Featured White Papers
Content provided in partnership with
African art - Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York
Art Journal, Spring, 1997 by Christa Clarke
The idea that northwestern Africa and Egypt are not part of Africa has gained such wide acceptance that when the Royal Academy of Arts in London contemplated mounting the exhibition Africa: The Art of a Continent, it had first to justify the inclusion of the arts of northwestern Africa and Egypt in an exhibition dedicated to the continent as a whole. That it decided to do so was for me a triumph for truth and common sense. This is an unprecedented exhibition and, hopefully, one that will foster the necessary changes in the way that people look at the continent, its history and its arts (p. 9).
The geographic and evolutionary justification for considering the continent as a whole provided by Eyo in the catalogue was complemented by Peter Mark's essay, "Historical Contacts and Cultural Interaction," which summarized the extensive history of cultural and artistic exchanges among Africa, the Muslim world, and southern Europe.
The sections devoted to the arts of northern Africa were illustrative of such themes, emphasizing artistic interaction both within and beyond the continent. In the section on ancient Egypt and Nubia, for example, there was a concerted effort to give equal weight to Nubia, a culture historically overshadowed by its neighbor Egypt. Alluding to active cultural interchange between the two regions, a 7th-century B.C. statue of the Nubian king Senkamenisken ([ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]; Guggenheim cat. 12), unique to the New York exhibition, showed the ruler in Egyptian pose and costume but with a traditional Kushite headdress, reflecting his ancestral ties to the Kushite kings who had also ruled Egypt. Throughout the section, the curatorial selections eschewed the monumental grandeur of Egyptian art in favor of smaller and less familiar works. A rare example of early Egyptian three-dimensional art was a door socket in the form of a bound prisoner dating to 3100 B.C. (Guggenheim cat. 3; Royal Academy cat. 1.24). Many of the objects included in the exhibition were intended for personal use, such as the New Kingdom wooden headrest in the shape of a hare (Royal Academy cat. 1.53), whose form is strikingly similar to those used in a number of sub-Saharan African cultures.
A diversity of cultural and artistic traditions was especially visible in the northern Africa section, which contained not only early Carthaginian works created under Phoenician and then Roman rule, but also an array of Muslim objects from later periods. Reflecting the region's complex history, a Moroccan gravestone (Royal Academy cat. 7.19) inscribed in Arabic to a 13th-century Marinid sultan reuses a Roman stela from the 3rd to 4th century. Of note as well is a richly illuminated Mamluk Qur'an from 1305 (Guggenheim cat. 98; Royal Academy cat. 7.55), by the celebrated calligrapher Ibn al-Wahid, an exceptionally beautiful work and the earliest dated example of its type. The section also included a number of objects by nomadic artists who once dominated trade routes across the Sahara, illustrating again the ties between northern and sub-Saharan Africa.
