, Louise: The Winged Figure, 267–68 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 2 Brancusi, Constantin, 249, 267 Braques, Georges, 151 Breton, André, 319, 322 British Columbia Totem Pole Preservation Committee, 119 Brown, Diane, 123–24 Buddensieg, Andrea, 1–2 Buka War (Kauage), 176, 177f Burn, Ian, 190–91, 194–95 Burnett, Ricky, 346–47, 351 Burrus, D. L., 75

Busa, Peter, 262 Bush, Ronald, 14 Cadena, Marisol de la, 16 Cain’s Aeroplane (Hlungwani), 347–48, 349f “Canada: Contemporary Eskimo Stone Carvings” (Saarinen), 209, 210f Canadian Eskimo Art exhibition and catalog, 79, 82, 227–28 Canadian Handicrafts Guild, 62, 65, 68–71, 85n7 Canclini, Nestor, 309 Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand, 147–50 Cape Dorset. See Inuit printmaking in Cape Dorset Caribou, Walter, 276 Carlson, Helen, 269 Carpenter, Edmund, 88n45 Carpenter, George, 69 Carr, Emily, 17, 67 Carter, Paul, 201 Cassatt, Mary, 51 Castle, Brother Roger, 327n2 Cattaneo, Guiseppe, 354n37 Central Australian Landscape (Battarbee), Plate 5 Central Mt. Wedge (Namatjira), 191f Césaire, Aimé, 319 Cetshwayo, King, 33, 40–42, 44, 58n17 Cézanne, Paul, 195 Champion, George, 35 Chatterjee, Partha, 236 Chocknajki, Stanlislaus, 318 Clark, Ed, 310 Clark, Peter, 344 Clemente Orozco, José, 242 Clifford, James, 14, 16–17, 20–21 Cockerel with Its Head Cut (Michou­ touch­kine), 282–83, 283f INDEX 

417 

Cold War cultural nationalism, Canadian, 225–30 Colenso, Harriet, 42, 43 Collier, Oscar, 262 Collin: Untitled (Landscape with Two Snakes and a House), 201f Collins, Henry, 216 colonial narratives and legacies: “Anglicized colonial subjects,” 236; Gold Coast photography and British colonialism, 368–70; Northwest Coast art and, 114–15, 132; Qwabe’s refusal to reproduce, 42; Western Arrernte (Australia) and, 197–98. See also decolonization comparative framework, 9–10 Confluences of Tradition and Change/​ 24 American Indian Artists exhibition, 274 Contemporary American Indian Painting Exhibition, 96, 97 contemporary art and modernity, relationship between, 1–2 Contemporary Māori Painting and Sculpture exhibit, Festival of Māori Arts, Hamilton, New Zealand, 140f Contemporary Painting in New Zealand (Commonwealth Institute, London), 147–48 Cook, James, 176 Cousins, Harold, 310–11 craft vs. art: Inuit, 64–65, 78–84; Native American modernism and, 93, 98, 104; Zulu art and, 40. See also artifact vs. art Cranmer, Doug, 121, 125, 137n72 Crosby, Marcia, 112, 119, 123, 126, 131 Cross, John, 118 Crucifixion (Okeke), 247–48 Crucifixion of a Cockerel (Pilioko), 283–84, 284f, 300 418 

INDEX

Crumbo, Woody, 92 cubism, 264, 272, 279n26 Cumulated Landscape (Morrison), 272, Plate 6 Cyprian Bhekuzulu, King, 53, 54f Czechoslovakia, 227–29 Dadi, Iftikhar, 252 Dali, Salvador, 279n23 Damas, Léon, 319 Dancing Couple (Owambe) (Nwoko), 250 Dansey, Harry, 141 Davidson, Robert, 110, 121, 123f, 137n72 Day, Archibald, 227 Day, Melvin, 151 Decker, J. P., 361 decolonization: African modernism in postwar Paris and, 308–9, 311, 312, 326–27; globalization and, 4; Inuit artistic agency and, 82–84; Kauage and, 172–73, 176; mapping, remapping, and, 9; Michoutouchkine and Pilioko in Polynesia and, 286, 287, 289, 299; nationalist narratives and, 18–19; Nigeria and, 235–43, 319; Papua New Guinea and, 165, 176; politics of inclusion and, 132; Senegal and, 314 DeHuff, Elizabeth, 94 DeHuff, John, 94 de Kooning, Willem, 264, 268, 269 Delaney, Beauford, 311 Delisle, Jean, 229–30 DeMott, Helen, 262 de Patta, Margaret, 118 Deressa, Solomon, 320, 323, 326, 332n52, 333n75 Desta, Gebre Kristos, 318, 332n52 Devonshire, Duke and Duchess of, 48, 50, 59n37 Diefenbaker, John, 225, 226 Dingane, King, 35

Dinuzulu, King, 33, 41–44, 48, 54, 56 Diop, Alioune, 312 Donaldson, Jeff, 324 Doyle, Laura, 4 Drapeau, Jean, 123f Dream of Calamity (Morrison), 264 Dreamtime or Dreaming (Altjira), 198–206 Dube, John, 59n22, 59n39 Duff, Alison: Anima, 156f Duff, Wilson, 119, 137n72 Dunn, Dorothy, 92, 95, 103 Durack, Mary, 192 Durban Agricultural Show, 45–46 Dussel, Enrique, 328n13 Eastern Europe, Inuit print shows in, 225–30 Eaton’s Salute to Indian Culture (Vancouver), 110–12, 111f, 130 Edenshaw, Charles (Da.a xiigang), 118–19 Egonwa, Osa, 240 Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, 276 Elizabeth II, 178, 178f Elkins, James, 342 el Salahi, Ibrahim, 166 Enuani Dancers (Nwoko), 250 Enwezor, Okwui, 309, 373 Ernst, Max, 279n23, 321, 333n75 Errington, Shelly, 14 Eskimo Affairs Committee, 226–27 “Eskimo” art. See Inuit art and handicrafts, promotion of; Inuit printmaking in Cape Dorset Eskimo Bulletins (Houston), 79–80 “Eskimo Graphic Art” (Houston), 212–13 Eskimo Prints (Houston), 212–13 Eskimo Whale Hunt (Qiatsuk), 220–22, 223f ethnography: autoethnography, 91,

