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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:The 'discovery' of the African mask
Author:Duerden, DennisISNI
Year:2000
Periodical:Research in African Literatures
Volume:31
Issue:4
Pages:29-47
Language:English
Geographic terms:Central Africa
West Africa
Subjects:masks
visual arts
External link:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v031/31.4duerden.pdf
Abstract:The principal theme in this essay is the part played in Western art by masks from the Niger and Congo basins in Africa, and the significance of their 'discovery' in the years preceding and immediately following the First World War. The essay first describes the widespread expropriation of Niger-Congo art that took place in the 19th century in order to fill ethnographic museums in Europe. This process of expropriation should be distinguished from the process of appropriation or 'discovery' by artists (Vlaminck, Derain, Picasso) at the beginning of the 20th century. The present author argues that visual cognition must be distinguished from verbal cognition and that immediate understanding is possible visually but not verbally. It was the visual form of the mask that was thought to have 'power' and it was this which was quickly seized upon and moved across the various ethnic cultures. Primitive art was frightening; it allowed a primitive display of emotion; primitive artefacts exhibit something of a happy state of living; and primitive art expressed some kind of luminous power and magic. A contemporary form of 'primitivism' is the search for the spiritual or shamanism. All these examples affirm the author's argument that the form of visual imagery is communicated in a manner that differs from the understanding of meaning communicated by verbal expression and that communication by eye is faster than communication by ear. Bibliogr., notes, ref.
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