Day 354 - Objects from Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa

 August 3, 2023

Over the next visits, my plan is to return to galleries I missed the first time around because they were closed. Gallery 136, today's destination, was being re-hung on my first go-round (five years ago!) and was then reopened with what I took to be a temporary exhibition. It turns out to be a semi-permanent display whose theme is "The African Origins of Civilization." I think I understand the purpose of the exhibition - to elevate the esteem in which sub-Saharan art is held - but for me, it raises many questions.

The introductory signage makes the point that homo sapiens originated in Africa, as did the effort to express abstract ideas in visual terms and to add beauty to material creations. The signage further notes that from the Classical period onward, European artists adhered to the canon of human proportions developed by the ancient Egyptians. Western connoisseurs generally did not discern similar connections between the art of Egypt and that of sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, the value and prestige  attached to Egyptian art did not transfer over to sub-Saharan art, which was instead termed "primitive," more fit for anthropological museums than for fine arts museums.  The history of the Met's own collections in these areas exemplifies this duality: While Egyptian works were integral to the museum from its founding forward, works from the rest of Africa, in great part acquired through a bequest from Nelson Rockefeller, were not exhibited until 1982. (Rockefeller had previously established the short-lived Museum of Primitive Art [sic[ largely to showcase the collection of his late son, Michael.) 

This gallery takes its inspiration from the writings of Cheikh Anta Diop, a Senegalese historian and anthropologist who studied pre-colonial African culture. Diop argued for shared cultural continuities across African peoples and maintained that Egyptian language and culture had spread to West Africa. I have never read Diop - indeed, I'd never heard of him before - and I can't possibly evaluate his assertions. (I gather, from a Wikipedia article, that he remains a controversial figure.) But I don't think this exhibition does much to make his case.

The exhibition consists of side-by-side displays of  parallel works, one from Egypt, one from sub-Saharan Africa.  Three of these are shown above. A limestone relief from the Old Kingdom (ca. 2500 B.C.E.) is paired with a wood-and-metal statuette from 18th or early 19th century Mali. Both depict loving couples: in each, the man's arm circles the woman's shoulder, his hand cupping her breast. In another case, a statuette from about 1800 B.C.E. showing a standing woman with a large basket on her head is paired with a late 19th century or early 20th century kneeling caryatid from what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo; she also bears a heavy object on her head. A third pairing, more intriguing to me, shows a bowl with human feet from about 3500 B.C.E. Egypt and a 19th to mid-20th ceremonial ladle whose handle takes the form of the abdomen and legs of a nude woman.  There are ,many other such pairings: an alabaster head-shaped lid of a canopic jar and a terracotta memorial head; statues of standing nude males; musicians blowing into instruments; masks and headrests; hippopotamuses and lions.

But so what? Does formal similarity denote influence? Isn't it possible that artistic conventions (e.g., representing powerful figures as larger than their subordinates) evolved independently in different places? (We certainly see this in European religious iconography.)  That artists were responding to similar environmental conditions (the presence of certain animals, for example)? That sub-Saharan artists were representing cultural traditions (musical instruments, ways of carrying burdens) that developed on their own, without reference to Egyptian models? That some of the images (e.g., loving couples, divine rulers) represent universal archetypes?  

There seems to me something perverse about the subtext of the show - that it's necessary somehow to legitimate sub-Saharan art by tying it to an artistic tradition that is widely recognized as important and of high artistic merit.  Can't we just appreciate sub-Saharan art on its own terms? 

Perhaps the greatest value of the gallery is that it may serve to expand the consciousness of visitors who come to see the Egyptian collection and end up being exposed to African art as well.