106n2; Inuit art and, 70–71; Knauft’s “alternatively modern” and, 113; Melanesian modernism and, 181–82; Native American art and, 91, 95; Northwest Coast art and ethnographic context, 120, 128; Papua New Guinea, commissioned ethnographic images from, 163–65 Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, Grand Central Art Galleries, 93–94 expressionism, 263, 279n26, 324. See also abstract expressionism Eyene, Christine, 313, 316 Fabian, Johannes, 7, 56 Fanon, Frantz, 18, 242–44 Feldman, Hannah, 309 Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, 276 Feni, Dumile, 344, 353n21 Festival of Māori Arts, Hamilton, New Zealand, 140f, 141 Fienup-Riordan, Anne, 216 Fineberg, Earl, 269 First Nations, Canada. See Inuit art and handicrafts, promotion of; Inuit printmaking in Cape Dorset; Northwest Coast art Fischer, Adelheid, 260 Flejšar, Josef, 228, 229; Uméní Kānādských Eskymáků, 228, 229f Ford, Robert, 227 Forge, Anthony, 163–65 Foster, Hal, 14 Foucault, Michel, 197 frottage, 220, 263, 272, 273 Fry, Amelia R., 60n40 Fry, Roger, 11 Futunian Dancers (Pilioko), 291, 291f Fynney, Eric, 53 Fynney, Oswald, 45 INDEX 

419 

Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, 176–78, 178f, 183 Garbara, Esther, 8 Gauguin, Paul, 192, 195 Gentry, Herbert, 310 Geometric Vertical Forms (Morrison), 267 George, Deinde, 241 Geschiere, Peter, 15 Giacometti, Alberto, 249, 342 Gibson, Ann, 262, 268 Gibson, R. A., 75 Gigibori magazine, 167, 184n9 Gikandi, Simon, 11 Gillen, Frank, 193, 198 Gilroy, Paul, 309 Givon, Linda, 339, 344 Gladstone, Charles, 118 Gladstone, Sophie, 117–18 Glass, Aaron, 119–20 Glissant, Edouard, 8 Global Indigenous Modernisms: Primitivism, Artists, Mentors colloquium, xv Gluckman, Judith, 327n2 God’s Antenna (Hlungwani), 347–48 Goetz, Henri, 318, 321 Gold Coast. See Lutterodt family photography studios, West Coast of Africa Gold Coast, Merry-Go-Round, Accra, Christmas 1887 (Lutterodt), 364f Gold Coast: Fort in Elmina (Lutterodt), Plate 13 Goldie, Charles, 144 Goldwater, Robert, 13, 255n29, 267 Goody, Jack, 183 Gordon, Allan M., 274, 275 Gorky, Arshile, 263, 264 Gottlieb, Adolph, 96, 262, 264, 272 Goubet, Pierre, 318 Graburn, Nelson, 69, 88n39, 193, 224 420 

INDEX

Graham, Fred, 144, 151 Grant, Fred, 361 Greenberg, Clement, 188, 193 Gregory, Chris, 183 Grey, Black and White Lines (Morrison), 270, 271f Group of Seven, 67, 82 Growth Forms (Wilson), 156f Gruzinski, Serge, 231 Guenther, Egon, 339–40, 342, 344, 353n17 Guilbaut, Serge, 308 Habib, Rowley, 152 Haefliger, Paul, 192 Haida: about, 132n1; Bill Reid, 110, 113–14, 117–24; totem poles, 118, 119–21, 122f, 123f. See also Northwest Coast art Hall, Vic, 187 Hallett, George, 316 Halliday, William, 126 Hapgood, Norman, 52 Harris, Bob (X - i’x-a’niyus), 125 Harris, ‘Wadzidi (Lucy), 135n48 Hartigan, Grace, 269 Hass, Robert, 260 Havemeyer, Luisine, 50–52, 60n40 Hawthorn, Audrey, 123f, 128 Hawthorn, Harry, 119 Head of a Girl (Okeke), 247, 248 Helicopter (Kauage), 171 Hemple, Heidi, 96 Henderson, Carol, 141 Herbert, Harold, 192 Hermannsburg Mission, Australia, 188–89, 195–98, 202 Hernanda, 91, 101, 102 Hessel, Ingo, 72, 75 heterochronologies, 326–27 Heysen, Hans, 190–91, 193–94, 203; The Land of the Oratunga, 190

Hiratsuka, Un’ichi, 216–18; Katsura Rikyu Amano Hashidate (Stone lantern), 217–18, 219f Hitler, Adolf, 187 Hlungwani, Jackson, 335, 336–37, 345–51; Altar for Christ, 337, 337f, 347; Cain’s Aeroplane, 347–48, 349f; God’s Antenna, 347–48; Leopard, 348–50; Lion, 348, 350f Holm, Bill, 121, 131, 137n72 Hossack, Rebecca, 176, 183 Hotere, Ralph, 143, 150 Houser, Allan, 259 Houston, James, 68f; Eskimo Bulletins, 79–80; “Eskimo Graphic Art,” 212–13; Eskimo Prints, 212–13; “In Search of Contemporary Eskimo Art,” 78–79; introduction to Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts pamphlet, 62, 70, 87n33; Inuit handicraft and art promotion by, 66–83; Inuit printmaking and, 211–16, 225–27. See also Inuit art and handicrafts, promotion of; Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts pamphlet Howe, Oscar, 93, 95–98, 105–6; Umine Wacipi: War and Peace Dance, 97; Woman Buffalo Dreamer, 96–97, Plate 1 Hrdlička, Aleš, 216 Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc), 62, 65, 67, 76, 224, 226 Hunt, Sarah, 131–32 Hutchinson, Elizabeth, 98 Huyssen, Andreas, 7, 9, 230 Ife terra-cotta, 249 Igbo Folk Tales (Okeke), 247 Ihimaera, Witi, 153 Impressions of Haiti exhibition, 215 Independence Celebration 1 (Kauage), 172

