Mapping Modernisms

MAPPING MODERNISMS
MODERNIST EXCHANGES
General editors: Ruth B. Phillips
and Nicholas Thomas

OBJECTS/HISTORIES: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ART,
MATERIAL CULTURE, AND REPRESENTATION
A series edited by Nicholas Thomas
ART, INDIGENEITY,
Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips | E D I T O R S
MAPPING
COLONIALISM
MODERNISMS
Duke University Press | Durham and London | 2018

© 2018 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill
Typeset in Minion Pro by BW&A Books, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Harney, Elizabeth, editor. | Phillips, Ruth B. (Ruth Bliss), [date] editor.
Title: Mapping modernisms : art, indigeneity, colonialism /
Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips, editors.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2018. | Series: Objects/histories:
critical perspectives on art, material culture, and representation |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2018013376 (print)
lccn 2018015976 (ebook)
isbn 9780822372615 (ebook)
isbn 9780822368595 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822368717 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: lcsh: Indigenous art. | Modernism (Art)
Classification: lcc N6351.2.I53 (ebook) | lcc n6351.2.i53 m37 2018 (print) |
ddc 700/.4112—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018013376
Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the

support of the Equity and Diversity in the Arts Fund
within the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media; the
Dean’s Contingency Fund; and the Research Impact Fund,
all from the University of Toronto Scarborough, which
provided funds toward the publication of this book.
Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support

of Carleton University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,
which provided funds toward the publication of this book.
Frontispiece: Lukta Qiatsuk, Owl, 1959. Stone-cut print,

12 × 14 in. (30.6 × 35.9 cm). Canadian Museum of History,
Gatineau, Quebec. Copyright Dorset Fine Arts.
Cover art: Paratene Matchitt, Te Kooti at Ruatahuna, 1967.
Polyvinyl acetate on hardboard, 1208 mm × 1338 mm. Courtesy
of the artist and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
IN MEMORY OF
Jonathan Mane-Wheoki
AND
Daphne Odjig
This page intentionally left blank
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ix
General Editors’ Foreword | Ruth B. Phillips and Nicholas Thomas xiii
Preface | Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips xv
INTRODUCTION Inside Modernity: Indigeneity, Coloniality,

Modernisms | Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips 1
PART I MODERN VALUES
ONE Reinventing Zulu Tradition: The Modernism of Zizwezenyanga

Qwabe’s Figurative Relief Panels | Sandra Klopper 33
TWO “Hooked Forever on Primitive Peoples”: James Houston

and the Transformation of “Eskimo Handicrafts” to Inuit Art |
Heather Igloliorte 62
THREE Making Pictures on Baskets: Modern Indian Painting

in an Expanded Field | Bill Anthes 91
FOUR An Intersection: Bill Reid, Henry Speck, and the Mapping

of Modern Northwest Coast Art | Karen Duffek 110
FIVE Modernism on Display: Negotiating Value in Exhibitions

of Māori Art, 1958–1973 | Damian Skinner 138
PART II MODERN IDENTITIES
SIX “Artist of PNG”: Mathias Kauage and Melanesian Modernism |

Nicholas Thomas 163
SEVEN Modernism and the Art of Albert Namatjira | Ian McLean 187
EIGHT Cape Dorset Cosmopolitans: Making “Local” Prints in Global

Modernity | Norman Vorano 209
NINE Natural Synthesis: Art, Theory, and the Politics of Decolonization

in Mid-Twentieth-Century Nigeria | Chika Okeke-Agulu 235
PART III MODERN MOBILITIES
TEN Being Modern, Becoming Native: George Morrison’s Surrealist

Journey Home | W. Jackson Rushing III 259
ELEVEN Falling into the World: The Global Art World of Aloï Pilioko
and Nicolaï Michoutouchkine | Peter Brunt 282
TWELVE Constellations and Coordinates: Repositioning Postwar Paris

in Stories of African Modernisms | Elizabeth Harney 304
THIRTEEN Conditions of Engagement: Mobility, Modernism,

and Modernity in the Art of Sydney Kumalo and Jackson Hlungwani |
Anitra Nettleton 335
FOURTEEN The Modernist Lens of Lutterodt Studios | Erin Haney 357
Bibliography 377
Contributors 409
Index 415
ILLUSTRATIONS
PL ATES
1. Oscar Howe, Woman Buffalo Dreamer

2. Magdalena Augustine, Large Basket
3. Henry Speck, Moon Mask Dancers
4. Selwyn Muru, Kohatu
5. Rex Battarbee, Central Australian Landscape [Mt. Hermannsburg]
6. George Morrison, Cumulated Landscape
7. George Morrison, Untitled
8. Aloï Pilioko, Tattooed Women of Bellona, Solomon Isles
9. Aloï Pilioko, Self-Portrait with Bracelets
10. Skunder Boghossian, Time Cycle III
11. Sydney Kumalo, Seated Woman
12. Unknown photographer, Portrait of Albert Lutterodt and His Wife
13. Unknown photographer, Gold Coast: Fort in Elmina
FIGURES
1.1. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, pair of large vertical pokerwork panels 34

1.2. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, panel detail documenting racial
discrimination 35
1.3. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, panel detail of King Cetshwayo 35
1.4. Mat rack decorated with geometric patterns 37
1.5. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, pair of vertical pokerwork panels 38
1.6. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, panel detail of Dinuzulu’s incarceration 38
1.7. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, panel detail of bride holding small ritual
knife 38
1.8. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, panel detail of a man drawn behind a cow 39
1.9. Undated photograph of Zizwezenyanga Qwabe and another carver 46
1.10. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, pair of vertical pokerwork mat racks 49
1.11. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, horizontal pokerwork panel portraying an
ox-drawn wagon 51
1.12. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, horizontal pokerwork mat rack panel 51
1.13. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, horizontal figurative pokerwork panel 51
1.14. Rebecca Reyher photographing King Cyprian 54
1.15. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe at the Bantu Agricultural Show, Nongoma 55
1.16. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe at his homestead near the Qondo
Trading Store 55
2.1. Cover, Sanajaksak: Eskimo Handicrafts 63
2.2. James Houston displaying carvings and crafts in Pangnirtung 68
2.3. Display shelf in Inukjuak, Quebec 70
2.4. Cribbage board, Sanajaksak 72
2.5. Bracelets, needle case, and matchstick holder, Sanajaksak 72
2.6. Totem pole, Sanajaksak 73
2.7. Detail of totem pole 74
2.8. Isa Oomayoualook, animal totem sculpture 74
2.9. Akeeaktashuk, Woman and Child 81
2.10. Amidilak, Bear Sculpture 81
3.1. Fred Kabotie, Two Bird Dancers with Costumed Audience 92
3.2. Unknown Chemehuevi artist, Basket 102
4.1. Eaton’s Salute to Indian Culture brochure 111
4.2. Bill Reid, hinged bracelet depicting the Raven 120
4.3. Bill Reid, earrings in abstract design 120
4.4. Bill Reid paints interior house post 122
4.5. Hawthorn, Reid, and Davidson present a totem pole to the City of
Montreal 123
4.6. Henry Speck carves interior house posts 127
4.7. Henry Speck, Sea Monster 129
4.8. Henry Speck at opening of Henry Speck, Ozistalis 130
5.1. Māori Festival of the Arts 139
5.2. Contemporary Māori Painting and Sculpture exhibit 140
5.3. Viewing a sculpture at the Māori Festival of the Arts 146
5.4. John Miller, Evening Concert, Tūkākī wharenui 153
5.5. John Miller, Artists’ Exhibition Te Kaha-nui-a-tiki District
High School 154
5.6. Works by Arnold Wilson and Alison Duff at Recent New Zealand
Sculpture exhibit 156
x I llustrations
5.7. Selwyn Muru in Wellington 158
6.1. Kuanimbandu, Tots 164
6.2. Timothy Akis, Untitled 168
6.3. Timothy Akis, Man i hait namil long tupela ston 169
6.4. Mathias Kauage, Magic Fish 170
6.5. Mathias Kauage, Pasindia trak 171
6.6. Mathias Kauage, Independence Celebration 4 173
6.7. Mathias Kauage, Okuk’s Son at Moresby Airport 175
6.8. Mathias Kauage, Buka War 177
6.9. Mathias Kauage, Biting the Doctor’s Arm 177
6.10. Mathias Kauage, Kauage Flies to Scotland for the Opening 178
6.11. Mathias Kauage, photograph by Ulli Beier 180
7.1. Albert Namatjira, Mt. Hermannsburg with Finke River 189
7.2. Albert Namatjira, Central Mt. Wedge 191
7.3. Collin, Untitled (Landscape with Two Snakes and a House) 201
7.4. Albert Namatjira, Whispering Hills 204
8.1. Aline B. Saarinen, “Canada: Contemporary Eskimo Stone
Carvings” 210
8.2. Ellis Wilson, To Market, Haitian Peasants 215
8.3. Un’ichi Hiratsuka, Katsura Rikyu Amano Hashidate [Stone lantern] 219
8.4. Lukta Qiatsuk, Owl 219
8.5. Kellypalik Mungitok, Man Carried to the Moon 221
8.6. Shikō Munakata, The Sand Nest 221
8.7. Lukta Qiatsuk, Eskimo Whale Hunt 223
8.8. Josef Flejšar, Uméní Kānādských Eskymáků 229
8.9. Kellypalik Mungitok, Blue Geese on Snow 229
9.1. Aina Onabolu, Sisi Nurse 238
9.2. Demas Nwoko, Titled Woman 249
9.3. Demas Nwoko, Soldier (Soja) 251
10.1. George Morrison, Untitled 265
10.2. George Morrison, Black and White Patterned Forms 266
10.3. George Morrison, Grey, Black and White Lines 271
11.1. Nicolaï Michoutouchkine, Cockerel with Its Head Cut 283
11.2. Aloï Pilioko, Crucifixion of a Cockerel 284
11.3. Aloï Pilioko, Futunian Dancers 291
11.4. Pilioko with carvings, Santa Ana, Solomon Isles 292
11.5. Nicolaï Michoutouchkine and Aloï Pilioko 292
11.6. Snapshot from Michoutouchkine’s collecting expedition 293
I llustrations xi
11.7. Exhibition of tapestries by Aloï Pilioko 297
11.8. Nicolaï Michoutouchkine and Aloï Pilioko in Red Square,
Moscow 298
12.1. Gerard Sekoto, Street Scene 305
12.2. Alexander Boghossian and Gerard Sekoto in a Parisian café 307
12.3. Gerard Sekoto, poster for the Second Conference of Negro Writers
and Artists 313
12.4. Gerard Sekoto, Senegalese Women 315
12.5. Gerard Sekoto, Untitled 316
12.6. Gerard Sekoto, Memories of Sharpeville 317
12.7. Skunder Boghossian, Spring Scrolls 320
12.8. Skunder Boghossian, Ju ju’s Wedding 321
12.9. Skunder Boghossian, Night Flight of Dread and Delight 322
13.1. Jackson Hlungwani, Altar for Christ 337
13.2. Sydney Kumalo in his studio 340
13.3. Sydney Kumalo, Killed Horse 341
13.4. Sydney Kumalo, Seated Figure 343
13.5. Jackson Hlungwani, Cain’s Aeroplane 349
13.6. Jackson Hlungwani, Lion 350
14.1. Carte de visite, two unidentified men, Ghana 358
14.2. [Gerhardt Lutterodt?], Slave Coast: Chief Ayevie of Little Popo
with His People 362
14.3. [Gerhardt Lutterodt?], Gold Coast, Merry-Go-Round, Accra,
Christmas 1887 364
14.4. [Gerhardt Lutterodt?], Almeida Brothers, Little Popo, Republic
of Benin 365
14.5. Frederick Lutterodt, The People of the Deceased King Tackie 367
14.6. Unknown photographer, Two Men Standing in a Field Cleared
for Cocoa 369
14.7. Unknown photographer, Accra-Mulattin 372
xii I llustrations
RUTH B. PHILLIPS AND NICHOLAS THOMAS
GENERAL EDITORS’ FOREWORD
Within the larger Objects/Histories series, this smaller set of volumes addresses
the diverse lives that artistic modernism has had beyond the West during the
twentieth century. This book, one of three volumes, explores the fertile ex-
changes between local artists and those of European descent, among them
radical expatriates, in colonial settings. A symptom of the complexity and het-
erogeneity of such settings is that some of those local artists are referred to, and
refer to themselves, as indigenous; for others, that term is less appropriate. The
focus on Africa, Oceania, and the Americas fills a gap in current scholarship
that is a legacy of Western modernism’s much-debated primitivism.
In response to the striking absence of these art histories from global nar-
ratives, in 2010 we initiated a program of research and discussion that has
resulted in these publications. From the outset, the agenda was not simply
to pluralize a monolithic Western construct. We take it for granted, as many
readers will, that the humanities and social sciences have moved in that direc-
tion. Yet this epistemological sea change does not in itself enable any genuine
understanding of the diversity of modernist innovation beyond the West, the
legacies of modernist primitivism, or the ambivalent exchanges between Eu-
ropean cultural brokers and those they stimulated and mentored. Whereas
globalization was already a cliché of the international art world by the late-
twentieth century, the apparent inclusiveness of biennials had in no way been
matched by an adequate account of the Native modernisms of the interwar
years or those of the fifties and sixties. In part for telling reasons —these artists’
notions of self, history, and culture preceded and were somewhat incommen-
surable with the formations of identity politics that gained ascendancy in the
seventies —the art world, and the critical writing around it, has suffered a kind
of amnesia regarding these remarkable and formative histories.
Scholars have produced fine studies focused on artists in specific countries
and regions, including books previously published in the Objects/Histories
series, but the subject also demands a wider, comparative approach, which can
reveal both the shared experiences engendered by colonial policies and the
specificity of local responses. This set of volumes draws on the work of schol-
ars from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom,
the United States, and elsewhere who collectively bring decades of research
experience into the remarkable lives of indigenous artists and their strange
and paradoxical dealings with Western mentors and institutions. The hetero-
geneity of milieux and artists’ trajectories, as well as the successes and failures
of these artists’ work, are vital to the understanding we seek to achieve and
convey. One aim is to tell some of their stories. Another is to exemplify, rather
than merely declare the need for, a genuinely global art history.
We wish to acknowledge the support of the Sterling and Francine Clark
Art Institute; Carleton University; Victoria University; the Museum of Ar-
chaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge; and our major
sponsor, the Leverhulme Trust. A Leverhulme international network award
(2013–14) and the institutions mentioned supported workshops and public
conferences at the Clark, in Williamstown, Massachusetts (2011); the National
Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2012); Cambridge (2013 and 2017); the Museum
of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington (2014); Wits University, Jo-
hannesburg (2016); and the University of Cape Town (2016). It is a pleasure
also to thank Ken Wissoker of Duke University Press for his longstanding and
continuing enthusiasm for this project.
xiv GENERAL EDITORS’ FOREWORD

ELIZABETH HARNEY AND RUTH B. PHILLIPS
PREFACE
The genesis of this book goes back to a colloquium entitled Global Indigenous
Modernisms: Primitivism, Artists, Mentors, held in May 2010 at the Clark Art
Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The Clark’s generous support of
Ruth Phillips’s proposal made possible a meeting of twelve scholars from the
United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, and
the United Kingdom. All study twentieth-century modern arts created by
indigenous artists subject to colonial rule. During two days of discussions,
we explored the potential for using a comparative framework to reveal global
modes of circulation, networks of communication, and common patterns of
development to highlight the unique features that characterize different local
iterations of modernism around the world.
The research presentations led us all to decide unanimously to reconvene a
year later, in Ottawa, for a public symposium, where we could pursue a broader
project and generate wider discussion. The editors of this volume organized
the symposium, entitled Multiple Modernisms: Transcultural Exchanges in
Twentieth-Century Global Art. The event began at the National Gallery of
Canada then continued on the other side of the Ottawa River, at the Cana-
dian Museum of Civilization (now the Canadian Museum of History), where
Indigenous artists and curators from the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective pre-
sented a lively set of talks on Canadian indigenous modernisms. Papers from
the symposium form the core of this book, and although two original Clark
participants —Kobena Mercer and Susan Vogel —unfortunately could not
continue with the project, three additional authors — Karen Duffek, Heather
Igloliorte, and Erin Haney — contributed chapters that have broadened our
book’s scope in important ways. To reveal the shared as well as the distinctive
aspects of indigenous modernisms, we sought geographic and cultural breadth,
yet this collection pretends neither to be comprehensive within the multiple
modernisms framework, nor to represent all modernisms created by peoples
identified as indigenous in colonial and neocolonial contexts. (We address the
complexities of this designation in our introduction.) Rather, we have adopted
a case study approach, which invites considerations of the complex webs of
interaction among artists, intermediaries, objects, images, and texts produced
by conditions of modernity and coloniality.
In George Kubler’s book The Shape of Time, first published in 1962, he
wrote of Western art that “the last cupboards and closets of the history of art
have now been turned out and catalogued.” 1 For the modernisms we explore
here, however, art historians are only just beginning to open the doors to the
cupboards. While the need for this book and its timeliness will, of course, be
judged by its readers, two deaths that occurred during its preparation under-
score the urgent need to document art histories, which are retained as much in
the memories of the participants and the ephemeral traces left by their artistic
projects as in any set of formally organized archives. Toward the beginning
of this project, we lost Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, eminent Maori art historian,
curator, and teacher, who contributed deeply to our knowledge of Maori
modernists. Early on, he had encouraged Phillips to pursue the comparative
project, and we had hoped to engage him as a contributor. Then, as the book
was going to press, pioneering Anishinaabe artist Daphne Odjig passed away;
her work, discussed at the Ottawa conference by contemporary Anishinaabe
artist and curator Bonnie Devine, is only now receiving the broader attention
it deserves. If, as many art historians today argue, a globalized world requires
wide-ranging narratives of human cultural history, the assembly of the archive
cannot be divorced from the work of reconceptualization and analysis, as each
chapter of this book demonstrates.
This volume also has deeper roots in the two coeditors’ career-long engage-
ments with the modernisms created by indigenous and colonized peoples in
Africa, North America, and elsewhere. Both have worked in museums initially
founded to rectify the neglect of non-Western arts and cultures (Harney at the
Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art and Phillips at the Univer-
sity of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology), and both have pursued
teaching careers in Canadian universities during a period when First Nations
and Inuit arts have steadily grown in prominence — not only affirming the
vitality of Indigenous cultures but also countering the settler nation’s own
modernist appropriations. It would have been hard for either of us, trained
in African art history and immersed in art worlds that were regularly electri-
xvi PREFACE
fied by the politics of Indigenous art production, not to be intrigued by the
parallel challenges of conceptualization, inclusivity, and canonicity that have
characterized African and Indigenous North American modernisms — first si-
lenced and marginalized, then primitivized and appropriated, then celebrated
(albeit lost in a space between anthropology and art museums), and, finally,
hailed as the global “contemporary.” That our intellectual trajectories belong
to different generations — Phillips received her PhD in 1979 and Harney in
1996 — indicates the persistence of problems of reception, periodization, and
classification this book explores.
This collaborative project has forced us each to confront the overdeter-
mined and overburdened intellectual categories we take to be natural in our
respective subfields. In particular, it has both loosened and deepened our
understandings of the metahistorical concepts of modernity, indigeneity, and
primitivism. And though working together has brought forth many useful
and telling comparisons and recognizable patterns of colonial-modern prac-
tices in the arts and in their systems of patronage, it has also demanded that
we recognize these experiences of the modern era as contingent and volatile,
produced through specific historical encounters, and in constant need of re-
reading. The goals of the collaborative research project we formulated at the
Ottawa meeting, Multiple Modernisms: Transcultural Exchanges in Twentieth-
Century Global Art, were thus twofold: we aimed to begin the essential work of
scholarly documentation of artists’ works and lives by assembling the research
already done and by initiating new studies. Through our comparative frame-
work, we also sought to enhance critical analysis of the cultural collisions and
conceptual confusions that have informed the reception of these arts. Many
of the contributors to this volume have built on the research presented here
in three subsequent symposia focused on particular themes — Modernists and
Mentors: Indigenous and Colonial Artistic Exchanges, in Cambridge, England,
in 2013; Indigenous Modernisms: Histories of the Contemporary, in Wellington,
New Zealand, in 2014; and Gendered Making / Unmanned Modernisms: Gender
and Genre in Indigenous and Colonial Modernisms, in Johannesburg and Cape
Town, South Africa, in 2016. This first of several planned publications is de-
signed to introduce the scope and richness of the project while instantiating
its potential to amplify the breadth of a discipline striving to reinvent itself on
global terms.
Without the generosity of several funding agencies, the conferences de-
scribed above — and this book — could not have come into being. At the Clark
Art Institute, scholars Michael Holly, Mark Ledbury, Natasha Becker, Aruna
P reface xvii
D’Souza, and the Clark’s wonderful staff made our initial meeting not only
intellectually stimulating but also hugely pleasurable. Funding for the Ot-
tawa conference was provided by the 2010 Premier’s Discovery Award in the
Humanities made to Phillips by the province of Ontario; further generous
support was provided by the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Mu-
seum of Civilization, Carleton University, and the University of Toronto. The
able organizing team was headed by Kate Higginson and assisted by Crystal
Migwans, Annette De Stecher, Stacy Ernst, Alexandra Nahwegahbow, Miriam
Aronowicz, and Akshaya Tankha.
Profound thanks go to Nicholas Thomas, who from the beginning has
shared with Phillips the overall intellectual direction of the Multiple Modern-
isms project and who procured grant funding from the Leverhulme Trust to
support the second, third, and fourth conferences. Chika Okeke-Agulu and
the Program in African Studies at Princeton University made possible an addi-
tional workshop in December 2015. We are very grateful for the invaluable help
of our research assistant Lisa Truong, who communicated with the authors
and assembled the manuscript with such efficiency, tact, and skill. Thanks also
go to the Equity and Diversity Fund, the Dean’s Contingency Fund, and the
Vice Principal of Research Impact Fund at the University of Toronto Scarbor-
ough and to Dean John Osborne at Carleton for generous subsidies in support
of publishing costs. We warmly thank Ken Wissoker for his encouragement
and support of the project from its inception as well as the three anonymous
reviewers for Duke University Press, whose rigorous feedback helped us to
refine our introductory framing and sharpen the individual case studies. Jade
Brooks and Olivia Polk have ably guided the book along its path to publication.
We offer our sincerest gratitude to our contributors for the penetrating in-
sights at that initial workshop and those that followed each of our conferences.
They patiently and positively responded to several rounds of editorial com-
ments, and their input has continued to sharpen the focus of the project. Of
course, we could not have pursued the research, travel, and writing required
for this work without the loving support of our families. As always, we owe
you a great thanks. Finally, the transcontinental friendships and collegiality,
generated by our meetings, is one of this project’s most precious legacies.
Note
1. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 12.
xviii PREFACE
ELIZABETH HARNEY AND RUTH B. PHILLIPS
INTRODUCTION INSIDE MODERNITY
Indigeneity, Coloniality, Modernisms
This book addresses the silence surrounding indigeneity in established narra-

tives of modernism and the continuing marginalization of Indigenous arts in
the growing literature on global modernist histories. It brings together studies
that assess the linkages between wide-ranging imperial histories and the var-
iegated processes that have linked local visual and material forms with emerg-
ing modernist subjectivities. As such, it aims to augment important scholarly
efforts to decenter art history’s Eurocentric accounting of twentieth-century
artistic modernisms and to expose persistent ghettoizing attitudes within the
art world toward those formerly regarded as “primitive” artists.1
The essays assembled here intervene in two important and interrelated re-
visionist projects: first, the search for new theories and methods to address
world art history, and second, the active retheorization of modernism and
modernity and their historical relationship to contemporary art practices.2
The authors propose different understandings of the relationship between the
modern and the contemporary than, for example, Hans Belting and Andrea
Buddensieg do when theorizing the “new world map of art” in their introduc-
tion to The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds after 1989:
Today’s contemporary art presents itself not only as new art but as a new
kind of art, an art that is expanding all over the globe. . . . One element
of its newness is that it is no longer synonymous with modern art.
Rather it sees itself as contemporary: not only in a chronological sense,
but also in a symbolic and even ideological sense. In many developing
countries, art can only be contemporary because locally it has no
modern history. Thus the twenty-first century is seeing the worldwide
emergence of an art that lays claim to contemporaneity without limits
and without history.3
Belting and Buddensieg are not alone in their desire to distinguish the con-
tours of global contemporary art from the entangled hegemonic histories of
modernity. Rather, their observations are part of a rapid rise of interest in and
embrace of these new coordinates for an art of the present. To cite another in-
fluential example, in the 2009 Tate Modern Triennial, curator Nicolas Bourri-
aud asked us to think through what he termed the “altermodern,” the global
art practices of our “heterochronical” era in which “the historical counters . . .
[could] be reset to zero.” 4 In the time of the altermodern, he argued, “works
of art trace lines in a globalised space that now extends to time: history, the
last continent to be explored, can be traversed like a territory.” These analyses
are heavily invested in revising how we write art histories. They reconfigure
established understandings of the role that art and artists can and should play
within contemporary society. Focusing on questions of historicity from a po-
sition of the now, presumed to be unencumbered by the burden of history,
they seek to reposition and retell the temporal and spatial narratives of mo-
dernity and modernism at large.5
While modernity is increasingly understood today as a global phenome-
non, the canon of art history, as a product of Enlightenment epistemology, has
operated as “self-evidently universal,” silencing the histories of the non-West.6
The contention that art (anywhere) “can only be contemporary because locally
it has no modern history” is, to our thinking, deeply problematic and pro-
foundly out of step with revisionist agendas that now seek polyphonic voices
to reconceptualize the narratives of modernity and artistic modernism. Schol-
ars pursuing workable paradigms for the comparative, cross-cultural study of
art aim to do so without recourse to outmoded and potentially neocolonial
paradigms. They question art history’s provincialism and seek to broaden
its scope.7 We build on these approaches, training the reader’s eye on lesser-
known modernist practices.
The project of world art history is loosely defined, diverse, and emergent.
We position our work as one possible engagement with the many potentiali-
ties of art history as a “global discipline.” While a certain bursting of the canon
is at work in all chapters, we do not believe there can be a singular response to
the challenges of comparative art historical work. Rather, our central concern
is the troubling inconsistency embedded in the renewed search for a global
2 E lizabeth H arney and R uth B . P hillips

art historical scope. With very few exceptions, world art history has not yet
fully considered the modernisms created by peoples historically defined as
“indigenous” or “native” by colonial regimes.8 In contrast to projects that seek
to mount an inclusive and revisionist “story of art” by insisting on a single
response to the challenge of comparative work (such as John Onians’s “neuro-
art history”), this book contributes a diverse and cosmopolitan set of histories
of modernist experience and art practices that have been systematically over-
looked.9 We are not interested in producing a global art history that simply
replaces one normative story with another. Rather, we write in opposition
both to an established canon and to the universalizing tendencies that are re-
surfacing in world art studies.
As the essays herein show, the lack of integration of modern indigenous art
histories into larger narratives is owed not to a dearth of research but to its
limited circulation within national and settler art historical communities as
they come to terms with their colonial pasts. In other words, although Austra-
lians and New Zealanders come to know Aboriginal and Māori arts through
dedicated wings in their national museums, and Canadians, Americans, and
South Africans have regular opportunities to view Inuit, Pueblo, or Zulu
modernisms, these arts have yet to find their rightful place within broader art
historical narratives.10
In contrast to other recent volumes that foster the comparison of urban,
national, or regional histories of modernism, the contributors to this book
work through the thorny legacies of modernist primitivism in areas histori-
cally grouped together as the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas — or
aoa, in the shorthand of several generations of students and museum profes-
sionals.11 The comparative framework we introduce reveals the pervasiveness
of primitivism and its charged legacies. In case studies, the authors address the
contemporary valences of indigeneity in the emergent discourse of multiple
modernisms and ask how artists living under varying structures of colonial
rule often engaged with primitivism through creative practice and philosoph-
ical debate.
The modern period covered in our volume stretches roughly from the late
nineteenth century to the end of the Cold War, coinciding with the spread of
colonialism, the rise of industrialization and urbanization, and the flourishing
of vanguardist activities — developments that define the era that modernity,
modernism, and primitivism cohabit. Throughout this modern era, and de-
spite the constraints imposed by imperialist structures, artists, artworks, and
art patrons moved within and across borders, carrying, appropriating, and
I ntroduction 3
translating objects, images, and ideas. Their itineraries made up the dense
networks of modern life and contributed not only to the shaping of local,
transnationally inflected modernisms, but also to the making of modern
subjectivities. Against this backdrop of movement, we emphasize the import-
ant connections to place and claims to territory (and anteriority) that have
dictated how modernisms developed and intervened effectively in differing
colonial and postcolonial frameworks.
Art world denials of long-standing modern practices in places outside
the West, of cosmopolitanism within the West, and of the many movements
within and between them have relied on a deliberate misunderstanding of
the inherent spatial and temporal politics of the modern world. In this con-
text, the book also examines the journeys through time inevitably required
of artists who made visual claims to the modern while living under colonial
rule. The chapters encourage readings of modernity not as a phenomenon of
diffusionism but as one that arose through encounter and exchange.12 Artists
remapped existing practices, rejecting, reinvigorating, and reimagining in-
herited forms to meet the needs of the present and the future. This rereading
of modernist histories is particularly important in an era in which the failed
promises of decolonization and the rapid spread of neoliberalism have laid
bare the unevenness of globalization.
The modernist experiences and accompanying artistic forms we emphasize
here are entangled, mutually constitutive, and culturally situated. The con-
tributing authors are all committed to what Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel
have called a “locational” approach — one informed by a “self-consciousness
about positionality.” 13 Some authors speak from positions of indigeneity; all
grapple with the ongoing legacies of colonialism. We strive to engage purpo-
sively and sensitively with differing forms of decolonial thinking and writing,
in response to prevalent hegemonic forces of neoliberalism.14
Although geographically dispersed, these local art histories are transna-
tionally linked by the artists’ exposure and contributions to modernist dis-
courses and exemplars. They demonstrate entrepreneurial engagements with
commodity culture and art markets, the invention of new genres and formats,
and translations of primitivism and existing visual traditions. These histo-
ries are also connected by the artists’ shared need to combat the racialized,
romanticized, and exoticized stereotypes that have defined the authenticity
of African, Oceanic, and Native American arts, and to counter allegations of
their incompatibility with modernity.

To position these studies individually and as a linked set, we need to unpack
three interrelated and contested constructs: primitivism, understood both as
a key generator of value and authenticity and — even within the constraints
of colonial systems — an available vehicle for the articulation of usable or re-
claimed “pasts”; indigeneity, defined as a colonial and contemporary category
of identity that is historically contingent and encompasses larger questions of
emplacement and belonging; and mobility, mappable as a shared experience
of modern life that made possible the cartographies of modernism and pro-
duced key artistic and critical networks of exchange. Each construct, forged
over hundreds of years of imperial encounters, is overdetermined, and each,
as a building block of modern consciousness, carries a heavy freight of his-
torical signification and deconstruction. Yet for that very reason, each needs
to be examined and reassessed as a necessary parameter for investigating the
multiple modernisms that make up this book. For clarity and effect, we have
organized the case studies loosely around these sites of negotiation, but with
full awareness that modernist histories operated in complex, complementary,
and contradictory manners. Each study could be viewed through any and all
of the lenses we provide.
Modernity, Modernization, Modernism

We use the term “modernity” to identify a shared set of economic, social, and
political conditions that characterized the lives of peoples around the world
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — one whose mechanisms
continue to reverberate in our present moment.15 Modernization refers to the
processes, systems, and ideologies that beget modernity, such as new divisions
of labor through industrialization, urbanization, capitalism, nationalism, and
the redefinition of the public sphere. The development of print culture and
increased speeds of communication and transportation enabled the rapid dis-
semination of these modernizing forces. As we argue in the following pages,
the time, space, and pace of modernity have varied widely, and the forces of
modernization have produced different effects in varying economic, cultural,
and political circumstances. Modernism is, of course, a notoriously slippery
and contingent term. It describes a range of cultural inventions through which
people express their experiences of living in modernity. But for many years it
has operated in the art world as an exclusionary discourse and canon.
Most major museums and art historical publications continue to define
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modernism in European terms, while acknowledging exceptions and addi-
tions to a primary model. Take, for example, a standard definition provided
today by the Tate Modern:
Although many different styles are encompassed by the term, there are
certain underlying principles that define modernist art: A rejection of
history and conservative values (such as realistic depiction of subjects);
innovation and experimentation with form (the shapes, colours and
lines that make up the work) with a tendency to abstraction; and an
emphasis on materials, techniques and processes. Modernism has also
been driven by various social and political agendas. These were often
utopian, and modernism was in general associated with ideal visions of
human life and society and a belief in progress.16
While this list certainly addresses some concerns of the modernist artists
featured in our volume, it lacks the nuance required to address the diversity
of experience and artistic engagement evident within our comparative frame-
work. As we argue below, artists operating within empire often sought to re-
engage with “traditions” that had been distorted, disfigured, or destroyed by
the colonial project; to be modern might mean a return to or a continuation of
realist/naturalist modes of expression, rather than a turn toward abstraction.17
Furthermore, the imbrication of local and global ideas often meant artists had
to confront notions of “progress” and “utopia” tied to systems that did not
accord with their goals and aspirations as colonized peoples.
As “unfinished business,” the specter of modernity lingers in its global in-
flections and remains in play with “practices that cannot be considered mod-
ern at all.” 18 Writing for the Grove Dictionary of Art in the late 1990s, Terry
Smith defined modernity as a “term applied to the cultural condition in which
the seemingly absolute necessity of innovation becomes a primary fact of life,
work and thought” and identifies it as “the first truly ‘world’ culture, univer-
salizing in its ambitions and impact.” 19 Smith’s classic understanding positions
modernity and its “world culture” in terms of changes occurring in Europe
that radiated outward. His more recent work, along with that of other scholars,
attends more closely to the non-West and to the questions of appropriation,
translation, and transnational exchanges of ideas, images, and material cul-
ture addressed in the chapters of this book. Modernity and modernism were
always already syncretic in practice, while in discourse they have remained
normatively Eurocentric until quite recently. Difference, in other words, was
always “inside” modernity, as is evident in a mounting body of compelling

arguments to this effect. Nonetheless the arts produced in modernist styles,
materials, and genres during the twentieth century by formerly colonized and
indigenous artists have continued to be regarded as belated and provincial
copies — even as those of their contemporary descendants are welcomed as
examples of global chic.
In “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World,” Andreas Huyssen
reminds us that modernist geographies “are also shaped by their temporal
inscriptions.” 20 Thus, the logics of modernity required a particular politics of
time and space. In different places, at different times, the past has informed
the present or has been purposely reinvented to create a better future; this past
is often marked by colonial oppression and real or perceived losses of cultural
traditions and freedoms. Huyssen takes his lead from scholars such as George
Kubler, Johannes Fabian, and Timothy Mitchell, who revolutionized how we
think about the politics of temporality.21 For example, Fabian’s now widely
cited discussion of “allochronism,” which explained how European thinkers
were able to deny the coevalness of non-Western populations, proved invalu-
able for unmasking the ideologies of difference at the heart of European mod-
ernism and for readying our approaches to modernity’s global faces.22 Like
many others who began their investigations in the heady days of postmod-
ernist debate, Huyssen has become increasingly concerned with the speed
and density of temporality as it was imagined and experienced across varied
terrains. Scholars of multiple modernisms have critiqued the denigration of
works by artists outside the West as myopic and monocultural. Yet questions
of time lag, speed, and the differentiated experiences of modernity continue
to haunt us. As Smith rightly notes, “This perspective leaves curators and art
historians with the job of playing ‘catch-up modernism,’ their task confined to
showing how these artists were really modernists, albeit in their own specific
and located way. The goal becomes to write each artist into a universal narra-
tive of the shared evolution of modernism, the outline of which has been set
by developments in EuroAmerica. This is to fall for a fiction, to perpetuate the
master-slave relationship, and, strategically, to play a losing game.” 23
Many scholars now argue that the “temporal inscriptions” of modernist
geographies are best understood through models of heterochronicity.24 Social
theorist Reinhart Kosselleck, for example, asserts that different cultural un-
derstandings of temporality coexisted in the same chronological time, char-
acterizing modernity as “the non-contemporaneousness of diverse, but in the
chronological sense, simultaneous histories.” 25 George Kubler’s well-known
meditation on “the shape of time” draws our attention to “different kinds of
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duration” and what he calls “interchronic pauses,” whereby the passages of
time and the perceptions of its markings fluctuate and shift. Following Kubler,
we consider how the anticolonialist activities, philosophical debates, and ar-
tistic creations emerging from indigenous artists in the relatively short period
of the “modern” might be calibrated to “speeds” at odds with European ex-
pectations and reigning narratives of modernization and developmentalism.26
Art historian Leon Wainwright has recently posited such an explanation
when discussing the working methods and artistic choices of pioneering
Caribbean modernists. In his provocative volume Timed Out: Art and the
Transnational Caribbean, Wainwright joined the “world art” debate by ask-
ing how the politics of time and space could be “reengaged to rethink the
global geography of art.” 27 With his consideration of the deliberate adoption
of anachronistic forms by Caribbean painters, he aims to dislodge art histo-
ry’s “continuing attachment” to models of modernity that emphasize (even
within the global turn) what he calls the “over here” and “back there” scenario.
What stakes were at play as colonized artists adopted, translated, or misread
modernist forms? The complex histories of interaction, epistemic violence,
and silencing of indigenous voices often hold within them creative practices
of deliberate mistranslation and appropriation that produce what Esther Gar-
bara has called “errant modernisms.” 28 In the context of creolized Caribbean
modernities, for example, Edouard Glissant writes of a “forced poetics” initi-
ated by displaced or enslaved populations living in the belly of modernist cap-
italism. The enslaved, fated to exist “outside the grammar forced upon them,”
or faced with limited vocabulary or tools, “chose to warp it, untune it, in order
to make the idiom [their] own.” 29
The case studies in this book evidence a wide variety of responses to and
engagements with the ideas of difference, authenticity, primordialism, and
spontaneity inscribed by primitivist discourses. They range from the anti-
primitivist lobbying of Nigerian painter Aina Onabolu to the reimagined ab-
stract Indigenous materiality of George Morrison. In different ways, these two
modernists reclaimed and reworked visual forms, materials, or techniques
from their cultural pasts, synthesizing what Chika Okeke-Agulu calls “artistic
assets,” to arrive at viable visual languages suited to anticolonialist and self-
affirming politics.30 These discrepant expressions of modernity might adopt
forms from colonial modern culture, but they were anything but blind deriva-

tion or mimicry. Rather, they exposed “the ambivalence of colonial discourse”
and disrupted its authority.31
(Re)mapping “Modernist Attitudes”

