If you still think that African art is not your thing, there’s an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum that may change your mind. It’s called “Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures,” and it’s as beautiful to look at as a show can possibly be.
It’s a perception changer in other ways too, as it argues, through demonstration, against basic misunderstandings surrounding this art. African art has no history? No independent tradition of realism? No portraiture? All African sculpture looks basically alike, meaning “primitive”? African and Western art are fundamentally different in content and purpose? Wrong across the board.
Art from sub-Saharan Africa is some of the oldest known, dating back tens of thousands of years. In the exhibition the oldest pieces are naturalistic, portraitlike terra-cotta heads from southwestern Nigeria from the 12th century.
Before the modern era, ancient African chronicles were passed on by word of mouth, from storyteller to storyteller, and many sculptures, early and late, embody centuries-old accounts of real people and real lives. They compress them into a visual shorthand the way oral tradition compresses generations-long narratives.
Even a quick stroll through this exhibition’s eight sections, each devoted to a different West or Central African art tradition, confirms African art’s variety, in a stylistic spectrum stretching from detail-perfect representation to near-abstraction. And as to African art’s pertinence to Western concerns, suffice it to say that almost all the sculpture in this exhibition is asking a question that is foremost on the mind of many Americans in the early stages of the presidential campaign: what are the qualities we want and need in our political leaders?
To ease our way into all of this, the show begins with a comparative look at political power portraits from Africa and the West: a 17th-century brass head depicting a ruler of the kingdom of Benin, in what is now Nigeria, and a carved marble bust of the Roman emperor Octavian, who called himself Augustus, from around A.D. 5.
Augustus’ portrait is of a familiarly naturalistic type; we know his name because it was written down and is found on many identical portraits. The naturalism of the Benin head is highly stylized, and the name of the ruler unknown, lost with the spoken histories erased by colonialism.
Despite their differences, though, neither “portrait” is more or less realistic than the other. Augustus is depicted as a Greek Apollo with a Roman haircut. The Benin king, wide-eyed and plump, almost bursting with good health, conforms to an African ideal of regal well-being. Both portraits commemorate real people who lived and died, but are, before all else, abstract emblems of ethical standards to be emulated and political power to be revered.
And since political power was usually accompanied by wealth throughout Africa, as everywhere else, the ruling elite drew on top-rank talent and technology when commissioning art. This is evident in the Benin royal portraits and in the terra-cotta heads produced in the Yoruba capital, Ife, also in Nigeria, between the 12th and 15th centuries.
With their soft, grave naturalism, these heads have an automatic appeal to the Western eye, and the seven examples in the show are simply out of this world. All have similar sensuous features: full lips, almond eyes and all-over patterns of vertical striations, read by some experts as cosmetic scarring, by others as representing shadows cast by beaded veils attached to royal crowns.
