The Art of Life in South Africa. Daniel Magaziner
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interested in art and education posited that the fact that moderns lacked the opportunity to resolve conflicts through self-expression was paramount among these. Both Grossert and Dewey agreed that harmony’s opposite—discord or dissonance—was also an experience, a potential narrative within the flow of life. Expression was how people responded to discord’s recurring presence. Words, paint, and wood (to cite but a sample) were the means by which harmony and unity were reestablished in the individual, and thus, through individual efforts, harmony restored to the social body. Everyone needed this; what made artists exceptional was the intensity with which they embraced discord as a necessary antecedent to harmony. As Dewey understood it, artists were people who sought out life’s rough, irregular moments, rather than striving for smooth tranquility: “Demand for variety is the manifestation of that fact that being alive we seek to live, until we are cowed by fear or dulled by routine. The need of life pushes out into the unknown.”22 A person became a self by grasping the experiences that made up the drama of life; selves became a society when they were able to share in the tension and release that marked the work of art. This same concern about social cohesion was what motivated the ethnographers to call for the preservation of so-called Bantu culture. But for Dewey, Lismer, and Grossert, this was bigger than Bantu society. It was a modern problem, demanding an institutionalized, societal response.
Writing a few years later, the Dewey disciple and English art theorist Herbert Edward Read (not to be confused with Tladi’s South African patron) expanded on this in a particularly eloquent and damning way. Like Dewey, Read argued that art was a fundamental human practice, once available to all, that had been obscured by industrial modernity and the isolation of “artist” as a social category. Lacking an awareness of the true work of art, contemporary society fetishized only the individual artist, the genius, at the cost of the mass repression of “instinctive life . . . [a] repression [which was] responsible for [man’s] mental illness—his psychoses and neuroses.”23 Writing in the early 1930s, Dewey had envisioned a world that would grant expanded opportunities for self-expression. Read wrote as World War I raged, and he was more pessimistic. Like Dewey, he bemoaned the separation between the “high” arts of the museum and the “low” arts of the struggling artisan, suggesting that the division rendered creativity the property of an exclusive few, not a widely dispersed practice. The suppression of “spontaneous creative ability” had led to the “disintegration of the [human] personality” in the centuries since the Renaissance, resulting in the chaos and disintegration that were amply evident in his time.24 In a telling passage, he put it this way:
It is the first day of June 1942. The laburnum trees cast their golden rain against a hedge of vivid beech trees. Everything is fresh and sweet in the cool early sunshine. I have just heard that during the weekend the biggest air-raid in history has taken place. Over the city of Cologne . . . our airforce on Sunday morning dropped [11,000] bombs. I listen half-consciously to the sounds that reach me here—the twittering of birds and the voices of children playing in the garden—and try to realize the meaning of these distant events.25
Read believed, as Dewey did, that human beings needed to to face, embrace, and resolve tensions by creating, and thus make life more expressive, more transparent, and more harmonious. Art was the necessary outlet, without which humans lived a denuded life, out of sync with the rhythms of the natural world and their own human community. Or so the horrors Read’s own time revealed.
Read’s critique was the latest in a long series of writings expressing similar sentiments. As John Ruskin and the arts and crafts movement demonstrated, when industrialization took hold in the nineteenth century a variety of Western utopian thinkers had looked backward to the West’s eroding artisanal traditions for guidance. In the interwar twentieth century, many looked instead to the supposedly harmonious African societies—and these, too, now appeared to be in danger.26
Proponents of the work of art in society shared primitivists’ fascination with the supposedly simple forms and geometric shapes of African sculpture. But theirs were not only formal concerns; to Barnes, Lismer, Dewey, and others, so-called primitive society stood out as a model for what had been lost along with the true meaning of art. The objects stood in for the forgotten ways of experience and creativity. “There is much in the life of the savage that is sodden,” Dewey explained, but also much for the civilized man to learn: “When the savage is most alive, he is most observant of the world around him and most taut with energy. As he watches what stirs around him, he, too, is stirred.”27 Dewey imagined primitive man “taut” with tension, not the master of the world but in constant, ever-evolving dialogue with his environment. “Primitives’” lack of mastery meant that their society was constantly forced to adapt, to create, and thus to humanize the world. In Dewey’s day and in his community, this was no longer the case. Instead, the “environment is, . . . exhausted, worn out, esthetically speaking.”28 He called for “civilized” people to get back to the fundamental creative negotiation that was the quest for balance and harmony.29
Dewey’s work at the Barnes Foundation brought him into contact both with Barnes’s notable collection of African statuary and with his dealer, the Parisian Paul Guillaume. Along with Thomas Munro—a former student of Dewey’s at Teachers’ College—Guillaume selected exemplary pieces to be shipped to Philadelphia and displayed at the foundation. The two also collaborated on the publication of Primitive Negro Sculpture (1926), one of the books which Lippy Lipschitz would later introduce to Ernest Mancoba and which observers credited with inspiring the young sculptor’s turn to a more recognizably “African” style.30
Guillaume and Munro applied Barnes’s ideas about “plastic form” to the analysis and appreciation of African art, while frequently straying beyond art objects to rehearse the theory of the work of art in society. African art suggested that a “durable intellectual culture” had once existed in Africa, although it was no longer in evidence. They imagined an Africa prior to colonialism and slavery, home to “the art-producing negro [who] was a negro un-touched by foreign influences.”31 The art-producing African’s way of life was visible not in the Africans of Guillaume and Munro’s present but through the “plastic form” of the statue, “recapturing a part, and the central part, of the experience of all who have come to vital grips with the statue: that of the sculptor himself [and] the first observer” in that long-distant past.32 The statue embodied the experience of its creator, as Dewey would put it; it was a piece of historical evidence, which in turn helped to produce the society that encountered and supported its production. Elsewhere, Guillaume described what he saw in the best of African art—“all-inclusive unity and harmony . . . every part is related to every other, and there are no loose ends, no discordant notes or irrelevant details . . . one exists for the moment in a single small harmonious world from which frustration and incompleteness have been removed.”33 To come into contact with an African sculpture and to consider its plastic form was to come into contact with an untouched, pure society, harmonious, unified, expressive. “Born along by the rhythm of the life about him, and by the momentum of the past, going a little farther by his individual power, the primitive artist creates a new form, the crystallized expression of his race and of his own personality.”34 The subtext was readily apparent: everything African society had been, which had resulted in their delightful objects, modern society was not. Modern society was discordant, off balance, and violent. Art was the privilege of the few, the fetish of the individual, whereas the African artist had “sought no individual fame.”35 The (imagined) work of art in the African past answered the critique that Dewey, Barnes, Lismer, and Read levied against their own time.
This is not to say that theorists about the work of art wanted to replicate African societies; rather, from objects of African social creation they culled lessons about creativity and the position of the artist, to be applied to modern life. But where did that leave African societies—and African artists? Guillaume and Munro could not control how their ideas—and ideas like theirs—were received. Mancoba responded in his own way. In Grossert’s careful sketches of Asante fertility dolls, Sahelian masks, and Zulu rugs, in Franz’s assertions about Basotho society, and in Grossert’s lovingly wrought village scene, we might see another response—the radical conviction that Guillaume and Munro were wrong and that harmony was