Guest Editor’s Introduction

This double issue of Critical Interventions represents the outcome of a four-year research project entitled African Art History and the Formation of a Modernist Aesthetic.¹ The project was administered at Iwalewahaus, University in Bayreuth (Germany), and ran from 2015 to 2019. Our objective in the project – and thus also for this special issue – was to bring different academic, curatorial and artistic approaches into a productive dialogue with one another and therefore to contribute to the complexification of research on African Modernisms – and the history of art in and from Africa at large. It was also to respond to the recent increasing interest and awareness of public institutions and private collectors both in the Global North and South in this period of artistic production on the African continent and its diasporas. This has recently been impressively demonstrated by auction results such as the sale of Ben Enwonwu’s Tutu (1974) for more than 1.8 Mill. GBP in 2018. In addition, the increase in numbers of exhibitions on the modernisms of the Global South such as Ibrahim El Salahi: A Visionary Modernist (Tate Modern 2013), Okwui Enwezor’s Postwar (Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2017), Microstories of an Ex-Centric Modernism at Kunstsammlung NRW (Düsseldorf, 2017–2018) and more recently Iheanyichukwu Onwuegbucha’s Layers (Labanque, Bethune, 2018) show that African Modernisms are recognized as a significant part of the art and cultural history of modernity of the continent. Also some important publications on African Modernism have been published in the last years, often accompanying exhibitions (e.g., CBCIU & Kunstsammlung NRW, 2018; Enwezor et al., 2016; Gaensheimer et al., 2018; Hassan, 2010).

We believe that this publication can be another step forward in a much-needed direction of formulating ideas and visions on how to study this tremendously important epoch of African art history that sits somehow uncomfortable between what is considered as “traditional,” “indigenous” or “classical” African art and what is called “the African Contemporary.” Already this concept of a linear trajectory is highly problematic, because we have to question its historiography: when did African Modernism actually start? And has it already ended? What are the criteria to mark African Modernism as an epoch? Is it when African artists started to engage with the artistic methods of Western modernism, such as two-dimensional easel painting? Or when they negotiated subject matters that are considered to be modern topics such as urban life, industrialization or political oppression? Perhaps it began when African artists started to define themselves as modern subjects within a process of decolonization and the anti-colonial struggles? When they formed collectives, wrote manifestos and traveled extensively to the art world events that defined the canon of modern art history of the last 100 years or more. All these are questions that are relevant when we look at the forms and content of artworks or the positioning of artists in the “global modern art history.” This is why we should carefully look at African Modernism, now 50, 60, 70 years later and at a time, when the artists of the “African Contemporary” constantly reveal very strong new works and tackle relevant, often very political questions.

In our opinion, the period of African Modernism has thus far received neither the acknowledgement nor the critical reflection it deserves. Therefore we encourage a deeper investigation of the art produced by individual artists mostly in urban contexts around the time of the African independences with its strong impetus on nationalism and “rootedness” that we regard as one of the most important moments of African Modernism. It is also productive to look at artistic practises that are embedded in collective social contexts and focus on social cohesion or spirituality and differentiate it from the art we find in the context of the globalized and commercialized art world of today. There is a big potential in revisiting the period of modernism that can bring a deeper understanding of the contemporary. Or as Boris Groys says “[…] ours is a time in which we reconsider not abandon, not reject, but analyse and reconsider – the modern projects” (Groys, 2009). Noting the plural here – modern projects – when looking at African Modernisms, it was precisely this idea of plurality and multiplicity that was also the baseline to explore research methods while we were working on collections of the African Modern in public institutions. Searching for methods can only happen in the plural. It is a set, sometimes even a combination that enables us to approach the multiplicity of African modernisms, its variety of local and regional contexts, its diverse and sometimes very different political surroundings with e.g., the particularities of the Cold War context, the colonial heritage or the lurking ghosts of oppressive violent political systems like apartheid or its relation to sociolinguistic and esthetic cultural settings. Artworks by African artists of the modern period can thus become our “comrades in time” as Groys puts it (2009).

