African Art - Dave DeRoche

African Art and Abstraction

The traditional arts of Africa are often described in the West as Abstract and while this is true in relation to what we may call Realistic art, it's a little more complex. Western Art shares a canon of style and a dogma that goes back to the Romans and the Greeks before them, in an attempt to represent the human form in a naturalistic way that has over time, developed into portraiture.

African art, though canonical within ethnic groups, is by its very nature abstract as it is not in any way constrained by naturalism as we understand it. Portraiture in African art often attempts to depict not the person, but the spirit - the awesome, actual presence or essence of that which is often otherworldly.

What does a deceased ancestor look like? To the Western artist an ancestor looks like an idealized version of their best self in life, yet to the African artist, the ancestor is often rendered in a spirit form, which may differ radically from both natural representation and expectation.

The early Modernists, such as Braque, Modigliani, and Picasso all owned African Art, and without understanding the context of the works, they intuited the powerful spiritual forms that these sculptures instantiate - and indeed, were influenced by and used these forms in their own works.

As viewers, African art awakens in us a vague and ancient recollection of ways of seeing and understanding things that is untethered to our Western constraints of realism and is perhaps in some sense, equally, if not more real.