As a quintessential product of modernity, art history has depended on tropes
of mapping since its inception, fixing boundaries of space and time that con-
tinue to control the canon. As Robert Nelson writes, art history as a discipline
“has been accorded the ability and power to control and judge its borders, to
admit or reject people and objects, and to teach and thus transmit values to
others.” 32
The processes of mapping, therefore, lead us into contentious historical
terrain. Maps, as the critical literature shows, are heavily loaded documents.
Since the Renaissance, cartographic imaging has invented modern spaces,
turning abstractions into imperialist representations that could be wielded as
a means to know, contain, and control place.33 This process has been partic-
ularly coercive in relation to indigenous peoples, as David Turnbull asserts:
“The real distinguishing characteristic of Western maps is that they are more
powerful than aboriginal maps, because they enable forms of association that
make possible the building of empires, disciplines like cartography, and a con-
cept of land ownership that can be subject to juridical processes.” 34
We revisit and reckon with the spatial politics of modernist scholarship by
employing mapping in both a historical and a metaphorical sense, addressing
the violence of imperialism and the hegemonic models informing narratives
of modernism as well as the territories of the imagination. Decolonizing
critiques employ mapping — or remapping — to acknowledge the centrality
of place in the crafting of modernist Indigenous subjectivities. Such maps
can complicate accepted and expected axes of colonial-modern movement
between center and periphery by allowing us to recognize complex local, re-
gional, and global sources of artistic production and consumption, networks
of travel, and polycentric nodes of modernist creation.
Huyssen has pointed to the value of the comparative framework for trans-
national studies, arguing, “We lack a workable model of comparative studies
able to go beyond the traditional approaches that still take national cultures
as the units to be compared and rarely pay attention to the uneven flows of
translation, transmission, and appropriation.” 35 To be analytically rigorous,
however, comparative approaches require a controlled set of variables. We
I ntroduction 9
have thus limited our scope to modernist arts that arose in the interrelated
and networked colonial spheres of Britain, France, and the United States.
This decision recognizes the power of shared languages, which facilitated
access to texts, images, and ideas, as well as the structural unities created by
the systemic imposition of policies and institutions, which allowed colonial
regimes to replicate particular strategies or to differentiate themselves from
one another. Canada, for example, consciously imitated the system of Indian
boarding schools first set up in the United States but chose not to copy the
art programs set up on Indian reservations by the U.S. government’s Works
Progress Administration during the 1930s. Colonial subjects living in French
colonies in Africa and the Pacific might read the same journals or be given art
classes by teachers trained in the same French educational system. And art
academies in several African colonies produced students with joint degrees
from the Slade School of Art in London.
The comparative approach of this volume is aligned with a small but signif-
icant array of recent projects that seek to document what Kobena Mercer calls
“modernist attitudes” and to overcome the “limitations of our available knowl-
edge about modernism’s cross-cultural past.” 36 His pioneering four-volume
Annotating Art’s Histories series is an important model for this book. We take
up his invitation to pursue “avenues and departure points for future enquiry,”
investigating a wide range of hitherto unlogged art histories, without inadver-
tently reifying the center.37 In a similar vein, the editors of Geomodernisms:
Race, Modernism, Modernity promote an understanding of modernism as “a
global, complex, multidirectional, and divergent set of projects . . . [launched]
from different locations at different times under unequal conditions.” 38
Living under colonial and neocolonial regimes, and identified by their colo-
nizers as “native” or “indigenous,” the artists discussed here confronted similar
obstacles in their efforts to become modern professionals. In some cases, their
lives spanned the era of political independence, while other artists remain
internally colonized.39 While some felt the coercive nature of modernity, for
others, modernism held emancipatory possibilities, its affiliations suggesting
and critiquing imagined or utopian futures.
Modern Values: Artistic Hierarchies and Modernist Primitivisms

The “discovery” of so-called primitive art by early twentieth-century avant-
garde artists is recounted as a central event in the origin story of modern
Western art. It is framed as a recuperative project accomplished through the

encounters of modernist artists, writers, and collectors with objects they found
in dusty ethnographic museums, flea markets, and shops selling exotic curi-
osities. They understood them as products of the “simpler” preindustrial and
premodern lives of their makers.40 Roger Fry’s art criticism is representative.
In two essays written in 1920, he celebrated the presence of “primitive art in
civilized places,” while dismissing “civilized art in primitive places,” to play on
Sally Price’s phrase.41 He celebrated European modern artists’ abandonment of
a naturalistic representational ideal which had enabled them to profit from the
models provided by non-Western arts. “We are thus no longer cut off from a
great deal of barbaric and primitive art,” he wrote, “the very meaning of which
escaped the understanding of those who demanded a certain standard of skill
in representation before they could give serious consideration to a work of
art.” 42 In his essay “Negro Sculpture,” however, he argued that the social and
intellectual backwardness of primitive societies prevented modern African
artists from participating in that same modernism: “For want of a conscious
critical sense and the intellectual powers of comparison and classification . . .
the negro has failed to create one of the great cultures of the world. . . . [T]he
lack of such a critical standard to support him leaves the artist much more at
the mercy of any outside influence. It is likely enough that the negro artist,
although capable of such profound imaginative understanding of form, would
accept our cheapest illusionist art with humble enthusiasm.” 43
For critics like Fry, the modern arts created by descendants of the artists
who had produced the masks and figures so admired by Western modernists
could not easily be contained within the “primitive” art category. Under the
logics of European modernism, “primitive” art forms belonged to isolated,
premodern societies whose artists (and cultures) were mere “survivals” of
earlier evolutionary moments, slated either to disappear under the weight of
modernity or suffer fatal contamination through their exposure to its pro-
gressive forces.44 As Simon Gikandi notes, “Fry had endowed Africans with
artistic genius but denied them the capacity to make critical judgments . . .
thus acknowledging their importance to the creation of modernism but cru-
cially without according them the civilizational authority of the modern.” 45
Many influential critics who shared Fry’s formalist appreciation of “primitive”
art also shared his conviction of the definitional impossibility of non-Western
modernisms, which could only be generated, as in the West, through the art-
ists’ cosmopolitanism, criticality, and intellectual reflexivity.
The case studies in part 1 of this book illustrate the measures of value im-
posed by modernist primitivism and the belief in a Kantian hierarchy of fine
I ntroduction 11
and applied arts used to classify the works of many indigenous artists. Colo-
nial educational systems designed to bring “natives” up to the level of “civ-
ilized” European colonizers attempted to either suppress extant indigenous
arts or contain them within the less evolved categories of craft and folk arts.46
The Zulu and Inuit case studies presented by Sandra Klopper and Heather
Igloliorte nicely illustrate the dichotomous pairings of primitivism/modernity
and craft/art at work. Zulu carver Zizwezenyanga Qwabe created innovative
versions of the traditional mat rack that replaced geometric relief carving with
a new mode of pictorial representation. He successfully exploited the modern-
ization process at large in South Africa by making use of the new art markets
created by the spread of modernist capital, the rise of migrant labor networks,
and the patronage of American journalist Rebecca Reyher. Troubled by the
modern sensibility of Qwabe’s works, seen in both their adoption of Western
pictorial formats to inscribe historical memory and their commercial and in-
novative character, historians have not classified the art as authentic primitive
art. Their functional origin as domestic furnishings and their wood-carving
medium have also prevented their recognition as modern fine art. Instead
they enter the equally ill-defined categories of folk art and craft.
Igloliorte’s research on the development of modern Inuit commercial art
production in the Canadian Arctic three decades later reveals a parallel nego-
tiation of value and authenticity. She shows how the small illustrated booklet
the government commissioned of artist James Houston, designed to inform
artists about the kinds of objects that would appeal to southern buyers, be-
came the unintended catalyst for a critical distinction between Inuit fine art
and craft. Her case study shows that a clear demarcation between art and craft
productions was necessary to position soapstone carvings as art, even though
the artists’ own concepts of visual artistic expression did not make the same
distinctions. In the process, Igloliorte also illuminates the roles played by
mentors in framing these arts.
Bill Anthes’s account of the shared modernity of Native American painters
and basket makers in California and the Southwest suggests more capacious
ways of articulating the linkages between indigenous identities, extant and
shifting traditional practices, and persistent colonial frameworks of pedagogy
and interpretation. His discussion of the innovative pictorial imagery woven
into souvenir baskets by Native women in the desert communities outside
early twentieth-century Los Angeles opens for us alternative histories of train-
ing, reflections on the mastery of materials, varied responses to rapid modern-
ization, and clear instances of market savvy. Anthes moves our discussions of

indigenous modernism far beyond those that have focused on “naïve” paint-
ings and “vanishing” traditions. He argues persuasively for recognizing that
a “fine art” genre, like painting, and a “craft” genre, like basketry, can convey
experiences of modernity with equivalent authenticity and expressive power.
These three chapters thus broaden the range of genres and media in discus-
sions of the modern, positioning all as components of modernist indigenous
cultural production. Crucially, they refocus our attention on the agency of In-
digenous artists as cocreators of their own modernity, despite the conscripted
nature of their involvement.47
In the early twenty-first century, a visitor seeking examples of modernist
indigenous arts in a large urban art museum is still likely to find them incor-
porated into a Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Although
this grouping takes the form of a geopolitical list, its conflation of a set of spa-
tially distant and historically unconnected artistic traditions has a well-known
genealogy in nineteenth-century theories of cultural evolution and the early
twentieth-century modernist discourse of primitive art. While discredited
for years by anthropologists and art historians alike, and rife with anomalies,
the “primitive” art construct remains a familiar convention of museum dis-
plays, art books, and art history curricula. This construct groups art forms
produced in small-scale societies with those of large centralized kingdoms
built on trade, mobile labor, and a cosmopolitan ethos. It brings into a unified
representational space art made by the inhabitants of former tracts of empire
now politically independent, and art by members of internally colonized com-
munities who continue to suffer displacement and disenfranchisement. It also
invokes the undifferentiated, often ambiguous, and problematic set of tempo-
ral coordinates we discussed earlier, mixing the ancient with the colonial and
situating these productions outside, before, or beyond history.
The stubborn survival of the aoa grouping, after decades of comprehensive
critique, is of central significance for this book. We argue that this classifi-
catory convention, however named, continues to obstruct recognition of the
artistic modernisms produced by the peoples whose ancestral arts have been
defined as “primitive” art. In other words, if the modern is, by definition, dia-
metrically opposed to the primitive, and if modernist primitivism is integral
to modern art’s “essential nature,” as Robert Goldwater wrote in the conclusion
of Primitivism and Modern Art, the museological ghettoization of indigenous
artistic modernisms from Africa, the Pacific, and North America and their
exclusion from narratives of art history continue to inscribe an outdated and
false dialectic.48
I ntroduction 13
The deconstruction of modernist primitivism was a central project of 1980s
poststructuralist scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, accom-
plished through the work of James Clifford, Sally Price, Shelly Errington, Hal
Foster, and others.49 Their analyses — many provoked by the controversial 1984
Museum of Modern Art exhibition Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art:
Affinities of the Tribal and the Modern and the 1989 Centre Pompidou’s Magi-
ciens de la Terre — compellingly demonstrated how the hierarchies advanced
by discredited nineteenth-century theories of cultural evolution pervaded late
twentieth-century museum displays, popular media, literature, and critical
texts. Widely read and profoundly influential, this body of critical writing has
circulated alongside and intersected with processes of political decolonization
and economic and cultural globalization.
It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that once a classificatory term has
been effectively deconstructed, its discursive power has been neutralized; and
for many, these critiques have settled the issue of modernist primitivism. In-
deed, the disappearance of the term “primitive art” from the titles of books,
university courses, and curatorial departments during the past two decades
has seemed to indicate the critiques’ effectiveness. As we have seen, however,
the new rubrics, even if less ideologically laden, have left largely untouched
the museological conventions and associated progressivist narrative of human
development that have excluded indigenous modern arts.
The radically formalist installations of African, Pacific Islands, and Native
American arts in the Louvre’s Pavillon des Sessions and in the Musée du quai
Branly’s dark and dramatically exoticist permanent exhibits — both opened at
the turn of the new millennium — illustrate the profound failure of attempts
to defeat primitivist framings.50 What accounts for the strength of these latter-
day renewals of exhibitionary tropes? As Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush have
argued, primitivism was invented prophylactically, as a “prehistory of the fu-
ture,” which could counteract the negative consequences and supply the losses
of urban and industrial dystopias.51 Primitivism, in other words, has contin-
ued to draw its strength from the awareness of modernity’s self-destructive
dynamics. Chapters by W. Jackson Rushing III, Ian McLean, and Elizabeth
Harney demonstrate how the deeply entrenched nature of these attitudes was
evident in the reception of indigenous modernisms during the mid-twentieth
century. The artists they discuss could be admitted to modernist art worlds
only as exceptions.
Damian Skinner and Karen Duffek present very different accounts of how
local modernists rejected primitivist readings of their works and intervened in

display spaces to insert modernist works into contexts previously reserved for
craft and traditional arts. By tracking exhibitions of Māori modernism in New
Zealand, Skinner shows us how modernists negotiated a critical distance and
difference from the past, as well as an ongoing relationship with it. During the
fifties and sixties, Māori modernists showed their works in white cube galler-
ies, department stores, and local meeting houses. Each exhibition mediated
quickly shifting modernist Indigenous subjectivities within a young settler na-
tion and questioned art world hierarchies. Duffek provides us with a compar-
ative analysis of Bill Reid and Henry Speck, two pioneering Northwest Coast
artists from British Columbia, Canada, arguing that their diverging career
paths and aesthetic engagements with tradition tell much about the circuitous
and often contradictory routes toward modernist status and self-awareness.
Critically, Duffek asks her readers to consider on whose terms and for what
purposes the work of these artists was recognized — or not — as modern or
even of their present, rather than as belonging to a vanishing (primitive) past?
Modern Identities: Indigeneity Historicized

Unpacking indigeneity, like parsing primitivism, is a necessary step in revis-
ing art history’s narrative. In contrast to categorization as primitive, the term
“indigenous” references neither levels of social and political organization nor
particular kinds of art forms. Like primitivism, however, indigeneity is gen-
erated dialogically; in Mahmood Mandani’s words, “There can be no settler
without a native, and vice versa.” 52 The artists we discuss were disadvantaged
by their positioning as indigenous within historical colonial contexts of pro-
duction and modernist institutional framings. Today, however, indigeneity’s
references have shifted. Peter Geschiere points out that as globalization and
the accompanying forces of neoliberalization increase, the importance of
belonging to the local strengthens, engaging new understandings and uses
of autochthony that differ from parallel debates around authenticity and
nativism in earlier periods of modernity.53 To refer today to the inhabitants
of modern African nations, or to those of Papua New Guinea or Samoa, as
“indigenous” is redundant, misguided, or inaccurate. In contrast, internally
colonized peoples within the settler nations of the Americas, Australia, New
Zealand, and elsewhere have reappropriated “Indigenous” (often capitalized)
as a preferred denominator of identity.54 For these communities, as Steven
Leuthold comments, “indigeneity reflects a growing awareness of the role
of ethnicity in national cultures and acts as an organizational focal point for
I ntroduction 15
anticolonialism.” 55 For the same reason, nationalism, as an aspect of moder-
nity, has different valences for colonized peoples who have achieved their
own political independence and nationhood than it does for people who
remain internally colonized. Discourses of indigeneity, however, continue to
be informed by a tension between an essentializing tendency, which attaches
pure and unchanged qualities to indigenous status, and diasporic, mestizo,
and cosmopolitan historical realities. Against the analytical advantage of this
strategy, then, we must weigh a potential danger. When we deploy indigeneity
as a subcategory of modernism we risk reinscribing the very phenomenon we
seek to examine critically.
We use indigeneity, then, as a troubling term, conscious of its historically
contingent connotations and dialectical applications over time. We deploy the
term “indigenous” to represent a historically operative category that artists
had to navigate and actively shape. At the same time, however, we recognize
the dialogical and relational evolution of the term’s referentiality and reject
reified or essentialist meanings. We understand indigeneity, in other words,
as a processual category that acknowledges its own historical instability and
as a designation whose application during the colonial era relegated a set of
globally dispersed modernisms to the margins of art history.
Writers on indigeneity stress the historical origin of the term as a de-
nominator of identity in early modern processes of European exploration,
conquest, and colonization. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn argue that
the category was invented to articulate an “imperial epistemology of same-
ness,” which “names a relationship based on a conception of time and space
that differentiates among groups of people.” 56 European travelers to lands
new to them distinguished the peoples they encountered by naming them
indigenes — a word derived from a late Latin term for “born in the country.” 57
In the Americas, such layered engagements with indigeneity can become
highly complex. For instance, as modernist theorists and novelists writing
from the Caribbean attest, the sense of displacement brought about by the
Middle Passage is best understood when further complicated by knowledge
of the widespread decimation and disavowal of indigenous populations that
haunted new world slave economies; in the historical nexus of the black Atlan-
tic, then, measures of belonging and claims to place remain both contingent
and ultimately unresolvable.58
James Clifford has delineated contemporary connotations of the construct
of indigeneity after centuries of colonial and settler occupation. Indigenous
peoples, he writes, “are defined by long attachment to a locale and by violent

histories of occupation, expropriation, and marginalization.” 59 Mary Louise
Pratt’s definition adds a quality of “unpayable debt,” which pertains specifi-
cally to settlers.60 Although we tend today to understand indebtedness in
the context of land claims and other forms of restitution, indebtedness also
informs the histories of modern art making. In modernism, the artist’s need
to establish and legitimate lineages of origin can become a drive toward appro-
priation and universalism. The canonical example of Picasso’s quotations from
preclassical Iberian art and African sculpture is repeated in the settler mod-
ernist’s citations of local indigenous arts, as exemplified by Australia’s Marga-
ret Preston, Canada’s Emily Carr, and America’s Georgia O’Keeffe.61 Although
positioned as gestures of homage, such works stake the settler’s competing and
questionable claims to indigeneity. As many have noted, although the main-
stream art world has admitted and celebrated the hybrid appropriations of Eu-
ropean settler modernists, when African, Pacific Islander, or North American
indigenous artists made similar borrowings from European art, their choices
were not seen as analogous.
For the first generations of indigenous modernists, these appropriations
were potential sites of affirmation and resistance. Indeed, one of the aims of
this collection is to ask how modern artists, working within and across a di-
verse set of colonial modern arenas, were able to make demands on the objects
and representations at their disposal. Drawing from rediscovered, reactivated,
or reimagined local aesthetic traditions, they translated and sometimes delib-
erately mistranslated, models of artistic practice that filtered through the dis-
cursive networks of imperialism, despite conditions of grossly unequal power.
The chapters in part 2 explore these issues of indigeneity, identity, and
transcultural exchange.62 In Nicholas Thomas’s examination of the modernist
artistry of Papua New Guinean artist Mathias Kauage, he traces the artist’s
move from the Highlands to the bustling colonial modern capital of Port
Moresby. Once there, Kauage was able to mix with cosmopolitan commu-
nities of modernists at the university, gaining access to print workshops and
ultimately becoming a rapporteur of a rapidly modernizing urban culture. For
Kauage, artistic creation became a site for observing urban modernity and the
rites and emblems of the new nation-state. Occasionally, Kauage — as “artist of
PNG” — proudly declared his affiliation with that nation. Yet he did so on his
own terms, remaining committed to portraying modernity through what he
understood as an established Chimbu aesthetic of self-presentation and dress,
mixing distinctive mythological beliefs and aesthetic predispositions with vi-
sions of local modern life.
I ntroduction 17
Hybridity of style, nationalist appropriation, and cultural continuity all fig-
ure in Ian McLean’s chapter on Albert Namatjira, the Arrernte tribesman from
a remote Lutheran mission in central Australia who became a central figure
in a rising Aboriginal modern art movement. McLean describes the shifting
relations between local Indigenous theologies, nationalism, and modern art
practice and makes evident how Namatjira used the genre of Western land-
scape painting to express Aboriginal concepts of the deep histories and cul-
tural values inscribed in land. In discussing the artist’s importance, McLean
asks us to consider how Namatjira’s successes were soon heralded as those of
a modern Australia, demonstrating how they established a “common ground
between what hitherto had been the incommensurable differences of Indige-
nous and Western culture.” 63
Norman Vorano’s chapter recounts a different story of hybrid creativity —
one that simultaneously engaged with modernist aesthetics imported into the
Canadian Arctic from Japan and Inuit traditions of belief and narrative. We
again meet James Houston, who, motivated by a desire to introduce a new
and economically remunerative artistic genre, brought Japanese prints to Inuit
communities and taught local artists their printmaking techniques. In the sub-
sequent half century, printmaking became a site for the expression of modern
Inuit identities that drew on extant traditions and new forms of settlement life,
technologies, and economic exchange. Imported pictorial conventions offered
Inuit printmakers additional ways to tell their stories of modern experience.
In postcolonial states, as in settler societies, the attribution of indigene-
ity has been wielded in diverse ways and at differing strategic moments to
distinguish particular groups from their neighbors and to claim sovereignty,
firstness, or a sense of belonging. The cultural histories of modern Africa, for
example, can be described as syncretic, mobile, and cosmopolitan. They have
been shaped by continuous migratory shifts in population, great and small,
by transcontinental trading, slaving raids, intermarriage, and black Atlantic
returns. And while histories of migration and settlement have led to the iden-
tification and self-identification of some peoples as Indigenous, such as the
San (Bushmen) of southern Africa and Namibia and the Mbenga (Pygmies)
of central Africa, important stories of belonging and claims to tradition and
nativeness have also characterized nationalist narratives in modern Africa. As
Frantz Fanon and others have argued, decolonizing societies and their intel-
lectuals required authentic traditions to attain legitimacy (even if they had to
be invented), while their desire to attain the status of modern nation-states
required that they reject the past.64 Thus, African modernists found them-

selves in a double bind, always seeking to be both modern (and freed from
the yoke of colonialism) and African (placed, distinctive, native). As imperial
frameworks gave way to national ones, processes of decolonization gave birth
to liberation politics, Indigenous pride movements, and interlinked Cold War
narratives. Within these shifting parameters, visual artists often weighed the
efficacy of looking backward to partly remembered, partly invented traditions
against the value of forging new forms of participation in the shared spaces
and times of modernity. The resulting works played pivotal roles in the art
histories we tell.
Chika Okeke-Agulu’s chapter illustrates these dynamics through his dis-
cussion of three Nigerian artists whose works negotiated the modern, the
indigenous (local), and the “primitive” (traditional) during the four decades
leading up to Nigerian independence. In the same years that Roger Fry was
writing his essays, Aina Onabolu traveled to study in England, where he ac-
quired professional training enabling him to create accomplished illusionistic
portraits. Okeke-Agulu argues that these works should be regarded as reflex-
ive and modern, for no task was more important for the modern artist than to
seize and redeploy the unprecedented representational facility of portraiture
in the academic style. They are no less modern than the work made several
decades later by Uche Okeke and Demas Nwoko, artists who negotiated the
avant-gardist styles and primitivism of European modernists in the context
of the politics of 1950s nationalism and postcoloniality. The work of all three
artists helped forge identities that resisted the social and cultural inferiority
coded by colonial constructs of indigeneity and discourses of primitivism
while reclaiming local artistic traditions for modernism.
Modern national identities are at play in all four chapters. Kauage and the
Nigerian modernists used art making to express citizenship in newly indepen-
dent nations. In contrast, Namatjira and the Inuit printmakers, as members of
internally colonized peoples, found themselves in a more ambivalent position,
gaining economic and expressive power through the production of modern
art that was systematically appropriated to the cause of settler nationalism.
Modern Mobilities: The Networked Maps of Modernists

The study of exchanges across space and the importance of mobility in stories
of modernity allow us to ask how spatial practices are manifested within the
aesthetic choices of artists. As we follow their itineraries and those of their
interlocutors, we complicate the assumed workings of tradition, innovation,
I ntroduction 19
and appropriation. We also, crucially, focus on how myriad mechanisms and
institutions of imperialism turned specific spaces into places of oppression
or resistance. The microhistories featured in this volume reveal that colonial
powers in widely distanced locations from New Zealand to Canada to South
Africa employed remarkably similar mechanisms of control and exclusion.
Most important for our focus on Indigenous modernisms, aspiring artists,
with few exceptions, were denied access to professional art schools. Yet despite
such restrictions, they engaged with modernist tenets in many different ways.
Artists traveled within their home countries and to the centers of empire, and
for many, these travels resulted in new states of diasporic identity that were,
inevitably, culturally syncretic. Although the number of artists able to travel
was small, their influence on other artists as transmitters of new aesthetic
ideas and solutions was often powerful. Many are today recognized as vital
pioneering figures within their own communities.
As many critics have argued, the recognition of difference within models
of global modernity can be a strategy that ultimately leaves in place European
centrality and primacy. By working with ideas of mobility through both phys-
ical and conceptual spaces, we can complicate the assumed cartographies,
genealogies, and visual histories of modernity and shift what Walter Mignolo
has called the “geopolitics of knowledge.” 65 We take our cues from the work of
urban geographers and postcolonial theorists who enacted a “spatial turn” in
the scholarship of the 1990s, urging us to imagine the work of modernity in
terms of networks resembling the nodal structures of a rhizome and to envi-
sion a wider spread of centers that ebbed and flowed in power and significance
according to local, national, regional, and global forces.66
Whether we invoke Edward Said’s discussions of the “voyages in” to Europe
of exiles, intellectuals, and artists, or the work of James Clifford, Irit Rogoff,
and Kobena Mercer on the significance of movement, exchange, travel, and
spatiality in the crafting of modernist subjectivities, we are led to fundamen-
tal reconsiderations of how the histories of global engagements in moder-
nity have been told.67 Arjun Appadurai’s writings on global flows of people,
products, images, and ideas ushered in textured readings of the machinery of
globalization and the linkages between location and identity in both earlier
and more recent periods. This emphasis on movement also challenges the
essentialized vision of indigeneity, as a state in which one is limited to local-
ized sets of spaces — reservations, boarding and residential schools, and real
and imagined ties to ancestral lands. Clifford’s work on “traveling cultures”
shows these habits of travel to be long standing.68 He questions the processes

by which traditions are essentialized, locating authenticity in a pure and im-
mobile state of attachment to place, thereby denying actual historical patterns
of indigenous mobility, diasporic relocation, and urbanization.
Travel and mobility play a central role in the case studies included in part 3.
W. Jackson Rushing’s study of the pioneering Anishinabe (Chippewa) mod-
ernist George Morrison argues that although the Native American painter
developed his work in art metropolises like New York and Paris, his Lake
Superior home came to deeply inform his modernity and his practice. Morri-
son’s career entailed more than three decades of expatriate training and work,
taking him into the heart of vanguardist (particularly surrealist and abstract
expressionist) activities. Yet, during the last decades of his life and in the
context of the liberation movements of the 1970s, he returned to his ancestral
homeland to investigate, through modernist painting, the roots of his identity
in the land.
Peter Brunt’s chapter contributes an evocative, poetic, and vivid micro-
history. His account of the unique partnership of a French-Russian migrant
modernist, Nicolaï Michoutouchkine, and a Pacific Islander modernist, Aloï
Pilioko, alerts us first to nomadism as a “mode of inhabiting modernity,” and
then to the role of transitory exhibition and collection practices in the shaping
of “island modernisms” in the South Pacific. During a life of perpetual travel,
these two artists left a provocative series of diaries, notebooks, and sketches of
life in transit, amassing a remarkable collection of ethnographic artifacts that
they displayed alongside their own works. In the process, they contributed a
critical intervention to the histories of primitivist discourse. Inspired by the
tone and tenor of these archival traces of mobility, Brunt sketches for us a
compelling tale of cross-imperial travel and modernist imaginative worlds.
In Elizabeth Harney’s study of the careers of painters Gerald Sekoto and
Skunder Boghossian, who found their way from South Africa and Ethiopia
to Paris in the immediate postwar period, she considers how each engaged
and played with ideas of modernist primitivism. Sekoto’s social commentaries
seemed to capture the lost dreams of a generation of black South Africans
who saw their experiences of modernity increasingly shaped by apartheid.
Boghossian’s canvases creatively reconciled elements of Ethiopian aesthetics
and mysticism with discoveries of his pan-Africanist subjectivity through a
decidedly surrealist approach. Both operated under the weight of constrictive
analytical categories; both joined in diasporic demands for decolonization;
both endured the pleasures and melancholies of exile.
Anitra Nettleton’s chapter peels back the assumptions made about moder-
I ntroduction 21
nity and modernism in relation to urban and rural spaces of twentieth-century
South Africa. Examining the works of two black artists, contemporaries Sid-
ney Kumalo and Jackson Hlungwani, she shows how their very different paths
through the armature of modernism in South Africa featured, respectively,
travel and networking beyond the national frame and retreat to a rural home-
land. The works of both artists were recognized as authentically African, but
in different ways. The arguments surrounding their proclaimed connection
to place and time echo the debates on invented identities, reclaimed heritage,
and exilic living seen in Harney’s chapter on diasporic modernist painters who
often found an Africa they sought within the framings of European primitivist
mediations and within the storehouses of imperial museums.
Artists and art patrons moved within and across the mapped borders of
modern nationhood, challenging the attempts of colonialism to limit move-
ment, and carrying objects, images, technologies, and ideas with them. Erin
Haney’s chapter documents just such itineraries through an investigation of
the photographic histories of the Lutterodt family of Accra. Their prolific ca-
reers depended on wide-ranging networks extending from their Gold Coast
base to Lagos, Fernando Po, Luanda, London, and Liverpool. These mobile,
cosmopolitan photographers disseminated their works through innovative
pop-up studios, documentary projects for colonial authorities, and commis-
sions that satisfied the needs of a growing local bourgeoisie eager to reflect its
successes and identity. Along the way, they trained a generation of modernist
photographers whose own careers continued to shape urban tastes and reflect
modern subjectivities into the era of decolonization.
The patterns of these movements need better recognition, for, as we have
noted, most scholarship on multiple modernisms has positioned individual
artists and movements or schools within local, national, or continental art his-
torical narratives rather than broader transnational frameworks. In Modern
Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, for example, the editors acknowledge
the vital place of “extraterritorial dynamics,” migrancy, and travel in the sto-
ries of modernism by stressing the centrality of cosmopolitan world cities
as crucibles for artistic vanguardism. Nonetheless, they ultimately adhere to
nationalist framings, arguing, “The national perspective dominates not only
because it is the standard for art historiography, but also because, more sub-
stantively, the nation and nationalism held a central place in the political and
cultural unconscious of most modern artists; and as a governing construct of
modernity, the nation effectively determined the shape of modern identity,
politics and official culture.” 69

In documenting Indigenous modern arts, all the contributors engage with
the interrelated scholarly project of investigating modernity as a global histor-
ical condition. The current silences and erasures do not simply signal a failure
to consider the transnational routes of modernity. Rather, they neglect to ac-
knowledge the coproductions of modernity in all their varieties. As we have
argued, the current omissions of indigenous modernisms are owed, in part,
to the residual agency of aesthetic primitivism still deeply embedded within
museums, the academy, and other art institutions. Yet, they also stem from the
tendency of recent art criticism to telescope the historical phase of modernist
production with the global politics of contemporary art. The compression of
the time-space coordinates of modernity and contemporaneity reinscribes
primitivist modes of thinking by hiding from view the longue durée of indige-
nous peoples’ active participation in modernity. These approaches ultimately
flatten out histories of exchange by invoking oversimplified binaries of local
and global, or by minimizing the profound imbrications and refractions at
work in all histories of modernity.
Reading the case studies as a loosely aligned and provocative exchange of
narratives about modernity and modernism allows us to question the mech-
anisms of power often occluded by pretensions of universality and to revisit
debates about the politics of representation and enunciation, the nature of his-
tory writing, and the poetics of exhibiting and collecting. Critically, we focus
on the heavy and often circuitous traffic of modernist forms, ideas, and artists
across borders and cultures. These histories show that the artistic exchanges
of the past have led not to the wholesale importation of concepts, forms, and
techniques into hitherto closed cultural units, but to the emergence of myriad
creative and generative misreadings, deliberate deformations, and counter-
discursive reclamations that address the weight of colonial denigration, exot-
icization, and rupture.70
Notes
1. Shelly Errington, “What Became of Authentic Primitive Art?” Cultural Anthropol-
ogy 9, no. 2 (1994): 201–26.
2. See Partha Mitter, “Interventions — Decentering Modernism: Art History and
Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (2008): 531–48; the four-
volume series Annotating Art’s Histories: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual
Arts, edited by Kobena Mercer: Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge, MA: mit
Press, 2005); Discrepant Abstractions (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2006); Exiles, Dia-
sporas and Strangers (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2008); and Pop Art and Vernacular
I ntroduction 23
Culture (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2007). See also further development of this cri-
tique in Veronica Sekules, George Lau, and Margit Thøfner, eds., “Local Modernisms,”
special issue, World Art 4, no. 1 (2014).
3. Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, introduction to The Global Contemporary:
Art Worlds after 1989 (Karlsruhe, Germany: zkm Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe,
2011), 6–7.
4. Nicolas Bourriaud, ed., Altermodern: Tate Triennial (London: Tate Publishing,
2009).
5. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
6. Mitter, “Interventions — Decentering Modernism,” 532.
7. For considered analyses of what “world art” might be, see James Elkins, ed., Is Art
History Global?, vol. 3 of The Art Seminar (New York: Routledge, 2007); John Onians,
“World Art: Ways Forward and a Way to Escape the ‘Autonomy of Culture’ Delusion,”
World Art 1, no. 1 (2011): 125–34; David Carrier, A World Art History and Its Objects
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008); Whitney Davis, “World
without Art,” Art History 33, no. 4 (2010): 711–16.
8. Three recent congresses of the Comité international d’histoire de l’art (ciha),
which have included papers on Indigenous arts across time, are notable exceptions;
see the program of the 2004 Montreal congress, “Sites and Territories of Art History,”
accessed September 16, 2016, http://ciha2004.uqam.ca/ciha_htlm/v_anglaise/accueil
.html; Jaynie Anderson, ed., Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, and Convergence
(Carlton, Vic: Miegunyah Press, 2009), the proceedings of the 2008 Melbourne con-
gress; and G. Ulrich Grossmann and Petra Krutisch, eds., The Challenge of the Object
(Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2013), the proceedings of the 2012
Nuremberg congress.
9. For other key texts on world art history, see Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van
Damme, eds., World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches (Amsterdam:
Valiz, 2008); David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western
Modernism (London: Phaidon Press, 2003); Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a
Geography of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); John Onians, ed., Com-
pression vs. Expression: Containing and Explaining the World’s Art (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2006).
10. Kapur and Mitter on India; Enwezor, Harney, Okeke-Agulu on parts of the Af-
rican continent; and Mosquera, Garbara, and Guinta on sites in Latin America. These
studies parallel those conducted on Indigenous modernities in settler societies in
North America, Australia, and Oceania by Rushing, Phillips, Thomas, Anthes, Myers,
Smith, Vorano, Skinner, and others.
11. Several other comparative studies have come out in recent years, most notably
John Clark, “Is the Modernity of Chinese Art Comparable? An Opening of a Theo-
retical Space,” Journal of Art Historiography, no. 10 (June 2014): 1–27; Mercer, Cosmo-

politan Modernisms; Elaine O’Brien et al., eds., Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013);
Fuyubi Nakamura, Morgan Perkins, and Olivier Krischer, eds., Asia through Art and
Anthropology: Cultural Translation across Borders (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).
12. See Robert S. Nelson, “The Map of Art History,” Art Bulletin 79, no. 1 (March
1997): 28–40.
13. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, eds. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Moder-
nity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 3.
14. Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (2007): 449–514.
15. Terry Smith, “Modernity,” in Grove Art Online, Oxford Art Online, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, January 1998, http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054
.article.T058788.
16. “Modernism,” Tate, accessed September 12, 2016, http://www.tate.org.uk/learn
/online-resources/glossary/m/modernism.
17. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York:
Grove, 1968), 169.
18. Bruce M. Knauft, ed., Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 3. Heather Igloliorte takes up these
issues of antimodernity in her essay in this volume, “ ‘Hooked Forever on Primitive
Peoples’: James Houston and the Transformation of ‘Eskimo Handicrafts’ to Inuit Art.”
19. Smith, “Modernity.”
20. Andreas Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World,” New
German Critique 34, no. 1 (winter 2007): 190.
21. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1962); Timothy Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
22. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
23. Terry Smith, “Rethinking Modernism and Modernity Now,” Filozofski vestnik 35,
no. 2 (2014): 292.
24. Julian Johnson, “The Precarious Present,” in Out of Time: Music and the Making
of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 86.
25. Reinhart Koselleck, “ ‘Spaces of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: Two
Historical Categories,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cam-
bridge, MA: mit Press, 1985), 267–88. This view mirrors Michel Foucault’s explanation
of multiple spatialities — what he called “heterotopias” — a juxtaposition or gathering of
incommensurable spaces of the postmodern. See Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias
and Heterotopias,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil
Leach (New York: Routledge, 1997), 330–36.
26. Kubler, Shape of Time, 17, 83; Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
(Washington, DC: Howard University, 1972).
I ntroduction 25
27. Leon Wainwright, Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2011), 13.
28. Esther Garbara, “Landscape: Errant Modernist Aesthetics in Brazil,” in O’Brien
et al., Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 353–61.
29. Edouard Glissant, “Free and Forced Poetics,” in Ethno-Poetics: A First Inter-
national Symposium, ed. Michel Benamou and Jerome Rothenberg (Boston: Boston
University Scholar Press, 1976), 95.
30. Chika Okeke-Agulu, “Natural Synthesis: Art, Theory, and the Politics of Decolo-
nization in Mid-Twentieth-Century Nigeria,” this volume.
31. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in
The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), 85–92.
32. Nelson, “Map of Art History,” 28.
33. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Deco-
lonial Thinking (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
34. David Turnbull, Maps Are Territories: Science Is an Atlas (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), 55.
35. Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism,” 194.
36. Mercer, Cosmopolitan Modernisms, 7; see also Mercer, Exiles, Diasporas and
Strangers, 6–27.
37. Mercer, Cosmopolitan Modernisms, 9.
38. Doyle and Winkiel, Geomodernisms, 13.
39. These investigations complement those more specifically focused on questions
of art and aboriginality by anthropologists like Howard Morphy and art historians such
as Charlotte Townsend-Gault. See Morphy, Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural
Categories (Oxford: Berg, 2007); and Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Jennifer Kramer, and
Ki-ke-in, eds., Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas (Vancou-
ver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013).
40. For a valuable compilation of primary sources on primitivism, see Jack Flam and
Miriam Deutch, eds., Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). See also T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of
Grace: Anti-modernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New
York: Pantheon, 1981).
41. Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989).
42. Roger Fry, “Art and Life,” the introductory essay to his Vision and Design (Lon-
don: Chatto and Windus, 1923), 12.
43. Fry, “Negro Sculpture,” in Vision and Design, 103.
44. Ruth B. Phillips, “Norval Morrisseau’s Entrance: Negotiating Primitivism, Mod-
ernism, and Anishinaabe Tradition,” in Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist, ed. Greg
Hill (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2006), 42–77.