In our research project, we closely examined collections of African Modernisms that are housed in public collections both on the African continent and in Europe and the past, present, and future connections between them. Rather than focusing on their singularity and specific history of becoming a collection, we wanted to understand their relationality, their complex entanglements – not only in the artistic movements of modernity, but also in relation to the network of collectors, artists, curators and other agents within the social field of art. The three institutions, the Iwalewahaus (Bayreuth, Germany), the Weltkulturen Museum (Frankfurt, Germany) and the Makerere Art Gallery/Institute of Heritage Conservation and Restoration (IHCR) (Kampala, Uganda) that cooperated in the research project, have an international reputation in their respective domain. Their collections host particularly rich works of African Modernism, comprising mainly paintings, sculptures and graphic art from the early 1940s to the late 1980s and art loans are an increasing task for the curators. Interconnections and parallels provided the starting point for the collaborative research project that aimed at reworking the histories of these collections with regard to their complex entanglements. Due to this fact, the research team conducted an in-depth research into the historical development of the collections together with international scholars. The collections were the starting point of and a resourceful pool for the studies.

The three collections have very different histories, which not only define their positioning within their respective institutional framework but also in regard to how the collected artworks were researched and documented: as part of an ethnographic museum, as part of an art school, or as part of a cultural center and museum dedicated to contemporary African arts. This is mirrored in the different methodologies of cataloguing and exhibiting as well as in the way they were researched and how they appear – or are missing – in art historical research and writing.

The foundation of the Iwalewahaus in Bayreuth in 1981 is based on the rich collection of artworks from Nigeria compiled over many years by Ulli Beier (1922–2011) and his wife, the artist Georgina Beier (*1938). They started their collection in the late 1950s with works from patients of the Lantoro Mental Hospital in Abeokuta, Nigeria. These works prepared the ground for their desire for “authenticity” and “raw art” in the Beiers’ collecting strategy. They collected a diversity of works from artists of the Osogbo Art School such as Twins Seven Seven or Muraina Oyelami, popular art such as sign paintings by Middle Art but also more “academic” works by graphic artists from the Nsukka School like Obiora Udechukwu and El Anatsui – to name a few. The collection is housed at Iwalewahaus since 1981 and is also documented in the Ulli Beier Photographic Estate that is hosted by Iwalewahaus since 2012 (Greven et al., 2018). The broad sweep of the material, ranging from artworks to photographs and other documents on the history of the collection gives a very personal insight into the Beiers’ collecting scheme. The Iwalewahaus collection has since been expanded with numerous initially private collections of modern and contemporary African art, which were acquired or given on long-term loan agreements. The Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt a. M. established a collection policy for the acquisition of art from Africa already in 1974. On the initiative of the former curator Dr. Johanna Agthe, the museum collected almost 3.000 works by artists from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe. The Weltkulturen collection of modern and contemporary art consists of numerous art works by today established and renowned artists like El Anatsui, Twins Seven Seven, David Koloane, Chéri Samba, John Muafangejo, El Hadji Sy or Vincente Malangatana. It is the largest institutional collection of its kind in Europe. A large, but hardly researched portfolio of artworks from Uganda in the collection was compiled by the German collector Jochen Schneider, who collected modern art while living in Uganda from the 1960 to the 1990s. From the 1980s on, Schneider acquired most of his art works from the Makerere School of Fine Arts or directly from artists he knew. Thirdly, the collection of Makerere Art Gallery/Institute of Heritage Conservation and Restoration (IHCR) in Kampala (Uganda) was continuously built with works by art students and artists from the art school environment since the late 1960s. Its collection represents different periods within the formal art education in Uganda. Margaret Trowell, an artist and teacher trained at the British Slade School of Fine Art, founded the art school at Makerere in the late 1930s. She promoted spiritual and indigenous cultural topics and motifs as inspiration for artistic practice while trying to keep Western influences away from her students. After her resignation in 1958, her successor Cecil Todd changed the focus to a more universal approach in line with Western art academy education.

