The Art of Life in South Africa. Daniel Magaziner
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power of industrial modernity—although those were issues about which he cared deeply. Art was also “educative in the profoundest sense of the word”—it trained people to think, to create, to be, and to be better members of a community.2 Art was foundational and essential, and after 1955, the apartheid government’s support for his program ensured that South Africa would remain on the cutting edge of progressive pedagogical practice.
Grossert was undoubtedly a primitivist; he was among the many white South Africans who worried about the loss of black South Africa’s cultural traditions and who fretted about whether the institutional training of African artists risked seeding a dangerous cultural schizophrenia. Yet Grossert’s faith in art education emerged simultaneously from a deeply held critique of white, Western, industrial modernity. He was not concerned that some vague “Africanness” was being lost to urbanization and social change; rather, like John Ruskin and others associated with the nineteenth-century arts and crafts movement, he was concerned that essential human values such as harmony and balance were at stake in the struggle to retain crafts on the curriculum.3
In addition to his duties as organizer and founder of the art-training course, Grossert published two books during the 1950s, which collected his ideas about art education’s role in society. The first, Art and Crafts for Africans (1953), was intended to serve as a handbook for teachers in African schools. Generously detailed and illustrated with Grossert’s remarkable reproductions of student work, Art and Crafts for Africans was largely instructional, with chapters on weaving, basketry, and so on. He coedited the second book, The Art of Africa, with Walter Battiss and two anthropologists, G. H. Franz and H. P. Junod. Ostensibly a study of the artistic traditions of the entire continent, from Egypt through West Africa and points south, The Art of Africa was a profound political, discursive, and ideological statement about the role of art in world society in general and in South Africa in particular. It set out a bold agenda for black South African art, which, as Grossert repeatedly assured audiences in the 1950s and 1960s, would make the entire country a more accomplished and more harmonious place.
As with Art and Crafts for Africans before it, The Art of Africa was intended for African school students as part of the expanded Bantu Education syllabus. Its goal was to guide Africans to the useful precedents of African attainment, to “re-awaken” the “joyful attitude” that Grossert claimed had prompted artistic invention in the past. To accomplish this, Grossert played two discursive tricks on his readers. First, he embraced the idea of a racialized Africa to smooth over the dramatically different material cultures of the continent. Although he acknowledged the obvious differences between southern Africa and West Africa, he nonetheless claimed that a “common cultural heritage” linked black people across the continent. This heritage, he continued, was apparent especially in material culture, where “simplicity” and directness of “universal forms” predominated. His second trick was to collapse the category of craft into that of art, thereby eliding the frequent assertion that black South Africans had no visual arts traditions to preserve and promote.4
Each chapter in the book was lavishly illustrated with Grossert’s careful reproductions of masks, headrests, statues, drums, pots, baskets, and so forth (save Battiss’s chapter on “bushmen” art, which included the author’s own drawings). Grossert’s illustrations served to link the different material cultures of West Africa and southern Africa. The book opened with a chapter on “The Arts and Crafts of Negro Africa.” There, Grossert drew from examples held in the Natal Museum and other collections to demonstrate the extent to which West Africa statuary, masks, and other material objects had become an accepted part of the global art world by the 1950s. But in a book called The Art of Africa, it was notable that the next five chapters focused exclusively on southern Africa, an area much less celebrated for its artistic achievements. Indeed, although in the 1930s and 1940s numerous observers called for the preservation of African craft, as we have seen, they did so largely in terms of preserving culture, not “art” per se. In their text, Grossert and his coeditors were granting craft—the making of useful objects—the same degree of aesthetic accomplishment as that usually reserved for the so-called fine arts. Grossert devoted as much loving care and seriousness to sketching a seemingly simple Zulu imbenge—a pot cover woven from ilala, a long, pliable palm frond—as he did to sketching a life-sized bronze head from Ife.5 Between the same covers, rendered by the same hand, the argument was apparent: both the celebrated bronze and the quotidian imbenge were esteemed markers of aesthetic attainment. Both were formally accomplished works of art.
Grossert and his coeditors defined art expansively to embrace the variety of objects reproduced in the text. “Art is most simply and most usually defined as an attempt to create pleasing forms,” they explained.6 The urge to create a pleasing form was a fundamental trait shared by all: “[Man] must create beauty for himself. That is how the art of man is born. True man is not really happy until he has ever with him that which pleases his eye, his ear, his taste, his touch, his emotions.” This was a compelling definition of art, which collated decades’ worth of aesthetic theory that thinkers across the globe had developed in response to what they perceived as a crisis in the arts in an era of capitalist expansion and technological change. The collapsing of high and low art into the all-encompassing category of art did important ideological work within the museum—but not only there. To assert that for man truly to be man, he had to work in pursuit of beauty was a profound political statement about the role of art and creativity in modern society. And here, both Grossert’s colleagues and his forerunners claimed that African art had a particularly vital role to play.
In The Art of Africa, drawings of kraals and huts brought the architecture of everyday African life (or at least “traditional life”) into the category of art. Grossert contributed a meticulous rendering of a village to Franz’s chapter on Basotho artistic practices. His drawing is a remarkable piece of art in its own right—the village detail shows a half dozen perfectly round huts set within a series of interlocking straight and rounded walls. Take away the detail (thatched roofs, a fence of vertical branches) and you have simple, geometric shapes—circles, squares, rectangles, ovals—that are well balanced and logically related to each other. “Now let us look at the Mosotho village,” Franz wrote in the accompanying text, “the first thing that strikes us is that it fits so beautifully into the landscape.”7 The village was obviously an artifact, or something made, but as drawn by Grossert and explicated by Franz, it was so natural as to fit perfectly into the landscape. In their huts and walls, Basotho villagers had perfected the work that the land’s creator had begun. Franz had a word for this: harmony. “In all things [people] seek for harmony . . . the sense of beauty is satisfied when man is able to appreciate a unity or harmony of formal relations among his sense-perceptions. His own creation must be in harmony with himself and with the life around him.”8
Figure 3.2 A Basotho Village, drawn by Jack Grossert, from Walter Battiss, G. H. Franz, Jack Grossert, and H. P. Junod, The Art of Africa (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Shuter and Shooter, 1958)
Here, Franz was writing about an imagined Mosotho, in language reminiscent of the earliest twentieth-century reception of African and other so-called primitive art in the salons of Europe and America. Artists, theorists, and critics had hailed African art not only for the simplicity of its form and the essential accomplishment of its design but also for the social values they read into the objects—harmony, unity, beauty—in other words, traits that many moderns found lacking in their own day-to-day lives. Since the 1910s and especially in the 1920s, African art had been levied as a critique against the excesses of industrial society. So conscripted, African art was profoundly political. By describing the art of everyday life in southern Africa in a similar way, Jack Grossert asserted that black South African art would change society, if only it could be cultivated in the next generation of Africans. Grossert published this text in the late 1950s, just as this generation was being drawn into the confines of Bantu Education schools, where African students encountered the arts and crafts requirements that the previous decades had bequeathed to them. Grossert did his best to reassure them that art deserved to be on the syllabus,