45. Simon Gikandi, “Africa and the Epiphany of Modernism,” in Doyle and Winkiel,
Geomodernisms, 49.
46. On such educational policies across the empire, see, for example, Bruce Bern
stein and W. Jackson Rushing, Modern by Tradition: American Indian Painting in the
Studio Style (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995); Michelle McGeough,
Through Their Eyes: Indian Painting in Santa Fe, 1918–1945 (Santa Fe, NM: Wheelwright
Museum of the American Indian, 2009); Damian Skinner, The Carver and the Artist:
Māori Art in the Twentieth Century (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008); Scott
Watson, “Art/Craft in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Townsend-Gault, Kramer, and
Ki-ke-in, Native Art of the Northwest Coast, 348–79; and Ronald W. Hawker, “Welfare
Politics, Late Salvage, and Indigenous (In)Visibility, 1930–60,” in Townsend-Gault,
Kramer, and Ki-ke-in, Native Art of the Northwest Coast, 348–403.
47. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
48. “But since primitivism itself and the effort to achieve the absolute character
previously noted are both products of the same situation in modern art, its primitivist
features may be considered not merely accidents, but of its essential nature.” Robert
Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Har-
vard University, 1986), 271.
49. Particularly important and influential critiques are offered by James Clifford,
The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places;
Hal Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art, or White Skins Black Masks,”
in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1985), 181–210;
Thomas McEvilley, “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief: Primitivism in Twentieth Century
Art at the Museum of Modern Art,” ArtForum 23, no. 3 (1984): 54–61; Marianna Tor-
govnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1990); Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and
Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Shelly Errington,
The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1998). Several important edited volumes also contributed impor-
tantly to this critique, notably, Susan Hiller, ed., The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives
on Art (New York: Routledge, 1991); Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush, eds., Prehistories
of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1995); and Flam and Deutch, Primitivism and Twentieth-
Century Art.
50. James Clifford, “Quai Branly in Process,” October 4, no. 120 (2007): 3–27; Sally
Price, Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2007).
51. Barkan and Bush, Prehistories of the Future.
I ntroduction 27
52. Quoted in Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn, introduction to Indigenous Ex-
perience Today, ed. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 4.
53. Peter Geschiere, The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion
in Africa and Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
54. Michael Yellow Bird, “What We Want to Be Called: Indigenous Peoples’ Perspec-
tives on Racial and Ethnic Identity Labels,” American Indian Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1999):
1–21.
55. Steven Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media, and Identity (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1998), 5.
56. Cadena and Starn, introduction, 4–5.
57. OED Online, adj. “indigenous,” accessed November 15, 2005, http://www.oed.com/
view/Entry/94474?redirectedFrom=indigenous.
58. Jamaica Kinkaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000);
V. S. Naipaul, The Loss of El Dorado: A Colonial History (New York: Vintage Books,
2003); Edouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 1997).
59. James Clifford, “Varieties of Indigenous Experience: Diasporas, Homelands,
Sovereignties,” in de la Cadena and Starn, Indigenous Experience Today, 198.
60. Mary Louise Pratt, “Afterword: Indigeneity Today,” in de la Cadena and Starn,
Indigenous Experience Today, 400–402.
61. On settler artists and appropriation, see discussions about Margaret Preston in
Nicholas Thomas, Possessions: Indigenous Art / Colonial Culture (New York: Thames
and Hudson, 1999), 127–43; and Djon Mundine “Aboriginal Still Life,” in Margaret
Preston, ed. Deborah Edwards and Rose Peel (Melbourne: Thames and Hudson Aus-
tralia, 1995), 208. On Emily Carr, see Gerta Moray, Unsettling Encounters: First Nations
Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press,
2006); and Sarah Milroy, From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia
(Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2014). For Georgia O’Keeffe, see essays by Carolyn
Kastner, “Changing Perspectives on Cultural Patrimony: Katsina Tithu,” and Alph H.
Secakuku, “Katsinam: The Katsina Dolls in Pueblo Culture and as Depicted by Georgia
O’Keeffe,” in Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico: Architecture, Katsinam, and the Land,
ed. Barbara Buhler Lynes and Carolyn Kastner (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico
Press, 2012), 99–109 and 111–17. See also Ruth B. Phillips, “Aesthetic Primitivism Revis-
ited: The Global Diaspora of ‘Primitive Art’ and the Rise of Indigenous Modernisms,”
Journal of Art Historiography 12 (2015): 1–25, https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress
.com/2015/06/phillips.pdf.
62. In the future, it will undoubtedly be illuminating and desirable to establish a
still wider and more varied comparative framework for our discussions of networked
world modernisms — one that could include other Indigenous peoples such as the Sami
of Scandinavia, the Ainu of Japan, the Adivasi (tribal peoples) of India, or those of

Latin America. The panorama we provide here is intended to begin a conversation, to
leave the discussions open ended, and ultimately, to complicate matters.
63. See McLean, “Modernism and the Art of Albert Namatjira,” this volume.
64. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (1968).
65. Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2000).
66. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo-
phrenia, trans. Biran Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987);
Appadurai, Modernity at Large.
67. Mercer, Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers; Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s
Other Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2000); James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Trans-
lation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997);
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993).
68. James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Routes, 17–46; Clifford, “Varieties of In-
digenous Experience.”
69. O’Brien et al., Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 2.
70. Garbara, “Landscape,” 353–61.
I ntroduction 29
MODERN VALUES
PART I
SANDRA KLOPPER
1 REINVENTING ZULU TRADITION
The Modernism of Zizwezenyanga Qwabe’s

Figurative Relief Panels
When the acclaimed South African photographer Lynn Acutt visited the Zulu
town of Nongoma in 1937, he bought two large figurative pokerwork panels
from an artist who has become known as Qwabe (figure 1.1). They feature de-
pictions of contemporary urban life interspersed with scenes related to the
history of Zulu king Cetshwayo and his son and successor, Dinuzulu. In theme
and content, these panels resemble a less ambitious but equally interesting
set that was found in an antique shop in Namibia before being donated to
the Killie Campbell Africana Library in Durban in 1980. While the first set,
now also in the Killie Campbell Collections, focuses primarily on momentous
events prior to Dinuzulu’s seven-year banishment to St. Helena in 1889, the
second set appears to record his subsequent incarceration in 1908, during his
trial for treason in Pietermaritzburg for harboring the wife of the leader of the
1906 Bambatha Rebellion, in which Africans had sought to overturn a poll
tax imposed on rural households in present-day KwaZulu-Natal (figure 1.5).1
I argue in this chapter that both works warrant careful scrutiny for the bold
modernity of their direct references to racial discrimination and their depic-
tions of the contrasting realities of rural and urban life in a society in which
exploitative migrant labor practices had become the norm (figure 1.2). These
panels also raise crucial questions about Qwabe’s remarkable, if short-lived,
interest in constructing complex narratives based on oral and popular sources,
such as photographs and postcards, thus drawing both on traditional Zulu
poetic traditions and modern technologies of reproduction.
F I G U R E 1 . 1
Zizwezenyanga
Qwabe, pair of large
vertical pokerwork
panels, purchased
by Lynn Acutt in
Nongoma in 1937.
Each panel: 29 × 4.5 in.
(74 × 11.4 cm). Killie
Campbell Africana
Library, Durban.
The advent of modern Zulu arts in the twentieth century had deep roots
in earlier traditions of royal patronage, which go back to the rise of the Zulu
kingdom in the early nineteenth century. The great warrior king Shaka and
his immediate successors employed skilled artists and craftsmen to produce
prestige items for the king and his royal entourage. These included arm and
neck rings cast in brass; intricately carved staffs of office, with complex ab-
stract finials made from various hardwoods; and monumental chairs (each
carved from a single block of wood), originally inspired by examples acquired
34 S andra K lopper

FIGURE 1.2 Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, detail documenting racial discrimination
and a migrant childminder from one of the panels purchased by Lynn Acutt in
1937. Killie Campbell Africana Library, Durban.
FIGURE 1.3 Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, detail of King Cetshwayo from one of

the panels purchased by Lynn Acutt in 1937. Killie Campbell Africana Library,
Durban.
from Portuguese traders at Delagoa Bay in present-day Mozambique.2 Some

artists attained considerable fame, among them Mtomboti kaMangcengeza,
who produced two chairs for the third Zulu king, Mpande, before his death
in 1872.3 Since no one but the king could sit on a chair, and those approaching
him had to crawl on the ground, prestige items like these had an important
symbolic function, affirming hierarchical power relations that were further
reinforced through royal control over trade imports, like beads and blankets.4
The second Zulu king, Dingane, who had a keen interest in beads, once asked
the American missionary George Champion whether it would be possible to
“get a beadmaker to live with him.” 5 People visiting Dingane’s royal home-
stead in the late 1830s were received in a large thatched beehive dwelling,
with twenty-one supporting posts, covered from top to bottom with beads of
various colors.6 A great champion of the arts, he was also interested in other
forms of expressive culture, such as praise poetry, which he promoted actively
throughout his reign.7
R einventing Z ulu T radition 35

Following the destruction of the Zulu kingdom by British forces in 1879, the
disruption of royal patronage forced most specialists to cultivate new patrons,
ultimately boosting the production of various skillfully honed household
items, such as headrests and spoons for the inhabitants of ordinary home-
steads. Some artisans also began to work for external markets, carving figu-
rative staffs and walking sticks, which they sold as mementos to soldiers and
other foreign visitors passing through the country during the South African
war of 1899–1902.8 These artists generally relocated to burgeoning colonial
centers such as Pietermaritzburg and Durban, where they established small
workshops aimed at supplying the growing market for carved curios.9 By the
early twentieth century, enterprising efforts to tap into additional sources
of income had also encouraged several carvers to produce novelty items for
indigenous patrons, including meat plates decorated with organic designs
inspired by the craftsmanship of German missionaries, and small open-shelf
wall cupboards, commonly decorated with inlaid or burnished geometric pat-
terns, in emulation of the early settler practice of fashioning comparatively
inexpensive but visually arresting storage for cooking pots and other house-
hold objects.
Indigenous interest in storage racks of this kind seems to have spread rap-
idly among African Christians who, as a sign of their rejection of tradition-
alist norms and values, abandoned the long-established practice of living in
circular thatch-covered beehive dwellings in favor of European-style wattle
and daub homes. But these racks also became popular in remote rural com-
munities, where they were used to store rolled-up grass sleeping mats that to
this day form part of the wedding gifts brides present to the relatives of their
future husbands. The mat racks produced now are still commonly decorated
with geometric patterns, but instead of carving elaborate designs into already
burnished panels, mat rack specialists, since the 1950s, have taken to painting
intricate multicolored patterns on their display surfaces (figure 1.4).
In the early 1920s, one of the pioneering producers of these mat racks radi-
cally transformed the then-emerging practice of decorating them with boldly
burnished geometric designs by interspersing those designs with figurative
motifs (figures 1.5–1.8).10 Almost certainly intended — at least initially — for the
burgeoning tourist market in Durban rather than indigenous patrons, these
figurative panels appear to have been part of the artist’s effort to supplement
his income while working intermittently as a migrant laborer, either in do-
mestic service or, more likely, as a rickshaw puller. This occupation had by
then been monopolized by men from the Nongoma district of present-day
36 S andra K lopper

FIGURE. 1.4 Mat rack decorated with geometric patterns, ca. 1980s. Wood and
enamel paints, each panel: 24.5 × 3.3 in. (62.2 × 8.3 cm). Private collection.
northern KwaZulu-Natal; toward the end of the nineteenth century, after the
aggressive land encroachments of white settlers had made subsistence farm-
ing inadequate, rural Africans left their homes annually for several months
to support their families.11 Born and raised in the Nongoma area, this artist
has since been hailed for his innovative pictorial practices, including his use
of aerial perspective and symbolic proportion.12 Although his art should be
recognized as a pioneering modern Zulu art form, considerable uncertainty

FIGURE 1.5 Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, F I G U R E 1 . 6 Zizwezenyanga
pair of vertical pokerwork panels, Qwabe, detail of Dinuzulu’s incarcer-

ca. 1930s, found in Namibia. Each ation from one of the panels found in
panel: 27.3 × 3.1 in. (69.4 × 8 cm). Killie Namibia. Killie Campbell Africana
Campbell Africana Library, Durban. Library, Durban.
F I G U R E 1 . 7 Zizwezenyanga
Qwabe, detail of bride holding small

ritual knife from one of the panels
found in Namibia. Killie Campbell
Africana Library, Durban.
F I G U R E 1 . 8
Zizwezenyanga Qwabe,
detail of a man drawn
behind a cow on one of the
panels found in Namibia.
Killie Campbell Africana
Library, Durban.
surrounds both his life and the extent of his oeuvre. Probably illiterate, he
has been referred to variously as Ntizenyanga, Tivenganga, and Ntizenganfa
Qwabe. None of these names is recognized by his surviving relatives, some of
whom still live near the Qondo Trading Store, approximately twenty kilome-
ters from Nongoma, where Qwabe once had his own homestead. According to
them, his first name was Zizwezenyanga. They have no idea when he was born,
or why and when he decided to dedicate his life entirely to producing figura-
tive relief panels, but they all agreed that he died sometime in the late 1960s
or early 1970s.13 His name was originally recorded as Mzinyanzinya Qwabe by
Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, an American suffragist who met him for the first
time in 1925 while working as a journalist for Hearst’s International. Although
her writing is a crucial source for understanding his work, in this chapter, I use
the name ascribed to him by some of his surviving descendants.14
It is not possible to reconstruct Qwabe’s trajectory from migrant carver
to full-time artist without resorting to plausible explanation. After meeting
Reyher, he seems to have abandoned his practice of working intermittently in
Durban in favor of producing panels for sale at agricultural fairs and church
fêtes, thereby satisfying a growing settler interest in African craft produc-
tion. Returning permanently to the Nongoma region by the early 1930s, he
sold work not only to rural patrons, but also to the growing number of local

and foreign visitors who traveled to Nongoma to meet members of the Zulu
royal family after colonial officials agreed in the late 1920s to allow them to
reestablish homesteads in this area. Nongoma, founded after a decision in
1887 to build Fort Ivuna as a colonial buffer between the Usuthu section of the
Zulu royal family and rival factions, had by the 1930s become a thriving ad-
ministrative center. It had a magistrate’s court; a Benedictine mission station,
which in 1937 was expanded through the addition of a hospital; and the Mona
market, which to this day remains a major center for the sale of medicinal
plants, traditional dress worn by Zulu people on ceremonial occasions, and
carved artifacts, like meat plates, which are still commonly used on occasions
requiring the ritual slaughter of goats and cattle.15
Qwabe’s work became increasingly versatile over time. He repeatedly chal-
lenged the received artistic conventions of the rural community in which he
was raised, modifying his figurative motifs for different markets and patrons.
Often boldly adventurous, he produced progressively larger, delicately carved
horizontal panels for his external market. But while he refined his pokerwork
technique and constantly reconfigured the narrative elements in his work in
new and inventive ways, by the 1950s he was relying more and more on stock
scenes and characters in an effort to meet the overwhelming demand for his
work in urban centers like Johannesburg. With the establishment of the Evan-
gelical Lutheran Church Art and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift in 1965, and the
Vukani Association in Eshowe toward the end of that decade, this growing
market for sophisticated carvings, pottery, baskets, and tapestries produced
by rural African communities was supported through the dedication of mis-
sionaries and other intermediaries.16 In earlier decades, however, artists like
Qwabe were forced to engage directly with dealers, whose motivation was to
profit from their work rather than to support their artistic development. Al-
though mat racks, as decorated functional items carved of wood, fit the stan-
dard Western “craft” category, I argue that Qwabe’s innovative introduction of
narrative pictorial imagery, affirming Zulu traditions of political leadership
and responses to colonial modernity, should be understood as a foundational
expression of modern Zulu art.
Qwabe as Oral Historian

Each of the two large panels acquired by Acutt is surmounted by a portrait bust
of King Cetshwayo, based on a photograph taken of him while visiting Lon-
don to meet Queen Victoria following the destruction of the Zulu kingdom in
40 S andra K lopper

1879.17 Both panels reproduce his head ring, a symbol of his status as a mature
married man (see figure 1.1). But in an apparent desire to draw attention to
his identity as the dignified leader of a powerful independent nation, Qwabe
modified one of the images to include bandoliers strung across the king’s tai-
lored jacket (see figure 1.3). At the bottom of one of the panels, Qwabe included
a depiction of Dinuzulu seated on a chair. Carefully copied from a photograph
taken toward the end of Dinuzulu’s life, this image is heraldically enshrined in
an elaborate border surmounted by a schematic rendition of the badge of the
British Royal Air Force. Further depictions include paired elephants in close
association with both kings; a roaring lion; a biplane, which appears to have
been traced from a photograph; a boat surrounded by soldiers; and, directly
below this scene, Dinuzulu standing on what appears to be a pier. We also see
a bishop surrounded by white Afrikaner (Boer) combatants, and other Boers
being killed by Zulu warriors. The imagery includes a further, dramatic depic-
tion of a white bartender refusing access to a young black patron wearing tails
and a bowtie, and a loosely grouped tableau in which the artist contrasts the
lone figure of a comparatively well-dressed woman — presumably an urban
migrant carrying the child of a white employer — with that of two women in a
rural setting, one of whom is pounding maize meal while the other balances
a child on her hip. The lone figure of a woman carrying a child reappears on
the edge of the bartender scene, along with a shield-bearing Zulu warrior (see
figure 1.2). Other similar warrior figures are scattered across both panels.
Since Qwabe was almost certainly illiterate and would have been in his mid
to late teens at the time of King Dinuzulu’s death in 1913, his knowledge of
Zulu history must have been shaped in part by oral sources, such as the praise
poems of kings and chiefs, the communications of emissaries dispatched by
the royal family to provide information to rural communities on momentous
occasions, and rumors and hearsay. Obvious examples of his familiarity with
oral poetry are afforded, for example, by the inclusion of the roaring lion be-
low one of the portrait busts of King Cetshwayo, which was almost certainly
suggested by a praise poem referring to the king as the one who gives his
people “the anger-heated blood of a lion.” 18 Similarly, the two sets of paired
elephants associated with images of Cetshwayo and Dinuzulu in other panels
invoke the poetic metaphors that praise the rulers’ power and invincibility.19
This panel also includes a scene chronicling Dinuzulu’s successful retaliation
against an Afrikaner (Boer) settler commando, which occurred toward the
end of the South African war of 1899–1902, when Zulu warriors killed Field-
Cornet Jan Potgieter (Upotolozi) and his party of fifty-five men.20 Most of

those killed were local farmers under the leadership of General Louis Botha,
who had destroyed a large Zulu settlement and seized 3,800 cattle and 1,000
sheep and goats.
Like the oral poet who included an oblique reference to this event in Dinu-
zulu’s official praises — “It happened that a Dutchman, Upotolozi, / Placed a hat
on your head, / And it happened that the hat suited you” — Qwabe appears not
to have relied on historical or chronological logic to structure his narrative
of dignity and triumph in the face of adversity.21 He chose, instead, to estab-
lish complex poetic associations in and between the horizontal bands into
which his low-relief images are structured. This reliance on associations helps
to explain the otherwise incomprehensible prominence of a biplane in one
of his panels, for the increasingly daring aeronautical feats of Louis Blériot,
the Wright brothers, and others did not begin to unfold in the international
press until 1908, at the time of the second trial and subsequent incarceration
of King Dinuzulu. The popular illustrated accounts and images of Dinuzulu’s
trial were often featured alongside others devoted to rapid changes in this new
mode of transport. Thus, for example, on December 26, 1908, the front page
of the Illustrated London News included a large engraving of several biplanes,
with the inscription “A Scene of Three Months Hence. The Great Aeroplane
Race at Monte Carlo: An Anticipation,” and a short account of the need to
revise international law to extend national jurisdiction over the air. On the
second page, a photograph entitled “The ‘Child’ and his Champion” showed
King Dinuzulu standing next to Harriet Colenso.22 She, like her father, the
Church of England’s first bishop of Natal, was a major advocate for the right to
independence of the Zulu kingdom. In a clear allusion to the bishop’s role in
supporting Zulu resistance to the land encroachments of Afrikaner farmers,
Qwabe placed a scene showing Colenso looming over four Boer farmers im-
mediately above the scene depicting the deaths of Field-Cornet Potgieter and
his party.23
Qwabe’s refusal to reproduce colonial narratives of domination and sub-
mission and his reaffirmation of the iconic status of Cetshwayo and Dinuzulu
as leaders of their people are consistent with the storytelling practices of oral
poets, who commonly draw attention to the shattering impact of kings and
chiefs on their foes. Commenting on the images in Dinuzulu’s poem, Harold
Scheub notes that they all depict “Dinuzulu’s relentless offensive and military
prowess, the steady drumbeats of his conquests, his irresistible strength, and
his annihilation of war material and armies.” 24 Qwabe’s rich mosaic of im-
ages linking heroic figures like these to larger social structures and networks,
42 S andra K lopper

including the lives and experiences of ordinary people, also finds echoes in
the structure of these oral poems. For this reason, according to Mazisi Ku-
nene, it would be more accurate to describe heroic praise poems as “poems
of excellence,” which seek to elevate “the highest desirable qualities in soci-
ety,” thereby projecting “an ethical system beyond the circumstances of the
individual.” 25
When Qwabe revisited Dinuzulu’s 1908 trial, as depicted in the second set
of Killie Campbell Africana Library panels, he recorded specific details related
to events surrounding the king’s arrest and subsequent incarceration. One of
these panels includes a scene of a man — presumably Dinuzulu — sitting in
what seems to be a holding cell or prison, shaking hands with a man dressed in
a suit, who most likely represents Eugene Renaud or W. P. Schreiner, the law-
yers who defended him (see figure 1.6). Two of the adjoining three rooms in
this scene are occupied by African men in what appear to be police uniforms,
one of whom seems to be gesticulating toward the occupant of the first room,
while the third room is inhabited by a white prisoner, an Afrikaner farmer
who is easily identified by his wide-brimmed hat. The uniformed men would
be the Zulu-speaking prison wardens who were arrested after they confessed
to assisting Dinuzulu by passing a letter from him to Renaud.26
In a scene on the second panel of this set, a car is followed by a Black Maria,
a police van designed to serve as a secure prison cell (see figure 1.5). Although
both vehicles evidently date to the 1930s, Qwabe must have been familiar with
either photographs of the horse-drawn Black Maria in which the king had
been transported in 1908, or, more likely, oral narratives referring to the events
surrounding the hearing. Why the artist chose to update these vehicles and the
clothing of colonial protagonists is unclear, particularly since he depicted the
two African wardens’ uniforms in the style that would have been issued at
the time of Dinuzulu’s trial and incarceration — but this tendency to collapse
the past into the present was likely inspired by the practice of oral poets. In a
further scene, we see three white men, one wearing what appears to be evening
dress and smoking a pipe, one a visitor in day clothes, and the third a police-
man. In another, we see a woman in contemporary dress, probably portraying
Harriet Colenso, standing next to a seated man. Viewed together, these panels
leave little doubt that the subject is the lead-up to the trial, Harriet Colenso’s
unfailing efforts on behalf of the king, and General Botha’s subsequent inter-
vention to have Dinuzulu released after the general became the first prime
minister of the Union of South Africa in 1910.27 Scheub’s observation about the
art of oral poetry applies not only to countless novels and modernist paintings,

but also to Qwabe’s reliefs: “If the narrative of history is present, it is evident
only in fragments; it is submerged, its contours apparent through inference.” 28
Dinuzulu’s relationship with Botha dated back to the 1880s, when Botha led
a group of Afrikaner farmers known as Dinuzulu’s Volunteers in support of
the Zulu king’s claims against one of his rivals. These Afrikaner mercenaries
subsequently secured almost half of the former Zulu kingdom as farms in re-
turn for their assistance, forming an independent republic, with St. Lucia Bay
as an outlet to the sea and a town called Vryheid (Freedom) as its capital. Most
of the land was never recovered by the Zulu despite numerous attempts to do
so. But the establishment of the so-called New Republic eventually brought
Dinuzulu into direct conflict with Botha in 1902. To this day, some Afrikaners
refer to Dinuzulu’s retaliation against Potgieter (Upotolozi) and his men at
that time as the Holkrans massacre. This checkered history of fraught inter-
actions between Boer settlers and the Zulu kingdom notwithstanding, Botha
was convinced that Dinuzulu had not received a fair trial following the Bam-
batha Rebellion. Prime Minister Botha therefore ordered Dinuzulu’s release
from prison and arranged for him to be exiled to Uitkyk, a distant farm in the
Transvaal, where he died in October 1913.
It is not inconceivable that Qwabe chose to produce his Dinuzulu images
more than twenty years later because of the growing attempts to revive the
status of the Zulu royal house following the death of Dinuzulu’s son, Solomon,
in 1933. When the Zulu kingdom was destroyed in 1879, the official jurisdic-
tion of Dinuzulu’s father, Cetshwayo, had been reduced to that of the Usuthu
section of the royal family. After Dinuzulu’s return from exile in 1897, he was
appointed as the Natal government’s induna (chief) and adviser. By the time
Solomon ascended to the throne in 1916, he “was officially treated as no more
than a private individual.” 29 Qwabe’s preoccupation with the genealogical
claims of the Zulu royal family and the related matter of Dinuzulu’s trials and
tribulations would also have been fueled by rumors from his childhood, when
Zulu speakers commonly believed that Dinuzulu would eventually succeed in
uniting chiefdoms on either side of the Thukela River, the historical boundary
between the Zulu kingdom and its southern tributaries, thereby effectively
turning the clock back to a precolonial past.30
Rebecca Reyher’s Influence on the Careers of Qwabe and His Circle

Qwabe’s ambitious historical panels were likely intended originally for a pa-
tron who would have understood his complex narratives and symbolic allu-
44 S andra K lopper

sions, perhaps even a member of the Zulu royal family. But whoever he had
in mind when he produced them, it is difficult to imagine that he would have
decided to carve panels like these had it not been for the intervention of the
American suffragist Rebecca Reyher, who had an unintended but far-reaching
influence on both his work and that of other carvers in his circle. Reyher’s
newspaper report, “Natives Who Are Artists in Woodcarving: The Work of
the Qwabe Brothers,” is the sole source of information on the early produc-
tion of Qwabe and several other carvers from the Nongoma district, including
Abenizo Zulu.31 Written some time after her second trip to South Africa in
1934, it provides invaluable insights into the work of these rural carvers, in-
cluding the expanding market for their art, which had developed following
her first encounter with them in Nongoma in early 1925.32
When Steven Sack produced his groundbreaking 1989 catalog and exhibi-
tion on the art of modernist African artists who had either been overlooked
or ignored in earlier accounts of the history of South African art, he noted, in-
correctly, that Reyher’s initial encounter with Qwabe had taken place in 1927,
claiming further that Qwabe’s work had originally been bought by Oswald
Fynney, the chief magistrate in Zululand. Contrary to this assertion, Reyher’s
account of her introduction to Qwabe and his circle shows clearly that she
initiated contact with — and purchased work from — him and his circle. As she
noted in the article she wrote on these carvers following her second visit to
South Africa:
Ten years ago I went on my first trip to Zululand, and noticed that
many natives carried roughly-carved sticks, with rarely the same design
repeated. . . . [I]t was sufficient to inspire my curiosity as to whether
there were any natives who carved figures and sticks of a more elaborate
nature. Mr Oswald Fynney, then Chief Magistrate, sent runners out all
over his territory to scout for carvers, and there gathered one day in
his court an impressive assembly of several dozen. . . . Most of it was
worthless and ugly, but there were two brothers Qwabe whose work
was both interesting and good. I bought what I could of it.33
After reconnecting with the Qwabes in the mid-1930s, Reyher learned that
in the interim, her intervention had led them to participate in “native” craft
shows that had “made their work much better known and had brought them
money and appreciation.” An undated photograph taken in the African section
of the Durban Agricultural Show (figure 1.9) features Qwabe working on a re-
lief panel filled with wild animals separated by geometric pokerwork designs,

FIGURE 1.9 Undated photograph of Zizwezenyanga Qwabe and another carver
at the Durban Agricultural Show. Killie Campbell Africana Library, Durban.
which Reyher described as “black and white diamonds and other decorative
patterns.” Another carver appears in the foreground of this photograph, his
head partly out of focus and his foot protruding into the middle ground. He
is facing a carefully arranged display, which includes several vertical poker-
work panels by Zizwezenyanga and four figurative staffs, some by his brother,
Amos, and others by Abenizo Zulu. Some of these pokerwork panels show
stock images of wildlife and young men and women traditionally dressed in
skins and beadwork. In the center of this repetitive display is a single horizon-
tal panel that includes what appears to be a depiction of the Tower of London
straddling two sprawling urban structures. This image confirms that by the
mid-1930s, Qwabe had come to rely on newspapers and other ephemeral
sources for the subject matter of his more adventurous works. It also raises
several important questions regarding the differences in artistic practice of
Qwabe and others working in his circle.
Reyher noted these differences when she wrote about Abenizo Zulu, whom
she met for the first time in 1934, when the Qwabes introduced her to him.34
She had learned, “He now spent all his time at carving,” because when he saw
what she had paid the Qwabes for their work ten years before, “he decided
46 S andra K lopper

from then on that he would be a carver and nothing else.” 35 Contrasting his
work with that of Zizwezenyanga’s brother, Amos, she pointed out that, unlike
Amos, who produced staffs and walking sticks “upon which crawl fantastic
animals,” and who generally worked in wild olive wood, “subtly contrasting
the yellow and grey graining in the structural design” of his work, Abenizo
Zulu always carved staffs for the royal family in red ivory, a hardwood that
had been used by Mtomboti kaMangcengeza to produce chairs for the third
Zulu king, Mpande. Reyher was impressed by Abenizo’s “sensible decision”
to become a full-time artist. When she visited members of the Zulu royal
family during the cleansing ceremony (iHlambo) for the late king Solomon,
she noted that Mshiyeni, who had become the Zulu regent in 1933, “proudly
displayed” one of his figurative staffs “on his rondavel wall, where it attracted
much admiration.” She also observed, “To-day his sticks are in demand in
all of northern Zululand” among indigenous and European patrons. Unable
to convince anyone to resell one of them to her, she tried, instead, to send
Abenizo out “to buy and coax back his own workmanship as my time was
short and I could not wait for duplicates.”
The Art of Invention

Although Reyher’s intervention clearly had a significant effect on the expan-
sion of the market for Abenizo Zulu’s staffs, it had no influence on his practice
as an artist. Working for various patrons, Zulu emulated what had become a
traditional Zulu art form, carving comparatively simple but carefully honed
figurative staffs similar to those popular among non-indigenous patrons to-
ward the end of the nineteenth century. Qwabe’s figurative panels were, in
contrast, unique, as Reyher realized soon after seeing them for the first time.
She later wrote on the back of a composite photograph of several relief scenes
she had acquired from him: “No one else in Zululand makes them. His idea
of pictures uses knife and poker to burn out design. Introduces shading and
heightening by use of lead pencil. No instruction.” 36 Surprisingly, she did not
appear to realize that Qwabe’s figurative panels had emerged from the com-
paratively recent tradition of making mat storage racks using sets of short hor-
izontal and long vertical panels decorated with burnished geometric designs.
Qwabe’s links to this tradition explain the inclusion on many surviving panels
of a bride holding a small ritual knife (isinqindi), which, when pointed down-
ward, is customarily associated with the loss of her virginity (figure 1.10; see
also figure 1.7). He clearly decided early on in his career to market these and

other panels either individually or in pairs to outside patrons, thus facilitating
their use as decorative hangings.
The vertical panels that depict events surrounding Dinuzulu’s trial (see fig-
ure 1.5) demonstrate interesting ways in which Qwabe, for a time, interspersed
aspects of Zulu history with images of Zulu tradition, such as the bride, as
well as other scenes of rural life, such as homesteads with thatched beehive
dwellings surrounding cattle byres. By 1939, when Qwabe sold panels to Natal’s
commissioner of Native affairs, H. C. Lugg, and to the Duke of Devonshire
during an official visit to Nongoma (see figure 1.12), the artist appears to have
abandoned the practice of producing hybrid panels, instead depicting idyllic
scenes of rural life on his horizontal panels, and using animal and wedding-
related imagery on his vertical panels (see figure 1.10).37 Although he some-
times introduced minor variations in the horizontal imagery — such as the
figure of a nineteenth-century leader, wearing indigenous leather garments,
walking toward a tree to the right of a large homestead — all panels evoke a pre-
colonial era of chiefly control and domestic abundance. Most include a tableau
depicting an ibandla (council or assembly), overseen by a king or a chief shown
seated on a chair, surrounded by men whose positions on the ground respect-
fully acknowledge his status. Large byres filled with horned Nguni cattle, in-
tricately carved in contrasting hues of light and dark, invariably occupy the
most prominent space at the center of these panels, while women are shown
returning from the river carrying pots of water on their heads or grinding corn
in the safety of the homestead’s enclosing walls. By affirming entrenched divi-
sions of labor, particularly the role of women in looking after the homestead,
these panels reinforce hierarchical relations of power that suggest a deep nos-
talgia for the past. Panels like these clearly appealed to outside buyers whose
sense of racial and cultural superiority would have been affirmed in the face
of such rural idylls. Qwabe’s arcadian vision also found favor, however, with
rural patrons, who were struggling to come to terms with their impoverished
circumstances as subsistence farmers in a racially segregated society.
Other themes, always in the horizontal format preferred by the external
market for Qwabe’s work, include a scene of barrels being transported on
ox-drawn carts, accompanied by men wearing rural costume (figure 1.11).38
Alluding to the gradual expansion of colonial trade networks over the course
of the nineteenth century, these panels are framed by decorative burnished
comma-like borders not found in any of his other relief carvings. Qwabe
also frequently depicted animated scenes of combat between Zulu warriors,
shown carrying shields and assegais (spears), a reference to the devastating
48 S andra K lopper

F I G U R E 1 . 1 0
Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, pair of

vertical pokerwork mat racks,
35.5 × 2.5 in. (90.2 × 6.4 cm).
Purchased by Grete Mannheim
between 1936 and 1949. Art
Institute of Chicago/Art
Resource, New York, NY.
i nternecine battles that followed the destruction of the Zulu kingdom by Brit-
ish forces in 1879. Similar scenes appear in at least three of the relief panels
Reyher purchased from him. Following further expansion of his external mar-
ket in the 1940s, Qwabe collapsed many scenes found in his earlier panels into
increasingly large horizontal reliefs, which combined depictions of home-
steads, like those in the panels Lugg and the Duke of Devonshire purchased in
1939 (figure 1.12), with elements formerly reserved for his vertical panels, such
as homestead heads, brides, young men and women, and domestic and wild
animals. These components were neatly compartmentalized by decorative
borders, which were similar to those commonly used in the Illustrated London
News, a periodical to which Qwabe seems to have had intermittent access.
Some of these later panels also had compartments filled with shield-bearing
warriors, standing shoulder to shoulder in neat lines. None of these panels,
however, returns to the specificities of historical moments and people as in
his earlier works. The interest of these later panels lies, instead, in Qwabe’s
increasingly sophisticated manipulation of his medium, as shown in a hor-
izontal panel currently held by the University of Pretoria (figure 1.13). These
manipulations include the delicate shading and animated naturalism of his
animals; a reliance on foreshortening; his tendency to truncate animals and
people as though they were caught, fleetingly, through the lens of a camera;
and his increasing use of playfully arbitrary juxtapositions, such as the over-
large torsos of two youths that pop up both inside and outside a homestead
scene at the top of the Pretoria panel.39
Reyher’s Primary Passion

When Reyher visited the Qwabe brothers at their homesteads near the Qondo
Trading Store, she was delighted to discover that relatives and close neighbors
were clearly very proud of what she referred to as their special gifts: “They
watch the brothers and speak of their work with the greatest respect. They
speak of the artists as men apart.” Echoing this appreciation, she lamented that
what she called the general public — the American audience for which she was
writing — “is not aware of the scattered native work which is of so outstanding
a quality that their product ceases to be a mere curio and becomes worthy to
be ranked as art.” Her own interest in art had originally been fostered through
her relationship with Luisine Havemeyer, who in 1913 founded the National
Women’s Party with Alice Paul. A major patron of the arts, Havemeyer regu-
larly allowed members of the party to view her extensive private collection fol-
50 S andra K lopper

FIGURE 1.11 Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, horizontal pokerwork panel portraying
an ox-drawn wagon, purchased by Lynn Acutt in 1937. 3.6 × 30 in. (9 × 78 cm).
Killie Campbell Africana Library, Durban.
FIGURE 1.12 Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, horizontal pokerwork mat rack panel

depicting idyllic rural life, 1939. 5.3 × 27.3 in. (13.4 × 69.5 cm). Donated to the Killie
Campbell Africana Library by former commissioner of Native Affairs, H. C. Lugg.
FIGURE 1.13 Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, horizontal figurative pokerwork panel

demonstrating increasing sophistication, ca. late 1960s. 10.4 × 29 in. (26.4 × 74.1 cm).
S. van der Walt Collection, University of Pretoria, no. 594499.
lowing the large afternoon meetings she held at her home in New York City.40
She and her children later donated an extensive collection of impressionist
and pre-impressionist art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,
including major paintings by Corot, Courbet, and Monet.41 Having spent
several years in Paris, Havemeyer had also acquired works by Mary Cassatt,
among them portraits of herself and her daughter Electra. She subsequently
commissioned the American designer Louis Tiffany to transform her home
into an elegant showpiece for the display of her large collection of European
art in the 1890s.42

It is unlikely that access to these art circles would have prepared Reyher for
her first encounter with Qwabe’s relief carvings. Luisine Havemeyer had been
“indifferent to the talents of such younger artists as Gauguin, van Gogh, and,
later, Matisse and Picasso,” all of whom were, of course, inspired to a greater
or lesser degree by the art of the exotic and the so-called primitive communi-
ties to which many European artists began to turn for inspiration in the early
twentieth century.43 Luisine’s daughter, Electra Havemeyer Webb, who became
a major collector of American folk art (and who would found the Selbourne
Museum in Vermont in 1947) may have inspired Reyher to express an early
interest in alternative art traditions, but she probably developed her interest in
African art through her friendship with Cape Town–based expressionist artist
Irma Stern.44 While living in Germany in her early twenties, Stern had studied
for a time with Max Pechstein, who was an avid collector of African art. Soon
after returning to South Africa, she traveled to Umgababa, on the south coast
of present-day KwaZulu-Natal, in search of new subject matter for her art,
which she likely found in subjects such as the young woman Stern depicted in
a drawing Reyher acquired from her before the latter returned to the United
States in 1925.45 Evidently inspired by Stern’s example, Reyher made contact
with other collectors of African art in Cape Town, including a former army
officer who had acquired what Reyher described as “some good carvings,” as
well as several books detailing art forms produced by southern African com-
munities.46 Among these were Henri Junod’s The Life of a South African Tribe
and Hendrik P. N. Muller and Johannes F. Snelleman’s Industrie des Cafres du
sud-est de l’Afrique: Collection recueillie sur les lieux et notice ethnographique.
Published in 1892, the latter volume contained thirty folio plates recording the
artifacts Muller and Snelleman had collected while walking through parts of
Mozambique and present-day KwaZulu-Natal in the late nineteenth century.
Some of these plates focused on beadwork, while others focused on household
objects, such as headrests and clay pots. One also included a figurative carving
of a man on horseback, described as an “objet de fantaisie,” which clearly had
been produced for sale to a non-indigenous market.47
After arriving in Cape Town in September 1924, Reyher had originally pro-
posed to do “some stories about women and the many discriminations against
them,” but, as she later recounted, the editor of Hearst’s International, Norman
Hapgood, “couldn’t have been less interested.” 48 She therefore decided to write
instead on Cape Dutch architecture and furniture, among other local forms
of colonial art.49 But her interest in the individual and collective histories of
women encouraged her to return to South Africa ten years later and led her to
52 S andra K lopper

write a biography of Christina Sibaya, the first of Zulu king Solomon’s sixty-
four wives, in which she recounts the harrowing abuse Christina suffered at
the hands of her husband. The biography, published in 1948, was based on
interviews conducted with the assistance of Eric Fynney, son of the Zululand
magistrate, who acted as Reyher’s interpreter and translated verbatim Christi-
na’s accounts of events in her life.50
Qwabe at Nongoma’s Bantu Agricultural Show

The colonial government’s refusal to recognize the royal status of King Cet-
shwayo’s successors was reversed by the apartheid state after it came to power
in 1948. Implementing a policy that accorded “independence” to African
communities living in segregated “homelands,” it announced in 1951 that it
was “pleased to confer” the title of paramount chief of the Zulu people on
Cyprian Bhekuzulu, Christina and Solomon’s son and successor.51 Reyher met
him when she returned to Zululand for a third time in the early 1950s (fig-
ure 1.14), but she does not appear to have had any further contact with the
Qwabes. As Katesa Schlosser discovered several years later, Amos had by then
ceased producing carvings altogether. When she visited him at his homestead
in June 1959, he told her that he had given a particularly beautiful stick to
King Cyprian, but he also explained that he had always regarded his staffs as
little more than a hobby. Showing her two damaged walking sticks that he had
never completed, he noted that the income he had derived from carving was
in any case negligible.
By contrast, Zizwezenyanga had become increasingly prolific. When
Schlosser met and photographed him at the Bantu Agricultural Show (fig-
ure 1.15) and at his home (figure 1.16) near the Qondo store, she was struck
by the confident fluidity of his practice, noting, “He worked on each fascia
board in such a way that it could immediately be functionally utilised if a Zulu
customer wanted to incorporate it into his sleeping mat frame; he drilled a
hole into each of the four corners. Vertical fascia boards could be fastened
through these holes with pegs to the short horizontal wooden pieces of the
frames.” She also mentioned Qwabe’s habit of producing work in the presence
of onlookers, obviously intent on impressing potential patrons. After arriving
at the market with a relief panel from which he “had only partially carved
out the motifs on the blackened surface, . . . Qwabe made more and more
figures appear” with his pocket knife over the course of the day: “He let several
parts remain black. By varying the depth of the cuts into the blackened layer

FIGURE 1.14 Rebecca Reyher photographing King Cyprian, ca. 1951.
This photograph was probably taken by Father Ignaz Jutz from the
Benedictine monastery, Nongoma. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute,
Harvard University.
or cutting right through it, he achieved colour-differentiation and a certain

three-dimensional effect.” 52 This sophisticated use of shading, which became a
hallmark of Qwabe’s work when he had access to comparatively fine-grained
hard woods, is a far cry from the pencil touch-ups he commonly used in the
mid-1930s, which are visible on the Acutt panels and on some of the works
Reyher purchased. His shading was also quite unlike the technique employed
in his panel recording King Dinuzulu’s 1908 incarceration, where he drew di-
rectly onto the surface of the panel images of a man standing behind a cow
(figure 1.8), a cattle byre filled with cattle, and the king in prison with a visitor
and the guards who had been imprisoned for trying to assist him (see figure
1.6). In some cases, he seems to have drawn these details because they were
too small to include as relief carvings; in others, drawing might have been an
awkward attempt to suggest spatial depth.
Qwabe’s increasing technical fluidity notwithstanding, by the late 1950s,
as Schlosser recounted, he clearly had developed the habit of manufacturing
“offcuts into small horizontal plates with only one motif, say, a kraal or maybe
a leopard.” 53 Like the mat racks he continued to produce for local clients liv-
ing in Nongoma area, he provided these platelets with four holes, which, as
Schlosser pointed out, “were in any case advantageous to the curio trade, as
54 S andra K lopper

F I G U R E 1 . 1 5
Zizwezenyanga Qwabe
at the Bantu Agricultural
Show, Nongoma, 1959.
Photograph by Katesa
Schlosser.
F I G U R E 1 . 1 6
Zizwezenyanga Qwabe at
his homestead near the
Qondo Trading Store,
close to Nongoma, 1959.
Photograph by Katesa
Schlosser.
they could then easily be hung up.” On odd occasions, he also carved “extra-
long slats of almost 90 cm for specific purposes,” but he was finding it difficult
to meet the demands for his work by traders in Johannesburg and Pretoria,
who purchased the “vast majority” of his production.54
Conclusion
Part of the difficulty in trying to provide a coherent interpretive framework
for Qwabe’s works is that he had no artistic peers. Like the Congolese artists
whose paintings have become widely known through the patronage and re-
search of Johannes Fabian and Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Qwabe became increas-
ingly client centered over time, ultimately producing multiple versions of a
single icon rather than unique and idiosyncratic creations of particular scenes
or historical narratives.55 But other comparisons between his works and theirs
are in some respects more revealing, including the complex relationship he es-
tablished between imagination and popular memory in the (re)construction
of historical events, his evocation of heroic martyrs like King Dinuzulu as a
deliberate act of resistance against colonial historiography, and his tendency
to rely on minute pictorial details, including elephants and scenes of contem-
porary life, to perform complex symbolic functions.56
Eurocentric narratives of modernity generally deny the agency of African
artists, repeatedly undermining their experience of colonialism as a form of
loss. These narratives of modernity also tend to question marginalized indig-
enous artists’ creative capacity to reflect critically on their understanding of
the diverse values and worldviews of their clients.57 But as Qwabe’s history of
engagement with his increasingly complex market demonstrates, he managed
repeatedly to transcend the artistic assumptions of the rural community in
which he was raised without compromising his ongoing commitment to af-
firm the importance of historically entrenched rituals and cultural concepts,
which challenged and sometimes destabilized colonial perceptions of the Zulu
kingdom’s history and the life experiences of ordinary people.
Reconstructing Reyher’s role in the gradual unfolding of this shifting land-
scape of images and ideas with any degree of certainty is no longer possible.
But her total lack of concern for upholding or celebrating false hierarchies
between, for example, art and craft and the work produced by educated and
self-trained artists, played a decisive role in her spontaneous validation of the
importance of Qwabe’s work. Reyher’s exposure to the Havemeyers and to
Irma Stern introduced her to early modernist, folk, and primitive tastes. In
56 S andra K lopper

combination, they enabled her to resist standard art-craft hierarchies. Rey-
her’s unqualified acknowledgment of the originality of Qwabe’s figurative
panels appears to have afforded him the creative space to challenge his own
preconceptions about the value and purpose of his art, ultimately encourag-
ing him to muster the confidence to use his work to confront racial prejudice,
the collective memory of painful historical events, and colonial narratives of
the Zulu kingdom’s transformation from an independent African state to an
impoverished colonial vassal in the aftermath of its destruction by British
forces in 1879. In a remarkable testament to Qwabe’s capacity for invention,
some of the works he appears to have produced in response to Reyher’s cel-
ebration of his artistry — such as the historical narratives of King Cetshwayo
and his son and successor Dinuzulu — would become springboards for the
increasingly complex compositional structures and pictorial solutions he de-
veloped in subsequent efforts to meet the growing demand for his work by
indigenous patrons and the external market. Ultimately, though, he would
abandon his interest in richly varied historical references in his effort to ser-
vice these markets.
Notes
1. The history of the Bambatha Rebellion is detailed, most notably, in Shula Marks,
Reluctant Rebellion: The 1906–1908 Disturbances in Natal (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1970).
2. James Stuart and D. McK. Malcolm, The Diary of Henry Francis Fynn (Pieter-
maritzburg, ZA: Shuter and Shooter, 1969), 269.
3. Sandra Klopper, “Carvers, Kings and Thrones in Nineteenth-Century Zululand,”
in African Art in Southern Africa: From Tradition to Township, ed. Anitra C. Nettleton
and David Hammond-Tooke (Johannesburg: ad Donker, 1989), 49–66.
4. Dirk J. Kotze, Letters of the American Missionaries, 1835–1838 (Cape Town: Van
Riebeeck Society, 1950), 158; James Y. Gibson, The Story of the Zulus (London: Long-
mans, Green, 1911), 241.
5. John Bird, ed., The Annals of Natal, 1495–1845 (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1965), 205.
6. George E. Cory, ed., The Diary of the Rev. Francis Owen (Cape Town: Van Rie-
beeck Society, 1926), 61.
7. David K. Rycroft and Abednego B. Ngobo, The Praises of Dingana: Izibongo zika
Dingana (Durban, ZA: Killie Campbell Africana Library, 1988), 4.
8. Sandra Klopper, “ ‘Zulu’ Headrests and Figurative Carvings: The Brenthurst Col-
lection and the Art of South-East Africa,” in Art and Ambiguity: Perspectives on the
Brenthurst Collection of Southern African Art, ed. Patricia Davidson (Johannesburg:
Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1991), 80–89.