Independence Celebration 4 (Kauage), 172–73, 173f India, 236, 253n4 Indian Craze, The (Hutchinson), 98 Indian Space Painters, 262 indigeneity as construct, 5, 15–17 Ingersoll, Fern S., 60n40 “In Search of Contemporary Eskimo Art” (Houston), 78–79 Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, 170 Inuit art and handicrafts, promotion of: agency in age of colonization and decolonization, 82–84; Alaskan Native Arts and Crafts (anac) catalogs, 75; art industries before modernism, 64–66; community traits in stone carvings, 88n44; cribbage boards, 71, 72f, 86n25; fur trade and, 66; growth of stone sculpture after Sanajaksat, 77–78; Inuktitut syllabic writing system, 86n23; “master” sculptors, 80–82; modernist primitivist art market, shift to, 77–84; precursors and creation of Sanajaksat, 67–75; reactions to Sanajaksat content and productions, 75–76; reception of Sanajaksat in the North, 66–67; Sanajaksat pamphlet (overview), 62–63, 63f; “Suggestions for Eskimo Handicrafts” (Canadian Handicrafts Guild), 69; totem poles, Inuit-made, 71–75, 73f, 74f Inuit printmaking in Cape Dorset: background, 211; Canadian Cold War cultural nationalism and Eastern European shows of, 225–30; comparison of Japanese and Inuit prints, 217–20, 219f, 221f; cultural reproduction and, 224; financial impact of, 224–25; INDEX 

421 

Inuit printmaking in Cape Dorset (cont.) Houston memo, Haitian graphic arts, and, 214–15; Houston’s account of origins of, 212–13; Houston’s studies in Japan, 215–16; “Japanese Print Revival” (Time magazine), 213–14; modernism as intercultural attractor and, 230–31; Saarinen’s Vogue article and, 209, 210f, 222–24 Inukpuk, Johnny, 80–81 Ipeelee, Osuitok, 80–81, 212 Irniq, Piita, 84n1 Jameson, Frederic, 348 Jansen van Rensburg, Susanna, 339, 340 Japanese printmaking, 213–20, 219f, 221f Jewsiewicki, Bogumil, 56 Johnny POV, 80–81 Johnson, Michael, 137n72 Jones, Philip, 194 Jonson, Raymond, 94 Joplin, Janis, 260 Ju ju’s Wedding (Boghossian), 321f Junod, Henri, 52 Kabotie, Fred, 94, 95; Two Bird Dancers with Costumed Audience, 92f kaMangcengeza, Mtomboti, 35, 47 Kandinsky, Wassily, 239 Kasfir, Sidney, 333n75 Katsura Rikyu Amano Hashidate (Stone lantern) (Hiratsuka), 217–18, 219f Kauage, Mathias, 180f; on Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 179–81; Biting the Doctor’s Arm, 176, 177f, 181; Buka War, 176, 177f; commentary and “stories” of, 174–76, 179–81; death of, 179; Georgina Beier and, 167–70; Helicopter, 171; Independence Celebration 1, 172; Independence Celebration 4, 172–73, 173f; Kauage 422 

INDEX

Flies to Scotland for the Opening of New Museum of Modern Art in Glasgow, 178f; Magic Fish, 170f; Man draiwim tripela member bilong hilans (Man driving three members [of parliament] from the Highlands), 172–73; Missis Kwin, 186n19; Okuk’s Son at Moresby Airport, 174–75, 175f; Pasindia trak (Passenger truck), 171f; sexual politics and, 172; signature and inscriptions of, 178 Keïta, Seydou, 357 Kempe, Herman, 196, 198 Killed Horse (Kumalo), 341, 341f Kīngitanga, King, 144 Kingwatsiak, Iyola, 212 Kirchner, Ernst, 218 Klee, Paul, 318–19, 323–24 Kleinert, Sylvia, 193–94 Kline, Franz, 270 Knauft, Bruce M., 113 Kohatu (Muru), Plate 4 Kovave magazine, 167, 184n9 Kuanimbandu, 164f Kubler, George, xvi, 7–8 Kumalo, Sydney, 335, 337–45, 340f, 348–51; Killed Horse, 341, 341f; Mythological Rider(s), 344; Praise Singer, 344; Reclining Figure: Ndebele Woman, 339–40; Seated Figure, 342, 343f; Seated Woman, 341–42, Plate 11 Kunene, Mazisi, 43 Kwakwa-ka-’wakw: Henry Speck, 110, 114, 124–31; potlatch tradition and prohibition, 115, 125, 126; Tlawit’sis tribe of, 124, 126, 128, 132n1, 136n54. See also Northwest Coast art Kwakwala Arts and Crafts Organization, 126 KwaZulu-Natal. See Zulu art and figurative relief panels

Lalonde, Christine, 78 Lam, Wifredo, 322–23, 333n75 Land of the Oratunga, The (Heysen), 190 Lasisi, David: The Whore, 172 Lattier, Christian, 310 Laurent, Louis St., 226 Leach, Edmund, 183 ledger art, Plains, 106n1 Legae, Ezrom, 339, 340, 342, 344, 354n37 Lemke, Sieglinde, 252 Leopard (Hlungwani), 348–50 Léro, Etienne, 319 Leuthold, Steven, 15–16 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 117, 198 Liddle, Nancy, 276 Lindauer, Gottfried, 144 Lindsay, Ian, 64 Lion (Hlungwani), 348, 350f Lismer, Arthur, 67 Loatjira, 200 locational approach, 4 Lord, Douglas, 76 Lugard, Lord, 252, 255n34 Lugg, H. C., 48, 50, 59n37 Lutterodt family photography studios, West Coast of Africa (wca): Accra-Mulattin, 372f; as agents of modernity, 371, 373; Almeida Brothers, Little Popo, Republic of Benin, 365, 365f; archives, loss of, 371; British colonialism, mobility, and, 368–70; Carte de visite, Ghana, 358f; display cultures of Gold Coast modernity, 362–65; as family business, 360–63; Gold Coast, Merry-Go-Round, Accra, Christmas 1887, 364f; Gold Coast: Fort in Elmina, Plate 13; history of coastal cosmopolitanism, 359–60; “overburdened” by flow of beautiful women, 370–71; The People of the Deceased King Tackie in Accra, 366–68, 367f;