With regard to the collections, the researchers in the project African Art History and the Formation of a Modernist Aesthetic argued that different complex narratives of African art history are embedded in the collections: that of the artists and that of the collectors or patrons. At the same time, the team experienced a gap when searching for appropriate methods and methodological frameworks or fitting terminologies when researching artworks of African Modernisms. The individual research projects were looking at a variety of methodologies and terminologies based on established Western methods, such as object biographies or visual analysis, questioning their usefulness within the field of African Modernisms. We also experimented with tools such as maps and trajectories, trying to visualize the different relationships between artworks, artists, collectors, curators and institutions, following an actor network theory approach (Naumann 2017). We tested collective methodological approaches like the Icon Lab, where a group of researchers meets to discuss one artwork in depth. By bringing together different perspectives on the formal, contextual, historical and museological aspects of a singular artwork, this form of collective knowledge production proved particularly fruitful for the research project (Gerhard et al., 2017, 215 ff.). For their individual studies, some researchers focused on visual methods such as Katharina Greven (University of Bayreuth), who used this approach toward the photographic estate of Ulli and Georgina Beier, creating her own “image plateau” within the rhizomatic structure of the overall archive of the Beiers. By expanding the rather classical iconological analysis and understanding the photographs as sensual materialities with an affective impact on the body (Brown & Phu, 2014; Edwards, 2010, 2012) her in-depth work with the images, individually as well as in groups with contemporaries of the Beiers and colleagues (e.g., in the Icon Lab), was crucial to understanding them as the entity an image is, its materiality, its networks and its affiliations, questioning one’s own codings and therefore one’s own knowledge production (Greven, in preparation). As a young researcher Martha Kazungu (MARKK, Hamburg) wrote her MA thesis on the question of style in regard to the collection of the Makerere Art Gallery, asking if there was a particular Makerere Style shaping the artistic production of generations of students. By clustering the works of graphic arts, she was able to combine the formal analysis of the works with the insights she gathered from expert interviews. Katrin Peters-Klaphake (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin) combined the writing of object biographies with a comparative approach of the Makerere collection, the Schneider estate at the Weltkulturen Museum Frankfurt a. M. and the graphic collection of Klaus Betz at the Iwalewahaus. Considering the collections as networks she investigated links between the works but also their contexts (Peters-Klaphake, 2018). Nadine Siegert (iwalewabooks) looked at a broader historical-political perspective by contextualizing the Beier collection in the Cold War period. By analyzing the subject matter of the artworks and their titles, as well as related archival material, she searched for the collector’s engagement within that tensed political context of early postwar Nigeria, in particular the political implications of the rival ideologies of communism and liberalism (Siegert, unpublished). George Kyeyune (Makerere University) took on the task to write a history of modern art in Uganda by referring not only to archival material and relevant literature but also based on his extensive conversations he conducted over the past years with artists of different generations. Facing the difficulty of the artist’s own voice entering the research on their very own production, Kyeyune’s forthcoming book is also a reaction to the lack of sufficient research on this period of African art history (Kyeyune, forthcoming).

Figure 1. ©Ł Lena Naumann

Figure 2. Icon Lab Session, 2015 ©Ł Katharina Greven

Especially toward the end of the project, after workshops, conferences and field experiences and a rich and continuous exchange between researchers all over the globe, it became obvious that a critical reevaluation of the used methods in regard to the field was crucial. Looking at African modernisms from the perspective of art history, the theory and the periodization at hand often fails in properly analyzing and interpreting the artworks. An attempt to adapt the “isms” of Western modernism to artist movements on the African continent results in constructions such as ulism (see, e.g., Okonkwo & Akhogba, 2013, p. 58) that fails to understand the complexity of the indigenous esthetic concepts that are behind such an artistic movement. The terminology of Western art history adapted to African Modernisms often ends with inappropriate and disrespectful comparisons such as “the African Picasso” or “African surrealism.” On the other hand, an ethnographic perspective that emphasizes the socio-cultural embeddings of an artistic practise often tends to neglect the esthetic form of an artwork or lacks the terminology and tools to describe it.

Therefore, in the call for this special issue, we as guest editors asked which methods have proven as successful in research on African Modernism and why? Also, which methodological approaches failed because they were not appropriate for the subject? Do we have to combine different methods, and if so, how? How can we find appropriate sources and what is their relevance for the research? Which terminologies were and are used and how does this limit the scope of thinking within the research in the first place? Based on these questions, we invited scholars from various backgrounds who take very different perspectives on the topic of methodology. The articles combined here give an insight into the pluralism of topics and methods and thus hopefully spark a debate about the usefulness of different methodological approaches to study African Modernisms. How could a methodological toolkit look like? How can scholarship in the field of African Modernism also have a decolonial perspective and practice, when most of the methods at hand – from ethnography via art history to museum studies – inherit a deep colonial burden that becomes visible in terminologies and concepts that always seem to fall short when approaching an artwork conceptualized as “African Modern.”