9. Sandra Klopper, “Entangled Meanings: Historical Perspectives on Style and Pa-
tronage in Carving Traditions from Southern Africa,” in The Art of Southern Africa:
The Terence Pethica Collection (Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2007), 25.
10. The panels shown in figure 1.10 were collected by Grete Mannheim, who emi-
grated from Germany to South Africa in 1936, and from South Africa to the United
States in 1949. In South Africa, where she worked as a children’s photographer, she
traveled widely, often purchasing souvenirs like these panels during her trips. The pan-
els were acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009.
11. The most sustained account of the history of rickshaw pullers is provided by
Ros Posel, “Amahishi: Durban’s Ricksha Pullers,” Journal of Natal and Zulu History 13
(1990–91): 51–70. For a discussion of the link between beachfront tourist pullers and
Nongoma, see Sandra Klopper, “Home and Away: Modernity in the Art and Sartorial
Styles of South Africa’s Migrant Laborers and Their Families,” in Visual Century: South
African Art in Context, 1907–2007, vol. 2, 1945–1976, ed. Lize Van Robbroeck (Johan-
nesburg: Wits University Press, 2011), 120–39.
12. Elza Miles, Land and Lives: A Story of Early Black Artists (Cape Town: Human
and Rousseau, 1997), 47.
13. On my trip to the area in August 2012, I met and spoke with Qwabe’s nephew,
Sibiya, whose mother was Zizwezenyanga’s sister.
14. Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, “Natives Who Are Artists in Woodcarving: The
Work of the Qwabe Brothers,” undated clipping marked 17.4.37, News Cuttings Book 9,
Killie Campbell Africana Library, Durban, South Africa. For further details about this
clipping, see note 31 below. The confusion over the spelling of Qwabe’s first name was
likely compounded in part by his seeming illiteracy as well as inconsistencies in apply-
ing orthography rules for the Zulu language, which remain a problem to this day.
15. Sandra Klopper, “ ‘He Is My King, but He Is Also My Child’: Inkatha, the African
National Congress and the Struggle for Control over Zulu Cultural Symbols,” Oxford
Art Journal 19, no. 1 (1996): 53–66.
16. Sandra Klopper, “Necessity and Invention: The Art of Coiled Basketry in South-
ern Africa,” in Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art, ed. Dale Rosengarten et
al. (New York: Museum of African Art, 2008), 172–203.
17. The photographs Qwabe used for his depictions of Cetshwayo and Dinuzulu
were reproduced in Robert C. Samuelson, King Cetshwayo Zulu Dictionary (Durban,
ZA: Commercial Printing, 1923). This dictionary, which was compiled by Cetshwayo’s
official interpreter, also includes the praise poems of both kings. Samuelson was com-
monly known by his Zulu name Lubhembhedu, but Cetshwayo always addressed him
as Robert.
18. Samuelson, Zulu Dictionary, xiii.
19. Samuelson, Zulu Dictionary, xiv and xxv.
20. The Zulu also suffered heavy losses, with fifty-two men killed and forty-eight
wounded.
58 S andra K lopper

21. Samuelson, Zulu Dictionary, xxiv.
22. It is very plausible that Qwabe had intermittent access to old copies of the Illus-
trated London News, and he may have also looked at images in local newspapers like
the Natal Mercury. No photographs or engraved images appear in early editions of the
Zulu-language newspaper Ilanga lase Natal, which was founded in 1903 by John Dube,
who later became the first president of the African National Congress.
23. See Jeff Guy, The Heretic: A Study of the Life of William Colenso, 1814–1883 (Johan-
nesburg: Ravan Press, 1983).
24. Harold Scheub, The Poem in the Story: Music, Poetry, and Narrative (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 110.
25. Mazisi Kunene, Emperor Shaka the Great: A Zulu Epic (London: Heinemann,
1979), xxix.
26. James Stuart, A History of the Zulu Rebellion 1906: And of Dinuzulu’s Arrest, Trial
and, Expatriation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 452.
27. See Jeff Guy, The View across the River: Harriett Colenso and the Zulu Struggle
against Imperialism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002).
28. Scheub, The Poem in the Story, 29.
29. See Nicholas Cope, To Bind the Nation: Solomon kaDinuzulu and Zulu National-
ism, 1913–1933 (Pietermaritzburg, ZA: University of Natal Press, 1993), 63.
30. Michael R. Mahoney, The Other Zulus: The Spread of Zulu Ethnicity in Colonial
South Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
31. It is not clear when Reyher’s article on Qwabe and his circle was published. A
copy of this article was lodged in News Cuttings Book 9 at the Killie Campbell Africana
Library in Durban, with the date 17.4.37 added at the top. This might be a reference
to either the date of publication or the date on which the article was received by the
library. The article seems to have been written following Reyher’s return to the United
States some time after her second visit to South Africa in 1934.
32. Judging from Reyher’s diary entries related to her first visit to South Africa be-
tween September 1924 and May 1925, she first met Qwabe on January 27, 28, or 29,
1925. Folders 11.1 and 11.4, mc 562, book 3, series 1, Rebecca Hourwich Reyher Papers,
1877–1988, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
33. Reyher, “Natives Who Are Artists,” n.p.
34. As Abenizo Zulu’s surname suggests, he was a member of the Zulu royal family.
35. Reyher, “Natives Who Are Artists,” n.p.
36. Photograph mc 562-dd 34–4, Subseries A: Photographs, ca. 1920–1965, Series 7:
Photographs, Oversized, and Memorabilia, Reyher Papers.
37. The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire bought a panel almost identical to the one
sold to Lugg, in addition to a panel depicting an oxcart transporting barrels, another
common theme in Qwabe’s work. See the sales catalog for Michael Graham Stuart,
Africa: Conquered Difficulties (London: privately printed, 2012).

38. This theme appears on several, almost identical surviving panels. There is also
one in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
39. The Qwabe panel in the University of Pretoria collection appears to have been
acquired in the late 1960s. It was donated to the university by Sarel van der Walt, who
worked for the Bantu Investment Corporation (bic) of South Africa. In the early 1970s,
van der Walt exhibited work purchased mainly from KwaZulu at the South African
Association of Arts in Pretoria; the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren,
Belgium; and the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna, Austria. Gerhard de Kamper, Uni-
versity of Pretoria, personal communication, November 9, 2012, and July 3, 2015. See
also Jenni Basson, “Zulu tentoonstelling is groot treffer in Europa,” Rapport, Septem-
ber 1, 1975.
40. Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, Amelia R. Fry, and Fern S. Ingersoll, “Heading the
New York Office 1918–1919, 1922,” Search and Struggle for Equality and Independence
(Berkeley: Regional Oral History Office, University of California, 1977), n.p. Search
and Struggle is a lengthy interview with Reyher conducted by Fry and Ingersoll as part
of the Suffragists Oral History Project. The information on Reyher’s relationship with
Havemeyer is recorded in the subsection titled “Board Members and Volunteers: Ef-
forts of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer.”
41. Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Splendid Legacy: The Havemeyer Collection (New
York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993).
42. Some of the Tiffany works commissioned for the Havemeyers’ New York resi-
dence on the Upper East Side are now in the collection of the University of Michigan
Museum of Art.
43. Frelinghuysen, Splendid Legacy, 6.
44. Reyher, who also collected folk art in later life, mentioned the importance of
Electra’s interest in these traditions in Reyher, Fry, and Ingersoll, Search and Struggle.
45. Reyher acquired only one drawing by Stern. Her other acquisitions included
a still life and two works painted on the recto and verso sides of a single canvas, a
depiction of the Cape Town flower market and scenes from the city’s Malay Quarter.
Stern also painted a portrait of Reyher, which was sold at auction in London in 2012,
along with the other Sterns formerly in her collection. Irma Stern: Five Works Origi-
nally from the Collection of Rebecca Hourwich Reyher (London: Christie’s, June 2012),
auction catalog.
46. Folder 11.1, mc 562, book 2, 111–12, series 1, Reyher Papers.
47. Hendrik P. N. Muller and Johannes F. Snelleman, Industrie des Cafres du sud-
est de l’Afrique: Collection recueillie sur les lieux et notice ethnographique (Leiden: Brill
[1892]), plate 21, figure 8.
48. Reyher, Fry, and Ingersoll, “Articles for Hearst’s International,” in Search and
Struggle, n.p.
60 S andra K lopper

49. These articles included “The Land of the Gable,” Country Life, April 1926; and
“South African Antique Furniture,” Good Housekeeping, October 1926.
50. Rebecca Hourwich Reyher’s Zulu Woman: The Life Story of Christina Sibiya was
republished by the University of Natal Press in 1999, with a historical introduction by
Marcia Wright and a literary afterword by Liz Gunner.
51. Anna K. Buverud, “The King and the Honeybirds: Cyprian BhekuZulu kaSolo-
mon, Zulu Nationalism and the Implementation of the Bantu Authorities System in
Zululand, 1948–1957” (master’s thesis, University of Oslo, 2007), 47.
52. Katesa Schlosser, “Bantukünstler in Südafrika,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 100,
no. 1/2 (1975): 38–98. The translations from the original article quoted in this chapter
were done by Claudia Ringelmann, German Department, University of Pretoria, South
Africa.
53. Schlosser, “Bantukünstler in Südafrika,” 71.
54. Schlosser, “Bantukünstler in Südafrika,” 72.
55. For useful comparisons, see especially Johannes Fabian, Remembering the Pres-
ent: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996); and Bogumil Jewsiewicki, ed., A Congo Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban
Art (New York: Museum of African Art, 1999).
56. Fabian, Remembering the Present, 218.
57. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Histor-
ical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), on the displacement
of alternative narratives of history and modernity.

HEATHER IGLOLIORTE
2 “HOOKED FOREVER
ON PRIMITIVE PEOPLES”
James Houston and the Transformation

of “Eskimo Handicrafts” to Inuit Art
In 1951, the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, funded by the Department of Re-

sources and Development and in cooperation with the Hudson’s Bay Company
(hbc), published an instructional pamphlet (figure 2.1) entitled Sanajaksat:
Eskimo Handicrafts.1 Written and illustrated by the guild’s Arctic representa-
tive, a young artist named James Houston, the pamphlet offered suggestions
to Inuit on what to create and what materials to use in their handicraft and
carving production to make their work appealing to the Qallunaat (non-
Inuit) who lived in southern Canada, far from their Arctic settlements and
communities. The purpose of Sanajaksat, which means “things to work with”
or “things that can be made” in Inuktitut, was to stimulate a craft and carving
industry in the North. Initially, the idea was well received and enthusiasti-
cally promoted throughout the Canadian Arctic by the teachers, missionaries,
Hudson’s Bay Company traders, and officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police (rcmp) who distributed it.
In the introduction to the booklet, Houston notes that Sanajaksat was in-
tended to be the first of a series of similar illustrated guidebooks. Yet shortly
after its celebrated publication, the booklet was withdrawn from circulation
and came to be considered an embarrassment to many of those who had ear-
lier promoted it. The failure of the booklet has since caused many Inuit art
curators and historians to conclude that Sanajaksat therefore had an insignifi-
F I G U R E 2 . 1
Cover, Sanajaksat: Eskimo

Handicrafts (Montreal:
Canadian Handicrafts Guild,
1951). Reproduced with the
permission of Indigenous and
Northern Affairs Canada.
cant effect on the development of Inuit art. In this chapter, however, I propose
an alternative interpretation of Sanajaksat’s influence. Instead of viewing this
moment as an inconsequential misstep in the early development of an Inuit
art industry, I argue that the massive failure of the souvenir works promoted
in Sanajaksat was a major catalyst for the shift toward fine-art production and
the international acceptance of Inuit art as a new, modern, and “primitive”
art form during the mid-twentieth century. Through an investigation of the
circumstances surrounding the creation, content, and reception of Sanajak-
sat, I analyze the features of the booklet that contributed to its “failure” and,
conversely, to the success of modern and contemporary Inuit art in the latter
half of the twentieth century. I consider the ingenuity of Inuit artists in devel-
oping an international arts industry from a small-scale handicrafts initiative,
and examine the influence of midcentury modernism and modernist primi-
tivism on the development of Inuit arts under the guidance of Houston, who
acted as Inuit art’s most influential mentor in the North, its primary advocate
in the South, and the key mediator between these two dissonant worlds. The
backlash that greeted the souvenir handicrafts initiative as initially conceived
spurred Houston to cultivate midcentury modernism in Inuit stone sculpture
“ H ooked F orever on P rimitive P eoples ” 63

and to mobilize early twentieth-century primitivist sentiments in the promo-
tion of Inuit art. This development, led by a new generation of artists, enabled
contemporary Inuit stone sculpture to emerge from the shadow of souvenir
art production to be claimed and, eventually, to be acclaimed internationally
as modern art by art cognoscenti.
Inuit Art Industries before Modernism

Reflecting on the introductory period of Inuit art in the late 1940s, prominent
early collector Ian Lindsay explained that when Inuit ivory carvings first made
their debut in the South, they were considered merely “Native craft” and were
associated with First Nations craftwork.2 Before 1949, Lindsay recalled, “Few
southerners had ever seen an Eskimo, let alone the Arctic. Eskimos were often
thought of as being some sort of Indian (when they were thought of at all),
who dwelt in igloos and travelled by dogsled in a cold, inhospitable land. And
that was about the sum of it.” 3 The Inuit, in return, had been exposed only to
the margins of the dominant culture within the small-scale contact zone cre-
ated by exchanges with explorers, whalers, missionaries, military personnel,
administrators, and trading post staff located within Inuit land. Experience
had taught the Inuit to produce crafts and carvings tailored to this limited
market. Therefore, when the handicrafts experiment was initiated with the
goal of producing objects salable in the South, the Inuit had to rely heavily on
their white contacts for guidance in creating “what the white man wanted.” 4
Inuit knowledge of “things that can be made” for sale or trade with Qallu-
naat before the 1940s was based on their existing expertise in creating every-
thing they had needed for life in the Arctic before European contact, coupled
with the experiences of several centuries of increasing contact with southern
visitors. For millennia before contact, Inuit across the circumpolar North had
employed steatite, commonly known as soapstone — one of the most popular
and common contemporary sculptural materials — to create cooking pots,
lamps, and other vessels, while objects of personal, cultural or spiritual signif-
icance, such as hair combs, ornaments, and amulets, were almost exclusively
carved from the most valuable carving material, walrus ivory.5
By the eighteenth century, the arrival of whalers in the eastern and central
Arctic created a stimulus for new carving genres. Eager to obtain valuable Eu-
ropean goods like steel needles, saw blades, trade cloth, flour, and sugar, Inuit
traded on their expertise as guides and mapmakers, while also beginning to
carve ivory figurines to barter with whalers. The whalers in turn taught Inuit
64 H eather I gloliorte

the art of scrimshaw, which expanded on the existing bow drill engraving
techniques that Inuit artists had used for millennia to incise elaborate decora-
tive patterns in ivory; thus the introduction of scrimshaw initiated a wave of
Inuit intercultural trade production in the eastern Canadian Arctic.6 Succes-
sive generations of whalers not only enthusiastically collected all manner of
precontact ivory carvings representing northern life, but also encouraged the
production of such intercultural souvenirs as ashtrays and cribbage boards —
Western objects that Native artisans made from materials indigenous to the
Arctic, particularly ivory, decorated with Inuit motifs.
The fur trade, and the establishment of Hudson’s Bay Company trading posts,
provided a further site for exchange during the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Through the posts, Inuit souvenir carvings and curiosities, such as
replica tools and hunting accoutrements, were disseminated to a relatively small
market of trading post staff, missionaries, military personnel, anthropologists,
government police, and Arctic administrators. In the twentieth century, two
other parties became interested in Inuit handicrafts. The first was the Canadian
Handicrafts Guild (established in 1906), a nonprofit organization whose man-
date was to preserve and stimulate the production of “traditional” Canadian
handicrafts, including forms of settler folk art and Indigenous handicrafts.7
Ellen Easton McLeod has argued that the guild’s annual exhibitions both cre-
ated and gratified the demand for “authentic” Native arts among collectors and
tourists, noting that by exhibiting indigenous crafts in the art gallery, the guild
gave them a stature above the “curio.” 8 And because the Northwest Territories
Council of the federal government was invested in fostering indigenous arts
industries, in 1938 Major David McKeand, the council’s secretary in charge of
the Eastern Arctic Patrol, began to explore how the guild could encourage Inuit
handicrafts as a way to provide support in the face of decline in the fur trade.
He was particularly concerned with Inuit who were orphans, elderly, unable to
hunt, or living in institutions because of illness or disability.9
The imagined future for Inuit carvers and craftspeople, as conceived vari-
ously by the guild, the government, and the Hudson’s Bay Company, was thus
firmly rooted in the faithful reproduction of “authentic” handicrafts, the mass
carving of souvenir trinkets, and the creation of an ad hoc replacement econ-
omy for those who were underemployed, ill, or disabled. Post managers of
the Hudson’s Bay Company had encouraged the production of “realistic and
craftsmanlike depictions of life in the Arctic,” whereas the guild had encour-
aged the elevation of traditional Inuit “curiosities” to gallery-worthy collect-
ible pieces.10 The Northwest Territories Council was primarily concerned that

the goods produced provide some economic relief, while other Arctic visitors
sought out transcultural items to take home as souvenirs. Given these various
and sometimes conflicting recommendations from outsiders, the expectation
that Inuit carvers and craftspeople would welcome the Sanajaksat guidebook
in the coming years seemed reasonable.
The Reception of Sanajaksat in the North

While the booklet has received little scholarly attention thus far, archival re-
cords show that for a brief period, Sanajaksat was widely used in the Canadian
Arctic, where it was shared and circulated at rates much higher than have been
reported. Government invoices and correspondence reveal that one shipment
of fifteen hundred copies went north in 1951, and that as many as seventy
or eighty copies were given out per settlement. This would have likely been
enough to allow each family to receive a booklet; even today most Inuit com-
munities number fewer than a thousand people, and settlements were much
smaller during the time of their formation.11 In fact, rcmp reports stated that
in the Keewatin District, on the west side of Hudson Bay, in the areas around
Arviat and Padlei, officers made sure that every family received a booklet.12
The welfare administrator and teacher in Kuujjuaq, Nunavik (then known as
Fort Chimo), also reported distributing copies to all adults in the surrounding
camps and urging them to participate in the initiative. The production and
sales of carvings and handicrafts increased dramatically in the communities
that received the booklet. Inukjuak (Port Harrison), for example, experienced
an increase in purchases from just $76 in 1948 to $11,700 in 1952. In Povungni-
tuk, the increase was from $90 to $1900 in the same time span.13
Spurred on by Houston’s initiatives, this preliminary success responded to
a deep economic need in Inuit communities. The cyclical decline in white fox
populations — the mainstay of the Arctic trapping industry for decades — and
the diminishing value of fur during the Great Depression had left many newly
settled Inuit suddenly dependent on governmental support, a situation that
had been causing great distress to the self-reliant Inuit as well as to their pa-
ternalistic benefactors in the government and hbc. The distribution of relief
funds soon decreased significantly in communities participating in the new
initiative, and rcmp officers further reported an overall increase in self-esteem
of Inuit who were given the opportunity to regain their independence and
support their families by participating in handicraft production.14 Given the
positive and almost immediate effects artistic production had on the contrib-

uting communities, an instructional booklet was welcomed because it offered
guidance to the carvers and craftspeople on what objects would be most val-
ued cross-culturally. Yet despite these initial good results, the pamphlet soon
drew sharp criticism from many earlier supporters.
The Creation of Sanajaksat: Precursors, Content, and Controversy

In the two years before the creation of the booklet, Houston had been actively
engaged in purchasing and promoting Inuit crafts and carvings on behalf of
the guild. The story of how he became involved with the initiation of this mod-
ern art form has been recounted often by Houston and others. In brief, he had
studied art in Canada during the 1930s before enlisting in the armed forces.
After serving in World War II, he spent a year at L’Académie de la Grande
Chaumière in Paris, and then returned to Canada in 1947. He first encountered
the Inuit on a chance trip to Inukjuak, Quebec, in 1949 and was so impressed
by their artistic talent and interest in creating artworks for trade that upon
his return south, he immediately approached the guild about developing the
handicraft industry in the North.
By his own account, Houston had long been searching for such an oppor-
tunity without knowing exactly what it was he had been seeking. Born in To-
ronto in 1921, his interest in art and in “primitive” peoples had begun early.
As a child, he took classes at the Art Gallery of Toronto, where he received
instruction from renowned Canadian painter Arthur Lismer. When Houston
was about twelve, as he later recalled in a New Yorker interview, Lismer re-
turned from a trip somewhere on the continent of Africa and came dancing
into the classroom wearing a huge mask while playing a recording of drums
and song. “I was hooked forever on primitive peoples,” Houston explained.
“Lismer changed everything for me, I was going to travel and draw.” 15
Like many young Canadian artists at the time, Houston was inspired by
the Group of Seven and Emily Carr, who decades earlier had established the
vast Canadian landscape as their primary subject matter, and then traveled
extensively in the West and North to capture this landscape on canvas.16 After
the war, Houston returned to Ontario and immediately headed north, even-
tually hitching a ride on a flight headed to Inukjuak. There, Houston began
sketching the Inuit he met. In exchange for a portrait, Houston was gifted with
a tiny stone caribou. He first assumed it was ancient, but when he showed the
piece to the local hbc trading post manager, he was surprised to learn that it
had probably been made for him just the night before. After a brief moment

FIGURE 2.2 James Houston displaying carvings and crafts in Pangnirtung, 1951.
In the 1950s Houston toured the Central Arctic, instructing Inuit on how to make
crafts and carving that would appeal to a southern audience. Reproduced with the
permission of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada.
of disappointment, Houston became excited to discover that carving was still

practiced in the North.17 Returning south, Houston presented a proposal to
the guild’s Indian and Eskimo Committee on November 18, 1948, for the de-
velopment of Inuit handicrafts in the Arctic.18 Soon, a tenuous agreement was
brokered between the guild, the Northwest Territories administration, and the
Hudson’s Bay Company. This agreement facilitated Houston’s purchasing and
promotional trips throughout the North as well as the sale of the pieces he
collected in the South (figure 2.2).
The first exhibition, which opened without fanfare at the guild on Novem-
ber 21, 1949, was a great success despite its relatively modest promotion.19
The following year, the government agreed to finance a second excursion to
the North. Encouraged by Houston, Inuit living in several communities in the
Northwest Territories and in northern Quebec produced approximately 2,500
pieces, mostly carvings, between February and July 1950. These pieces, too,
sold briskly in the South.
Houston thus encouraged this handicraft and carving production in ad-
vance of the publication of Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts. Numerous sources
have reported that while he traveled with several crafts and carvings to show
Inuit, he also frequently made sketches of the things he collected across the

Arctic and circulated these drawings for the purposes of instruction. George
Carpenter of the Montreal Gazette interviewed Houston for the guild’s ex-
hibition opening on November 19, 1951, and reported, “Jim makes drawings
of any new and authentic Eskimo carvings and passes them around to other
bands.” 20 In Ethnic and Tourist Arts, anthropologist Nelson H. H. Graburn
reported that Inuit artists told him, “Mr. Houston made small drawings with
a pencil on paper and asked if they could be copied in soapstone, saying that
these carvings would be bought.” 21 In the article “Canadian Eskimo Carving
in Historical Perspective,” Charles Martijn, another anthropologist working in
the North during those years, cited Guy Mary-Rousselière as telling him in
1961 that in “Repulse Bay, and no doubt other settlements as well, the Hud-
son’s Bay Company store had on display a big placard of drawings by Houston,
providing the Eskimos with some ideas on what kind of carvings they ought
to be making.” 22 A 1950 National Film Board photograph of a display shelf in
the Inukjuak hbc store corroborates this account, showing Inuit carvings and
crafts arranged directly below two large and prominent posters, complete with
instructions written in Inuit syllabics in what is unmistakably Houston’s hand
(figure 2.3). Departmental reports note that similar displays and information
had been seen in settlements and posts across the Arctic. Using drawings,
then, Houston had already been surmounting the language barrier between
himself and the Inuit and had begun to suggest what they should make based
on what he had seen during his trips across the Arctic.
The guild’s publication of its instructional pamphlet thus came early in the
history of the fledgling craft and carving industry. Four years earlier, the guild
had published a similar one-page list entitled “Suggestions for Eskimo Hand-
icrafts,” which had been circulated throughout the eastern Arctic. As an in-
structional guide, however, Sanajaksat was more comprehensive and effective
because it included on every page both pictorial suggestions and explanatory
texts, which had been translated into Inuktitut syllabics.23 Houston’s approach
to instruction by circulating illustrations changed how Inuit received infor-
mation about making art that would appeal to Qallunaat and widen their
repertoire. The twenty-eight-page booklet, and the initial productions it fos-
tered, did not differentiate among the kinds of things Inuit had been making
for themselves or for sale to outsiders for centuries, and those that had been
collected as curiosities, souvenirs, and crafts, rather than as “art,” such as tools,
toys, and figurines. On page eight, for example, Houston drew a harpoon head,
a model snow knife, and an ulu (a woman’s knife, with a handle and semicir-
cular blade), the primary uses of which are, respectively, hunting, building an

FIGURE 2.3 Display shelf in Inukjuak, Quebec, 1950. Photograph by Wilf
Doucette, National Film Board of Canada, Library and Archives Canada,
1971-271 npc, e011160482. Reproduced with the permission of Indigenous
and Northern Affairs Canada.
iglu, and skinning and butchering animals; on page twenty-five, he illustrated

a goose wing brush, used to dust snow from traditionally prepared skin and
fur clothing to prevent it from freezing. These functional objects were held
in great esteem by the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, as well as by Qallunaat
buyers who had long appreciated Inuit tools and technologies as ethnographic
curiosities, and many savvy Inuit had already created replicas of these practi-
cal objects for trade. In Houston’s introduction to Sanajaksat, he stressed that
these “purely Eskimo” objects depicted in the booklet could be made wherever
materials were available, regional or cultural specificity notwithstanding. To
make these “curiosities” appealing to a southern Canadian audience, Hous-
ton reiterated the instructions from his introduction on the relevant pages,

reminding Inuit to carefully polish all ivory models and to thoroughly clean
any skin or fur products — such as the sealskin purse, button-down coat, and
rifle case complete with ammunition pouch — to ensure the removal of all “na-
tive” smells. While Clifford Wilson of Hudson’s Bay House had forewarned
the guild that the smell of these naturally tanned items would be unappealing
to a southern audience, the guild insisted it would still purchase these works
because they would be valuable for exhibition purposes or “for sale to curio
collectors.” 24 Houston and his guild collaborators believed it necessary for
makers to abide by these contradictory specifications — “keeping the native
character” but finishing according to southern tastes — for their products to
appeal to the underdeveloped Inuit handicraft market.
Sanajaksat also included drawings of objects inspired by the long history
of transcultural contact and exchange with European whalers and explorers
during the preceding centuries, as well as many models of Arctic wildlife
scenes still popular today. Ashtrays, keepsake boxes, matchstick holders, and
bracelets were suggested, all decorated with Inuit motifs and made from ma-
terials indigenous to the Arctic. Inuit-made cribbage boards of walrus ivory,
such as the one depicted on page six of Sanajaksat, were particularly popular
(figures 2.4 and 2.5).25 Other pages of the booklet depict carvings of animals
or Inuit figures engaged in camping or hunting. In the context of Arctic carv-
ing production, such animals and figures would have been accessible, iconic
representations of the Inuit creators and their way of life as imagined by
southern consumers. These experimental early works, which pointed to the
artistic potential of the Inuit sculptors from the beginning of the fledgling art
movement, were described as “moments in time” by Houston. The carvings,
while still quite small, were often pegged to bases, making them suitable (and
stable) for tabletop display. This was a new way for Inuit to conceptualize their
sculptural work, which had been previously created to be worn on the body or
turned over in one’s hand, rather than displayed on a surface.26
This new era thus ushered in a number of significant adaptations to Inuit
artistic production, both reflected in and inspired by the booklet, some more
unusual than others. By far the most perplexing inclusion in the booklet was
the “totem pole,” illustrated on page eleven (figure 2.6). Miniature totem poles
made of argillite and wood had long been produced on the Northwest coast
of Canada, where totem poles were both culturally and regionally specific to a
number of Northwest Coast First Nations, as well as popular early twentieth-
century tourist attractions; not so in the Canadian Arctic, where most Inuit
would never have seen anything like a totem pole before. That examples of

FIGURE 2.4 Cribbage board, Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts (Montreal: Canadian
Handicrafts Guild, 1951), 6. Reproduced with the permission of Indigenous and
Northern Affairs Canada.
FIGURE 2.5 Bracelets, needle case, and matchstick holder, Sanajaksat: Eskimo
Handicrafts (Montreal: Canadian Handicrafts Guild, 1951), 7. Reproduced with the
permission of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada.
these Inuit-made totem poles predate the booklet’s publication and can be
found in several Canadian collections from this era is not itself the mystery;
Houston had been circulating drawings prior to Sanajaksat, and in fact, sev-
eral totem poles appear in the image of the aforementioned Inukjuak hbc
store shelf in 1950 (see figure 2.3).27 The questions are, rather, why Houston
chose to include iconic Northwest Coast imagery in an Inuit art instructional
guide at all, and where the original inspiration for these Inuit “totem poles”
came from.
Ingo Hessel has commented that “totem imagery is not inconsistent with
Inuit spiritual beliefs,” and it is true that sculpting in the vertical is often used
to represent the transformation from humans to animals, or to express the
kinship between Inuit and Arctic nonhuman entities.28 Yet Houston’s drawing

FIGURE 2.6 Totem pole, Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts
(Montreal: Canadian Handicrafts Guild, 1951), 11. Reproduced
with the permission of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada.
of a totem pole — depicting large-faced stylized animals stacked one above the

other, with a raven with wings outspread on the top — is clearly influenced by
Northwest Coast art, even if Houston refers to the piece not as a totem pole
but as “the animals carved from a single piece of stone.” 29 This drawing likely
influenced the production of several similar carvings now at the Winnipeg
Art Gallery, while another example discovered in the Canadian Museum
of History collections so closely resembles Houston’s drawing that it could

F I G U R E 2 . 7 Detail of totem pole, Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts (Montreal:
Canadian Handicrafts Guild, 1951), 11. Reproduced with the permission of

Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada.
FIGURE 2.8 Isa Oomayoualook (attributed), animal totem sculpture, ca. 1951.

Inukjuak. Stone and ivory. Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, Quebec,
iv-b-1725, s98-3371.
have feasibly served as his model for the booklet illustration. As Hessel has
written, determining which works were copies from the booklet and which
were not is difficult, as even the earlier carvings could have been drawn from
other sources.30 Winnipeg Art Gallery curator Darlene Coward Wight has also
suggested that Houston might have been inspired by the earlier “composite”
works to combine this Inuit transformation imagery with “his own Northwest
Coast-flavoured drawings.”
Yet, based on government correspondence and other archival discoveries,
I believe the most likely explanation is that Houston was responsible for the
prebooklet “totem-poles,” and that he suggested the creation of these min-
iature poles based on those he had seen in Alaskan Native Arts and Crafts
(anac) catalogs. These catalogs, which used photographs rather than draw-
ings, were published annually during the 1930s and 1940s. Produced by the
U.S. Department of the Interior Indian Arts and Crafts Board and the Bureau
of Indian Affairs, the anac catalogs included work not only by Alaskan Inuit
(Yupik and Iñupiat), but also by other diverse Northwest Coast First Nations
native to the Alaskan region, such as the totem-pole-making Tlingit, Haida,
and Tsimshian.31 Correspondence between Deputy Commissioner R. A. Gib-
son and anac Clearing House manager D. L. Burrus in November 1949, con-
firms that just months after commencing the “Eskimo project” with the guild,
Gibson requested information on the U.S. Cooperative for Eskimos in Juneau,
Alaska, and received in response a letter explaining the anac procedures for
collecting and distributing works and a list of the most popular items: mocca-
sins, dolls, baskets, carved ivory animals, and totems.32 Considering Houston
was in the employ of Gibson and the Northwest Territories administration in
1949, he likely saw these publications prior to creating Sanajaksat. The timing
of the Gibson’s request for information suggests that these catalogs were likely
sent for on Houston’s behalf, and since the catalogs grouped the art of all Alas-
ka’s Native peoples, they may well have been the source of Houston’s confusion
about the nature of the totem poles, resulting in their perplexing inclusion in
his “Eskimo” booklet (figures 2.7 and 2.8).33
Reactions to Sanajaksat’s Content and Productions

The response to Sanajaksat was remarkable, but not in the manner that had
been hoped for or expected. Although Houston had written that the book-
let was intended to “in no way limit the Eskimo,” the didactic tone of the
instructions and the simplified illustrations led many carvers to believe that

those objects, and only those objects, were exactly what the Qallunaat desired.
Instructions such as “A man standing over the seal hole; snow blocks for pro-
tection. Dressed in skins; ivory face; harpoon in hand,” or “They can be made
in any position, either sitting or walking,” seemed to leave little room for cre-
ativity, and the Inuit reasonably interpreted these definitive statements as a set
of rules, therefore reproducing the illustrated works en masse. Over decades
of increasing contact, the Inuit had become accustomed to Qallunaat gov-
ernment agents issuing strict missives, and they seem to have misconstrued
Houston’s suggestions as similar directions, against his best intentions.
The Inuit efficiency in this effort thus resulted in the production of nu-
merous examples of remarkably similar, and therefore unsalable, copies of
the objects depicted in the booklet. Hudson’s Bay posts were soon inundated
with numerous examples of objects replicating those Houston had illustrated,
many of which displayed little creative sensitivity or workmanship.34 Doug-
las Lord, a Coppermine government teacher who was actively involved in
handicrafts development in the early stages of production, also reported on
the “flood” of inferior souvenir articles, noting that he feared that this new
incentive to make “easy money” was taking hold in Coppermine, and carving
was replacing hunting activities.35 Likewise, hbc officials expressed concern
that this turn toward carving would cause the Inuit to neglect hunting and
trapping.36 The latter was clearly the reason the company was involved with
the Inuit in the first place, and they continued to insist on the “spare time”
nature of handicrafts production, despite the failing ability of the fur trade to
provide for Inuit livelihood.
The government was concerned about the tone of the booklet, which in
later years was severely criticized for its “instructional nature” and came to be
considered an embarrassment.37 R. A. J. Phillips, then chief of the Arctic Divi-
sion of the Department of Northern Affairs, described Eskimo Handicrafts as
“unfortunate.” 38 Particularly objectionable were the condescending captions
that accompanied some illustrations. On page 3, for example, Houston wrote,
“The small Eskimo man and woman . . . are carefully smoothed and polished.
Can you make one?” On page 4, he instructed, “When it is done with great
cleverness it is a thing anyone would want. Polish it carefully.” And on page 14,
he advised, “If they are carefully carved and polished the kaloona [sic] will buy
them.” In the end, the pamphlet did not turn out to be “the first of a series” as
promised; it was withdrawn from circulation shortly after its publication and
recalled in 1958.