Portrait of Albert Lutterodt and His Wife, Accra, Ghana, Plate 12; portraiture as biography, 365–68; self-fashioning, concerns about, 357–59; Slave Coast: Chief Ayevie of Little Popo with His People, 362f; Two Men Standing in a Field Cleared for Cocoa Plantation, Bioko, Equatorial Guinea, 369f Macaulay, Herbert, 253n2, 253n7 Magic Fish (Kauage), 170f Magnin, André, 373 Māhinarangi meeting house, Ngāruawāhia, 144–45, 152. See also Māori Festival of the Arts, Māhinarangi Makeba, Miriam, 353n21 Makenna, Louis, 304 Malangatana, 166 Manangananga cave, 200–202 Man Carried to the Moon (Mungitok), 220, 221f Mancoba, Ernest, 304, 353n21 Mandani, Mahmood, 15 Mane-Wheoki, Jonathan, xvi, 141, 147 Manganyi, Noel Chanbanyi, 316 Man i hait namil long tupela ston (Man hiding between two stones) (Akis), 169f Mannheim, Grete, 58n10 Māori art: art/artefact distinction and, 138, 149, 158; contemporary New Zealand art and Selwyn Muru, 155–58; exhibition history and the negotiation of value, 138–42; Festival of Māori Arts, Hamilton (1966), 140f, 141; Māori Artists and Writers Society meeting, Te Kaha marae (1973), 152–55, 153f; Māori Festival of the Arts, Māhinarangi (1963), 139–41, 139f, 144–47, 146f, 152; INDEX 

423 

Māori art (cont.) “modern” art vs., 157–58; New Zealand Māori Culture and the Contemporary Scene, Canterbury Museum, Christchurch (1966), 147–50; Te Hau’s exhibition at Adult Education Center, Auckland (1958), 142–44; “Tovey generation,” 141; The Work of Māori Artists exhibition, nag (1969), 150–52 Māori Artists and Writers Society, 152–55, 153f Māori Festival of the Arts, Māhinarangi, 139–41, 139f, 144–47, 146f, 152 mapping tropes, 9–10 Maqhubela, Louis, 339 Marini, Marino, 339, 342 Martijn, Charles, 69, 82 Mary-Rousselière, Guy, 69 Mason, Ngahiraka, 142 Massey, Vincent, 227 Massey Report, 227 Masson, André, 263, 264, 322 Mataira, Katerina, 143 Matchitt, Paratene, 144, 145, 151, 154f Matisse, Henri, 195, 266 Matta, Roberto, 267, 323 Matulu, Tshibumba Kanda, 172–73 Maurer, Evan M., 273 Mayer, Gyula, 127–28, 129, 130f Mbembe, Achille, 309 McCarthy, Conal, 147, 149, 151, 152 McKeand, David, 65, 85n9 McLaughlin, Anne, 154 McLean, Ian, 254n14 McLeod, Ellen Easton, 65 Medhin, Tesfaye Gebre, 332n52 Melanesian modernism. See Papua New Guinea (PNG) art and Melanesian modernism Memories of Sharpeville (Sekoto), 315, 317f Mercer, Kobena, 10, 20 424 

INDEX

Mexico, 231 Michener, James, 214 Michoutouchkine, Nicolaï, 292f, 298f; about, 282–83; Cockerel with Its Head Cut, 282–83, 283f; collection and planned museum, 290–91, 294, 302n18; Esnaar studio-home, 291, 299; in Futuna, 290–91; island modernism and, 288–90; travels, exhibitions, and collection in Pacific Islands, 291–96; world travels and exhibitions, 285–87, 296–99 middlebrow taste, 188 Mignolo, Walter, 20 Miles, Elza, 340–41 Miller, Daniel, 220 Miller, John, 153f Miró, Joan, 263–64 Missis Kwin (Kauage), 186n19 Mitchell, Joan, 268, 269 Mitchell, Marybelle, 83 Mitchell, Timothy, 7 mobility: apartheid and, 339; as construct, 5, 19–21; horizontal, 309; Lutterodt photo studio and, 361, 364, 368–70; “migritude,” 329n18; Pilioko and, 287; Sekoto and, 306. See also spatiality modernism: definitions of, 5–6, 230; diversity of Indigenous practices as challenge for, 116; as intercultural attractor, 230–31; Knauft’s “alternatively modern” approach, 113; middlebrow taste and, 188; modernist attitudes and mapping, 9–10; “modern” works vs. “modernist” art, 106; rupture and, 114–16, 121–23; as temporal category, 348. See also specific cases modernist primitivist art. See primitivism

modernity: African, 236, 343–44, 350–51; African agency, marginality, and, 56; African modernists and, 250–51; Africanness and, 336, 344; the altermodern, 2; alternative modernities, 308; avant-garde and, 251–52; Boghossian and, 319, 324; as condition of art production, 335; the contemporary, relationship with, 1–2; definitions of, 5, 6–7; display cultures of Gold Coast modernity, 362–65; encounter, exchange, and, 4; as “frozen allegory,” 348; geopolitics of knowledge and, 20; heterochronologies and, 326–27; as historical condition, 23; historiography of, 20; Hlungwani and, 336, 350–51; home/ away binaries and, 287; India and, 253n4; infiltration into daily lives, 197–98; Inuit art and printmaking and, 210–11, 213–25; Kumalo and, 336, 339, 343, 345; Māori artists and, 140; modernist primitivism turned into indigenous modernity, 83; Namatjira and, 187, 192; nationalism and, 22, 236; Northwest Coast artists and, 113–16, 118, 127, 130–31; Onabolu and, 239–41; Pacific Islands and, 287, 289, 295–96, 299; Papua New Guinea artists and, 165, 172, 180; revolution and, 198; Sekoto and, 306, 308–12, 326; silencing of non-West histories, 2; spatial turn and, 20; temporal inscriptions of modernist geographies, 7–8; temporal rupture and, 195, 205; transcultural Indigenous strategy, 195; transmodernity, 307, 328n13; West Africa photography and, 359–62, 371, 373; Western Arrernte (Australia), 195–206 modernization, defined, 5

Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison exhibition, 277 Modigliani, Amedeo, 322 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 224, 225 Moon Mask Dancers (Speck), Plate 3 Moore, Henry, 80, 228–29, 339, 342, 354n31 Morrison, Ann K., 85n16 Morrison, George: 9 Black Squares, 11 Brown Squares, 273; Abstract Composition, 264–66; abstract expressionism and, 262, 264, 268–69, 270; action painting and, 270; The Antagonist, 269; automatism and, 263, 266, 270, 273; background, 259–61; biomorphism and, 264, 266; Black and White Patterned Forms, 266–67, 266f; Boghossian compared to, 319; Brown and Black Textured Squares, 273; critical reception of, 268–70; cubism and, 264, 272; Cumulated Landscape, 272, Plate 6; death of, 259; Dream of Calamity, 264; emplacement and Chippewaness of, 275; exhibitions and accolades, 269–70, 275–76; Fulbright Fellowship, Paris, 266; Geometric Vertical Forms, 267; Grey, Black and White Lines, 270, 271f; Howe compared to, 97; as Native modernist, 277; New York, 267, 268; primitivism and, 261–63, 267; Red Totem series, 273–74; Starfish, 264; surrealism and, 263–67, 270, 273; Surrealist Landscape, 270; Three Figures, 263; Turning the Feather Around (memoir), 264; Un­titled (1945), 265f; Untitled (1995), 274, Plate 7; Whalebone, 264 Motherwell, Robert, 268, 269 Moxey, Keith, 326–27 Mpande, King, 47 Mphahlele, Es’kia, 311, 316 INDEX 