In our call, we were proposing a kaleidoscope of possible approaches from ethnographic methods, critical theory, art history to semiotics, visual studies and archive and narrative perspectives. The responses were not as manifold as we wished for and showed that it seems to be difficult to firstly name and secondly elaborate on methods used in the research conducted by scholars on both the African continent and abroad. It was a challenge for authors as well as us editors and was therefore not possible to group the contributions according to different schools of thoughts or academic fields – they stand rather loosely next to each other but are definitely able to show the benefits and possible shortcomings each approach entails.

This publication starts with a recollection piece, namely Rowland Abiodun’s Identity and the Artistic Process in Yoruba Aesthetic Concept of Iwa that was first published in the Nigerian Journal of Cultures and Ideas in 1983. While searching for seminal texts on methodologies for the study of African Modernism, this text was one of the few that proposed a genuine approach by looking at Yoruba Esthetic and what this concept entails for a thorough analysis for Yoruba Modern Art. Abiodun’s proposal that he later developed further in his writing (e.g., Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, 2014) clearly states that the understanding of a local esthetic is closely linked to esthetic concepts that are entangled with language – both verbal and visual. Yoruba esthetic thus is more than just an artistic framework – it is rather a complex cosmology, and one has to embrace the whole to understand its pieces. Abiodun’s text brings us back to the importance of decolonial perspectives and practices and to question western terminologies and methods and their reach within the fields of African Modernism.

This is also the question in Which Art History in Africa?: A Question of Method by Moses Serubiri and sets the tone for the entire issue as he is pointing out the dominance of Western philosophical discourse in and on African Art. In his essay, he questions his own academic upbringing which is dominated by texts by white American and French theorists from the 1970s and the lack of literature with regard to Ugandan art. He also shows how writing on African art is often overshadowing the art itself and that we know a lot about how we can theorize about African arts, but we know very little about the artworks. This brings us back to the question of methodology, since it is needed to not only describe artworks but also to find appropriate ways how to interpret and position them into a broader context. This is what the following chapters aim to do, each in its very own way.

Ozioma Onuzulike’s paper is dealing with “Traditional” and “Craft” Paradigms as Dividing Walls: The Place of Formal Analysis in the Study of African Ceramic Art and Design Modernism. He examines the marginalization of African pottery by the Eurocentric imagination as “traditional” and “craft” by having a close look at postcolonial pottery from Inyi in South-Eastern Nigeria. Through a formal and historical analysis, he gives insights into the individual styles of the artists. Using established formal and esthetic elements endured from one generation to the other as well as appropriating new forms from imported articles and other sources of inspiration, the artists are indeed part of an overlooked modern development, which went along with a substantial technical change. Onuzulike’s application of the formal analysis allows him to question the dichotomy of “traditional” and “modern” and focuses on the individual style of the artists as one of many contributions to African Modernism.

Verena Rodatus in her paper Toward a Film-based “Oral Art History” in Benin: Interviews and Multi-sited Knowledge Production in African Art Contexts introduces the method of audio-visually recording artist interviews building on the approach of semi-structured interviews and participatory observation she conducted in Benin. While the methods stem from an ethnographic methodological approach, which is dominant in a multitude of scholarly work on African art, the idea is really concerned with the search for tools that eventually will enable forms of joint knowledge generation. In reference to Haraway’s term of “situated knowledge,” she analyses the individual, cultural and socio-historical contexts of the respective artist and his/her work as well as her own background, experiences and cultural as well as scholarly knowledge and interests.