Stone Sculpture Gains Ground in the Wake of Sanajaksat
While criticisms of the “souvenir” goods and mass-produced miniatures
included in Sanajaksat were many, some of the small stone carvings began
to quietly gain a warm reception in the South, and prices for these works
increased. Historically, soapstone had rarely been used for anything but oil
lamps and cooking pots, yet small numbers of diminutive soapstone carvings,
like the caribou Houston had been given on his first trip to Port Harrison,
had begun appearing on the market in the 1940s.39 Houston recognized that
soapstone, cheaper than ivory and readily available, was an ideal replace-
ment for ivory, which by that time was in short supply.40 Found walrus tusk
ivory, furthermore, had to be at least a year old to ensure it would not warp or
crack after carving, and it had a high intrinsic value, so post managers were
reluctant to allow children or novice carvers to practice with it.41 Because
Houston’s favored method of encouragement was to purchase everything that
Inuit artists produced, he saw stone, an inexpensive material, as ideal for the
inexperienced carvers to practice with.42 Stone also facilitated an increase in
scale beyond what had been previously possible. Whereas ivory pieces, such as
those that had inspired Sanajaksak’s illustrations, could be only a few inches in
diameter, the new stone carvings grew first to six or eight inches tall, and then
to “pedestal” or “tabletop” dimensions.43 The change in scale made it more dif-
ficult to marginalize these works as “souvenirs” or “Native crafts.” This trans-
formation in carving practices was driven by innovative Inuit artists in the
North adapting to new approaches as well as the tastes of discerning patrons
in the South, who paid good prices for larger works. As the market for bigger
carvings developed through the guild, stone quickly became the favored mate-
rial in the minds of collectors and artists alike.44 Though the trend had begun
with works by a small handful of daring carvers, within just a few years, Inuit
stone carving would become highly sought after.45
The public reacted positively to these new carvings, which conveyed a sense
of the primitive to its audience through the rounded, reductive, and simplified
forms of Arctic figures. At the time, romantic notions of the “Eskimo,” closely
associated with the rugged northern tundra and its wild Arctic animals, still
referenced the long-standing Inuit way of life on the land, even though that
reality was quickly changing into a different kind of existence.46 This nostal-
gic quality made the new stone carvings highly appealing to the Western art
world, conforming to the close association of modern avant-garde taste with
“primitive art” during the first half of the twentieth century.47

To sustain the success of these new carvings, Houston saw that promotion
of both the carvings and the carvers would have to change dramatically and
quickly in response to modern tastes. As evidenced by shifts in his writing
and collecting, in his promotional activities in both the North and the South,
and especially in his instructional practices, Houston quickly realized that the
curio carvings and crafts he had envisioned for the Inuit handicraft industry,
and had promoted in Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts, ignored the carvings’
greater potential as a new modern primitive art form. Ideally positioned as
the primary mentor to artists in the Arctic, their main promoter in southern
Canada, and the key mediator between artist and market, Houston was able
to influence both production and promotion, shaping the early industry into
the success it would become. Rather than dwelling on the shortcomings of
the handicrafts initiative, or continuing its avid promotion, Houston made an
about-face in the years immediately following the publication of Sanajaksat.
Inspired by the ambitious new sculptures of the Inuit he worked with, he took
steps to dissociate the new Inuit art from the transcultural objects included in
the booklet that contradicted the myth of Inuit primitiveness and thus dimin-
ished their appeal to the modernist primitive art market.
This shift is evident in the numerous promotional articles Houston wrote
during the 1950s, the first decade of contemporary Inuit art production, and
particularly in changes in his language that reflect the tastes of modernist
primitivism. For example, in his first article on the subject, “Eskimo Sculp-
tors,” published in 1951 in the widely read hbc magazine the Beaver, Houston
described the Inuit as “carvers,” the objects they produced as “Eskimo work”
or “handicrafts,” and the “Eskimo Project” as an “industry” intended to aid the
Inuit economy rather than as an art form.48 By 1952, however, he had begun
using the terms “art” and “artists.” 49 As Kristen Potter has noted, Houston’s
task was to naturalize Inuit commercial art production for the “armchair tour-
ist,” the indirect consumer of Inuit culture, in order to maintain the myth of
primitivity held in the South.50 To do so, Houston focused on what Christine
Lalonde has called “the sensationalism of hunters-become-artists.” 51 In his
1952 article “In Search of Contemporary Eskimo Art,” Houston wrote, “When
we ask an Eskimo if he carves art objects (sinourak), he replies, ‘Certainly.’ ” 52
At the end of this article, Houston added that the Eskimo “is delighted with
the opportunity to improve his living (and to avoid the necessity of Govern-
ment relief) through the creation of art,” writing that 75 percent of Inuit in the
settlements he had visited were making Inuit art.53 This is a significant shift
from the 1951 article, in which he described the new industry as a replacement

economy for trapping in the summer months, rather than as an emergent
art practice. Houston also shrewdly downplayed the use of power tools and
contemporary sculptural techniques, noting, “Files and saws are now used to
some extent but when those are not available the carver readily returns to his
old ways.” 54 His statement, “There is no copying of one another in this work,”
appeals simultaneously to primitivist notions of authenticity and modernist
valuations of the singular object over commodity production.55
Houston then located the Inuit in an imagined ahistorical primitive reality
— what Mary Louise Pratt has called the timeless present tense.56 He pondered,
“What motivates this man? What inner spring of consciousness demands an
art of him? Perhaps it is a clinging remnant of a forgotten civilization of the
Asiatic continent where he almost certainly originated. Perhaps it is a pure
worship of craftsmanship which he obviously holds in high esteem.” 57 He
thus guaranteed the desired authenticity by closely associating the Inuit with
ancient man, while fetishizing the commercial art production of a paradox-
ically prehistoric yet modern people. In 1954 he wrote further, “The Eskimo
possesses a cheerfulness and a tranquillity of mind to a degree that seems
almost unknown in our modern civilization.” 58 Such statements reflect a keen
awareness of the modernist idealization of “authentic” Indigenous societies
as untouched, pastoral, and unprogressive. Because the modern industrial
world is unstable and mutable, the conception of authentic Inuit society is
necessarily static and distant, “frozen” in imagined primitivist nostalgia. In
1955 Houston wrote even more explicitly in Canadian Eskimo Art, the catalog
of a major traveling exhibition, “Even today, after a century of exposure to
European culture, this primitive art persists, original, creative, and virile.” 59
This new mode of promotion in the years immediately following Sanajak-
sat’s withdrawal from circulation facilitated the ability of modernist buyers
desiring “authentic” primitive art to suppress their knowledge of the actual
conditions of the art’s production, allowing them to maintain the belief that
the art they collected was both primitive and unique.60 By 1954 Houston rarely
mentioned “handicrafts” in the media, and his writing began to demonstrate a
deeper appreciation for the modern primitivist art market.
In the North, Houston also sought new ways to provide assistance and di-
rection to artists without interfering in the creative process. In 1953, following
Sanajaksat, Houston published a series of Eskimo Bulletins for the North,
writing in the inaugural edition, “The pictures here are some of the things that
have been made by Eskimos. They are not shown to have you copy them but to
give you an idea of some things that are wanted. Make your own carvings the

way you want but try hard to make them the best you can.” 61 Clearly, Houston
was trying to avoid the pitfalls of Sanajaksat by encouraging Inuit to be cre-
ative and to experiment. Yet in the second edition of his Eskimo Bulletin, sub-
titled “Handicrafts” but containing only carving suggestions, Houston wrote,
Eskimos are becoming well-known for their cleverness in carving.

The things some of you make are very good and many people in the
white men’s countries buy them and like them very much. Some things
they like better than others and it is to let you know which things are
best liked that we are writing this article. The things they like best are
carvings of people, animals and birds. They like the single pieces best,
not the ones that are joined or pegged together. They want stone, ivory
or bone carvings of people, bears, walrus, seals, caribou, whales, fish,
otters, owls, ptarmigan, ducks, geese, seagulls and loons; stone kayaks
with kayak-men and a few ivory or stone iglus. They like both large
and small carvings but they want good ones, so all the things you make
should be carefully and perfectly carved.62
Houston was clearly at pains to encourage creativity and to enable Inuit to

learn how to appeal to the modernist primitivist art market, and yet in listing
seventeen separate and specific subjects for carvings, complete with illustra-
tions, his message appears at variance with his intentions.
As became evident in the works and growing fame of individual artists,
Houston had significantly altered his promotion to encourage Inuit artists to
follow the lead of the most successful of the new generation of sculptors, includ-
ing using stone, increasing scale, and developing individual styles. Exhibitions
in Montreal and internationally began to publicize an emergence of “master”
Inuit sculptors. Akeeaktashuk, an artist originally from Inukjuak, was one of
the few artists who had begun his rise to fame even before Sanajaksat was pub-
lished (figure 2.9).63 By the time Houston featured his sculpture in Canadian
Eskimo Art, Akeeaktashuk’s work was already gaining wide recognition; he was
a featured artist in the landmark 1953 exhibition held in London’s Gimpel Fils
gallery (which had drawn the attention of European admirers of primitive art,
such as Henry Moore, to the new Inuit sculpture).64 Like Akeeaktashuk, artist
Amidilak (Amidlak), of Kogaluk River on the east coast of Hudson Bay, was
quick to gain early fame and was featured in several publications between 1950
and 1953. Boosted by sales at the guild and coverage in Houston’s articles, art-
ists such as Sywollie (Sarollie), Johnny Inukpuk, Osuitok Ipeelee, and Johnny
POV were soon sought after by private and public collectors alike, beginning a

F I G U R E 2 . 9
Akeeaktashuk, Woman
and Child, ca. 1948–1953.
Steatite (soapstone).
Canadian Museum of
History, Gatineau, Quebec,
iv-b-1179, s2002-2128.
F I G U R E 2 . 1 0
Amidilak, Bear Sculpture,

ca. 1950s. Steatite (soap
stone). Canadian Museum
of History, Gatineau,
Quebec, na 586, s98-3343.
newfound, if slow to develop, appreciation for Inuit artists as individual talents,
rather than as anonymous cultural producers (figure 2.10).65
One factor that contributed to this new modern art form’s success was its
aesthetic accessibility. In contrast to the “primitive” arts of other Native North
Americans, this contemporary art form was easily “understood” by the public.
Free from abstraction or codified symbols, the bold, simplified, and expressive
forms and the recognizable Arctic subject matter catered to the primitivist
market. This acceptance was accompanied by frequent comparisons to “mas-
terpieces” and “masters” of Western art. In a review of Canadian Eskimo Art,
for example, Henry Strub writes, “The Eskimo sculptures from life, but not
in realistic detail such as is found in Rodin. It is more reminiscent of Maillol
showing love of life, of form, of texture and of rhythm. It is a strange coinci-
dence that Eskimo artists have independently arrived at so many conclusions
that we associate with what is most modern in art.” 66
Such comparisons, of course, were not the result of coincidence but were
carefully orchestrated by Houston, a modernist artist whose tastes had been
formed by exposure to the Group of Seven, a lifelong interest in “primitive
peoples,” and a year studying art in Paris, in 1947, during a period when
primitive art had become closely associated with the modern art of the avant-
garde.67 Martijn notes, “As an artist in his own right, and having been imbued
at art school with all of the values and ideas peculiar to Western art tradition,
[Houston] could not help but interpret Inuit carving on the basis of what his
training had taught him. Perhaps unconsciously, Houston ended up impos-
ing his Euro-Canadian art concepts on the acquiescent Eskimo carvers who
benefited from his hints and advice by making their handiwork as acceptable
as possible to southern buyers.” 68 Houston’s influence and instruction thus
ensured that not only would Inuit art’s primitive qualities appeal to mid-
twentieth-century Qallunaat buyers, but its modernism would as well.69
Inuit Artistic Agency in the Age of Colonization (and Decolonization)

Although the early handicrafts industry produced many noticeable benefits
for Inuit, Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts and its resulting productions were
received very poorly by Inuit, the government, and the public alike. Yet during
the same years, in some ways ignited by Houston’s initiatives, the stone carv-
ings produced by a small but growing group of talented Inuit artists began
garnering recognition and a following in the South as a modern primitive
art form. Faced with the failure of Sanajaksat, and the growing acceptance

of stone sculpture by the national and international art world, Houston was
able to use his position as a middleman to promote Inuit art and artists as
modern and neoprimitive. These two discursive shifts were interdependent.
Houston’s new focus on the development and promotion of individual artists’
talents was tied to the failure of handicrafts and, on a deeper level, to his longer
interest in modernist primitivism, sparked in his youth and no doubt rekin-
dled during his year as an art student in Paris. As the primary contact between
North and South in handicrafts developments, Houston was positioned to ex-
ert decisive influence on both the white administrators and the Inuit produc-
ers, to exercise direction over the initial handicrafts experiment, and later, to
dramatically alter the initial plans for that arts and crafts development to the
eventual benefit of those involved. His ambassadorship for the industry led
to an unprecedented collaboration among government, Inuit, trade industry,
and a major philanthropic organization, each with a very different agenda for
Inuit handicrafts development.
Of course, no matter how influential or charismatic the promoter, promo-
tion alone cannot create and sustain an art movement or market. Whatever
lens was cast on Inuit artists in the mid-twentieth-century by its initial audi-
ence in the South, Inuit creative expression, talent, leadership, and tenacity
have made this industry the success it is today. As Marybelle Mitchell has writ-
ten, although the guild, the government, and the hbc — united by Houston —
had laid the foundation of the carving industry in the 1950s, only under later
Inuit cooperative control did that the industry became a multimillion-dollar
business.70 Ruth B. Phillips has explained, in a parallel context, that by ab-
sorbing Houston’s advice and adapting his strategies in his or her own work,
each Inuit artist “turns modernist primitivism into indigenous modernity.” 71
Inuit art is now internationally recognized, and the arts in all forms and media
contribute significantly to sustaining both the economy and community well
being. Kinngait (Cape Dorset), for example, has recently been declared Cana-
da’s most artistic community, with the highest per capita number of artists in
the country.72 Modern and contemporary Inuit artists have been able to create
and maintain appreciation among both the general public and discerning
modernist and contemporary art collectors.
Although Inuit craft industries never completely vanished, and some major
exhibitions continued to include “handicrafts” with “fine arts” well into the
next decade, the initial shift from a general purview of Inuit expression to
the focused fine-art production of stone sculpture, then prints, and eventually
drawings, undeniably succeeded in firmly cementing a clear division between

Inuit “high” fine arts and “low” craft productions that persisted in the field for
decades. While the fine-art genres of stone carving and printmaking may have
gradually developed into major streams of production on their own, I would
argue that Houston and the innovative first generation of Inuit stone sculptors
with whom he collaborated played a critical role in encouraging this rapid
shift in the public perception of Inuit art during the early 1950s.
Ironically, the failure of Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts can now be seen as
having had a palpable effect on the development of contemporary Inuit art.
The poor reception of souvenier and craft objects, such as those promoted in
Sanajaksat, fueled a shift away from handicraft production toward fine arts,
and away from didactic instruction to an emphasis on encouraging quality
of workmanship and the development of individual styles. While handicraft
production — the creation of “useful and acceptable” objects like parkas, mitts,
and slippers — has always been an important industry in the North, the early
success of Inuit art in the South has relied on its separation from craft and
its transition from miniature ivories and souvenirs to the fine-art genres of
large stone carvings, wall hangings, drawings, and prints; today this has grown
to include such contemporary modes of production as painting, photogra-
phy and installation. In those brief yet formative years, it is remarkable how
quickly and nimbly Inuit were able to shift from the role intended for them, as
the rote producers of mass souvenirs, to self-determined, modern artists. In so
doing, they have inspired successive generations of Inuit artists to also carve
their own path in the art world.
Notes
1. The cover of the booklet only shows stylized Inuktitut syllabics, and the title is not
repeated anywhere else in the booklet in Inuktitut roman orthography, so respected
Inuit elder and language preservation advocate Piita Irniq, the first commissioner of
Nunavut, translated the title into contemporary Inuktitut: “Sanajaksat: things to work
with.” Previous mentions of this booklet, including my own and others cited through-
out this essay, include spellings of the same term as Sunuyuksuk and Sanajaksat.
2. Ian Lindsay, “A Look Back at the Early Days: Some Personal Thoughts,” in The
First Passionate Collector: The Ian Lindsay Collection of Inuit Art (Winnipeg, MB: Win-
nipeg Art Gallery, 1990), 21.
3. Lindsay, “A Look Back,” 21.
4. Nelson H. H. Graburn, “Inuit Art and the Expression of Eskimo Identity,” Ameri-
can Review of Canadian Studies 17, no. 1 (1987): 52.
5. While this chapter refers primarily to ivory sourced from found walrus tusks,

Inuit carvers also sculpted with ivory sourced from mammal teeth and narwhal tusk
as well.
6. Archaeological evidence and oral history attest that Inuit from Labrador were
engaged in trade practices with other Indigenous peoples along the coast of southern
Labrador and Newfoundland long before the arrival of Europeans to the Canadian
Arctic, after which Inuit traded or stole precious European goods such as metal.
7. In 1974, the Canadian Handicrafts Guild merged with the Canadian Craftsman’s
Association to become the Canadian Crafts Council in Ottawa. In Quebec, the new
entity was renamed the Canadian Guild of Crafts Quebec, which remains its name
today. “Historical Background,” Canadian Guild of Crafts, accessed July 10, 2015, http://
www.canadianguildofcrafts.com/modules.php?name=Historique&newlang=english.
8. Ellen Easton McLeod, In Good Hands: The Women of the Canadian Handicrafts
Guild (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), 217.
9. McKeand subsequently became the Northwest Territories administration repre-
sentative of the Indian and Eskimo Committee, thus cementing the commitment of
the guild and the government to work together on the development of an Inuit craft
and souvenir art industry. Interestingly, the first collaboration between the guild and
the Northwest Territories administration was to create a one-page list of “Suggestions
for Eskimo Handicrafts” to be distributed by the steamship Nascopie on its summer
voyage “to every post where there was a white woman, missionary, nurse or teacher,
wife of a Factor, or an R.C.M.P. man.” Alice Lighthall, Annual Report of the Indian and
Eskimo Committee, Canadian Guild of Crafts Quebec (cgcq), 1941, c10 d1 017, Cana-
dian Handicrafts Guild Archives. When Major McKeand retired in 1945, James Wright,
chief of the Arctic Division, took over responsibility for the Inuit handicrafts industry.
During his tenure, Wright also explored the possibility of using the handicraft industry
to benefit ill or disabled Inuit living in institutions, as well as orphans and the elderly.
Helga Goetz, The Development of Inuit Art (Hull, QC: Department of Indian Affairs,
1985), 10.
10. Graburn, “Expression of Eskimo Identity,” 52.
11. G. E. B. Sinclair to A. Lighthall, May 2, 1951, and I. M. Plummer to G. E. B. Sin-
clair, May 14, 1951, file 255–1, pt. 1, vol. 108, rg85, Library and Archives Canada (lac).
12. Goetz, Development, 16.
13. These figures are estimates by Goetz and include prices paid by the guild, hbc,
Catholic and Anglican missions, and military personnel. Goetz, Development, 22.
14. Nelson H. H. Graburn “Authentic Inuit Art: Creation and Exclusion in the Ca-
nadian North,” in “Beyond Art/Artifact/Tourist Art: Social Agency and the Cultural
Value(s) of the Aestheticized Object,” ed. Nelson Graburn and Aaron Glass, special
issue, Journal of Material Culture 9, no. 2 (2004): 148.
15. Mary D. Kierstead, “Profiles: The Man,” New Yorker, August 29, 1988, 34.
16. Ann K. Morrison has explained that these journeys by modernist artists “have
been equated with the nineteenth-century ideal of personal enlightenment through

the testing grounds of the wilderness, their status as avant-garde artists reaffirmed
through their imagery and use of paint.” Morrison, “Nationalism, Cultural Appropri-
ation and an Exhibition,” in Rhetorics of Utopia: Early Modernism and the Canadian
West Coast, Collapse 5, ed. Grant Arnold (Vancouver, BC: Vancouver Art Forum So-
ciety, 2000), 97.
17. Houston’s own multiple accounts of the period between 1948 and 1953, from the
time of his first encounter with the Inuit until the end of the “handicrafts experiment,”
are rife with conflicting information, inaccuracies, and errors. While the key elements
are usually consistent, the minor details vary significantly. For a discussion of these
inconsistencies and possible reasons for the discrepancies, see Richard C. Crandall,
Inuit Art: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000), 47–101.
18. Virginia Watt, “The Beginning,” in Canadian Guild of Crafts, Quebec: The Perma-
nent Collection, Inuit Arts and Crafts, c. 1900–1980, ed. Virginia Watt (Montreal: Cana-
dian Guild of Crafts Quebec, 1980), 12.
19. Darlene Coward Wight, “The Handicrafts Experiment, 1949–1953,” in The First
Passionate Collector: The Ian Lindsay Collection of Inuit Art (Winnipeg, MB: Winnipeg
Art Gallery, 1991), 45–92.
20. George Carpenter, “Tuktu-Angot, North Spirit in City to Guard Eskimo Art,”
Montreal Gazette, November 19, 1951, 3.
21. Nelson H. H. Graburn, “Eskimo Art: The Eastern Canadian Arctic,” in Ethnic and
Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World, ed. Nelson H. H. Graburn
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 42.
22. Charles A. Martijn, “Canadian Eskimo Carving in Historical Perspective,” An-
thropos 59, no 3/4 (1964): 564.
23. These texts would have been accessible to the widest possible audience of Inuit
artists and craftspeople, as syllabic literacy was widespread throughout many commu-
nities in what is now known as Nunavut and Nunavik by the mid-twentieth century.
The introduction of the syllabic reading and writing system is credited to missionary
Rev. James Peck. Following the successful initiation of a syllabic writing system with
the Cree, Peck created and introduced an Inuktitut version of syllabics throughout the
North. Beginning in Cumberland Sound in 1894, Peck spent eight years translating
texts into Inuktitut and teaching syllabic literacy to Inuit, which was then spread to
other Inuit settlements across the Arctic. See Heather E. McGregor, “History of the
Eastern Arctic: Foundations and Themes,” in Inuit Education and Schools in the Eastern
Arctic (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 21.
24. Clifford P. Wilson to C. J. G. Molson, February 11, 1949, c10 d1 024, cgcq.
25. Inuit cribbage boards were exquisitely carved, often elaborately constructed
pieces featuring engraved or relief-carved Arctic animals and camp scenes, hidden
compartments, and fanciful decorative pegs. The boards were so popular that even
today, numerous examples fill museum drawers in Arctic collections in Canada and
internationally.

26. Edmund Carpenter, Frederic Horsman Varley and Robert Joseph Flaherty, Es-
kimo (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), 43.
27. For example, the Ian Lindsay Collection, now primarily housed in the Winnipeg
Art Gallery, contains several of examples of these miniature stone “totem poles,” pur-
chased between 1948 and 1950.
28. Ingo Hessel, Inuit Art: An Introduction (Vancouver, BC: Douglas and McIntyre,
1998), 30; Darlene Coward Wight, The First Passionate Collector, 105, cat. no. 27n.
29. James Houston, Sanayaksak: Eskimo Handicrafts (Montreal: Canadian Handi-
crafts Guild, 1951), 11.
30. Hessel, Inuit Art, 30.
31. I am indebted to Molly Lee for her observation — mentioned in passing in a 1987
essay by Nelson Graburn — of the similarity between the appearance of anac catalogs
and Sanajaksat, which led me to research the connection between anac and Depart-
ment of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (diand), leading to the discovery
of ongoing correspondence between Deputy Commissioner R. A. Gibson, and anac
Clearing House manager D. L. Burrus in 1949. The mention of Lee’s observation can be
found in Nelson H. H. Graburn, “The Discovery of Inuit Art: James Houston, ‘Anima-
teur,’ “ Inuit Art Quarterly 2, no. 2 (spring 1987): 3–4.
32. In addition, Burrus attached a three-page promotional document on the totem
poles of the Alaskan Natives, as well as information on basketry and Chilkat blankets.
D. L. Burrus to R. A. Gibson, November 4, 1949, file 255–1, pt.1, vol. 108, rg85, lac.
33. Based on Houston’s introduction to Sanajaksat, in which he stressed that all the
objects depicted in the booklet were “purely Eskimo” and could therefore be made
wherever materials were available — whether or not Inuit in a particular region had
been producing that style of work previously — we know that Houston was not con-
cerned about introducing various kinds of “Eskimo” art from one Arctic region to
another. Though Houston does not specify the regional origins of any of the objects,
several items are illustrated in the booklet that Houston would have knowingly in-
troduced from one region of the Arctic to another, such as grass basketry and goose
wing brushes. By encouraging Inuit to copy from widely dispersed groups in the early
years of the handicrafts experiments, Houston ignored the significance of regional and
cultural diversity among the Inuit, at least as far as artistic production. This supports
my thesis that Houston willingly introduced miniature totem poles to parts of the Arc-
tic where he had never seen real totem poles erected, under the belief that they were
“purely Eskimo” and native to Alaskan Inuit, and therefore could be made wherever
materials were available.
35. Helga Goetz, “Inuit Art: A History of Government Involvement,” in In the
Shadow of the Sun: Perspectives on Contemporary Native Art, ed. Canadian Museum of
Civilization (Hull, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1993), 362.
36. Goetz, “Inuit Art,” 362; Goetz, Development, 20.

37. In addition to these criticisms, complaints came from government agents on
multiple points. One government official particularly objected to Houston’s illustration
of a hunter stalking a musk ox. The musk ox was a protected animal under the Game
Ordinance, and the government had been trying for years to enforce conservation laws
in the North, without much success. The government’s frustration over the hunting
of protected species is clear in an excerpt from an “open letter” to the Inuit written by
the director of the Northwest Territories and Yukon Branch of the Department of the
Interior, O. S. Finnie, in 1924: “The Government and the Police say that the people must
not kill musk-ox. If any more are killed the Government will be very angry. Traders
will not buy musk-ox skins. The Government and the Police are the true friends of
the Eskimos. The Eskimos should do as they say because it is right. The Government
wishes the Eskimos to be well and happy.” This letter and other attempts like it to curtail
musk-ox hunting had done little to curb the practice among the Inuit over the years, es-
pecially in remote and isolated areas, and as late as 1949, western Arctic officials made
complaints that the Inuit did not follow regulations, or appreciate the need for conser-
vation. In light of this, it is understandable that the illustration received criticism for
any reference “that might conceivably convey to the Eskimos that they can now kill
musk ox.” Goetz, Development, 15.
39. Ernest S. Burch Jr., “Canadian Inuit Culture 1800–1950,” in Canadian Museum
of Civilization, In the Shadow of the Sun, 305. Nelson H. H. Graburn recorded that in
Salluit, an Inuk had told him that before soapstone was in regular use for carvings, in
the early 1940s, he had carved some souvenirs out of a used soapstone pot when he had
run out of ivory. The Hudson’s Bay Company would not purchase them at the time,
but he sold some to whalers and traded others to sailors; subsequently, other Inuit also
began carving soapstone figurines for trade. Graburn, “Eskimo Art,” 42–43.
41. Wight, “Handicrafts Experiment,” 71.
42. James Houston, “In Search of Contemporary Eskimo Art,” Canadian Art 9, no.
3 (1952): 104.
43. George Swinton, Sculpture of the Inuit, 3rd ed. (Toronto: McClelland and Stew-
art, 1999), 142.
44. Gradually, too, each community developed recognizable traits in stone carving,
based in part on the different colors and veins of stone in local quarries, which came to
be associated with art production in particular areas. Large-scale antler and whalebone
works would also gain favor in the southern art market over the subsequent decades.
Yet when many species of whales were declared endangered in 1972, the international
market for whalebone pieces dropped dramatically.
45. Not all collectors were enthusiastic about this new development. Some main-
tained that the change in scale would fundamentally alter the character of the work,
and other critics of the “new” art form, such as Edmund Carpenter, denigrated the

shift in materials and size as being the products “Western” influence. Carpenter often
repeated the assertion that Inuit art was not “Eskimo” at all, saying stone carving and
printmaking were “White” and “inauthentic.” Edmund Carpenter, Eskimo Realities
(New York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, 1973), 195.
46. These changes included Inuit settlement in communities around trading posts;
the introduction of the federal day school program, a northern residential school sys-
tem related to the southern Indian residential schools; forced High Arctic relocations;
and numerous other shifts in Inuit lives brought about in the mid-twentieth century.
47. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Lit-
erature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 242.
48. James Houston, “Eskimo Sculptors,” Beaver (June 1951): 34–39.
49. Houston, “In Search of Contemporary Eskimo Art.”
50. Kristen Potter, “James Houston, Armchair Tourism, and the Marketing of Inuit
Art,” in Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories, ed.
W. Jackson Rushing III (New York: Routledge, 1999), 42.
51. Christine Lalonde, “Status 2000: Presenting Contemporary Inuit Art in the
Gallery Setting,” in On Aboriginal Representation in the Gallery, ed. Lydia Jessup and
Shannon Bagg (Hull, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2002), 195.
52. Houston, “In Search of Contemporary Eskimo Art,” 99.
54. Houston, “Contemporary Art of the Eskimo,” Studio 147, no. 731 (February 1954):
44.
56. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London:
Routledge, 1992), 62.
57. Houston, “Contemporary Art of the Eskimo,” 43.
58. Houston, “Contemporary Art of the Eskimo,” 44.
59. James A. Houston, Canadian Eskimo Art, exhibition catalog (Ottawa: Depart-
ment of Northern Affairs and National Resources, 1955), 7.
60. Ruth B. Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art
from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 7.
61. James Houston, “Handicrafts,” Eskimo Bulletin 1, no. 2 (June 1953): 2.
62. Houston, “Handicrafts,” 1.
63. Akeeaktashuk, who had been relocated to Craig Harbour.
64. Judy Hall, “Charles Gimpel: Early Promotion of Inuit Art in Europe,” Inuit Art
Quarterly 24, no. 1 (spring 2009): 34–42.
65. For a discussion of those “famous” carvers whose work appears in the Ian Lind-
say Collection, see Wight, “Handicrafts Experiment,” 85–86.
66. Henry Strub, “New Books on the Arts: Canada Eskimo Art,” Canadian Art 12,
no. 1 (1954): 32.
67. Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 242.

68. Martijn, “Canadian Eskimo Carving,” 577.
69. Martijn, “Canadian Eskimo Carving,” 577.
70. Marybelle Mitchell, “Social, Economic, and Political Transformation among
Canadian Inuit from 1950–1988,” in Canadian Museum of Civilization, In the Shadow
of the Sun, 343.
71. Ruth B. Phillips, “The Turn of the Primitive: Modernism and Indigeneity in Set-
tler Art Histories” (paper presented at Annotating Art’s Histories: Exiles, Diasporas,
and Strangers, Institute of International Visual Arts, London, July 6–7 2006), 3.
72. “Cape Dorset Named Most ‘Artistic’ Municipality,” CBC.ca, February 13, 2006,
https://web.archive.org/web/20080629235818/http://www.cbc.ca:80/story/arts
/national/2006/02/13/report-artistic-capedorset.html.

BILL ANTHES
3 MAKING PICTURES ON BASKETS
Modern Indian Painting in an Expanded Field
Indian women all make you pictures, you call them,

we make pictures on basket. I tell you about pictures.
H E R N A N D A | quoted in Emil Paulicek Steffa,
“Tales of a Desert Indian”
The pictorial arts — painting in watercolor or ink and drawing in pencil — were

a novel form introduced in Native communities in the American Southwest
and southern plains during the last years of the nineteenth century. Painting
and drawing were certainly “modern,” in that these artworks by artists in New
Mexico, Oklahoma, and elsewhere were produced with manufactured materi-
als acquired through encounters with non-Native anthropologists, collectors,
and other patrons and mentors and were made to be viewed by audiences far
from Indian Country.1 Paintings and drawings by Native artists served no
ceremonial or economic purpose in Native communities, although they were
effective in communicating information about Native cultures and values to
non-Native viewers. They were simultaneously documents of “autoethnog-
raphy” and portable intercultural aesthetic commodities.2 In the American
Southwest, anthropologists commissioned artworks depicting ceremonies
and other cultural practices. Early twentieth-century paintings by Native art-
ists, perhaps betraying their origins in illustrations made for ethnographers
(revealing artists’ early exposure to commercial illustrations and promotional
images for the region’s burgeoning tourist industry), were characterized by
picturesque ethnographic subjects, depicted with clear outlines filled in with
flat areas of color, an absence of background, and spatial illusions effected by
FIGURE 3.1 Fred Kabotie, Two Bird Dancers with Costumed Audience, ca. 1920s.
Watercolor on brown paper, 19.5 × 12.5 in. (49.5 × 31.75 cm). Hartley Burr Alexander
Collection of American Indian Artwork, Ella Strong Denison Library, Scripps
College, Claremont, California.
the repetition and grouping of figures rather than by chiaroscuro modeling or

dramatic foreshortening (figure 3.1).
Particularly in the Southwest and southern plains, a set of institutions that
trained and supported Native artists — mostly male — was in place by the
1920s. This art world was shaped largely by the unequal relationship between
Indian artists and their white patrons, as was the style in which most suc-
cessful artists painted. It featured stylized and sentimental depictions of the
past, with little attention to the modern experiences of Native people.3 An
unintended irony has come to inform the term given to this art by its pro-
moters: “traditional Indian painting.” Prominent among these were Dorothy
Dunn, who established the first official studio program at the Santa Fe Indian
School in 1932, and the influential Native artist-teachers who taught at Bacone
College in Muskogee, Oklahoma, from the 1930s through the 1970s, includ-
ing Acee Blue Eagle (Creek), Woody Crumbo (Potawatomi), and Dick West
(Southern Cheyenne). Both programs produced several significant artists,
whose legacies define Native American art in the middle twentieth century.4
One narrative of Native American modernism has highlighted the break with
92 B ill A nthes

this style and its institutional supports by artists such as Oscar Howe in the
1950s. In the first part of this chapter, I sketch, briefly, how artists such as Howe
conceived of a Native American modernism in opposition to the “traditional
style” of Native American painting that had become established by the mid-
twentieth century.
This story of Native American modernism, however, in privileging painting
and drawing (and to a degree sculpture) to the exclusion of the diverse range
of Native North American cultural production, highlights genres that are
easily recognized as modernist. Such art histories also reinscribe a Western
notion of the individual creator, usually male, and the innovative, paradigm-
shifting breakthrough.5 In this context, exclusive attention to painting might
reproduce the shortcomings of art historical narratives of modernism that a
focus on Native cultural production might otherwise hope to critique.6 Priv-
ileging visual or “fine” arts over “crafts” and other expressive forms remains
a problematic hierarchy for Native North American art histories, the history
of Native North American modernism no less so. The modernity of a diverse
range of locally valued objects as well as that of craft and souvenir production
in ceramics and textiles — genres, most often produced by women, that tend to
fall beyond the pale of modernism — remains unaccounted for and therefore
less visible in the present as a resource and legacy for contemporary Native
artists. In the second half of this chapter, then, I suggest how this narrative
might be complicated by considering painting as just one aesthetic practice
in an expanded field. I use as my case study a collection of baskets made by
Cahuilla and other Native female weavers from the inland desert valleys of
Southern California, a collection assembled by Emil Paulicek Steffa while he
was working in the region as a water resources surveyor in the early twentieth
century. Steffa collected several hundred baskets and recorded extensive doc-
umentation, including information on materials and techniques as well as the
names of weavers — rare information for what are often termed tourist arts.
The collection and its documentation tell a story of economic and environ-
mental change in the region and evidence the response of local Native artists
to a shifting landscape. I argue that considering painting in such an expanded
field would enable a more nuanced understanding of twentieth-century Native
American art as a set of intercultural and generically heterogeneous aesthetic
commodities that respond to a broader context of societal modernization.
By the early 1930s, drawings and paintings by Native American artists had
been exhibited as “art, not ethnology” (in the words of the organizers of the
Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts held in 1931 at Grand Central Art Galleries)
M aking P ictures on B askets 93

in locations as distant as New York and Venice, Italy.7 Fred Kabotie, a Hopi
artist who exhibited at the 1931 Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts and at the 1932
Biennale di Venezia, began making drawings and paintings, along with other
young Native students from the western United States, while studying at the
Santa Fe Indian School, a federal Indian boarding school in New Mexico’s cap-
ital. In 1918, Elizabeth DeHuff, wife of superintendent John DeHuff, began an
unofficial art program at the school, inviting Native students into the family
home and supplying paper, pencils, watercolors, and encouragement to make
pictures based on traditional subjects. Similar informal programs flourished
in the early twentieth century in other locales. Many of these early mentors
and patrons worked against the grain of popular sentiments and federal pol-
icies intended to speed the assimilation of Native peoples into the American
mainstream. Encouraging young Natives to express themselves as artists with
valuable — if racialized — Native subjectivities ran counter to the Indian school
curriculum, which was designed to train students for future lives as agricul-
tural laborers, domestics, or manual tradesmen. This informal art curriculum
could be dangerous for its promoters. John DeHuff, for example, was censured
for his wife’s activities. Nevertheless, the work of Elizabeth DeHuff and other
early mentors and patrons introduced the radical idea that traditional cultures
could have continuing relevance for Native peoples in the twentieth century,
and perhaps for whites as well.
This radical idea was foundational to an American formation of modernist
primitivism that flourished in the years between the First and Second World
Wars, as avant-garde artists and intellectuals redefined — contra government
policy and church-related initiatives — Native cultures as a unique and vital
component of an autochthonous American cultural heritage, distinct from
European traditions. Northeastern bohemians took to summering in Taos and
Santa Fe, and some, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Mabel Dodge, and Raymond
Jonson, took up permanent residence. Other visual artists and writers, such
as Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Bellows, John Marin, Marsden Hartley,
George L. K. Morris, and Mary Austin, broke with academic representation
and concomitant cultural hierarchies by appropriating Native aesthetic idi-
oms, pictorial motifs, and musical rhythms. As modernists they claimed an af-
finity that enabled them to break free from stultifying traditions and parochial
notions of art and identity.8
94 B ill A nthes

Oscar Howe’s Native American Modernism
Yanktonai Dakota Oscar Howe came from Crow Creek Reservation in South
Dakota to the Santa Fe Indian School in 1933 to study art in Dunn’s studio
program. Under Dunn, the young artist mastered the mode developed by
Kabotie and other early twentieth-century innovators, which has come to be
known as the “studio style,” or “traditional Indian painting.” The studio style
was characterized by the depiction of subjects drawn from what might be
thought of as an “ethnographic present,” in an illustrational style that Dunn
and other supporters regarded as “authentic” Native American art. Yet this
“traditional” style was also modern; the works not only were produced in new
material (pencil, watercolor, and ink on paper) but were also conspicuously
not rooted in specific or local indigenous visual traditions. Rather, the art was
“pan-Indian,” a byproduct of the off-reservation, intertribal educational en-
vironment of institutions such as the Santa Fe Indian School and others that
encouraged and supported artists. Howe later remembered the pedagogy at
the studio, which, while lacking in overt direction (thought to be unnecessary
because Native students were assumed to be “natural” artists), still encouraged
the culturally diverse young artists to adopt a standard formula:
There were no lectures at all on anything, not even hints of instructions.