425 

Mt. Hermannsburg with Finke River (Namatjira), 189f Mt. Sonder from Ormiston (Pareroultja), 193 Muller, Hendrik P. N., 52 Multiple Modernisms: Transcultural Exchanges in Twentieth-Century Global Art symposium, xv–xvi, xvii Munakata, Shikō, 214, 216–18; The Sand Nest, 220, 221f Mungitok, Kellypalik: Blue Geese on Snow, 228, 229f; Man Carried to the Moon, 220, 221f Murray, Kenneth C., 240–41, 252–53, 255n34 Muru, Selwyn, 144, 150–51, 155–57, 158f; Kohatu, 150, Plate 4 Mythological Rider(s) (Kumalo), 344 Nalbandian, Kevork, 332n53 Namatjira, Albert: Aboriginality, modernism, and, 187–95; Arrernte modernism, Christianity, and, 195, 198, 202–5; background of, 188–89; Burn and Stephen essay on, 194–95; celebrity of, 187, 189; Central Mt. Wedge, 191f; first exhibition, 187–88; Mt. Hermannsburg with Finke River, 189f; pastoral modernism and, 190–91, 195–96, 202–3; Whispering Hills, 204f. See also Australian Indigenous and Western Arrernte art National Art Gallery (nag), Wellington, New Zealand, 150–52 nationalism: Cold War Canadian cultural nationalism, 225–30; decolonizing societies and, 18–19; modernity and, 22, 236; Nigeria and, 236, 242–45 Native American modernism vs. “traditional Indian painting”: disappearance narrative and, 101; early 426 

INDEX

mentors, patrons, and promoters, 92, 94; Howe’s letter to Philbrook (1958), 97, 105–6; Howe’s shift to modernism, 95–98; Hutchinson’s The Indian Craze, 98; informed by women’s traditions, 108n17; introduction of pictorial arts, 91–92; “modern” works vs. “modernist” art and, 106; Plains ledger art, 106n1; Steffa’s basket collection and narrative, 98–106, 102f; “studio style” (traditional Indian painting), 92, 95–97. See also Morrison, George “Natives Who Are Artists in Woodcarving” (Reyher), 45 “Natural Synthesis” (Okeke), 243–46 Ndebele, Nimrod, 304 Ndiaye, Iba, 310 Neel, Ellen, 137n72 Negritude movement and discourse, 242–44, 313–14 Negro Artists and Writers congresses, 312–13, 313f Nelson, Robert, 9 “neo-African idiom,” 340 New Design Gallery, Vancouver, 128–30, 130f Newman, Barnett, 262 Newton, Norman, 124 New York (Morrison), 267, 268 New York school, 268, 270, 277, 280n39. See also abstract expressionism New Zealand. See Māori art New Zealand Māori Culture and the Contemporary Scene, Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, 147–50 Ngata, Āpirana, 139–40, 145–46 Ngatane, Ephraim, 339 Nigeria, Arts Society in: aesthetic primitivism and, 251–53; background, 235; Fanon and Okeke on Negritude, 242–44; nationalism, decolonization,

and the artistic avant-garde, 236–41; Okeke’s theory of natural synthesis, 240–46; Onabolu’s portraiture and, 236–41; postcolonial modernism and primitivism in works of Okeke and Nwoko, 246–53 Night Flight of Dread and Delight (Boghossian), 321–22, 322f Nimis, Érika, 368 Nin, Buck, 147–48 9 Black Squares, 11 Brown Squares (Morrison), 273 Nok terra-cotta, 248–50 Nongoma district, KwaZulu-Natal, 37–40 Northwest Coast art: Arts of the Raven exhibition (Vancouver Art Gallery), 110–12, 115, 121, 131, 137n72; Eaton’s Salute to Indian Culture, 110–12, 111f, 130; Haida (Bill Reid), 110, 113–14, 117–24; Kwakwa-ka-’wakw (Henry Speck), 110, 114, 124–31; politics of inclusion and, 132; potlatch and prohibition, 115; “renaissance” of, 113; rupture, colonialism, and forced detachment, 114–16, 121–23. See also totem poles and sculptures Northwest Territories Council, 65–66 nostalgia, primitivist, 79, 101 Nwoko, Demas, 241, 246, 248–50; Adam and Eve, 249; Dancing Couple (Owambe), 250; Enuani Dancers, 250; Philosopher, 249; Soldier (Soja), 250, 251f; Titled Woman, 249, 249f Oceania. See Michoutouchkine, Nicolaï; Papua New Guinea (PNG) art and Melanesian modernism; Pilioko, Aloï Odjig, Daphne, xvi Ogbechie, Sylvester, 240 O’Hanlon, Michael, 181, 183

Oja Suite (Okeke), 246–47 okala isinwaọji (Nigerian kola nut motif), 248 Okamura, Kichiemon, 216–17 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 17, 94 Okeke, Uche, 240–48, 319; Ana Mmuo, 246, 247; Crucifixion, 247–48; “Growth of an Idea” speech, 242; Head of a Girl, 247, 248; Igbo Folk Tales, 247; “Natural Synthesis,” 243–46; Negritude and, 242–44; Oja Suite, 246–47; Owls, From the Forest, 247, 248; Primeval Forest, 247–48; radio interview, 241–42 Okuk, Iambakey, 174–75 Okuk’s Son at Moresby Airport (Kauage), 174–75, 175f Onabolu, Aina, 236–41, 252, 253n7; Sisi Nurse, 238f Onians, John, 3 Onobrakpeya, Bruce, 241 Oomayoualook, Isa, 74f Orientalism, 216, 324 Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, 184n10 Our Land/Our Selves: American Indian Contemporary Artists exhibition, 276 Owl (Qiatsuk), 217–18, 219f Owls, From the Forest (Okeke), 247, 248 Paalen, Wolfgang, 127 Painters and Sculptors of Promise exhibition, Auckland Society of Arts, 155 pan-Africanism, 312–17, 324. See also Paris, postwar African modernisms in Papua New Guinea (PNG) art and Melanesian modernism: commissioned ethnographic images as precursors, 163–65; difficult climate for art, 178–79; Highlands aesthetic of self-decoration, 181–83; migrant workers and, 171–72; INDEX 