InHae Yap is contextualizing African modern esthetics by looking at the conditions that shaped the emergence of a modernist esthetic around the time of the independences. In her paper Reaching for Freedom, Touching Modernity: Political and Consumptive Desire in Francophone African Magazines, 1950 to the 1960s she looks at the period of the 1950s and 60 s that shaped the modern subject in the African metropolis. She presents alternative archives such as magazines and, through which, the possibility to write a transnational history of African photography in the modern period of the twentieth century. Focusing not only on the photographs in the magazine but also on their context and how they resonated with the surrounding texts and advertisements she uses a more complex and haptic approach. With that, Yap makes use of new archives in order to find a new narrative for the advent of modernity on the African continent. Dealing methodologically with the materiality of the archival documents, Yap proposes that by studying African modernism one should not only look at the artworks as such but also the other media around it and as such being able to understand artistic modernism as a form of esthetic modernity.

Also Sabrina Moura puts the archive at the center of her methodology. She introduces an interesting and under-researched aspect of South-South art history by studying the archives of the Brazilian artist and art educator Rossini Perez. Her text Rossini Perez​’​ workshops and other ​artistic​ pedagogies at the​ École de Dakar (​1970s): a methodological approach to a neglected archive focuses on the rich holdings of the archive that itself is a forgotten or as she puts it neglected one. Primarily based on interviews and archival research her work points at the existence of the many unwritten art histories and the differences in the educational approach practices mainly by patrons/educators of European descent compared to Perez as an artist and educator from Brazil.

Sule Ameh James compares in his paper African Modernism: A Comparative Study of Resistance in the Modernist Art of Nigeria and South Africa six artworks with a cross-cultural and cross-national visual comparative method. He tries to give insights not only in the contexts of these “resistance artworks,” but also into the causal relationship of similarities and differences in African modernism and resistance arts in both countries. The formal analysis is used to actually show different modes of representation of figures in the artworks, revealing them as comments on appreciated but oppressed cultural values by the colonial regime in Nigeria and respectively the apartheid regime in South Africa.

We close the issue with an artist portfolio that also focuses on the methodological question, in this case that of the artist’s method. The artist portfolio written by Moses Serubiri on the artist Immy Mali and her work Virtual Becomings elaborates on the question of how research can be used by artists and if those methodological approaches can be useful also in a wider scholarly scope. In this work, Immy Mali works with a form of data mining to create a private archive of digital media communication – questioning the role of the “self” within the digital sphere.

Finally, the review written by Yvette Mutumba on one of the most important books on Nigerian Modernism, Uche Okeke’s Art in Development (2019) shows that publications and re-editions of such seminal texts by African artists and writers of that period can be another way to increase the visibility of African scholarship in this field and to broaden the scholarly scope beyond the academic North. The book was first published in 1982 and compiles his most important writings including Natural Synthesis, a manifesto-like text which formulates basic thoughts on how one can imagine modernism in the context of the early years of Nigerian post-independence.

With this variety of approaches and perspectives, we hope to contribute to the engagement with African Modernisms and in particular with the question of “how” to research them. Experiencing this as a field that is in flux and dire need for new insights, we are looking forward a future dialogue on these questions with the interested readers of this journal and we would like to thank all the contributors and in particular the journal editors for their interest, trust and patience in our endeavor.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katharina Greven

Katharina Greven is a scholar at the University of Bayreuth. She studied at the Art Academy Düsseldorf with Thomas Ruff, wrote her MA Thesis in African Language Studies and her PhD on the archive as a place of belonging. Her research interests are archives, knowledge production and affective reading of images.

Katrin Peters-Klaphake

Katrin Peters-Klaphake is a researcher at Kunst-bibliothek, Photography Collection, Berlin. 2015 – 2019 she was on the core team of the research project “African Art History and the Formation of a Modern Aesthetic”. 2009 – 2017 she worked as curator in Uganda. She contributed to several books on art and photography from Africa.

Nadine Siegert

Dr. Nadine Siegert is a writer, curator and publisher and currently the Head of “Culture and Development” (Goethe-Institute in Johannesburg). From 2011 to 2019, she was the Deputy Director of Iwalewahaus (University of Bayreuth) and sits on the board of Asele Institute and ACASA. Siegert also runs the publishing house iwalewabooks.

Notes

1 The project was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation within the funding scheme Research in Museums. We are very grateful for the support given by the foundation that enabled us to do research with an international team of emerging and established scholars in Africa, Europe and the Americas. More information can be found here: https://www.iwalewahaus.uni-bayreuth.de/en/projects/050_VW-Projekt/index.html