We weren’t allowed to do research. The teachers . . . said: “Start paint-
ing.” I stayed there three years, but I never heard a word of instruction.
The idea to figure out one’s own way of doing drawings or detail work
was . . . quite a challenge for me. I depended on my knowing of Sioux
culture and things of symbolic meaning. It seems that we all did the
same technique, whether he or she was a Navajo, Hopi, Apache, Sioux,
Kiowa, Cheyenne or what.9
Perhaps more than any other Native American artist, Oscar Howe’s biog-
raphy mirrors the history of Indian painting in the twentieth century, from
the institutionalization of the traditional style in the 1930s to its supersession
by more innovative and individual styles after the Second World War. Howe
was born during the reservation period, a time when Native cultures in North
America were in crisis because their communities had been confined to mea-
ger slices of marginal land. Traditional spiritual practices, languages and cul-
tures were repressed and persecuted. The Native population was at its nadir
and was the target of the federal government’s massive assimilation campaign.
During a period when traditional arts were collapsing under the influence of

Americanization and the dire poverty that afflicted reservations, Oscar Howe’s
bold artistic innovations are all the more remarkable.
As a young artist Howe excelled in the traditional style. While still a stu-
dent, his works were exhibited with those of other Santa Fe Indian School stu-
dents at the Brooklyn Museum and in San Francisco, Paris, and London. After
completing his studies under Dunn in Santa Fe, Howe taught art at the Pierre
Indian School, in South Dakota, and undertook commissions for a division of
the federal Works Progress Administration. He saw active duty in North Af-
rica and Europe during the Second World War and met his future wife, Heidi
Hemple, while stationed in Biedelkopf, Germany. After the war, Howe’s paint-
ings were regular prizewinners in the annual Contemporary American Indian
Painting Exhibition held at the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and
elsewhere. With the assistance of the 1944 Serviceman’s Readjustment Act, or
the gi Bill, Howe completed a bachelor degree at Dakota Wesleyan University
in 1952 and a master of fine arts degree at the University of Oklahoma in 1954.
As Mark Andrew White has demonstrated, Howe was joined at the Uni-
versity of Oklahoma by other Native veterans who were taking advantage
of the gi Bill, such as Dick West (Southern Cheyenne) and Chief Terry Saul
(Choctaw/Chickasaw). They were trained by a young faculty in the thrall of
modernism, especially Mexican muralism and European cubism, expres-
sionism, and surrealism. Moreover, Howe and his fellow students would have
had access to a collection of American modernist painting assembled in 1946,
under the auspices of the U.S. State Department, for exhibition as part of U.S.
cultural diplomacy abroad. Advancing American Painting included works in a
variety of styles by artists such as Ben Shahn and Adolph Gottlieb. As White
notes, the exhibition became a political football “when conservative members
of Congress learned that not only had the State Department purchased the
paintings with public money but that some of the artists included had com-
munist sympathies.” The exhibition was recalled, and the works were sold at
public auction in 1948. Several paintings were acquired for the University of
Oklahoma Museum of Art, where they were regularly exhibited and had a
recognizable influence on the student work in an art department steeped in
modernist aesthetics.10 In an undated work, Woman Buffalo Dreamer (plate 1),
probably produced during Howe’s studies at the university, he integrated sur-
realist form and Dakota content. As White writes, “Howe demonstrated an
awareness of the elongated forms, desolate plains, and timeless environments
of Dalí, Yves Tanguy, and Alberto Giacometti. The subject evokes the vision-
ary and oneric subject matter of the Surrealists, but within a Native context.
96 B ill A nthes

A buffalo dreamer was usually a man of exceptional visionary ability who
helped the tribe locate bison, ensuring the survival of the people. A woman
with such abilities was extraordinarily rare, according to oral tradition, and
Howe attempted to suggest the nature of her gift through the strange scene
around her.” 11
By the mid-1950s the notion of a “traditional” style was becoming increas-
ingly contentious. Non-Native audiences and institutions, including the Phil
brook, continued to promote the illustrative style associated with Dunn’s studio,
Bacone College, and other centers. But Howe and other artists argued that the
categories non-Natives had created for Native American art had become ir-
relevant to Native artists’ lives and work. In 1958, Howe entered his innovative
expressionistic painting Umine Wacipi: War and Peace Dance in the 13th An-
nual Contemporary American Indian Painting Exhibition at the Philbrook Art
Center. As a prizewinner at several previous Philbrook Indian annuals, Howe
was shocked when a panel of Indian and white jurors disqualified his inven-
tive and abstract painting from the competition, explaining that it was “a fine
painting . . . but not Indian.” 12 When his artwork was excluded from judging,
Howe sent an angry letter to Philbrook curator Jeanne Snodgrass. “Whoever
said, that my paintings are not in traditional Indian style has poor knowledge
of Indian art indeed,” he wrote. “There is much more to Indian art than pretty,
stylized pictures. . . . Are we to be held back forever with one phase of Indian
painting, that is the most common way?” 13 Howe’s famous letter is widely cited
as a central document in the history of Native American modernism in the
United States. A key statement by an ascendant Native voice, it stands as a pre-
cursor of contemporary Native artists and critics who argue that indigenous
perspectives and epistemologies should be fundamental to any interpretation
of Native artists’ work.14
As a mature artist, Howe maintained that his paintings represented a per-
sonal aesthetic evolution of northern Plains visual practices — specifically
citing Dakota abstract quill embroidery and hide painting — rather than a bor-
rowing of modern styles.15 This position — perhaps strategic and rhetorical —
distinguished Howe’s sense of his own practice from that of artists like Dick
West, who advocated aesthetic crossbreeding of Native and modern (i.e.,
European art historical) forms, or George Morrison (Chippewa), who em-
braced modernist aesthetics and fashioned an identity as an artist foremost,
without racialized qualifiers.16 Howe sought to opt out of the European tradi-
tion, claiming an identity as a Yanktonai Dakota modernist. While it is true
that Howe, like West and Saul, benefited from instruction by University of

Oklahoma faculty who were versed in modernist aesthetic theory and tech-
nique, he claimed to be developing an abstract art that evolved not from Eu-
ropean cubism and abstraction, but from specific Indigenous sources. Howe’s
style, developed by the mid-1950s, marked the culmination of his conscious
engagement with a Plains tradition of abstraction painted on animal hides,
tipis, clothing, and winter count robes, albeit filtered through and inflected by
modernism. As Howe explained it, Dakota abstract art was centuries old, but
it had been overshadowed since the early twentieth century by the dominance
of the pan-Indian narrative style promoted by Dunn and other white champi-
ons of Native painting. Howe rediscovered Dakota abstraction as a resource,
and as a modernist artist, he reinvested its practice with cultural and personal
significance.
Another Native Modernism

An alternative narrative of Native American modernism might consider
painting as just one aesthetic practice in a field that includes not only the “tra-
ditional” artists and institutions against which Howe had railed, but also con-
temporary craft and souvenir productions in ceramics and textiles. Baskets
and other craft and souvenir arts were most often produced by women and
have tended to be excluded from histories of modernism.17 Elizabeth Hutchin-
son offers an important corrective in her book The Indian Craze: Primitivism,
Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915. She writes, “For
much of the twentieth century Native American art has been separated into
studies of mediums associated with Western academic traditions (often re-
ferred to as ‘modern’ Native American art) and handicrafts (or ‘traditional’
arts). Books exploring the relationship between Native American art and
mainstream aesthetic trends have primarily addressed Indian painting. They
have also focused on art from the interwar years or later.” To correct for the
effects of this bias, Hutchinson suggests, “Looking at an earlier period, when
the hierarchy between art and craft in the mainstream art world was less sta-
ble, allows us to recognize the modernity of a wider variety of Native objects,
including those made for pure aesthetic contemplation, those made for use,
and those made for circulation outside indigenous communities.” 18
Emil Steffa assembled his collection of baskets in the early twentieth cen-
tury, as rapid agricultural and industrial development encroached on the
small reservations set aside by executive order in the 1870s for scattered inland
desert Native communities, or bands.19 In addition to his meticulously cata-
98 B ill A nthes

loged collection of baskets, Steffa also authored two unpublished manuscripts
illustrated with his own photographs — “Tales of a Desert Indian” (n.d.) and
“Basket Makers of the Coachella Valley” (1927). These offer insight into his
relationships with the women weavers whose work he purchased, as well as
the changing economy and culture of the inland desert valleys of Southern
California in the early twentieth century. After graduating from Pomona Col-
lege in 1899, Steffa worked as a water resources surveyor in the burgeoning
cities along the southern foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, which were
developing as centers for agriculture, particularly citrus production, and other
industries. Steffa also made collecting trips farther east, into what he described
as the “wonderful below-sea-level agricultural empire of Southern Califor-
nia.” 20 The Coachella and Imperial Valleys, as well as the areas surrounding the
Salton Sea, were in the midst of development by private interests, assisted by
government policies and spending. Steffa’s collection and manuscripts allow
for a close examination of the production of basketry in communities whose
cultural, economic, and environmental systems had been affected for gener-
ations by successive waves of Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. settlers. They also
reflect the revival of traditional art practices and craft technologies that was
underway at the beginning of the twentieth century. They reveal Native artists
as historical actors and highlight Native arts as deliberately produced inter-
cultural commodities and as individual aesthetic and economic responses to
a changing world.
A focus on the inland desert weavers places them in an emerging intercul-
tural history of the American West (with parallels to larger global patterns that
the authors in this volume explore in varied contexts) and links their art to
an emerging body of scholarship on settler colonial, postcolonial, and neoco-
lonial visual arts and their markets. Thinking about these art forms in terms
of movements from environments to networks, and makers to markets, can
highlight the role of Native American cultural production in the imaging of a
regional identity for Southern California in the early twentieth century.
Steffa’s “Basket Makers of the Coachella Valley” established the backdrop
against which he interpreted the work of the women weavers whose baskets he
collected. He described the Native population’s adaptation to the harsh desert
climate and the basket makers’ art as the expression of their relationship to
land and place.
The early history of these people is one of simple wants with the means
of supplying them close at hand. Nature placed the means of livelihood

at their very door, but though they were present, it took infinite
ingenuity, patience, and wisdom to separate the good from the bad,
to shape them to fit their needs. This the Indian did. Through ages of
toil and suffering they built up a system (if you please to call it such)
that not only supplied their bodily wants, but also gave opportunity
to indulge the artistic and temperamental side of their being. No one
thing so completely combines and exemplifies these facts as their
basketry. Usefulness and bodily convenience always, but ever a line or
a curve to satisfy the longing for adornment that is inherent in all of
the human race. Out in the sun scorched desert, where death lurked
at every hand, “in the places that God forgot,” these people tore out
the secrets of nature and turned them to their needs. The beans of the
mesquite, the seeds of other desert shrubs, the leaves and even stalks
of the cacti contributed to stay their hunger and feed their bodies. The
stalks and bark of not more than four plants made it possible for them
to produce baskets that are works of art. In them the soul of the maker is
set forth, her ideals, her strivings, the successes of herself and her tribe,
her yearnings for, and conception of the infinite, all find a place and are
reproduced by the nimble fingers of the basket maker. For her and hers
the waste places “blossomed like the rose.” To be sure it had its thorns
and many of them, yet it also had its sweetness, and of that fragrance the
Indian partook and was happy.21
Steffa noted the development of large-scale agriculture in the region, made

possible by automated irrigation and paving the way for increased white set-
tlement in the desert: “But where once were broad plains of windswept desert
brush and barren flats, we now see row and groves of trees, patches of cotton,
fields of alfalfa, vineyards of early table grapes, acres upon acres of cantaloups
[sic], tomatoes and onions, groves of grapefruit, gardens of the stately date
palm, and towns and villages of the white man. Over all floats the incessant
chug, chug, of the gas engine and the whir of electric motors, as they raise the
life-giving waters that have made this change possible.” 22 Agriculture and de-
velopment gave rise to a new intercultural landscape, dotted with reservations
on small parcels of once open land, as young Native men headed off to work
in the fields. Steffa took a particular interest in water resources, noting the ex-
istence of natural springs, as well as old Indian wells — now abandoned — and
that water was now supplied by modern wells drilled at government expense
to serve relocated Native communities. He also noted a pattern of outmi-
100 B ill A nthes

gration and urbanization: “To be sure some of the younger generation go to
mingle with our cosmopolitan population in other parts of the country and to
the public are lost sight of as Indians, becoming simply members of that vast
mixed unnamed class that is a class by itself, and yet the fact remains that that
the Indian population is getting less and less.” 23
The nostalgia of Steffa’s narrative is striking. Even as mentors, patrons, and
other promoters of Native art in the Southwest and Northeast championed
a revitalized “traditionalism” appropriate to modern times (and appropriate
to the demographic rebounding in Indian country, after its late nineteenth-
century nadir), Steffa clung to a notion of Native disappearance. Perhaps this
was understandable, given the pace of development as water resources were
marshaled and arid lands were conscripted into service to feed a growing
population of new arrivals to the state. Looking around the changed land-
scape of the inland valleys, Steffa could only foresee the end of the line for the
Chemehuevi, Cahuilla, and other desert peoples. In his undated manuscript
“Tales of a Desert Indian,” his informant Hernanda, a weaver from the Agua
Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians (in the Palm Springs area, approximately
one hundred miles east of Los Angeles), voices the following eulogy: “Some-
times we go to the great towns of the white man. But, oh, they are not for us!
We come back to the desert, content with that which we know. Not unhappy,
but sad because we know that our time is past. We are the children of the
desert! As the desert that we have known will soon be no more, we too will be
forgotten. The places that knew us will know us not. The land of the Cahuilla
is no more.” 24
Steffa also wrote extensively of the possibility that the areas below sea level
inhabited by the inland desert Native communities might flood and become
once again an inland sea as in prehistoric times. Indeed, Steffa seems to con-
flate the purely historical, political, and social factors that threatened these
lands and their people with the unstoppable forces of nature. For him, the
loss is inevitable. The final photograph he included in his manuscript depicts
an adobe bungalow in ruins, its sun-baked clay blocks returning to the earth.
Steffa’s nostalgia and primitivism notwithstanding, the baskets themselves
exhibit a good measure of aesthetic self-referentiality, even playfulness. Ab-
stract (and presumably esoteric motifs Indigenous in origin) coexist with
English text and presumably non-Native and novel pictorial elements, includ-
ing arrowheads, mission bells, palm trees, eagles, horned toads, deer, and the
swastika (or as he terms it, a “good luck symbol”), which nevertheless played
to expectations and communicated across linguistic boundaries in the inter-

FIGURE 3.2 Unknown Chemehuevi artist, Basket, ca. 1914.
Juncus, deer grass, and sumac, 12 × 26 in. (30 × 66 cm). Pomona
College Museum of Art, Claremont, California. Gift of Mr. Emil P.
Steffa, P1326.
cultural marketplace of the inland Southern California deserts. Particular bas-

kets thematize their own manufacture and purchase. As Hernanda told Steffa,
“Indian women all make you pictures, you call them, we make pictures on
basket. I tell you about pictures.” 25 One basket in Steffa’s collection, a thirteen-
inch-tall olla-shaped form that Steffa identified by the Cahuilla term ka-va-
mal, features schematic human figures representing the collector and his wife.
He wrote, “The Indian woman who made the basket had known me for some
time and laughingly assured me that it was my picture. On another side of the
basket is the figure of a woman. This the maker said was my wife.” 26
Steffa described a large, flat-bottomed, hemispherical coiled basket by an
unknown Chemehuevi artist (figure 3.2) as “the largest basket in the author’s
collection and one of the most profusely decorated and finely made.” Twelve
inches high, the basket flares out to a twenty-six-inch diameter rim. The inner
surface of the basket features a complex pictorial of a landscape populated
by diverse animal and plant life, including “a deer upon the background of a
mountain and the stately outline of a palm tree,” a rattlesnake’s tail, the snake’s
head emerging from behind a mountain near the basket’s rim, as well as sun-
dry tree branches, flowers, and a desert tortoise. The bottom of the basket
features a five-star or five-petal flower motif, outlined in several shades. Steffa
wrote, “The wonderful smoothness and blending of color in the finished bas-
ket is not often found.” 27
102 B ill A nthes

Other landscape pictorial baskets in Steffa’s collection feature hunting
scenes with a silhouetted deer and a hunter with bow and arrow, traversing
mountain ranges. One basket includes a sailing ship woven by a young student
at the Sherman Indian School in the nearby city of Riverside, a seascape likely
based on magazine or advertising illustrations. On another basket, a seem-
ingly abstract motif was interpreted by Steffa as representing the water level
of the Salton Sea, which, Steffa reported, the maker had seen rise to its highest
level, then recede.28
Another example, a large, restricted, hemispherical coiled basket with a flat
base, which Steffa termed a to-vig-nil, or “gift basket,” attributed to Cheme-
huevi weaver Magdalena Augustine, is described in clearly primitivist terms
(plate 2). Noting that the individual motifs are not organized as a landscape,
Steffa praised Augustine’s basket as a “marvel of workmanship and accuracy.”
He wrote, “The decorations are typical of the Indian. It has a wild beauty of
the strikingly bold type, which is possible only to a mind that still has ideas
primitive to the race and is not overcome by modern influences. The horse,
the butterfly, the rugged mountain peaks are the conceptions of a simple, wild
mind. The crosses on the mountain peaks are the expression of an idea, whose
suggestion can be traced to the Mission Padres.” 29 Here, Steffa distinguishes
between “conceptions of a simple, wild mind” and “ideas” suggested by the
Spanish missionizers, such “ideas” perhaps being comparable to the polyglot
images that characterize baskets made for intercultural trade. The collector
praised the weaver’s artistry and technical ability, but also located her genius
in racialized knowledge and modes of expression. For Steffa, as for many com-
mentators and supporters, including Dorothy Dunn, this was the essence of
the Native artist: someone possessed of a natural creativity whose work ex-
pressed a racialized subjectivity. Yet this view also contains an ambivalence
around the idea of the modern and Native artists’ capacity for modernism,
understood as an artist’s self-conscious relationship to time and to history. It
was as if, Steffa seems to suggest, the weaver’s genius lay in her ability to resist
time, the “ideas” of the padres and those of later purchasers. “Surrounded as
she is by the modern influences,” he wrote, “the maker of this basket still has
within the depths of her soul, bold ideas of a wild beauty that find expression
in her baskets. She is, if not the best, at least one of the best, basket makers of
her time.” 30
Steffa wrestled in his manuscript with the ambivalent effects of the new
market he foresaw. He recognized that it perpetuated an art-making tradition,
even as it motivated artists to adapt forms and create new motifs that would

appeal to contemporary demands and other literacies, and he believed that he
could distinguish designs purported to be of the “old school . . . so old that if
they had any meaning it has been lost” from the “pattern made simply to look
pretty . . . the outcome of a desire for something new . . . [s]omething to please
the eye and the prospective purchaser.” At the same time, Steffa credited the
weavers themselves with innovations, recognizing in them individual creativ-
ity befitting an artist. Ultimately, however, he fell back on a racialized narra-
tive of cultural transformation in the face of larger historical and sociological
forces. “Commercialism,” he wrote, “was the great incentive of the basket
maker to leave the old time-worn ideas and get something new. It is not by any
means an improvement on the old patterns, but rather the result of the resist-
less [restless?] change that is gradually overcoming the entire Indian race. The
old-time-honored patterns are becoming scarcer as the years go by. A good
one is a joy to the collector and is greatly prized.” In Steffa’s view, racialized
cultural practices yielded to the new, innovative, and individual “works of art
. . . pages of recorded thought from the mind of the maker.” 31
Steffa was relying on a modernist (and Eurocentric) notion of what distin-
guishes a “utilitarian” object from a “work of art.” Moreover, he echoed others
in the 1920s who noted the transformations in craft forms brought about by
the adoption of manufactured “utensils” in place of the handmade. As these
changes occurred in a shared modern American consumer culture, they also
had the effect of transforming traditional modes of making into “works of
art,” or intercultural aesthetic commodities. Steffa, however, seems to have
taken a less negative view of this transformation, recognizing the weavers
as autonomous individual creators and artists. Steffa also continued to link
basket making, as a gendered practice, to nineteenth-century notions of wom-
en’s domestic pursuits: “Basketry is today the Indian woman’s fancy work.
Removed as it now is from the realm of necessity, it has become more and
more an art and as such is being sadly neglected.” 32 And if the basket-weaving
tradition was “neglected” by the desert tribes because it had lost its utilitarian
function in the changing landscape, it was also underappreciated by the “pur-
chasers.” Tourists and other uninformed consumers were drawn — perhaps as
the weavers themselves were — to the “pattern made simply to look pretty,”
rather than to the venerable designs of the “old school,” which expressed the
“racial genius” of the “primitive” artist. Thus Steffa also distinguished between
the “collector” and the mere “purchaser” — bringing into play a hierarchical
scale of connoisseurship linked to class and educational refinement. There is
further ambivalence in this formulation, for while Steffa acknowledged the
104 B ill A nthes

individual innovation and creativity of the artists, implicit in his narrative
was a shift from racialized cultural practices (“The old-time-honored patterns
[which] are becoming scarcer as the years go by”). He felt the loss deeply, as
did Hernanda, whose lament he reported: “The places that knew us will know
us not. The land of the Cahuilla is no more.”
Unfortunately, we have no access to the voices of the weavers other than
those filtered through Steffa’s narrative. Indeed, “Hernanda” merely gives voice
to ideas Steffa expressed elsewhere. Unlike Howe’s letter to the Philbrook,
Steffa’s writings contain no directly verbalized artists’ perspective on their
own negotiations of the new intercultural markets and the California desert
valleys. Yet the words Steffa ascribed to Hernanda (“Indian women all make
you pictures, you call them, we make pictures on basket”) nevertheless suggest
that the weavers who captured Steffa’s attention in the early twentieth cen-
tury were consciously and deliberately remaking their work into intercultural
commodities that they considered art. But without the weavers’ voices — and
their perspectives on their art and their place in time, history, and a changing
landscape — the only self-conscious modernist in Steffa’s manuscript is Steffa
himself.
As rich as Steffa’s collection and manuscripts are as resources, the very lim-
ited access they afford to the weavers’ voices and perspectives exemplifies the
limitations of the archive for histories of Native modernisms. The women who
made the works of art in Steffa’s collection are inaccessible in their silence.
Oscar Howe’s carefully negotiated position — his eloquent anger — regarding
the past and the present is a resource for Native artists today in a way that
the women in Steffa’s manuscript cannot be. Their modernity appears only in
Steffa’s transcriptions of their conversations and exchanges, which took place
in what he described as an “incomprehensible” mix of English, Spanish, and
Native languages.
In another sense, however, the weavers’ artworks are an archive for those
who can read them. The baskets are a precious resource today for a new gener-
ation of weavers, who are working once again to revitalize the art form and to
ensure that it will persist for future generations. The California Indian Basket
Weavers Association works to perpetuate the art through education and col-
laborates with public agencies to preserve access to traditional materials on
public and tribal lands, monitor land use and development, and discourage
the use of harmful pesticides in vulnerable areas where traditional materials
are gathered.33 And today, work in forms that have been classified as tradi-
tional arts or “handicrafts” is also a resource for contemporary Native Amer-

ican artists, much as it was for modernists of Howe’s generation. In Howe’s
modernist art, the abstract quill embroidery and hide-painting techniques
traditionally practiced by women in Plains cultures was subsumed within the
artist’s individual innovation, invisible to all but the most astute viewers. As
Native artists reckon their relationship to time and tradition, the past remains
present as a resource for negotiating a changing world.
The baskets in Steffa’s collection also need to speak with all the force of
Howe’s 1958 letter, which is justifiably seen today as a key document in the
history of Native American modernism. But there are other documents of
modernism if we can learn to read them. Histories of modernism have tended
to draw distinctions between “modern” works made in relative isolation, such
as the baskets produced by the weavers Steffa documented, and “modernist”
art made in dialogue with metropolitan modes and discourses. But Howe’s
abstractions, which he insisted he drew from Indigenous sources, suggest
that Native modernisms are not so easily parsed. Howe’s innovative painting
(along with sculpture and other modernist artworks by other Native artists in
the twentieth century) might be more properly understood as one of the many
art forms in an expanded field — a field we should look at in its entirety, al-
lowing for a more nuanced understanding of twentieth-century Native North
American art as an intercultural aesthetic commodity within the broader con-
text of societal modernization and Native peoples’ roles within those complex
histories.
Notes
1. A distinction should be made here between painting and drawing as an inter-
cultural art form in the Southwest and the pictorial arts practiced by Plains men —
commonly referred to as “ledger art” — that developed from the male tradition of
making historical and autobiographical records, traditionally on animal hide, and later
on new surfaces such as bound ledgers, found or acquired through trade with white
settler merchants and military men. While Plains ledger arts did later come to the no-
tice of nonnative audiences, these visual records were made primarily to function as
personal and community histories for the benefit of Plains peoples. See Janet Catherine
Berlo, ed., Plains Indian Drawings, 1865–1935: Pages from a Visual History (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 1996).
2. My use of the term “autoethnography” draws from David Penney and Lisa
Roberts’s essay “America’s Pueblo Artists: Encounters on the Borderlands,” in Native
American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories, ed. W. Jackson
Rushing III (New York: Routledge, 1999), 21–38, which in turn borrows the term from
106 B ill A nthes

Mary Louise Pratt’s influential work on travel writing. Pratt defines “autoethnogra-
phy” as “instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in
ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms. If ethnographic texts are a means by
which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others, autoeth-
nographic texts are those the others construct in response to or in dialogue with those
metropolitan representations.” Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transcultura-
tion (London: Routledge, 1992), 7.
3. For an early critique, see J. J. Brody, Indian Painters and White Patrons (Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971). Recent scholarship has taken a more
nuanced view, emphasizing the complex positionality of artist and patron, and lo-
cating Native epistemologies and agency in early paintings. See Bruce Bernstein and
W. Jackson Rushing, Modern by Tradition: American Indian Painting in the Studio Style,
exhibition catalog (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995); J. J. Brody, Pueblo
Indian Painting: Tradition and Modernism in New Mexico, 1900–1930 (Santa Fe, NM:
School of American Research Press, 1997); Penney and Roberts, “America’s Pueblo
Artists”; Bill Anthes, Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960 (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Aaron Fry, “Local Knowledge and Art Historical
Methodology: A New Perspective on Awa Tsireh and the San Ildefonso Easel Painting
Movement,” Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas 1 (spring 2008): 46–61; Mi-
chelle McGeough, Through Their Eyes: Indian Painting in Santa Fe, 1918–1945 (Santa Fe,
NM: Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 2009); Sascha Scott, “Awa Tsireh
and the Art of Subtle Resistance,” Art Bulletin 9, no. 3 (December 2013): 597–622.
4. See Margaret Archuleta and Rennard Strickland, Shared Visions: Native American
Painters and Sculptors in the Twentieth Century (New York: New Press, 1991); Lydia L.
Wyckoff, ed., Visions and Voices: Native American Painting from the Philbrook Museum
of Art (Tulsa, OK: Philbrook Museum of Art, 1996); Mark Andrew White, ed., The
James T. Bialac Native American Art Collection: Selected Works (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2013).
5. The opening exhibition of the National Museum of American Art in Washing-
ton, D.C., in 2004 reinforced this narrative, focusing on abstract painting by George
Morrison (Chippewa) and sculpture in stone and metal by Allan Houser (Chiricahua
Apache). See Truman Lowe, ed., Native Modernism: The Art of George Morrison and
Allan Houser (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005).
6. The resonance with the feminist critique of art history in the 1970s and 1980s
should be apparent. For a useful introduction, see Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia
Mathews, “The Feminist Critique of Art History,” Art Bulletin 69, no. 3 (September
1987): 326–57.
7. Molly Mullin, Culture in the Marketplace: Gender, Art, and Value in the American
Southwest (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), esp. 91–127; Jessica L. Horton,
“A Cloudburst in Venice: Fred Kabotie and the U.S. Pavilion of 1932,” American Art 29,
no. 1 (spring 2015): 54–81.

8. W. Jackson Rushing III, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A
History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); Leah Dilworth,
Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past (Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997); Margaret D. Jacobs, Engendered Encounters:
Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879–1934 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999);
Mullin, Culture in the Marketplace; Elizabeth Hutchinson, The Indian Craze: Primitiv-
ism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915 (Durham, NC: Duke
9. Oscar Howe interview, July 12, 1977, American Indian Research Project, no. 1044,
10, Institute of American Indian Studies, University of South Dakota, Vermillion. For a
more detailed biography of Howe, see Anthes, Native Moderns, 155–70.
10. Mark Andrew White, “A Modernist Moment: Native Art and Surrealism at the
University of Oklahoma,” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 7, no. 1 (2013): 58–59.
11. White, “A Modernist Moment,” 66, 68.
12. Frederick J. Dockstader, “The Revolt of Trader Boy: Oscar Howe and Indian Art,”
American Indian Art Magazine 8, no. 3 (summer 1983): 42–51; Mark Andrew White,
“Oscar Howe and the Transformation of Native American Art,” American Indian Art
Magazine 23, no. 1 (winter 1997): 36–43; and Anthes, Native Moderns, xi. Because the
painting was disqualified from competition, it was not purchased by the Philbrook and
is now lost.
13. Oscar Howe to Jeanne Snodgrass, April 18, 1958, Jeanne Snodgrass King Col-
lection, H. A. and Mary K. Chapman Library, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa,
Oklahoma.
14. Nancy Marie Mithlo, “The First Wave . . . The Time Around,” in Manifestations:
New Native Art Criticism, ed. Nancy Marie Mithlo (Santa Fe, NM: Museum of Con-
temporary Native Arts, 2011), 18–27; Jolene Rickard, “Visualizing Sovereignty in the
Time of Biometric Sensors,” in “Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law,” edited by Eric
Cheyfitz, N. Bruce Duthu, and Shari M. Huhndorf, special issue, South Atlantic Quar-
terly 110, no. 2 (spring 2011): 465–86.
15. Anthes, Native Moderns, 162–68.
16. W. Richard West, Sr., “Traditional Motifs and Contemporary Principles,” South
Dakota Review 7, no. 2 (summer 1969): 101–2; W. Jackson Rushing III and Kristin
Makholm, Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison (Norman: University of Okla-
homa Press, 2013). See also W. Jackson Rushing III, “Being Modern, Becoming Native:
George Morrison’s Surrealist Journey Home,” this volume.
17. Moreover, the history of “traditional” Native painting contains numerous ex-
amples in which baskets, textiles, and other women’s arts are depicted, and arguably
the abstract and nonobjective styles by Native artists of the later twentieth century
are informed by traditions of pottery painting, quillwork, and symbolic abstraction
practiced by women in many Native North American cultures. This history of mostly
108 B ill A nthes

male modernists picturing or otherwise incorporating women’s “crafts” suggests con-
tinuities between what are termed “traditional” and “modern’” arts. Thanks to Jessica
Horton for suggesting this reading of these pictorial “citations.” Horton, e-mail mes-
sage to author, November 10, 2014. For a study of a Northern California Native basket
production in the context of modernization and the growth of the tourist industries,
see Marvin Cohodas, Basket Weavers for the California Curio Trade: Elizabeth and Lou-
ise Hickox (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997).
18. Hutchinson, The Indian Craze, 7.
19. For an overview of Cahuilla history and culture, see John Lowell Bean, Mukat’s
People: The Cahuilla Indians of Southern California (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1974).
20. Emil Paulicek Steffa, “Basket Makers of the Coachella Valley” (1927), 5, Special
Collections, Claremont College Library, Claremont, California.
21. Steffa, “Basket Makers,” 15–16. Steffa’s biblical reference (Isaiah 35:1, “The desert
was made to rejoice and blossom as the rose”) suggests that his primitivism was in-
formed by his Christian education at Pomona College, founded in 1887 by Protestant
Congregationalists.
22. Steffa, “Basket Makers,” 28.
23. Steffa, “Basket Makers,” 56
24. Emil Paulicek Steffa, “Tales of a Desert Indian” (n.d.), 6–7, Special Collections,
Claremont College Library, Claremont, California.
25. Steffa, “Tales of a Desert Indian,” 6.
26. The basket, catalog P1263 in the collection of the Pomona College Museum of
Art, is identified as having been made by “Mrs. Chuple.”
27. Steffa, “Basket Makers,” 96–97
29. Steffa, “Basket Makers,” 123. In addition to finding in the basket a “wild beauty,”
Steffa suggested a racial explanation for its patterning: “The reverse side of the basket
. . . has a small figure in the center, the meaning of which has not been obtained. In
showing this basket to a Chinese student of Pomona College he exclaimed, ‘We have
that pattern in our Chinese art.’ This may be simply another straw that indicates this
country was once inhabited by Asiatics” (124).
31. Steffa, “Basket Makers,” 77, 79.
32. Steffa, “Basket Maker,” 70.
33. “CIBA Vision Statement,” California Indian Basket Weavers Association, accessed
July 1, 2014, http://www.ciba.org/home/vision-statement.

KAREN DUFFEK
4 AN INTERSECTION
Bill Reid, Henry Speck, and the Mapping

of Modern Northwest Coast Art
In 1967, the year of Canada’s one-hundredth anniversary of confederation, a

major department store in downtown Vancouver staged an event called Eaton’s
Salute to Indian Culture. It was a public celebration of the Indigenous arts and
cultural practices of the province of British Columbia, arranged by the ven-
erable national retailer from street level to the sixth floor. There were artifact
displays and carvers demonstrating their craft among racks of clothing and
hardware, chiefs offering autographs on Saturday between 2:30 and 4:00 pm,
“Mrs. White” distributing samples of her barbequed salmon, and non-Native
artists showing paintings of “Indian” people and totem poles.1 On the main
floor, the young Haida artist Robert Davidson demonstrated argillite carving;
nearby was the already well-known Haida artist and radio broadcaster Bill
Reid, depicted in the brochure wearing a headband and loincloth while carv-
ing a cedar screen with a stone adze (figure 4.1). Prints of Chief Henry Speck’s
Kwakwa-ka-’wakw thunderbirds and sea monsters were displayed on floors
two and five; and in the middle of the Ladies’ Lingerie department was the
’Namgis artist Doug Cranmer (quite contentedly, as he later recalled), carving
a ten-foot totem pole.2
The Eaton’s event was organized to complement the concurrent Arts of the
Raven exhibition at the nearby Vancouver Art Gallery (vag), which set out
to contribute “explicitly and emphatically” to an institutionally driven “shift
in focus from ethnology to art.” 3 Such an approach had been gradually con-
stituted since the late 1930s, through museum and gallery exhibitions of the
F I G U R E 4 . 1
Eaton’s Salute to Indian Culture

brochure, 1967. Collection of the
Audrey and Harry Hawthorn
Library and Archives, University
of British Columbia Museum of
Anthropology, a035049.
province’s historical Northwest Coast and other Native art and artifacts.4 Do-
ris Shadbolt, then acting director of the vag and one of the organizers of the
exhibition, declared in her often-quoted catalog statement that the selected
works were “art, high art, not ethnology.” The sculptures and jewelry presented
in the contemporary section of the show, moreover, “though truly enough of
Indian descent,” were to be further recognized during this year of nationalist
celebration as “Canadian art, modern art, fine art.” 5 If from our perspective to-
day, there was an obvious disjuncture between Eaton’s recontextualization and
the optimistically modernist pronouncements of Arts of the Raven, there were
certainly also cross-articulations. Mapped in the gradually escalating dotted
pathway and crude caricatures of the Eaton’s brochure is something of the
entrenched hierarchies and binaries that have marked the twentieth-century
cartography of Northwest Coast Indigenous art and public performance.
These distinctions aimed to differentiate between past and present, “primi-
tive” and Western, the culturally protected and the nationally appropriated,
the low and the high, the hidden and the revealed. Yet “Indian dancing and
singing,” canoe carving, food, and sweater knitting shared equal space at the
department store with displays of painting, sculpture, and photography. The
featured artists and artisans represented their work within an unabashedly
hybrid setting of commercial consumption, cultural translation, and national
commemoration. At the vag’s Arts of the Raven, by contrast, the need for clear
distinctions, even boundaries, between singularized “masterpiece” artworks
and collective “ethnological,” or cultural, practices was emphasized. The gal-
lery’s bold reclassification of selected Northwest Coast artworks into an aes-
thetic space occupied by modern Canadian (non-Native) fine art, despite their
indigeneity, promoted what Marcia Crosby describes as “an abstract equality
that eclipsed the concrete inequality most First Nations people were actually
experiencing.” 6 Reinforcing Western typologies of art history and anthropol-
ogy, the exhibition simultaneously recognized Indigenous art while distanc-
ing it from Indigenous frameworks of value. Here were strong hints about the
price of admission into the lineage and discourse of modernism.
This chapter investigates the divergent, intersecting, and still incomplete
routes through which two of the artists featured in Eaton’s storied salute — Bill
Reid and Henry Speck — experienced and sought access to the modern. Like
the distinct pathways offered by Eaton’s and the vag in 1967, the metaphor
of routes is helpful in making visible the spatial and temporal platforms on
which these two artists positioned themselves and were positioned by others,
against and within the discursive framings of modernity and modernism.
112 K aren D uffek

Bruce M. Knauft offers an image of the “alternatively modern” as being “more
processual than classificatory, more concerned with specific disempower-
ments and cultural engagements than with typological differences.” 7 While a
multiple modernisms approach would resist the notion that Reid’s and Speck’s
engagement with modernity and modern art practices should be considered
“alternative” to a model centered elsewhere, understanding their trajectories
as processual rather than linear opens up the complex ways in which these
artists negotiated the spaces and categories within which their art functioned
and was received. Adds Knauft, “It also moves us close to ethnographic and
historical specifics, which are often if not typically our best defense against the
imposition of Western assumptions and oppositions.” 8 Whether contesting or
affirming notions of what it meant to be traditional or modern, each artist
drew from his own inherited cultural traditions and their ongoing histories;
each engaged with diverse and sometimes intersecting networks and audi-
ences. Each has helped to complicate assumptions about the apparent chasm
between an autonomous art aspiring to inclusion in “modern art” worlds
and an art contributing to Indigenous cultural practices and narratives of
modernity — challenges that loomed large, and with differing implications, for
Reid as well as for Speck.
Bill Reid is widely credited with playing a seminal role in what is often
called the “renaissance” of Haida and other Northwest Coast art that emerged
in the 1960s — a process of renewal and expansion of both art production and
public interest that followed the period of more than a century of colonial
persecution and profound culture change for Indigenous people in British
Columbia.9 Born in 1920 to a Haida mother and Euro-American father, Reid
became known through his metalwork, carvings, and sculptures as the first
twentieth-century master of Haida art. He often referenced the distance he
felt from the cultural traditions of his maternal ancestors, articulating what
he saw as contradictions in his position as both a maker of art in a histori-
cal Haida style and, as he succinctly said, “a product of urban 20th-century
North American culture.” 10 In his public discourse Reid not only confounded
the beliefs of others, both Native and non-Native, about what Haida art and
culture had been and were now becoming, but he simultaneously and strate-
gically drew on and resisted the values of Western modernism through his art
practice.11 The rupture between art practices of the past and present became
his starting point. He navigated Haida art with the initial intention of making
the ancient forms of a “bygone” culture modern, and he provoked controversy
within the Haida and academic communities with his discourse of universal-
A n I ntersection 113
ism over cultural protectionism.12 Yet he came to stand for Indigenous art and
its framing institutions more than he probably ever intended.
Reid was a defining figure in establishing public recognition for historical
and new Northwest Coast Indigenous art — indeed, for the idea of “Northwest
Coast art” as it came to be understood institutionally and in the art market
after the mid-twentieth century. His story received much popular and schol-
arly attention during his lifetime, with numerous reappraisals by Haida and
non-Haida scholars.13 Henry Speck’s work, by contrast, has only recently
begun to be critically assessed within the field of artistic modernisms.14 The
Kwakwa-ka-’wakw artist and hereditary chief was born in 1908 in the coastal
village of K-alugwis and died twenty-seven years before Reid, in 1971 — too
early to witness the expansion of the market and institutional support in the
1970s and 1980s for new Northwest Coast art, including silkscreen prints, that
both he and Reid had helped set in motion. A committed Christian and re-
spected community leader, dancer, and singer, Speck was active in countering
assimilationist legislation suppressing Kwakwa-ka-’wakw cultural practices
and self-governance, as well as in facilitating the modernization of his reserve
community’s infrastructure and economy. He painted and carved for much of
his life, but was “discovered” by a Vancouver art dealer in 1961 for his compo-
sitions on paper — works that, with this new patronage, allowed him to exper-
iment visually and conceptually with motifs drawn from his deep connection
to Kwakwa-ka-’wakw ceremony, place, and story. The works’ recognition as
inventive forms of expression — images centered as much on culturally spe-
cific knowledge as on “modern” mediums and genres of painting — did not,
however, result in Speck’s inclusion, until recently, in either the modernist or
the local Indigenous modern canons.15
If modernism may be defined in part by its “critical overturning of previ-
ously held values and ways of doing things,” we can observe how Reid and
Speck contended differently with modernist regimes of value.16 The “rupture”
between past and present, between the culturally entangled or owned and the
detached or universal, between tradition and modernity, was not just a foun-
dational construct of modern art. Preceding and running concurrently with
each artist’s story were the legacies of colonization that imposed real rupture
on Indigenous people in British Columbia. Beginning in the 1860s, colonial
policies worked to separate art and its cultural functions from one another,
paralleling the separation of the land from the people. The survival of cultural
practices was threatened, and externally constructed narratives of artistic and
social decline were established. The effects of Christianization, devastating
114 K aren D uffek

population loss due to epidemics, radical economic change and marginal-
ization, loss of lands and resources, and assimilationist strategies, including
Indian residential schools, combined to disrupt the exchange and transference
of cultural knowledge within communities — from master to apprentice, uncle
to nephew, and grandmother to granddaughter. Between 1885 and 1951, more-
over, the Canadian government prohibited the potlatch and related feasts
and winter ceremonies, the central ceremonial complex among Northwest
Coast Indigenous peoples.17 The potlatch encompassed spiritual, economic,
judicial, genealogical, and political elements performed through oratory,
dance, display of masks, and other inherited privileges, wealth distribution,
and witnessing. “From this potlatch prohibition period,” observes the Kwak
wa-ka-’wakw educator Daisy Sewid-Smith, “many carvers and painters became
well known as ‘Northwest Coast artists’ ” — in part because the federal govern-
ment encouraged curio production as a form of economic development and,
paradoxically, as a national symbol.18 As a newly emerged category, Northwest
Coast art was born of that forced rupture. Making masks and other art objects
for the purposes of ceremony between 1885 and 1951 became a criminalized
activity, whereas making representations of functional items for sale to tour-
ists, or carved totem poles as commissioned state symbols, was encouraged.19
This history of forced detachment is inseparable from the discursive space
of modernity on the Northwest Coast, where cultural traditions subjected to
colonial erasure or assimilation struggled for recognition on their own terms.
Scott Watson points to non-Native Canadian modernists who, in the early de-
cades of the twentieth century, looked to assimilate Indigenous arts to create a
true Canadian art rooted to place: “Native art was accordingly stripped of local
meaning and placed within the horizon of universal expression and timeless
form. Its greatness assured that it belonged to ‘mankind.’ ” 20 And later, when
the Arts of the Raven exhibition included selected contemporary Northwest
Coast artworks with those of the old masterpieces, “The crucial emphasis on
ethnicity, even more than on cultural experience, as an authenticating factor
in the production of native art, contradicted all the arguments made for its
universality — the very quality that made it high art.” 21 Clearly, Indigenous
artists confronted the ideal of an emancipated art at these intersections of
imposed and desired modernities, of collective cultural responsibilities and
modernist regimes of value. Here, it is worth noting the often-contrasting
routes taken by Reid and Speck, individually and relationally. They raise ques-
tions central to achieving an expanded yet locally situated understanding of
modernism; in their differences, they also complicate the conventional narra-
tives of twentieth-century Northwest Coast art.22 As individuals, each man set
out to articulate for himself the terms of his heritage and his modernity within
a broader local history of colonization and ongoing marginalization of Indig-
enous peoples. Each resisted but also took advantage of the freedoms that a
modernist approach to art making promised. Both sought a contemporary
public platform on which their inherited traditions would be recognized as
equal among other art traditions of the world. This rests on two primary ques-
tions: How did Reid and Speck negotiate the art/artifact, art/craft, traditional/
modern, and locally specific/universal distinctions by which their work was
given value and meaning in art institutions and changing markets? And on
whose terms and for what purposes was their work recognized — or not — as
modern, or even as contemporaneous to their present, rather than as belong-
ing to a supposedly vanishing (“primitive”) past?
Underlying these questions is the challenge of articulating a modernism
that not only encompasses but is also informed by the diversity of Indigenous
art practices developed in response to the conditions of modernity. Discus-
sions of Indigenous modernisms have, to date, often posited the use of “new”
media — such as painting on canvas or paper — or visual art approaches already
established by Western modernists as requirements for recognition.23 More-
over, as Charlotte Townsend-Gault reiterates, modern art “is a critical project
aimed at freeing the individual from oppressive social systems. This degree of
freedom appears to run counter to the constraints implicit in identifying with
a distinct culture and its traditions.” 24 Of course, for Indigenous artists, their
own traditions were not the only ones that might be considered oppressive.
To avoid yet another externally defined criterion for inclusion in a history of
twentieth-century modernism — which carries with it the potential of dis-
missing work that reaffirms collective origins, ancestry, and connections — I
argue for a more nuanced view in which modernism stands for “a condition of
being modern that entails both a rupture from the past and a re-engagement
with it.” 25 Both Reid and Speck created artworks referencing locally specific,
culturally rooted practices as responses to — not denials of — the conditions
of modernity. In so doing, they negotiated a kind of “third space” of framing
that is neither traditional nor modern; rather, it asserts the presence of the
traditional within the modern. But then, can we call them modernists?
116 K aren D uffek