427 

Papua New Guinea (PNG) art and Melanesian modernism (cont.) modernity and modernism, 179–82; Port Moresby cultural conjuncture and the Beiers, 165–74; Timothy Akis, 166–69, 168f, 169f. See also Kauage, Mathias Pareroultja, Edwin, 192–93; Amulda Gorge, 193; Mt. Sonder from Ormiston, 193 Paris, postwar African modernisms in: communality and, 325–26; heterochronologies and archipelagoes, 326–27; pan-Africanism, transmodernity, and, 312–17; postwar Paris milieu, 310–12; surrealism and politics of postwar blackness, 317–25. See also Boghossian, Alexander “Skunder”; Sekoto, Gerard Paris, school of, 279n26 Parks, Gordon, 311 Pasindia trak (Passenger truck) (Kauage), 171f pastoral modernism, 190–91, 195–96, 202–3 Pechstein, Max, 52 Peck, James, 86n23 Pemba, George, 344 People of the Deceased King Tackie in Accra, The (Lutterodt), 366–68, 367f Pere, Baden, 147–48 Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, 96, 97 Phillips, R. A. J., 76 Phillips, Ruth B., 83, 255n29 Philosopher (Nwoko), 249 photography, pictorialist, 237, 253n6 photography on the Gold Coast. See Lutterodt family photography studios, West Coast of Africa Picasso, Pablo, 17, 151, 157, 195, 239, 259, 312–13 428 

INDEX

Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, 277n3 Pieces of Paradise exhibition, Australian Museum, Sydney, 185n16 Pilioko, Aloï, 292f, 298f; about, 283–84, 287–88; Baume exhibition, Papeete, 296–97, 297f; Crucifixion of a Cockerel, 283–84, 284f, 300; Esnaar studio-home, 291, 299–300; in Futuna, 290–91; Futunian Dancers, 291, 291f; island modernism and, 288–90; Self-Portrait with Bracelets, 300, Plate 9; Tattooed Women of Bellona, Solomon Isles, 297, Plate 8; travels and exhibitions in Pacific Islands, 291–96; world travels and exhibitions, 296–99 Pine, Willie L., 357 Poggioli, Renato, 342 Poland, 228–30 Pollock, Jackson, 259, 260, 262, 326 Polynesia. See Michoutouchkine, Nicolaï; Pilioko, Aloï Pootoogook, Egyvudluk, 212 Pootoogook, Kananginak, 211, 212, 220 Portrait of Albert Lutterodt and His Wife, Accra, Ghana (Lutterodt), Plate 12 portraiture as response to racism, 237–41 postcoloniality and Nigeria. See Nigeria, Arts Society in postcolonial theory, 193 Potgieter, Jan (Upotolozi), 41–42, 44 potlatch, 115, 125, 126 Potter, Karen, 78 Pousette-Dart, Richard, 262, 268 Powell, Ivor, 331n45 Praise Singer (Kumalo), 344 Pratt, Mary Louise, 17, 79, 107n2 Pratt, Scott, 275 Preston, Margaret, 17 Price, Sally, 11, 14 Primeval Forest (Okeke), 247–48

primitive art, modernist. See specific cases primitivism: aesthetic, 251–53, 255nn29–30; Africanness and, 339; aoa grouping and, 3, 13; as construct, 5, 10–11; deconstruction of, 14; “Eskimo,” romantic notions of, 77; Hlungwani and, 346; Kumalo and primitiveness vs., 343; Morrison and, 261–63, 267; Nigerian art and, 246–53; as prehistory of the future, 14; Prins’s “primitivist perplex,” 222; Rubin on, 250–51; Santiniketan, 253; Steffa on Native American basketry and, 99–100; Vogue and, 222; Western Arrernte (Australia) and, 193 Prins, Harald, 222 printmaking, Inuit. See Inuit printmaking in Cape Dorset Pudlat, Pudlo, 211 Qiatsuk, Lukta, 212; Eskimo Whale Hunt, 220–22, 223f; Owl, 217–18, 219f Qwabe, Amos, 46–47, 50–51 Qwabe, Zizwezenyanga, 46f, 55f; art of invention and, 47–50; at Bantu Agricultural Show, 53–56; name of, 39, 58n14; as oral historian, 40–44; as pioneering producer, 36–40; Reyher’s influence on career of, 44–47 Rainbow Serpent, 201–2 Rankin, Elizabeth, 341 Rauschenberg, Robert, 260 Recent New Zealand Sculpture exhibit, Auckland City Art Gallery, 156f Reclining Figure: Ndebele Woman (Kumalo), 339–40 Red Totem series (Morrison), 273–74 Reid, Bill, 110, 113–14, 117–24, 122f, 123f, 129–31, 137n72, 319

Reid, John, 155 Renaud, Eugene, 43 Renkaraka, Titus, 200 Reyher, Rebecca Hourwich, 39, 44–47, 50–53, 54f, 56–57, 60n40, 60nn44–45 Robinson, Margaret, 253n6 Rogoff, Irit, 20, 306 Rosenblum, Robert, 264 Rothko, Mark, 262, 269, 274–75 Rotorua School of Māori Arts and Crafts, 138, 141, 145 Rousseau, Madeleine, 311, 318, 330n32 Rubin, William, 250–51 Ryan, Terrence, 225 Saarinen, Aline B., 209, 210f, 222–24 Sack, Steven, 45 Said, Edward, 20, 307, 329n15 Samuelson, Robert C. (Lubhembhedu), 58n17 Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts pamphlet (Canadian Handicrafts Guild): growth of stone sculpture, 77–78; Houston’s introduction to, 62, 70, 87n33; overview, 62–63, 63f; precursors and creation of, 67–75; reactions to content and productions, 75–76; reception in the North, 66–67 Sand Nest, The (Munakata), 220, 221f Santa Fe Indian School, 92, 94, 95–96 Sash, Cecily, 354n37 Saul, Terry, 96 Scheub, Harold, 42–44 Schlosser, Katesa, 53, 54 Schoon, Theo, 144 Schreiner, W. P., 43 Schwarz, Wilhelm, 196 Scow, William, 128 scrimshaw, 65 Sea Monster (Speck), 129f Seated Figure (Kumalo), 342, 343f INDEX 