Bill Reid (1920–1998)
Faithful to his home tradition, Bill Reid has fully assimilated its laws but
his own genius has allowed him to continue to diversify it without ever
repeating the message of his ancestors. Sensitive to the universal import of
this message he has released it from the special conditions in which it was
conveyed for generations. . . . Hereafter, thanks to Bill Reid, the art of the
Indians of the Pacific coast enters into the world scene: into a dialogue
with the whole of mankind.
C L A U D E L É V I -S T R A U S S | quoted in Bill Reid: A Retrospective
Exhibition, 1974
Those old people were completely educated in their universe. Our universe
is no longer a stretch of beach and a number of genealogies and a body of
myth. It extends far beyond that.
BILL REID | quoted in Karen Duffek, “On Shifting Ground,” 1984
Much has been written on Bill Reid’s life and art, and he was himself a pro-
lific and cosmopolitan writer, poet, and speaker who complicated the terms
by which his work, as well as Haida art and history, were understood.26 His
legacy remains a subject of reassessment because of his place as a contentious
figurehead, an argued-about symbol of the “revival” of Native culture, an em-
bodiment of both Haida and European cultures, and a metaphorical bridge
between the lost (primitive) culture and modern art.27 In his own words he
emphasized the temporal and spatial distances under that bridge, lamenting
but accepting as inevitable his own (as well as other Haidas’) detachment
through colonization from an authentic past, arguing for the need to “cut
the losses” and be modern.28 His apparent place in between two worlds po-
sitioned him as mediating opposites and contradictions (whether Native and
European, or traditional and modern) that could more accurately be seen as
dynamic and overlapping.
Indeed, Reid’s journey as an artist began far from the villages of his mother
and grandparents on Haida Gwaii. Born in Victoria, British Columbia, to
a Haida mother and a non-Native father, Reid described his sense of being
“just a middle-class WASP Canadian” as an effect, in part, of his mother Sophie
Gladstone’s experience at Indian residential school.29 “My mother,” he wrote,
“had learned the major lesson taught the native peoples of our hemisphere
during the first half of this century, that it was somehow sinful and debased to
be, in white terms, an ‘Indian,’ and certainly saw no reason to pass any pride in
that part of their heritage on to her children.” 30 His mother and aunts did wear
gold and silver bracelets made by his maternal grandfather, Charles Glad-
stone, and John Cross.31 These were for Reid a first glimpse of the art forms to
which he would later dedicate his career, deciding at age twenty-eight to train
as a goldsmith. While working as a radio commentator for the national Cana-
dian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc), Reid studied conventional European
jewelry techniques at the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto for two
years. There, he developed an interest in new jewelry design, looking to the
work of modernists like Margaret de Patta, whose Bauhaus-and American-
inspired sculpted jewelry became as influential on his emerging aesthetic as
the monumentally sculpted Haida totem pole from T’anuu, his grandmother’s
birthplace, that he discovered in the nearby Royal Ontario Museum.32 Later,
he advanced his goldsmithing techniques with an apprenticeship at the Plat-
inum Art Company in Toronto and, in the late 1960s, with a year of study in
contemporary jewelry design in London, England. But Reid’s interest in Haida
art was newly sparked when, on his return to the west coast of British Co-
lumbia in 1951, intending to establish himself as a designer of contemporary
gold, platinum, and diamond jewelry, he saw a pair of bracelets owned by one
of his great-aunts and engraved by Da.a xiigang, Charles Edenshaw. “It was
during this period,” Reid writes, “that I built up an unrepayable debt to the late
Charles Edenshaw, whose creations I studied, and in many cases shamelessly
copied, and through whose works I began to learn something of the underly-
ing dynamics of Haida art.” 33
For Reid, Edenshaw’s metalwork embodied a high point in the “classical”
nineteenth-century Haida style and a standard of craftsmanship that deserved
worldwide recognition. In important ways Edenshaw’s output was already
an art of the world. His inventive, wide-ranging, and still-influential practice
was rooted in a deep understanding of Haida art and cosmology, but also in
the clash and coexistence with Euro-Canadian cosmologies and economies
that he experienced. Edenshaw’s art registered an emerging modernity: in
form and intent, it belied the notion of traditional art as unchanging. During
a period of legislated cultural oppression and concurrent market expansion,
he made works for his community and a wide network of coastal Indigenous
peoples, as well as for tourists and international museum collectors.34 These
works modeled for Reid an aesthetic both canonical and uniquely individual
on which he chose to build his own understanding and interpretation of the
tradition. Reid applied European techniques to Edenshaw’s motifs and to other
118 K aren D uffek

artifacts he studied in books and examined and photographed in museums
and private collections. His goals were to bring attention to the masterworks
of the past, to apply their level of craftsmanship to new work, and to create a
modern Haida art that would enter into a dialogue with current international
jewelry design (figure 4.2). “It was not a commitment to the ceremonial, to the
mythical, to any part of it — it was an attraction to the aesthetic of the art forms
and the wonderful experience of seeing these things grow as they were applied
to the pieces of jewelry,” he recalled.35 Undertaking his investigations without
cultural constraint, extracting and translating the crest and mythological im-
ages from lineage and social obligation into art, Reid gradually began to see
the possibilities for his own creativity within the Haida tradition. The tech-
niques he commanded, such as repoussé and casting, enabled him to move his
practice beyond the engraving he had seen on work by his Haida predecessors.
Ultimately, he fused Haida expressive forms with the conventions of Western
sculpture and modernist jewelry design, confronting notions of Indigenous
cultural purity even as he came to embody a link to master artists of the past in
the public imagination (figure 4.3).
During that early period of learning and experimentation, in the 1950s, Reid
joined anthropologists Wilson Duff (of the then British Columbia Provincial
Museum) and Harry Hawthorn (University of British Columbia) on two expe-
ditions to salvage historical totem poles from abandoned villages in southern
Haida Gwaii.36 Together with other members of the British Columbia Totem
Pole Preservation Committee, they selected, purchased, and relocated pieces
to museums in Victoria and Vancouver with the stated objective of protecting
the poles from vandalism and decay.37 “We came . . . to honour the carvers
in our own way — by taking what remained of their work, to preserve it, and
show the outside world something of the wonder of the old days,” stated Reid
in a CBC television broadcast about the 1957 trip.38 Marcia Crosby has written
extensively on how Reid was then beginning to position Haida culture, and
himself, in relation to urban institutions — museums and the university — and
to participate as a leading figure in building a new discourse and value for
Northwest Coast art.39 The trips and the poles themselves became part of the
raw material that simultaneously reinforced his sense of connection to his
maternal heritage and his appreciation of the nuances of nineteenth-century
Haida sculptural form. Moreover, these experiences laid a foundation for his
ensuing role in the recognition of Haida art according to universal aesthetic
values. As Aaron Glass summarizes, “Salvage paradigms in anthropology and
the universalist aesthetics of modernism provided a rationale for the removal
FIGURE 4.2 Bill Reid, hinged bracelet depicting the Raven, ca. 1955.
Gold, 1.7 × 2 × 2.4 in. (4.3 × 5 × 6 cm). Photograph by W. McLennan.
Dr. Sydney Friedman and Dr. Constance Livingstone-Friedman Collec-
tion, University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, 2923/1.
FIGURE 4.3 Bill Reid, earrings in abstract design, 1961. Silver,

0.7 × 0.9 × 0.5 in. (1.9 × 2.3 × 1.3 cm). Photograph by Tim Bonham.
FitzGerald Collection, University of British Columbia Museum of
Anthropology, Nb1.708 a–b.
and decontextualization of indigenous objects and imagery, while the per-

ceived loss of this ethnographic context was a precondition for that material’s
transformation into fine art.” 40
With institutional patronage, Reid took on his first monumental wood-
carving commission: an outdoor complex of Haida-style totem poles and two
cedar-plank houses for the University of British Columbia, constructed between
1959 and 1962 with the assistance of experienced Kwakwa-ka-’wakw (’Namgis)
120 K aren D uffek

carver Doug Cranmer (figure 4.4). The project marked a shift in scale for Reid
and contributed to the repositioning of Northwest Coast art within an urban
Canadian frame. Reid selected and combined figures drawn in part from the
pole fragments salvaged for museum collections, piecing together the crests
not in relation to specific clan and family histories, but in a way that could
more generally represent the main supernatural beings from Haida narrative
for the education and enjoyment of a diverse public. Restorative in style rather
than function, Reid’s poles were modern in their autonomy from the social re-
lations that crest figures traditionally symbolized, even as the new works rep-
licated nineteenth-century forms. Yet these were also the first old-style Haida
houses to be made in the twentieth century. The project ultimately provided an
impetus for further totem-pole carving by a new generation of Haida artists,
including Robert Davidson. Specific clan histories and other local meanings
may have been subsumed, but they had clearly not been erased for the Haida
people who found in Reid’s new works more than a mere recognition of the
historical and universal value of Haida sculpture. In 1978, Reid contributed
directly to the renewal of carving in Haida Gwaii, producing a fifty-six-foot
house-front pole, which was raised at the band council office in his mother’s
village of Skidegate.
Yet throughout much of his career, Reid based his artistic approach on a
firm belief in the death of Haida culture. With equal conviction, he spoke
about the importance of reassessing its material legacy — its art — in universal
terms. In the years leading up to the 1967 Arts of the Raven exhibition, he par-
ticipated with art historian Bill Holm in articulating a language of formal anal-
ysis that could be applied to Haida and other northern Northwest Coast art
styles to enable understanding and cross-cultural appreciation of their under-
lying logic.41 Moreover, he succeeded in bringing Haida motifs into modern
institutional frameworks and discourses, both locally and nationally (figure
4.5). His pronouncements of cultural extinction reinforced more widely held
assumptions about the rupture between the art and the spiritual and cultural
traditions it represented. But throughout the 1980s and to the end of his life,
Reid increasingly contradicted his own remarks as his ties to the living Haida
community strengthened. In 1989, for example, he used his international
renown and cosmopolitan networks to protest Canada’s refusal to recognize
Haida territorial title by taking the canoe he had carved to Paris and refusing
to fly the Canadian flag while paddling it down the Seine. His was a process of
conscious reconnection, countering while always complicating the historical
effect and modernist criterion of “rupture” between a culturally implicated
FIGURE 4.4 Bill Reid paints the interior house post he carved with Doug
Cranmer for the University of British Columbia’s Haida House complex, ca. 1962.
Photograph by Derek Applegarth. Courtesy of the Audrey and Harry Hawthorn
Library and Archives, University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology,
a034048.
F I G U R E 4 . 5 Left to right: Audrey Hawthorn (curator, ubc Museum
of Anthropology), Bill Reid, and Robert Davidson present a totem pole

to the City of Montreal, represented by Mayor Jean Drapeau, at Man
and His World, Montreal, 1970. Davidson was brought to Montreal to
carve the pole in public, and Reid, who was then living there, assisted
him. The project was part of the first major public exhibition since
1956 of Museum of Anthropology’s growing collection. Photo credited
to ubc Extension Department. Courtesy of the Audrey and Harry
Hawthorn Library and Archives, ubc Museum of Anthropology.
and an autonomous art. Crosby has pointed to the questions raised for the
Native community by Reid’s assertion throughout this process that Haida art
belongs to the world: “At what point does that which has been distinguished —
precisely because it is culturally Haida — become separate from its origins
through identification as ‘universal’ and cease to have the freedom to acquire
selfhood? To be Haida?” 42
Haida citizen and language teacher Diane Brown, who knew Reid well,
recognized his relationship to the Haida this way: “I saw the struggle that
went on in him. So many things about how Bill operated and how we as Haida
people operated were different. Whenever we do something, the protocol has
to be right: we have set rules. And Bill always managed to just smash all those
up.” 43 As Townsend-Gault adds, “Ignoring rules was a modern thing to do.” 44
Smasher and rebuilder, Reid remains an iconic and yet contentious figure in
the twentieth-century history of Haida and Northwest Coast art. He helped
to both reestablish the formal “rules” for classical Haida art and free himself
from them; he struggled for inclusion in the living Haida community yet ar-
gued passionately for a classically based, detached, and modern Haida art that
could stand on its own. And into the last decade of his life, Reid continued
to state, wryly and publicly, “I haven’t made up my mind yet whether Haida
culture is extinct. If it’s become more than that, it’s only recently.” 45
Henry Speck, Udzi’stalis (1908–1971)
cbc interviewer Norman Newton: Do you follow the purely traditional style,
or do you alter it to suit your own needs?
Henry Speck: I alter it to suit my own needs. . . . It’s been handed down to me,
this talent. . . . I find myself an artist ever since I was a little boy.
NN: Let’s say you have a design which, two hundred years ago, stood for a spirit
that the people really believed in — say, the Dzunuk’wa — and they could
give it a lot more power and conviction because they really believed that.
HS: I actually believe it, because it’s right in our village. I hear a lot of stories
about this Dzunuk’wa; it has a magical power, and still does today.
NORMAN NEWTON | interview with Henry Speck on the cbc radio
program The Indian as an Artist, 1965
The popular media narrated the story of Henry Speck, an artist of the Tlawit’sis
tribe of the coastal Kwakwa-ka-’wakw people, as beginning with the paintings
on paper through which he was “discovered” in 1961. After this moment, his
work began to circulate and to be promoted as “pictures so old they are new”
in the urban setting of Vancouver.46 Of course, only part of his story started
there. Of greater relevance to the Kwakwa-ka-’wakw way of defining who he
was are the stories of who his ancestors were, where they originated, and
what they encountered on their journeys. These were the subjects of Speck’s
paintings; they represented particular, situated knowledge and its movement
through time and space. His images of dancers and supernatural beings stood
for the Kwakwa-ka-’wakw people’s ancient connections and ongoing account-
ability to their belief systems, territories, and laws; to their genesis and ge-
124 K aren D uffek

nealogical relationships manifested in the present; and to a cosmos in which
one’s place is always subject to change. They also demonstrate a fundamental
misalignment between the terms of modernism and Speck’s artistic strategy in
asserting, rather than articulating opposition to, a continuum with what had
come before.47
Henry Speck was born in the village of K-alugwis on Turnour Island, near
the northern tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Known and still re-
membered today as Ga-lidi’y in the Kwakwa-ka-’wakw community, he belonged
to a high-ranked family, receiving the privileges and responsibilities that such
a position entailed.48 Because Speck attended the Boys’ Industrial School (In-
dian residential school) in Alert Bay for only two years, he was able to retain
his Kwak’wala language, unlike children who spent many years in that assim-
ilationist institution. He was given a rigorous education in Kwakwa-ka-’wakw
ritual, song, dance, and traditional protocol by his uncles and other cultural
leaders, who initiated him, at the age of eight, as a dancer in the sacred ha-
mat’sa society. “There’s no one ever teach me how to draw,” Speck wrote in a
1963 biographical statement, bringing to mind not only the trope of innate Na-
tive artistry but also modernist myths of genius: “My first art work far as I can
remember. I used to copy everything that’s in the [mail-order] catalogue.” 49
In a 1968 interview, he recalled, “It was in my blood, they say. . . . I just grab
those carving knives and paintbrush and start in. They find I’m a good artist.” 50
Speck’s maternal grandfather, X - i’x-a’niyus (Chief Bob Harris) — an acclaimed
artist, who performed as part of a “living exhibit” with other Indigenous peo-
ple from Vancouver Island at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 — is said to have
worn Ga-lidi’y’s umbilical cord at his wrist when carving in order to transmit
his talent to his grandson.51
Speck’s ritual initiation occurred during the period when Canadian law
prohibited the potlatch, along with other Indigenous gatherings related to
land claims. He first danced as a hamat’sa at a potlatch in Alert Bay in 1922, the
same year that many Kwakwa-ka-’wakw individuals were fined or sent to prison
in Vancouver for participating in Dan Cranmer’s potlatch on nearby Village
Island. More than six hundred potlatch-related items — including masks,
whistles, regalia, and valuable hammered shields known as “coppers” — were
forcibly surrendered by participants at Cranmer’s potlatch in return for the
promise of lighter prison sentences.52 The illegally confiscated regalia were
displayed in the parish hall of the Anglican church at Alert Bay in what
must be considered among the most significant public institutional exhibi-
tions of Kwakwa-ka-’wakw visual culture in the twentieth century.53 “Curated”
by Indian agent William Halliday, who initiated the raid and presided over
the prosecutions in his fervor to eliminate the potlatch, the exhibition was
intended more as a righteous display of colonial booty than of fine art. Yet
the dispossession it celebrated intersects in profound ways with the discourse
of detachment and rupture that long defined modernist art. For Speck, who
maintained his ceremonial and art practices throughout and beyond the three
remaining decades of potlatch prohibition, the implications of “detachment”
may have ultimately encompassed aesthetic freedoms; but he also experienced
it as the enforced separation of his people from their culture, economy, and
right to self-determination.54
As a young man, Henry Speck succeeded his father as a hereditary chief of
the Si’santla namima (clan) of the Tlawit’sis, and took on the ancestral name
of Udzi’stalis, translated as “The Greatest,” under which his paintings were
later promoted.55 An accomplished dance-screen painter and song leader, he
worked as a fisherman for most of his life. He was an active member of the
rights organization the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia (nbbc), and
at age forty-four he joined the Pentecostal church. In his home community of
K-alugwis, Speck organized the building of a church, a power plant, a dam for
a water source, a school, and a community hall.56 He moved to the community
of Alert Bay in the late 1950s or early 1960s, several years after the ban on
potlatching had been removed from the Indian Act. He had been invited by
the influential cultural figure and elected chief James Sewid to become one of
a group of leaders committed both to revitalizing the potlatch and to modern-
izing the village infrastructure. They began by constructing a traditional-style
bighouse, for which Speck oversaw the carving of interior house posts, to have
a site for community ceremonial purposes and for the economic potential of
performing for tourists the previously banned dances (figure 4.6). The group
determined that “reviving” the art after its legislated oppression could offer
a much-needed source of employment, and so it formed the Kwakwala Arts
and Crafts Organization.57 Advocating against the exploitation of Native art
by outside interests, the group looked beyond cultural preservation toward
greater Kwakwa-ka-’wakw control over their own representations, their cultural
property, and the production and circulation of objects in expanding art mar-
kets. In all these initiatives, Speck was clearly a modernizer. But was he also a
modernist? Crosby offers a more nuanced question: “How did his work as a
‘modernizer’ overlap with his work as an artist?” 58
Speck had been painting Kwakwa-ka-’wakw motifs on paper for much of
126 K aren D uffek

FIGURE 4.6 Henry Speck carves interior house posts for
the new community bighouse at Alert Bay, 1964. Photographer
unknown. Photograph courtesy of the Thomas and Mildred
Laurie Collection, Audrey and Harry Hawthorn Library and
Archives, ubc Museum of Anthropology, a033146.
his life, as is evidenced by early works owned by family members.59 Former

surrealist painter and theorist Wolfgang Paalen may have picked up one of
his stylized paintings of a killer whale when he famously toured the North-
west Coast in 1939, collecting artifacts and seeking an understanding of myth
and totemism as part of his attempt to develop “a new consciousness for
modernity.” 60 The painting, featured on the cover of Paalen’s internationally
circulated art journal dyn — its 1943 “Amerindian Number” — is attributed to
a James Speck, but appears to be in the style of Henry Speck and features a
motif repeated with many variations in Henry’s hundreds of known paintings
on paper.61 But not until 1961, when Henry Speck was fifty-three years old,
was he “discovered” by the Vancouver art and antiques dealer Gyula Mayer,
who began to purchase and promote Speck’s paintings on paper. Mayer, one of
the 200,000 refugees who fled Hungary after the revolt of 1956, was a distiller
by trade and a serious art collector. On arriving in Canada in the late 1950s,
he was “horrified at how little the provincial or federal governments are do-
ing to revive the genuine art of the Indian tribes.” 62 He decided to stimulate
the production of a new Native fine art to counter the commercialism he felt
was degrading the ancient traditions. With his then business partner William
Scow, a Kwakwa-ka-’wakw hereditary chief, he traveled up the coast seeking
older artifacts to sell amid the European historical paintings and decorative
arts featured in his Muse Antiques and Art shop, but he also brought water-
colors, brushes, and paper to distribute to Indigenous artists and community
members interested in painting. He offered to purchase any resulting work.
Henry Speck proved to be the most prolific, and accomplished, of the paint-
ers Mayer contracted, producing more than two hundred works on paper for
him.63 While Mayer’s initial impetus may have been a desire to restore past
(authentic) art forms and standards, Speck’s spontaneous, freehand, and color-
rich depictions of masked dancers, sea monsters, and biblical scenes instead
marked an intercultural, aesthetic translation: a kind of reconfiguration of his
lived cultural knowledge for an unspecified, but potentially global public (fig-
ure 4.7 and plate 3). In some works, he depicted supernatural beings mapped
onto the landscape features of Tlawit’sis territory, or the holy family in button
robes and head rings. Depicting a mask in a painting, rather than carving and
painting a mask to wear, marked a conceptual change made possible by the
medium of painting on paper for a purpose outside the ceremonial space of
the gukwdzi, or bighouse.
Mayer and a larger group of business partners — bc Indian Designs Limited
— organized an exhibition of forty Speck paintings in 1964 at Vancouver’s New
Design Gallery. One of the first galleries dedicated to contemporary art in
Canada, the space was also rented out to artists to organize their own shows,
as was presumably the case for Speck’s exhibit. While his images may have
been the first representation of Kwakwa-ka-’wakw cultural production and ex-
perimentation in that edgy space, they did not participate in the discourse of
antipainting, performance, and new media then emerging on the Vancouver
art scene.64 The show’s invitation promised a “world premiere — a new and
exciting discovery,” while a catalog by the University of British Columbia Mu-
seum of Anthropology’s Audrey Hawthorn gave ethnographic context to the
images.65 Photographs of the opening event show Speck, who believed that
ceremonial regalia should properly be worn only in the bighouse, wearing suit
and tie (figure 4.8).66 He in turn honored Mayer by placing a cedar-bark neck
ring around his patron’s shoulders.
The paintings received much media acclaim and some criticism for the re-
128 K aren D uffek

FIGURE 4.7 Henry Speck, Sea Monster, ca. 1958–1964. Gouache on paper,
20 × 22 in. (50.8 × 56.4 cm). Photograph by Kyla Bailey. University of British
Columbia Museum of Anthropology, 2984/1.
contextualized Kwakwa-ka-’wakw motifs they presented. Perhaps not surpris-

ingly, newspaper reviews with such headlines as “The Chief Gives a Tootle for
Talents of Kwakiutl” signaled the paternalism in some media descriptions of
the paintings as products of the naïve, untutored, and uncosmopolitan Na-
tive.67 Often they focused on the role of Gyula Mayer as savior, reinforcing
the modern/traditional binary that Speck’s art might have been seen to com-
plicate. In a lengthy cbc radio broadcast, Bill Reid offered his own opening-
night review of what he called “a wonderful art of the past”:
What the New Design Gallery is presenting is, to me at least, an almost

unbelievable phenomenon — an art which really has no business to be
in existence at all. For it was born of a culture which has now almost
entirely disappeared. . . .
F I G U R E 4 . 8 Henry Speck (far right) stands beside dealer Gyula Mayer, federal
ministers, and other dignitaries at the opening of Henry Speck, Ozistalis, March 24,
1964, New Design Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia. Photo courtesy of Suzanna
Mayer.
His drawings are imaginative in their concept, often going far beyond
anything attempted before in Kwakiutl art, but still retaining the basic
convention intact. . . . And yet . . . I felt that something was very wrong.
. . . For theirs was a dramatic, theatrical art, and their masks, house
posts, and house paintings were all bigger than life. On a house wall
forty feet long, a painted beast could be awe-inspiring. In a 19-by 24-
inch picture frame, it looks trapped and desperate rather than fierce.68
Here, in an intersection of Reid’s and Speck’s paths three years before Eaton’s
1967 Salute to Indian Culture, Reid applied his own struggle with modern-
ist terms of recognition to evaluate Speck’s paintings as a kind of misplaced
modernity — or perhaps a misplaced indigeneity. Family crest or modern art?
Culturally functional or autonomous? Reid was both drawn to and troubled
by the apparent temporal and spatial (dis)placement of Speck’s motifs, as
though their references to the ancient would be more properly located else-
130 K aren D uffek

where. Speck, who experienced little of the institutional patronage that Reid
had then already garnered, welcomed this new platform. He performed his
own autonomy even as he resisted universalist claims of a singular modern-
ism. After all, his images remained meaningful to his community in this and
other locations, despite being reframed as commodity or relic of the past. They
also inspired new generations of Kwakwa-ka-’wakw and other Northwest Coast
artists who saw — and still see — in these vibrant and textured compositions
a possibility for the creative renewal of their two-dimensional art.69 Speck’s
trajectory, therefore, raises a provocative question: Can his clear and deep en-
gagement with the supernatural world of the Kwakwa-ka-’wakw be recognized
as also standing for his own modernity and his experience of being a partici-
pant in modernity?
Speck’s “trapped beasts” preceded the development of the Native print mar-
ket that emerged in the 1970s, during which Reid issued a series of images,
each featuring a single creature of Haida narrative centered on a white page. As
Crosby notes, Speck’s paintings predated the “formalist language and criteria
for ‘mastery’ of Northwest Coast fine art that by the late 1960s had gained pre-
eminence.” 70 This system of valuation arose in part through art historian Bill
Holm’s influential analysis and invention of a new vocabulary of “formlines”
and “ovoids” — and to some extent through the positioning of Bill Reid as its
exemplar by art institutions and museums.71 The new discourse created a way
of evaluating the art that left little room for Speck’s nonconformist pictorial
renderings of three-dimensional performance arts. The “world premiere” of
his paintings traveled to a handful of venues after Vancouver, and after enter-
ing the storage vaults of a few museums and private collectors, largely fell from
public view. Three years later, Speck’s paintings were not included in the vag’s
Arts of the Raven, which Reid helped curate — an exhibit that included new
work in historical mediums and claimed a lack of accomplished living artists.72
Still active as a carver and designer of totem poles, Speck died in 1971.
New Intersections
If I say I am dancing, what does it mean to you now? I am dancing not for
you, but in the footsteps of my ancestors who taught me how to resignify
Indigeneity, or more specifically Kwakwa-ka-’wakw knowledge, such that it
does not lose its meaning and power in the face of colonial constraint.
SARAH HUNT | “Ontologies of Indigeneity,” 5
In these words Kwakwa-ka-’wakw scholar Sarah Hunt invokes her experience
of dancing in the bighouse to ask how, and in what contexts of knowledge
production, Indigenous ways of being can be legitimized.73 Her question also
applies to the place of Indigenous art and values within modernist frame-
works shaped by a selective “politics of inclusion” or “colonial politics of
recognition,” which are receiving increasing and necessary critical attention
in relation to contemporary global art practices and Indigenous decoloniza-
tion efforts.74 Many contemporary practices assume an inclusive rather than a
marginalizing approach, mapping Indigenous knowledge and identity in the
urban landscape and in the bighouse. They seek to place a formerly displaced
indigeneity in the foreground, whether the work is directed toward cultural
functions or global art worlds. They carry Indigenous concepts and ways
of knowing into the hierarchies of values with which cultural production is
judged to belong, or not, to the present moment.
Such contemporary practices are helping to complicate the still-pervasive
binary between autonomous and culturally situated approaches to art, as re-
vealed by this discussion of how Bill Reid and Henry Speck contributed to the
history of modernism on the Northwest Coast. These practices continue the
debates with which both artists grappled on their divergent, intersecting, and
still incomplete paths through a twentieth-century art history.
Notes
1. The term Indian is less commonly used today, especially as a term of self-
designation; in this chapter, I use the terms now more commonly used in Canadian
discourse: Indigenous, Aboriginal, First Nations, and Native, recognizing the prob-
lematics of all such homogenizing labels. Regarding Bill Reid’s Indigenous heritage
more specifically, the Haida people are a First Nation whose traditional territory is
Haida Gwaii, in what is now British Columbia. (The territory was named the Queen
Charlotte Islands by British captain George Dixon in 1778; that name was “repatriated”
by the Haida to the queen in 2009.) Speck identified as Tlawit’sis, one of the eigh-
teen tribes or nations of the Kwakwa-ka-’wakw (meaning Kwak’wala-speaking) people,
whose traditional territories extend over northeastern Vancouver Island to the adja-
cent coastal mainland of British Columbia.
2. Recollection from Vickie Jensen, cited in Jennifer Kramer, Ḱesu’: The Art and Life
of Doug Cranmer (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 59.
3. Doris Shadbolt, foreword to Arts of the Raven: Masterworks by the Northwest
Coast Indian, edited by Wilson Duff, exhibition catalog (Vancouver, BC: Vancouver
Art Gallery, 1967), n.p.
132 K aren D uffek

4. For an important analysis and critique of Arts of the Raven and its contexts, see
Marcia Crosby, “Indian Art/Aboriginal Title” (master’s thesis, University of British
Columbia, Vancouver, 1994), 7–8.
5. Wilson Duff, “The Art Today,” in Duff, Arts of the Raven, n.p. Note that some of
the works were actually made by non-Natives and Americans.
6. Crosby, “Indian Art/Aboriginal Title,” ii.
7. Bruce M. Knauft, ed., Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 26.
8. Knauft, Critically Modern, 26.
9. See Aaron Glass, “History and Critique of the ‘Renaissance’ Discourse,” in Native
Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas, ed. Charlotte Townsend-Gault,
Jennifer Kramer, and Ki-ke-in (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press,
2013), 487–517.
10. Karen Duffek, Bill Reid: Beyond the Essential Form (Vancouver: University of
British Columbia Press, 1986), 3.
11. See Karen Duffek, “On Shifting Ground: Bill Reid at the Museum of Anthropol-
ogy,” in Bill Reid and Beyond: Expanding on Modern Native Art, ed. Karen Duffek and
Charlotte Townsend-Gault (Vancouver, BC: Douglas and McIntyre, 2004), 71–92.
12. See Marcia Crosby, “Haidas, Human Beings and Other Myths,” in Duffek and
Townsend-Gault, Bill Reid and Beyond, 108–30; and Charlotte Townsend-Gault, “Strug-
gles with Aboriginality/Modernity,” in Duffek and Townsend-Gault, Bill Reid and Be
yond, 225–44.
13. See especially Marcia Crosby, “Construction of the Imaginary Indian,” in Van-
couver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art, ed. Stan Douglas (Vancouver, BC:
Talonbooks, 1991), 266–91; and essays by twenty-one different writers in Duffek and
Townsend-Gault, Bill Reid and Beyond.
14. Crosby, “Making Indian Art Modern,” Ruins in Process: Vancouver Art in the Six-
ties digital archive, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the grunt gallery, accessed
August 28, 2017, http://www.vancouverartinthesixties.com/essays/making-indian-art-
modern; Karen Duffek and Marcia Crosby, Projections: The Paintings of Henry Speck,
Udzi’stalis (Vancouver: ubc Museum of Anthropology, 2012). This includes the exhi-
bition that Marcia Crosby and I cocurated (Projections: The Paintings of Henry Speck,
Udzi’stalis, ubc Museum of Anthropology at Satellite Gallery, Vancouver, BC, July
14–September 15, 2012), which helped to bring Speck’s work and historical context to
renewed public attention; our research is ongoing.
15. Duffek and Crosby, Projections; Crosby, “Making Indian Art Modern.”
16. Charlotte Townsend-Gault, “The Material and the Immaterial across Borders,” in
Townsend-Gault, Kramer, and Ki-ke-in, Native Art of the Northwest Coast, 976.
17. This was implemented through an 1885 amendment to the Canadian Indian Act
legislation.
18. Daisy Sewid-Smith, “Interpreting Cultural Symbols of the People from the
Shore,” in Townsend-Gault, Kramer, and Ki-ke-in, Native Art of the Northwest Coast,
17; Scott Watson, “Art/Craft in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Townsend-Gault,
Kramer, and Ki-ke-in, Native Art of the Northwest Coast, 351.
19. Watson, “Art/Craft,” 351; see also Leslie Dawn, “Northwest Coast Art and Cana-
dian National Identity: 1900–50,” in Townsend-Gault, Kramer, and Ki-ke-in, Native
Art of the Northwest Coast, 304–47.
20. Scott Watson, “The Modernist Past of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s Landscape
Allegories,” in Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Born to Live and Die on Your Colonialist
Reservations, ed. Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Scott Watson, and Lawrence Paul Yux-
weluptun (Vancouver, BC: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 1995), 62.
21. Watson, “Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun,” 67.
22. The constructed idea of “Northwest Coast art” is unpacked from multiple
perspectives in Townsend-Gault, Kramer, and Ki-ke-in, Native Art of the Northwest
Coast.
23. See, for example, Bill Anthes, Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–
1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
24. Charlotte Townsend-Gault, “Struggles with Aboriginality/Modernity,” in Duffek
and Townsend-Gault, Bill Reid and Beyond, 225.
25. Veronica Sekules, George Lau, and Margit Thøfner, “Foreword: Local Modern-
isms,” World Art 4, no. 1 (2014): 2.
26. See Crosby, “Construction”; Crosby, “Indian Art/Aboriginal Title”; Crosby,
“Haidas, Human Beings and Other Myths,” 108–30; Duffek and Townsend-Gault, Bill
Reid and Beyond; Bill Reid, “Curriculum Vitae 1 [1974],” in Solitary Raven: The Essential
Writings of Bill Reid, ed. Robert Bringhurst (Vancouver, BC: Douglas and McIntyre,
2009), 113–21; Shadbolt, foreword to Arts of the Raven; Duffek, Bill Reid; Bringhurst,
Solitary Raven; and their extensive bibliographies.
27. See Aaron Glass, “Was Bill Reid the Fixer of a Broken Culture or a Culture Bro-
ker?,” in Duffek and Townsend-Gault, Bill Reid and Beyond, 190–206.
28. Townsend-Gault, “Struggles with Aboriginality/Modernity,” 226.
29. Duffek, Bill Reid, 4.
30. Duffek, Bill Reid, 4.
31. Haida and perhaps other carvers began in the 1800s to carve bracelets from
hammered-out American silver dollars.
32. Monica Moses, “Groundbreaking Jeweler: Margaret De Patta,” American Craft
Council, May 1, 2012, http://craftcouncil.org/post/groundbreaking-jeweler-margaret-
de-patta; Reid, “Curriculum Vitae,” n.p. (also in Bringhurst, Solitary Raven, 116).
33. Reid, “Curriculum Vitae,” n.p. (also in Bringhurst, Solitary Raven, 117).
34. See Robin K. Wright, Daina Augaitis, and James Hart, eds. Charles Edenshaw
(London: Black Dog, 2014).
134 K aren D uffek