429 

Seated Woman (Kumalo), 341–42, Plate 11 Sekoto, Gerard, 307f; about, 304–6; Boghossian, commonalities with, 325–26; as jazz musician, 310, 328n10; Memories of Sharpeville, 315, 317f; in Paris and Senegal, 312–17; poster for the Second Conference of Negro Writers and Artists, 313, 313f; postwar Paris milieu and, 310–12; Senegalese Women, 315f; Street Scene, 305f; temporal relationship to modernism, 326–27; Untitled (1969), 316f Selassie, Emperor Haile, 317, 332n53 Self-Portrait with Bracelets (Pilioko), 300, Plate 9 Senegalese Women (Sekoto), 315f Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 314 Serizawa, Keisuke, 216 Sewid, James, 126 Sewid-Smith, Daisy, 115 Shadbolt, Doris, 112 Shahn, Ben, 96 Sheath, Stephen, 153f Sherman, John K., 269–70 Sibaya, Christina, 53 Sihlali, Durant, 339 Simpson, Merton, 324, 333n74 Sisi Nurse (Onabolu), 238f Sissons, Jeffrey, 140 Skaha, King, 34 Skotnes, Cecil, 338–40, 342, 344, 346 Slack, Mary, 347 Slave Coast: Chief Ayevie of Little Popo with His People (Lutterodt), 362f Smith, Bernard, 191 Smith, Don Lelooska, 137n72 Smith, Jaune Quick-to-See, 276 Smith, Terry, 6, 7 Snelleman, Johannes F., 52 Snodgrass, Jeanne, 97 430 

INDEX

soapstone carvings, Inuit, 64, 77–78, 88n39 Soldier (Soja) (Nwoko), 250, 251f Solomon, King (Zulu), 44, 47, 53 sōsaku hanga (“creative print”) movement, 213–14, 216, 218, 220, 230 South Africa, 304, 351n2, 353n21. See also Hlungwani, Jackson; Kumalo, Sydney; Zulu art and figurative relief panels South Pacific. See Michoutouchkine, Nicolaï; Papua New Guinea (PNG) art and Melanesian modernism; Pilioko, Aloï Soyinka, Wole, 166 spatiality, 7–8. See also mobility Specht, Jim, 185n16 Speck, Henry (Udzi’stalis), 110, 114, 124–31, 130f, 137n72; Moon Mask Dancers, Plate 3; Sea Monster, 129f Speck, John (Tlakwagila’game), 135n48 Spencer, Baldwin, 193, 202 Spiral Group, 333n74 Spring Scrolls (Boghossian), 320f Standing in Northern Lights retrospective, 275–76 Starfish (Morrison), 264 Starn, Orin, 16 Steffa, Emil Paulicek, 91, 93, 98–106 Stephen, Ann, 194–95 Stern, Irma, 52, 60n45, 252 Strathern, Marilyn, 171, 181, 182–83 Street Scene (Sekoto), 305f Strehlow, Carl, 200 Strub, Henry, 82 “Suggestions for Eskimo Handicrafts” (Canadian Handicrafts Guild), 69 sumi-zuri (black ink) painting, 217–18 surrealism: abstract, 263–64; black modernists and, 319; Boghossian and, 319–22; Morrison and, 263–67, 270,

273; primitive art and, 261; veristic and ethnographic, 263, 279n23 Surrealist Landscape (Morrison), 270 Sywollie (Sarollie), 80–81 Tackie Tawia, King, 366–68, 376n20 Taiapa, John, 149 Taiapa, Pine, 141 “Tales of a Desert Indian” (Steffa), 91, 99, 101 Tall, Papa Ibra, 310 Tattooed Women of Bellona, Solomon Isles (Pilioko), 297, Plate 8 Teakles, John McLaurin, 227 Te Hau, Matiu, 142–44 Te Kaha marae, 152–55, 153f Tekle, Aferwerk, 318 temporality: heterochronology, 327; modernism as temporal category, 348; modernist geographies and, 7–8; modernity’s rupture of, 195–96, 205; Sekoto’s temporal relationship to modernism, 326–27; translation processes and, 198–99 third space, 116 Three Figures (Morrison), 263 Tiberio, Wilson, 310, 314 Tiffany, Louis, 51 Time Cycle III (Boghossian), 322, Plate 10 Titled Woman (Nwoko), 249, 249f Tjalkabota, 196–97, 202–5 Tjita, 197 tjurunga concept (Australia), 189, 199–205 Tlawit’sis tribe, 124, 126, 128, 132n1, 136n54. See also Northwest Coast art To Market, Haitian Peasants (Wilson), 215, 215f Tomory, Peter, 147–48 totem poles and sculptures: British Columbia Totem Pole Preservation

Committee, 119; Haida, 118, 119–21, 122f, 123f; Inuit-made, 71–75, 73f, 74f; Red Totem series (Morrison), 273–74 Tots (Kuanimbandu), 164f Tovey, Gordon, 141 to-vig-nil (“gift basket”), 103, Plate 2 Townsend-Gault, Charlotte, 116, 124 translation processes, 198–99 transmodernity, 307, 328n13 Tributaries: A View of Contemporary South African Art exhibition, 337–38 Tūrangawaewae marae, Ngāruawāhia, 144–47 Turnbull, David, 9 Turner, Evan, 225 Tuwhare, Hone, 152 Two Bird Dancers with Costumed Audience (Kabotie), 92f Two Men Standing in a Field Cleared for Cocoa Plantation, Bioko, Equatorial Guinea (Lutterodt), 369f ukiyo-e print tradition, 214, 218 uli (Igbo body drawing and mural painting), 246–48 Uméní Kānādských Eskymáků (Flejšar), 228, 229f Umine Wacipi: War and Peace Dance (Howe), 97 University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, 122f, 123f, 128 Untitled (ca. 1970) (Akis), 168f Untitled (1945) (Morrison), 265f Untitled (1995) (Morrison), 274, Plate 7 Untitled (1969) (Sekoto), 316f Untitled (Landscape with Two Snakes and a House) (Collin), 201f Vancouver Art Gallery (vag), 110–12, 131 van der Walt, Sarel, 60n39 Van Gogh, Vincent, 157, 195 INDEX 

431 

vanguardism, 319 van Kraayenberg, Nielen, 352n9 Villa, Edoardo, 338, 344 Vincent, Mac, 157 Vincent, Rosemary, 157 Vogue magazine, 209, 210f, 222–24 Wainwright, Leon, 8 Waititi, John, 144 Walters, Muru, 142, 143 Watanabe, Sadao, 216 Watson, Scott, 115 Webb, Electra Havemeyer, 51–52, 60n44 West, Dick (W. Richard, Sr.), 92, 96, 97 West, W. Richard, Jr., 262, 276 West Coast of Africa (wca) elites. See Lutterodt family photography studios, West Coast of Africa Western Arrernte art. See Australian Indigenous and Western Arrernte art Western Desert school of painting, 205 Westra, Ans, 144, 145, 147 Whalebone (Morrison), 264 whare whakairo (meeting house), 139–40, 146 Wheeler, Steve, 262 Whispering Hills (Namatjira), 204f White, Mark Andrew, 96–97 Whiting, Cliff, 151–52, 153–54 Whitney Museum of American Art, 269 Whore, The (Lasisi), 172 Widmer, Kingsley, 255n29 Wight, Darlene Coward, 75 Wilk, Richard, 222 Wilson, Arnold, 142, 143, 144, 145, 151; Growth Forms, 156f

432 

INDEX

Wilson, Clifford, 71 Wilson, Ellis: To Market, Haitian Peasants, 215, 215f Wilson, Selwyn, 143 Winged Figure, The (Bourgeois), 267–68 Winiata, Maharaia, 143 Winkiel, Laura, 4 Winnipeg Art Gallery, 73, 75, 86n27 Wirepa, Ivan, 153f Wolf, Eric, 310 Woman Buffalo Dreamer (Howe), 96–97, Plate 1 Woodruff, Hale, 333n74 Work of Māori Artists exhibition (National Art Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand), 150–52 Wright, James, 85n9 Yanagi, Soetsu, 216 Zadkine, Ossip, 311, 327n2 Zamecznik, Stanislaw, 228–29 Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe, 252 Zulu, Abenizo, 45–47 Zulu art and figurative relief panels: art of invention and, 47–50; background and history, 34–40; Bantu Agricultural Show and, 53–56; “craft” vs. art and, 40; Eurocentric narratives and, 56; fascia boards, 53–54; mat racks, Qwabe as pioneering producer of, 36–40, 37f; Qwabe as oral historian, 40–44; Reyher’s influence, 44–47; Reyher’s passion for art and, 50–53. See also Qwabe, Zizwezenyanga

P L A T E 1   Oscar Howe, Woman Buffalo Dreamer, n.d. Tempera on paper, 17.5 × 15.5 in. (44 × 39 cm). Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman. Gift of Gertrude Phillips, 1978. Courtesy of the Oscar Howe Estate.

Magdalena Augustine, Large Basket, ca. 1914. Juncus, deer grass, and sumac, diameter: 11 in. (28 cm). Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, California. Gift of Mr. Emil P. Steffa, P1276.

PLATE 2 

Henry Speck, Moon Mask Dancers, 1962. Gouache on paper, 14 × 16.8 in. (35.6 × 42.9 cm). University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, A8003. Museum of Anthropology purchase from Muse Antiques and Art Galleries, Vancouver. Photograph by Derek Tan.

PLATE 3 

Selwyn Muru, Kohatu, 1965. Oil on hardboard, 31 × 47 in. (79.5 × 120.3 cm). Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, 1965-0020-1.

PLATE 4 

Rex Battarbee, Central Australian Landscape [Mt. Hermannsburg], 1938, watercolor on paper, 12 × 14.6 in. (31.2 × 37.1 cm). Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle. Photograph by Newcastle Art Gallery. Courtesy Gayle Quarmby.

PLATE 5 

George Morrison, Cumulated Landscape, 1976. Wood, 48 × 120 × 3 in. (121.2 × 304.8 × 7.6 cm). Collection of the Minnesota Museum of American Art. Gift of Honeywell.

PLATE 6 

George Morrison, Untitled, 1995. Colored pencil on paper, 17 × 15 in. (43 × 38 cm). Collection of Hazel Belvo.

PLATE 7 

Aloï Pilioko, Tattooed Women of Bellona, Solomon Isles, 1966. Wool tapestry and oil paint on jute (copra sacking), 27 × 87.4 in. (68.5 × 222 cm). Private collection. Courtesy of Aloï Pilioko. PLATE 8 

PLATE 9 

Aloï Pilioko, Self-Portrait with Bracelets, 1974. Wool tapestry on jute, 42 × 24 in. (106 × 61 cm). Private collection. Courtesy of Aloï Pilioko.

Skunder Boghossian, Time Cycle III, 1981. Embossed bark and sand with collage on board, 48 × 47 × 2.7 in. (121.9 × 121.6 × 7 cm). Courtesy of Bill Karg and the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville. Museum purchase with funds provided by the Caroline Julier and James G. Richardson Acquisition Fund, and the Charles P. and Caroline Ireland Foundation. Photograph by Randy Batista. PLATE 10 

P L A T E 1 1   Sydney Kumalo, Seated Woman, 1960–61. Bronze, 37.4 × 5.6 × 6 in. (95 × 14.3 × 15.4 cm). Wits Art Museum.

P L A T E 1 2  Unknown

photographer, Portrait of Albert Lutterodt and His Wife, Accra, Ghana, ca. 1885. Carte de visite. Inscribed “With Mrs. Lutterodt to Mrs. M. ­Schweizer.” Albert Lutterodt Photograph, Gold Coast Colony. Permission of Basel Mission Archive, qq-30.145.0001.

P L A T E 1 3   Unknown photographer, Gold Coast: Fort in Elmina, ca. 1880. Albumen print. Elmina fort with houses in foreground, Elmina, Ghana. From Conrad Bullnheimer Album. Courtesy the Walther Collection, New York and Neu-Ulm, Germany.