35. Reid, quoted in Duffek, “On Shifting Ground,” 76.
36. The village sites were abandoned because a series of smallpox and other epidem-
ics, particularly in the 1860s, led to the near decimation of the Haida population and
the movement of survivors to two main communities: Skidegate and Old Massett.
37. Some of the funds from the sale of totem poles were put toward the Skidegate In-
let General Hospital Fund. Wilson Duff, “Last Six Haida Totems to Victoria’s Museum,”
Native Voice 8, no. 7 (July 1954): 3.
38. Transcript of this May 21, 1959, broadcast, “Rescue Mission for Haida Art,” nar-
rated by CBC’s Pacific 8 program host Bill Reid, ubc Museum of Anthropology Archives.
39. Crosby, “Construction”; Crosby, “Indian Art/Aboriginal Title”; Crosby, “Haidas,
Human Beings and Other Myths.”
40. Glass, “Was Bill Reid the Fixer,” 202.
41. Bill Holm, Northwest Coast Indian Art: Analysis of Form, Thomas Burke Memo-
rial Washington State Museum Monographs 1, rev. ed. (Seattle: University of Wash-
ington Press with the Bill Holm Center for the Study of Northwest Coast Art, Burke
Museum [1965] 2014).
42. Crosby, “Haida,” 127.
43. Gwaganad (Diane Brown), “A Non-Haida Upbringing: Conflicts and Resolu-
tions,” in Duffek and Townsend-Gault, Bill Reid and Beyond, 69.
44. Townsend-Gault, “Struggles with Aboriginality/Modernity,” 225.
45. Duffek, “On Shifting Ground,” 71.
46. Stephen Scott, “Indian Chief Newly Discovered Artist,” Peterborough Examiner,
May 1, 1964.
47. The following discussion of Henry Speck’s work draws on previous and ongoing
work by the author and Marcia Crosby, including the exhibition that we cocurated and
its associated publication (Duffek and Crosby, Projections).
48. His father was John Speck, Tlakwagila’game, a hereditary chief of the Tlawit’sis
people, and his mother was ‘Wadzidi (Lucy) Harris, an Eagle chief of the Mamalilik-a-la
people. Henry Speck’s paternal grandfather carried the name Udzi’stalis, which was
passed down to John Speck and then to Henry.
49. Henry Speck, “My Life Story — by Ozistalis” (unpublished manuscript, ca. 1964),
n.p. I have not yet found further information on what kinds of images he copied, or
whether any still exist.
50. Norman Newton, interview with Henry Speck and other artists, “Program 2:
Problems of Style,” The Indian as an Artist (Ottawa, ON: Canadian Broadcasting Cor-
poration, 1965), audiocassette, aaac0115, bc Archives, Royal bc Museum, Victoria,
British Columbia.
51. Quentin Ehrmann- Curat, “A Short Biography of X - i’x-a’niyus, Bob Harris,”
T’sit’sak’alam (summer 2012): 1.
52. “The Potlatch: On the Suppression of the Potlatch,” The Story of the Masks,
U’mista Cultural Society, accessed August 3, 2014, http://archive.umista.ca/masks_
story/en/ht/potlatch02.html.
53. I am grateful to Kwakwa-ka-’wakw artist and scholar Marianne Nicolson for first
alerting me to the place of this display in the lineage of Northwest Coast art exhibitions.
54. In 1962, the British Columbia government shut down the school in Tlawit’sis and
ended monthly hospital ship visits. With no prospect of providing their own alterna-
tive to residential school and no access to health care, community members relocated
throughout Vancouver Island and southern British Columbia. Tlowitsis Nation web-
site, accessed July 20, 2014, http://www.tlowitsis.com/.
55. Speck signed his name Ozistalis. Udzi’stalis is the newer spelling of this ancestral
name and more accurately represents its pronunciation.
56. John Speck, personal communication with the author and Marcia Crosby, April
16, 2012.
57. James P. Spradley, ed., Guests Never Leave Hungry: The Autobiography of James
Sewid, a Kwakiutl Indian (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1972), 240–42.
58. In Duffek and Crosby, Projections, n.p.
59. John Speck, personal communication; Wedlidi Speck, personal communication
with the author, May 17, 2012.
60. W. Jackson Rushing III, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A
History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 121.
61. The attribution of this image to a “James Speck” has been unquestioningly cited
in publications about dyn ever since, but personal communication with Speck family
members affirms that, while the name does exist in their twentieth-century geneal-
ogy, none was an artist. Confirming the attribution to Henry Speck requires further
research.
62. Gyula Mayer quoted in “Former Hungary Collector Trying to Save Indian Art,”
Vancouver Sun, July 27, 1962, 8.
63. Among the more than thirty other artists represented in the collection are Ben
Dick, Charles Dudoward, Godfrey Hunt, Allan James, and James King.
64. In Duffek and Crosby, Projections, n.p.
65. Audrey Hawthorn, Kwakiutl Art by Chief Henry Speck (Vancouver: bc Indian
Designs, 1964), n.p.
66. John Speck, personal communication.
67. Moira Farrow, “The Chief Gives a Tootle for Talents of Kwakiutl,” Vancouver Sun,
March 24, 1964, 10.
68. Bill Reid, “Ozistalis, a North American Phoenix,” Critics at Large, cbc, transcript
of radio commentary, March 24, 1964. My thanks to Suzanna Mayer for sharing the
transcript of Reid’s critique with me.
69. Chuuchkamalthnii (Ron Hamilton), personal communication with the author,
January 2002 and December 2014. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
136 K aren D uffek

painting had been one of the most prominent and inventive forms of visual art on the
Northwest Coast, as evidenced in historical photographs and surviving examples of
monumental house-front paintings and interior dance screens and curtains. In the early
to mid-twentieth century, moreover, artists such as George Clutesi (Tseshaht), Fred-
erick Alexcee (Tsimshian/Iroquois), and Mungo Martin (Kwakwa-ka-’wakw), among
others, created paintings on paper and canvas. See Bill McLennan and Karen Duffek,
The Transforming Image: Painted Arts of Northwest Coast First Nations (Vancouver, BC:
Douglas and McIntyre, 2007). Some paintings and drawings created by students at the
Alert Bay residential school in the 1960s, now in the collection of the ubc Museum of
Anthropology, were clearly inspired by Speck’s paintings or reproductions of his works.
70. Crosby, “Making Indian Art Modern,” 5.
71. Holm, Northwest Coast Indian Art.
72. Gallery 8 in Arts of the Raven featured “The Art Today.” Wilson Duff ’s text intro-
ducing this section in the catalog states, “The old Indian cultures of the coast are dead,
but the art styles continue on in new and modern contexts. The Kwakiutl style never
did suffer a full eclipse, but was kept alive by such artists as Charlie James, Mungo Mar-
tin and Ellen Neel. Today in the hands of Henry Hunt and Tony Hunt of Victoria, Doug
Cranmer of Vancouver, and Henry Speck and many others in the Kwakiutl villages, it
is continuing as always to find new expressions. The Haida style, kept barely alive for
many decades by a handful of slate carvers, has recently been rediscovered and revived
by Bill Reid, Bill Holm, and others.” Wilson Duff, “The Art Today,” in Duff, Arts of
the Raven, n.p. Artists shown in the exhibition included Doug Cranmer (carvings and
painted panel), Robert Davidson (argillite and silver), Bill Holm (non-Native; carv-
ings), Henry Hunt (carvings), Tony Hunt (carving), Michael Johnson (non-Native;
carving), Bill Reid (silver and gold jewelry; carvings in ivory, slate, and wood; thirteen
works), and Don Lelooska Smith (non–Northwest Coast Native; carvings in ivory,
mountain-sheep horn, and wood).
73. Sarah Hunt, “Ontologies of Indigeneity: The Politics of Embodying a Concept,”
Cultural Geographies 21, no. 1 (2014): 5, doi:10.1177/1474474013500226.
74. Sunanda K. Sanyal, “Critiquing the Critique: El Anatsui and the Politics of In-
clusion,” World Art 4, no. 1 (2014): 89–108, doi:10.1080/21500894.2014.893902; Glen
Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
DAMIAN SKINNER
5 MODERNISM ON DISPLAY
Negotiating Value in Exhibitions of Māori Art, 1958–1973
Exhibition History and the Negotiation of Value

Māori artists began to produce modernist work in Western genres of sculpture
and painting during the late 1940s and 1950s, at the same time that more radi-
cal modernist art practices began to develop among settler-artists in Aotearoa
(Māori for New Zealand).1 Two projects sponsored by the New Zealand gov-
ernment provide the context for the development of Māori modernist art: the
first was a project to revive traditional or customary Māori art in the 1920s and
1930s, especially through the Rotorua School of Māori Arts and Crafts, estab-
lished in 1927; and the second was the art specialist scheme established as part of
the New Zealand education system reforms in the 1940s and 1950s, which also
saw Māori art introduced into the curriculum for all New Zealand children.2
The acceptance of these new forms of Māori art as authentic and as modern
required, for both Māori and Pākehā [settlers of European descent] audiences,
various shifts in the critical environment. These shifts included transforming
Māori artifact (displayed in vitrines according to the discourses of anthropol-
ogy) to art (displayed in temporary exhibitions according to the discourses
of art history); moving Māori art among the marae (the complex of land and
buildings where many Māori ceremonies take place), the museum, and the
art gallery; and managing the tensions between customary art and modernist
art. What was involved in negotiating these shifts is in part visible through a
series of five exhibitions of modernist Māori art held between 1958 and 1973, in
which the intersections of these tense pairings can be tracked, along with how
the differing physical spaces of Māori community buildings, and in one case
FIGURE 5.1 Māori Festival of the Arts, Ngāruawāhia,
December 1963. Photograph by Ans Westra. Ans Westra Proof
Sheets, m643, National Library of New Zealand, Wellington.
a Pākehā art gallery, continually flip and invert the relationships of artworks
to contexts.
The larger forces shaping Māori art in the twentieth century came to bear
immediately on the exhibitions that are the subject of this chapter. For exam-
ple, an exhibition of modernist Māori art at the 1963 Māori Festival of the Arts
was held in Māhinarangi, a whare whakairo (meeting house with customary
arts) completed by the Rotorua School of Māori Arts and Crafts in 1929, un-
der the supervision of Sir Āpirana Ngata (figure 5.1). A politician and cultural
expert, Ngata was a leading promoter of the renewal of the whare whakairo,
which became a center of community life and a way to strengthen Māori cul-
tural practices and identities in the first half of the twentieth century.
For Ngata, the power of the whare whakairo was not in its purity but in
its ability to adapt to Western innovations — in lighting, ventilation, flooring,
elevation, and construction materials and methods — yet still remain identifi-
ably Māori. He established the Rotorua School of Māori Arts and Crafts by an
act of parliament in 1926, and in May 1927 the school began work in Rotorua,
training carvers, then weavers and painters, to produce the distinctive art
M odernism on D isplay 139

F I G U R E 5 . 2 Contemporary Māori Painting and Sculpture exhibit, Festival of
Māori Arts, Hamilton, August 1966. Photograph by National Publicity Studios,

Archives New Zealand, Wellington, aaqt 6539, a81,944.
forms that mark out the meeting house. Art played the role of establishing and
maintaining a familiar identity for Māori in the face of massive change and ac-
culturation. Defined as a kind of ornamentation and disguise for the technical
and social innovations of the whare whakairo, customary arts worked to min-
imize the presence of modernity and the modernizing agenda that was at the
heart of Ngata’s political program. While the whare whakairo changed under
Ngata’s direction in the early twentieth century, the changes were undertaken
to firmly connect the art forms inside to the past, not to the modernized future
that otherwise so concerned him.3 Within a very short time, the innovations
that Ngata pioneered in the 1920s and 1930s began to seem historical, as if
the whare whakairo as imagined and built by Ngata and the Rotorua School
had existed for hundreds of years. Jeffrey Sissons describes this process as
“traditionalization,” an effect of the process whereby “aspects of contemporary
culture come to be regarded as valued survivals from an earlier time.” 4
At the Māori Festival of the Arts in 1963, held inside Māhinarangi and
surrounded by examples of Māori carving, weaving, and painting that repre-
sented the best of customary Māori artistic achievement, was an exhibition of
140 D amian S kinner

modernist artworks by three Māori artists, part of a pioneer generation who
broke with the customary art promoted by Ngata and embraced the values
and strategies of modernism. It is commonplace to speak of the “Tovey gen-
eration” when describing these Māori artists, a reference to Gordon Tovey,
who was national supervisor of arts and crafts, in charge of the art special-
ist scheme and therefore a significant employer of artists. The term is also,
however, a way of noting his influence on the kind of art made by the Tovey
generation artists.5 Reviewing an art exhibition that was part of the 1966 Fes-
tival of Māori Arts (figure 5.2), journalist Harry Dansey thought “perhaps the
most significant aspect” was that the exhibitors were teachers as well as artists:
“These young men and women are almost all employed as art advisors to the
Education Department.” 6
Tovey’s agenda of translating Māori customary culture into simple struc-
tures and practices for Māori and Pākehā children to use in schools was a
parallel task to that undertaken by these Māori artists in their search for ar-
tistic strategies that could translate motifs and ideas from customary Māori
art, their heritage as Māori, into the spaces and issues of contemporary art
in Aotearoa New Zealand during the 1950s and 1960s. As art historian Jona-
than Mane-Wheoki writes, “What happened — simplification of form, creative
distortion, untrammeled expressivity — was consistent with the modernist’s
reverence for children’s art and tribal art Tovey shared with his team of art
advisers. From this kind of experience the contemporary Maori art movement
emerged.” 7
The decision in 1959 to make Māori art part of the arts and crafts program
for all New Zealand children led Tovey to facilitate a hui, or meeting, at Ru-
atōria in March 1960, where art specialists had the opportunity to study under
cultural experts. The meeting was both an authorization of Tovey’s project and
an attempt to push back against the traditionalization of Māori art that had
resulted from Ngata’s scheme. One of the key cultural experts, Pine Taiapa,
had been closely associated with the Rotorua School of Māori Arts and Crafts,
and his involvement in the hui at Ruatōria is often interpreted as his conferral
of a kind of blessing on modernist Māori art. For Carol Henderson, Taiapa’s
willingness to work as a part-time specialist in Māori art for the Education
Department “signaled both his support of changes being made to traditional
Maori arts and crafts and his personal endorsement of Gordon’s aspirations
and methods.” 8
A single exhibition of Māori art in 1963 demonstrates the complex relations
between customary and modernist art that are the subject of this chapter.

Individual artists had quite extensive careers in dealer galleries and public
institutions during this period, as my case study of Selwyn Muru later in this
chapter reveals. But this history of group exhibitions of modernist Māori art,
rather than exhibitions by modernist Māori artists, enables me to identify
the various dynamics that come into play in such exhibitions. By tracking
the spaces in which modernist Māori art circulated and the various claims
made for and about it, as well as identifying how different audiences invested
in these artworks, we can see how indigenous modernism is subject to an on-
going negotiation of value. This negotiation includes classifying the artworks
and their varying presentation as modernist art made by Māori artists or, as
they are framed in this text, modernist Māori art.
Modernist Māori Art and the Education System

The first exhibition of modernist Māori art was a simple affair. A show “that
had no title, no curator or named venue” was notable, in the view of one jour-
nalist, because one of the artists had been a member of the national All Blacks
rugby team. This exhibition of five artists marked the beginning of the grow-
ing visibility of modernist Māori art in New Zealand artistic culture.9 Held in
1958 at the Adult Education Center in Auckland, the exhibition was organized
by Matiu Te Hau, who worked for Continuing Education at the University
of Auckland, part of the university’s night school program. Ngahiraka Ma-
son describes Te Hau as an example of “takawaenga Māori,” individuals who
served their communities by bridging the gap between Māori and Pākehā at
all levels of society.10 Te Hau attended Ardmore Teachers Training College and
received a bachelor of arts from the University of Auckland before taking up
his position with Continuing Education in 1953. Apart from being aware of
new developments in Māori art through his extensive networks and contact
with Māori and Pākehā institutions and communities, Te Hau and his family
had taken in Arnold Wilson (one of the artists who would be in the exhibi-
tion) as a boarder when he first began studying at Elam School of Fine Arts
at the University of Auckland; as one of the few Māori in higher education
positions in the 1950s, Te Hau was also an important mentor for Muru Walters
(another of the artists).11
Unfortunately, very little documentary evidence remains of this exhibition.
There was an anonymous review (“Show by Maori Artists”) published in the
Auckland Star on May 29, 1958, and another front-page article (“Maori Goes

in for Abstract Painting”) in the same newspaper on June 10, 1958. Beyond
this, there are no photographs of the event, exhibition list, or even artist rec-
ollections, which would provide insight into what artworks were included in
the show. (Selwyn Wilson was in London at the time, while Ralph Hotere,
Katerina Mataira, Muru Walters, and Arnold Wilson were working as teachers
in Northland.)12
Yet, we can still draw several conclusions based on what information is
available. Certainly, much about this exhibition is typical of modern Māori
art in the 1950s and 1960s. First, the artists were closely tied to the education
system, which acted as patron and employer. Four of the five artists in the
1958 exhibition — Selwyn Wilson, Ralph Hotere, Katerina Mataira and Muru
Walters — worked as art specialists with the Department of Education, while
Arnold Wilson, the fifth artist in the show, was an art teacher. Second, these
artists were part of an urban context, representatives of a generation of Māori
who were migrating to the cities and making the most of the education and
employment opportunities found there. Their art was exhibited and purchased
within the Pākehā art system and considered to be part of that system. As one
newspaper review noted, “Most of the works are oils, and although painted by
Maoris, are not Maori paintings.” 13 Third, these artists were modernists. An-
other reviewer wrote, “Admittedly the show has crudities but throughout are
the strong lines and sweeping rhythms, the gusto and the naiveté, that stamped
the workmanship of the exhibitors’ forebears.” 14 The emphasis on “strong lines
and sweeping rhythms,” the approving use of terms like “gusto” and “naiveté,”
and even the suggested link to customary Māori art are all indications of the
rhetoric of modernism as it was operating in Aotearoa New Zealand in the
1950s, and the applicability of these terms to the artworks of these Māori art-
ists reveals a new closeness between Māori and Pākehā art during this period.
Notably this first exhibition of modernist Māori art took place under the
auspices of the Continuing Education program of the University of Auckland,
rather than the Adult Education system run by the University of New Zea-
land, which was a major source of funding for and promotion of customary
Māori arts. Writing in 1957, Maharaia Winiata described a number of acade-
mies of Māori art that were run by tutors funded through the Adult Education
scheme. Catering to mostly Māori but also Pākehā students, these academies
were usually connected to meeting house projects. “The Academy scheme
centralises the centre of instruction, sets it within local communities desirous
of building carved meeting houses and brings into it expert instructors,” wrote

Winiata. “The financial burden is shared between the people and the Maori
Purposes Fund, with the Adult Education tutor coming in as stimulant and
co-ordinator of effort.” 15
Te Hau’s exhibition of modernist art made by Māori artists who worked
independently as creative artists was a contrasting statement to the communal
nature of customary Māori art production. Multiple commentators returned
to this distinction in the 1960s. Opening an exhibition of artworks by Paratene
Matchitt, Clive Arlidge, and Fred Graham in 1964, John Waititi “expressed his
pleasure at seeing the work of three young Maoris who, having overcome the
tradition of communal work, had made that extra effort necessary to succeed
in expressing themselves in colour and design, which was often a lonely one.” 16
Another reviewer, writing in 1967, noted that in contrast to the communal
activity of customary Māori art, “modern Maori art is highly individual. The
artist follows his personal vision, and relies on the uncertain market of those
art lovers who are pleased by it. Pakeha firms will sometimes commission a
work; Maori communities hardly ever.” 17
Modernist Māori Art and the Marae

In December 1963, Tūrangawaewae marae in the Waikato town of Ngāru-
awāhia hosted the first Māori Festival of the Arts to celebrate the centennial
of the Kīngitanga, the Māori king movement established in the nineteenth
century to combat the predatory effects of colonialism and the ongoing loss of
Māori land at the hands of Pākehā settlers. The festival included poetry read-
ings (by contemporary poets of their own work, and translations of traditional
songs and histories), two concerts (one of opera, and the other of popular
music), and an exhibition of modernist art by three Māori artists, as well as
carved gourds by Pākehā artist Theo Schoon and paintings of Māori subjects
by Charles Goldie and Gottfried Lindauer from the early twentieth century.18
Perhaps most notable about this exhibition is its location within Māhina-
rangi, a whare whakairo on Tūrangawaewae marae that was a showcase of cus-
tomary Māori art from the early twentieth century.19 As Ans Westra wrote in
Te Ao Hou magazine, “Mahinarangi, with its elaborate carvings and its many
mementos and reminders of past history, made a striking background for an
exhibition of contemporary art which included work by the sculptors Arnold
Wilson and Para Matchitt and the painter Selwyn Muru, who are among the
most promising younger artists working in New Zealand today.” 20 Māhina-
rangi was initially conceived as a hospital, a place where Māori patients could

receive European medical care in an environment that respected Māori val-
ues and cultural practices, and the architecture and art forms of the whare
whakairo were used to present a familiar and comforting appearance for
the Māori who would receive care there.21 The meeting house was funded by
money raised from a concert party tour to Hawkes Bay, East Coast, and Auck-
land, and by contributions of timber and money from the government, as well
as the services of the Rotorua School of Māori Arts and Crafts. Building began
in September 1928 and was completed by March 1929. Because the Pākehā
authorities refused permission for Māori to use it as a hospital, arguing that it
did not meet the standards required for such buildings, Māhinarangi came to
be used as a reception hall and museum, with the interior being “subsequently
furnished in the style of a European living-room.” 22
To a certain extent, the modernist artworks by Māori artists shown in 1963
were in tension with the customary Māori art created by the Rotorua School
of Māori Arts and Crafts in the late 1920s, which formed the backdrop for the
exhibition. For example, one of the artists, Arnold Wilson, spoke out in classic
modernist style against what he saw as an inauthentic cultural model: “Reviv-
ing so-called Maori arts and crafts is a dead loss,” he says. “All they’re doing is
reviving something that doesn’t apply to the Maori’s present-day attitudes and
way of life.” And out of that comes more specifically his conviction that teach-
ing traditional Māori sculpture and carving serves no use in preserving Māori
culture. “It’s time they scrubbed it,” he says. “All they’re getting is a template of
what was done before 1840, or what is even worse, a template of the template
that was created by the Ngata revival.” 23
Modernist Māori art was, in contrast, invested in originality and innova-
tion. As Ans Westra wrote in 1963 of Matchitt, another of the artists in the
exhibition, “The starting-point for his paintings is usually a traditional Maori
story, but though the reference to the story gives his work another dimension
of meaning, here again his interpretation is an entirely new one; like all good
artists, he is interested in doing something which has not been done before.” 24
It is a telling statement, which indicates the kind of milieu of activity and in-
terpretation in which Māori artists like Matchitt and Wilson operated. The
desire for innovation, to create “something which has not been done before,”
was not part of how artists working as part of the “Ngata revival” thought
about their work.
From a twenty-first-century perspective, this conjunction of modernist
artworks and customary context seems meaningful, particularly the irony
of Māori artists, whose work is in part articulated as a rejection of Ngata’s

FIGURE 5.3 Viewing a sculpture at the Māori Festival of
the Arts, Ngāruawāhia, December 1963. Photograph by Ans
Westra. Ans Westra Proof Sheets, m656, National Library of
New Zealand, Wellington.
project, showing their modernist artworks in a whare whakairo, which is a

prime example of the kind of Māori art they oppose. The juxtaposition also
reveals how Ngata’s whare whakairo and modernist Māori art were different
aesthetic responses to the ongoing transformations of Māori society in the
twentieth century. But in 1963 this conjunction was also interpreted as reveal-
ing a relationship between the past and the present, the old and the new, the
customary and the modernist. An editorial in Te Ao Hou magazine noted that
while such festivals allowed Māori and Pākehā audiences to enjoy the work of
some promising young artists, musicians, and writers, the festival presented
art of a very specific kind:
An occasion such as this is of much interest in giving the public an

opportunity to consider the ways in which talented young Maoris are
expressing themselves today in the arts: to see how these young people,
the inheritors of two rich cultures, are making something new of their
own — something to which both of these cultures are contributing.

It was especially illuminating to see their work at Turangawaewae,
the centre of such strong historical and traditional associations. In
this setting the contrast between the old and the new was a striking
one — but a sense of continuity was even more apparent.25
Modernist Māori artworks construct a different subjectivity for the viewer,

who enters into a specific relationship with the object. It is tempting to draw
links between the subjectivity constructed by new forms of Māori art and the
new subjectivity constructed by the novel urban context Māori were negotiat-
ing in the 1950s and 1960s. A series of photographs taken by Ans Westra at the
Māori Festival of the Arts in 1963 visually represents this kind of complexity in
particularly interesting ways (figure 5.3). What experience of being Māori did
these works provide to the viewers who look so carefully at them in Westra’s
photographs? How did these individuals articulate the relationship between
the artworks on tables and the customary Māori art displayed on stands in
Māhinarangi? As Conal McCarthy writes, “In the extraordinary photographs
of Ans Westra showing young Māori coming face to face with modern Māori
art, we see how object and subject constitute one another through the culture
of display.” 26
Modernist Māori Art and the Museum

In 1966 the exhibition New Zealand Māori Culture and the Contemporary
Scene opened at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch. Curated by Buck
Nin, a Māori artist who had recently graduated from the School of Fine Arts at
the University of Canterbury, and Baden Pere, a Royal New Zealand Air Force
officer at Wigram air force base in Christchurch, the exhibition is notable
because it “was almost certainly the first curated exhibition of contemporary
Maori art to be welcomed into a ‘mainstream’ cultural institution.” 27 It marked
an important moment in modernist Māori art’s engagement with the artistic
mainstream in 1960s Aotearoa New Zealand, and through the accompanying
catalog, the exhibition presented an ideological argument about the purposes
and functions of “this modern movement in Maori expression [which] is
barely five years old and subject to many changes in direction.” 28
As Jonathan Mane-Wheoki has noted, New Zealand Māori Culture and the
Contemporary Scene needs to be understood as constructing a staged antago-
nism with Peter Tomory’s exhibition Contemporary Painting in New Zealand,
which was held at the Commonwealth Institute in London in 1964. The argu-

ment that Nin and Pere had with Tomory’s show revolved around the meaning
and value of terms like “indigenous.” As Tomory wrote in his catalog essay,
“In the selection of this exhibition consideration has only been given to those
artists who have been working in New Zealand during that period, since the
selectors felt that the British public would be more interested in the indige-
nous art rather than that by expatriates working in England or elsewhere.” 29
Tomory’s exhibition did not include any Māori artists, just Pākehā, so a para-
phrase of his sentiment in the catalog for Nin and Pere’s exhibition of mod-
ernist Māori art could document an entirely different artistic history. As the
foreword to New Zealand Māori Culture and the Contemporary Scene states:
“The works here represent contemporary painting and sculpture derived from
an indigenous culture — that of the Maori. Consideration has been given to
only those artists who have been working in New Zealand since we felt that
the overseas public would be more interested in indigenous art rather than
that of expatriates working in England or elsewhere.” 30 A significant amount
of the essay titled “Art — The Reflection of a Society” published in the New
Zealand Māori Culture and the Contemporary Scene catalog was given over to
negative reviews of Tomory’s show, lamenting the lack of a distinctive national
identity in the art shown in London. According to Nin and Pere, the answer
to this problem was modernist Māori art: “If a true New Zealand school of art
emerges, the rich inheritance of the Maori people, here interpreted in modern
forms, may well provide a major source of inspiration for the future.” 31 This
appeal to national identity, established around a kind of primitivist modern-
ism that demonstrated “patterns derived from two cultures” in artworks that
showed “how two cultures may be assimilated to produce new art forms,” was
the mechanism by which Nin and Pere made their unabashed appeal for the
importance and authority of modernist Māori art within the contemporary
art scene of the 1960s.32 According to the curators, the artworks in their exhi-
bition were interesting and excellent not merely in relation to Māori culture,
but in terms of mainstream modernist art practice in Aotearoa New Zealand.
These Māori artists did not belong to a cultural milieu separate from that of
Pākehā modernism. As Nin concluded in his remarks at the exhibition open-
ing, “We can make a valid contribution to the value of contemporary painting
and sculpture in New Zealand.” 33
Exhibitions like this one, and the modernist Māori art they promoted, ac-
tivated tensions and disagreements within Māori audiences. In reference to
the contemporary New Zealand art debate, one article noted, “To some Mao-
ris, art such as this, as modern in its technique as in its subject, is as much

anathema as a Hepworth bronze was to some Pakehas not so long ago.” 34 A
journalist reported that when the New Zealand Māori Culture and the Con-
temporary Scene exhibition was shown at the Wellington Māori Arts Festival
in 1967, “John Taiapa, instructor and master carver from the Maori Arts and
Crafts Institute in Rotorua, shook his head when asked for his opinion. . . . ‘I
think of attempts to create new forms in that way as a prostitution of Maori
art,’ he said.” 35
Yet New Zealand Māori Culture and the Contemporary Scene actively ex-
plored the relationship between customary and modernist Māori art by
displaying examples of nineteenth-century Māori art from the Canterbury
Museum collection alongside the modernist artworks. This pointed to a com-
plex relationship. It established specific relationships between the aesthetic
features of modernist and customary Māori art, notably the sculptural depth
of older Māori carvings echoed in the sculptural depth and lack of surface
patterning on modernist Māori art — a connection asserted by some Māori
artists in the 1950s and 1960s.36 And this relationship also spoke directly to
transformations that were happening in museums during this period. As Mc-
Carthy argues, “The most important change in the genealogy of [museum]
display from the 1940s to the 1960s was a shift in emphasis from artifact to
art, the subtle transformation of the dominant category from something that
might be described as ‘artefact/art’ toward ‘art/artefact.’ ” 37
What had previously been called Māori artifacts were in the process of be-
coming Māori art, and objects in museums were increasingly being judged
according to their artistic qualities. “Certain objects, freed from the didactic
confines of the show cases, were isolated as sculptural elements in their own
right by being silhouetted against a plain wall or left on the floor as free stand-
ing forms,” writes McCarthy of the display strategies at the Dominion Mu-
seum in Wellington, which allowed audiences to appreciate Māori art as art/
artifact.38 The idea of Māori art as a form of primitive art (which in Aotearoa
New Zealand more frequently referred to Pacific objects) was supported by
the display technology of the “temporary exhibition,” which enabled this new
category to become visible within museums. Whereas the permanent exhibit
took the form of didactic displays, contextualizing objects within a model of
Māori culture based on the anthropologist’s field report (and using text and
images), temporary exhibitions featured objects as artworks against neutral
walls and with minimal staging.
Notably, New Zealand Māori Culture and the Contemporary Scene was held
in the temporary exhibition annex in the Canterbury Museum foyer, and in

this sense, the exhibition was a way for the Canterbury Museum to embrace
this shift in terminology and display strategies. Bringing modernist art and
customary art together in the format of the temporary exhibition enabled the
museum to recontextualize its collections as Māori art rather than artifact,
and to demonstrate an awareness of up-to-date transformations in museum
trends.
Modernist Māori Art and the Gallery

The one exhibition to display Māori art in an art gallery during the 1960s took
place in 1969 at the National Art Gallery (nag) in Wellington. Sharing the
same building as the Dominion Museum (where customary Māori art was
on display) and the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts (which catered to
the conservative tastes of an aging group of wealthy patrons), the nag was,
in the immediate postwar period, dedicated to showing a selection of British
academic art and its New Zealand–based followers. It began to attract growing
criticism for its conservative focus, as new developments in dealer galleries
and public institutions, such as the Auckland City Art Gallery, made the nag’s
ornately framed oil paintings, hung in a single line in neutral galleries, appear
increasingly old-fashioned.39
Modernist Māori art had entered the nag by the mid-1960s. Both Selwyn
Muru, whose painting Kohatu (1965) was the first work by a Māori artist ac-
quired by the gallery (plate 4), and Ralph Hotere had artworks in the national
collection, and Muru’s painting was, by 1969, on permanent display along with
a group of modern New Zealand and Australian paintings.40 But Māori art as a
category did not feature in the exhibition program of the nag until 1969, when
the New Zealand Māori Council organized an exhibition called The Work
of Māori Artists. Like other exhibitions of modernist Māori art discussed in
this chapter, this exhibition was part of a wider event, in this case a Ranga-
tahi [Youth] Weekend run by the New Zealand Māori Council to promote the
achievements of Māori youth. As a note in the catalog for The Work of Māori
Artists states, “Through the various functions arranged for this weekend, the
Maori Council aims to highlight the contribution that our younger people are
making to New Zealand as a whole.” 41 An awards ceremony, a concert at the
Wellington town hall, and the nag art exhibition were the main events.
Although the exhibition took place within a Pākehā art gallery, it was sim-
ilar to the other exhibitions organized during the 1960s. Selwyn Muru was
named as the curator for the exhibition. In practice this meant contacting

fellow artists and asking them to submit work, which would then be cataloged
and displayed. (As it turned out, there was too much work to fit into the small
nag space, which could house only twenty artworks, and additional works
were housed in the Display Centre, a for-rent exhibition and events center
across town.) The cover of the catalog featured a pen-and-ink drawing by Sel-
wyn Muru in which the words “Maori” and “art” are faceted within an oval
that brings to mind the early twentieth-century synthetic cubist collages of
Pablo Picasso and Georges Braques. Even the exhibition review in the Do-
minion newspaper strikes a familiar note, suggesting, “This Maori work is an
indication of adjustment to a new age of science and culture,” and praising
artists like Fred Graham, Paratene Matchitt, and Selwyn Muru for their ability
to use “Maori traditions to make art of our own century” whose “sophistica-
tion combined with the best of an exciting culture of the past” produced “an
intelligent compromise between the old and the new.” 42
What was unusual about this exhibition was the furor that erupted in the
local newspapers after an emergency meeting of the nag’s Building and Fi-
nance Committee resulted in a memo sent to John Booth, of the New Zealand
Māori Council, giving instructions as to how the artists and their guests were
to behave at the opening: “1. function is to finish at 6.30p.m. 2. the building
must be cleared at 6.45 p.m. 3. no smoking or drinking of liquor permitted
outside the Blue Room. 4. Adequate ash trays are to be provided by the N.Z.
Maori Council. 5. any person misbehaving is to be removed immediately.” 43
As the official records of the National Art Gallery show, this memo reflected a
series of misunderstandings and differences between the nag’s ways of oper-
ating and the more casual ways in which exhibitions such as these were usually
managed. For example, director Melvin Day commented that some of the pro-
posed artists and works were “of a standard high enough for the gallery to be
associated with,” but demanded that organizers vouch for other artists whose
names he did not know. This must have rankled, especially as this exhibition
included experienced and well-known Māori artists such as Arnold Wilson,
Fred Graham, and Cliff Whiting.
McCarthy concludes, “Under the guise of maintaining fine art standards
and rules, this gate-keeping behavior confirmed that the nag reflected the val-
ues of the dominant culture.” 44 It certainly reaffirmed for several Māori artists
taking part that they faced discrimination in seeking entry to the Pākehā art
world that they had, from the 1950s onward, identified as the appropriate con-
text for their modernist art. As Cliff Whiting later recalled, the argument was
about “whether Māori should be displaying art in a place like this. . . . [T]hey

suggested that if they displayed our art, Māori art, up there, then you would
have all these people eating kai, having parties . . . in the galleries!” 45
Modernist Māori Art on the Marae

In 1973, the Māori Artists and Writers Society held its inaugural meeting in
Tūkākī whare whakairo (one of the meeting houses produced by the Rotorua
School of Māori Arts and Crafts) at Te Kaha marae on the east cape of the
North Island (figure 5.4). The poet Hone Tuwhare was the convener, and the
conference “attracted over 200 people either involved or interested in Maori
culture. They included writers, poets, artists, sculptors, photographers, ac-
tors, dancers, carvers and culture group leaders.” 46 As well as readings, per-
formances, and workshops, the event included an art exhibition, which was
described by poet Rowley Habib in his report of the weekend’s events:
Two busloads go to the local high school to view the art exhibition. Now
here’s something. There’s guts, here, vitality. . . . I leave with the strong
notion that this is what art is all about. And that it should never have left
here in the first place. One couldn’t help being struck by the significance
of the whole concept. For here were works by people who, in the main,
were not only leading Maori artists, but leading New Zealand artists,
hanging on walls and in some cases propped up precariously against the
blackboard of this humble school, in this humble settlement, away out
in the sticks.47
The Māori Artists and Writers Society, founded in 1973, was essentially the
patron of returning modernist Māori art to the marae, the complex of build-
ings, including the meeting house, where Māori ceremony and identity is
performed in its most intense form. Though modernist Māori art of the kind
displayed in Te Kaha — and indeed by some of the same artists — had already
been shown inside the Māhinarangi meeting house in Ngāruawāhia in 1963,
the intention behind the society’s project was not the same. Māhinarangi had
served as a venue, and while the juxtaposition was meaningful and important
in many different ways, the view articulated by Habib that Māori art “should
never have left here in the first place” had not been present earlier. The display
strategies born of necessity in the Māori Festival of the Arts in 1963 — which
McCarthy describes as “A wide range of objects . . . haphazardly arranged on
tables and standing panels like a school fair” — was affirmed in 1973 as a means
to break down the barriers erected by professionalism and the rules of the

FIGURE 5.4 John Miller, Evening Concert, Tūkākī wharenui, Te Kaha-nui-a-tiki
marae, Te Kaha, June 2, 1973. Classical music recital, with Ivan Wirepa (from
Whanarua Bay) on piano and Stephen Sheath on cello. Digital scan from original
35 mm black-and-white negative. Collection of the artist.
Pākehā gallery that kept Māori audiences away from the work of contempo-
rary Māori artists (figure 5.5).48
The Māori Artists and Writers Society had a specific political and social
agenda, revealed by Māori novelist Witi Ihimaera in the account of the Te Kaha
meeting he published in Te Ao Hou magazine. Groups were formed to discuss
“the position of the Maori artist in New Zealand society; what directions are
needed; are our people sensitive to our presence; is there communication in
the development of our art and artists in relation to our people; use of the
marae for creativity; and the dilemma of the Maori artist in expressing Maori
concepts or feeling within a Pakeha medium.” 49 These agenda items make it
clear that in 1973, the Māori Artists and Writers Society sought a Māori audi-
ence quite unlike the Pākehā audience that had been addressed in 1966 by New
Zealand Māori Art and the Contemporary Scene.
By the early 1970s, artists like Cliff Whiting were suggesting that the marae
was a conceptual space deeply relevant to their art. One could argue that this
was in part a response to the question of audience; seeking to connect with

FIGURE 5.5 John Miller, Artists’ Exhibition Te Kaha-nui-a-tiki District High
School, Te Kaha, June 1973. Work by Para Matchitt. Digital scan from original 35 mm
black-and-white negative. Collection of the artist.
Māori people, the marae was the logical starting point since it was the place
where Māori people encountered and expected art. This is how Whiting made
the case in 1974 when he told Anne McLaughlin, “The marae is the Maori
people’s art gallery, and it is here that the full meaning of Maori art will be
found.” 50 This shift in meaning was tied to the changing social and political
context of the 1970s, especially to the so-called Māori renaissance. The new
visibility of cultural activity in New Zealand society was tightly connected to
the resurgence of mana Māori (Māori authority, power, and cultural auton-
omy) in political and social spheres, and it represents a moment in the 1970s
when Māori became irrevocably part of mainstream life in Aotearoa New
Zealand. During that decade, modernist Māori art was increasingly caught
between two big shifts: an emerging Māori nationalism, which demanded a
new artistic politics, and a dethroned artistic nationalism, which demanded
new artistic identities and practices, including allegiance to alternative forms
of modernist and postmodernist art practice.51 The ideal of a “blended” cul-
ture drawing from Māori and Pākehā cultural forms ran out of steam and was
transformed into a desire to express and maintain Māori culture as a defined

and unique entity. Art, like many other aspects of Māori culture in the 1970s,
was not concerned with Māori and Pākehā interaction but became instead an
expression of Māori culture in the face of Pākehā ignorance and racism.
Social and cultural pressures meant that the sense of individualism that had
made modernist Māori art so useful in the 1950s and 1960s as an expression
of resistance and political action was no longer the most obvious or powerful
way to achieve such outcomes. Yet to identify as Māori was to be committed
to a social and political struggle, and art still had a vital and visible role to
play in this process. It became necessary, however, to bridge the gap between
modernist and customary Māori art that earlier art practices and exhibitions
had worked so hard to establish.
Māori Artists and Contemporary New Zealand Art

Māori artists were regular exhibitors in the late 1950s and 1960s, taking part
in group exhibitions and holding solo shows at many of the leading public in-
stitutions and private galleries responsible for supporting and promoting New
Zealand modernist art (figure 5.6). The exhibition possibilities available to
Māori artists during this period are nicely illustrated by the example of Selwyn
Muru, who burst into the New Zealand art world (and public) consciousness
in 1963 after six of his paintings were selected for the Autumn Exhibition at
the Auckland Society of Arts. The exhibition committee, led by Paul Beadle,
an artist and a lecturer at the Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland, decided
to restrict the exhibition of members’ work to a grand total of 16 paintings
chosen from the 140 submitted. The selection of 6 paintings by Muru was thus
a staggering vote of confidence in a twenty-three-year-old artist, prompting
John Reid, who opened the exhibition, to ask “where he had been hiding his
talent for so long, that the public had never heard of him.52
Muru, a secondary school teacher who had no formal art training other
than that provided by art lecturer Philip Barclay at the Ardmore Teachers
Training College in Auckland, quickly followed this achievement with other
exhibitions, including the Painters and Sculptors of Promise exhibition at the
Auckland Society of Arts in 1963, and solo exhibitions at the Willeston Gal-
lery in Wellington and the Uptown Gallery in Auckland in 1964, the Centre
Gallery in Wellington in 1965, and again at the Willeston Gallery in 1966.
An article published in the Wellington Evening Post in 1964 noted that Muru
“has exhibited at the Auckland City Art Gallery, the Ikon Gallery in Auck-
land, the Auckland Art Society (all one-man exhibitions), the Contemporary

F I G U R E 5 . 6 Left to right: Arnold Wilson, Growth Forms, and Alison Duff,
Anima. Recent New Zealand Sculpture exhibit, Auckland City Art Gallery, May
1966. Photograph by Gregory Riethmaier, National Publicity Studios, Archives
New Zealand, aaqt 6401, a80,598.
New Zealand Exhibition in Japan and South-east Asia (a group exhibition by
leading New Zealand contemporary artists) and recently . . . at the Willeston
Gallery in Wellington.” 53
Throughout this chapter I have used the term “Māori art” and discussed a
sequence of mid-twentieth-century exhibitions in which these artworks were
displayed to explore the various ways in which subsets of this term — notably
modernist Māori art and customary Māori art — interacted with each other
and with various audiences. What the early exhibition history of an artist like
Muru makes clear is that while he and other artists were usually acknowl-
edged as Māori, their work was not often described or positioned as Māori
art. For example, in 1964 Mac Vincent wrote, “Muru is one of the group of
young Maori artists, all of strong individuality and with a personal vision, who
within the past few years have come into public view. Hitherto the Maori race
had lagged in the arts, and had produced no really good painter; now the men
in this group are doing some of the best work among our contemporary art-
ists.” 54 A 1963 profile in the New Zealand Listener talked at length about Muru’s
background in a small village in Northland, including his family and cultural
experiences.55 But even though the artist is always identified as Māori, at no
point is the work itself described as Māori art; rather, it is called “contempo-
rary” or “modern” art. This suited the diverse subject matter and approach
of an artist like Muru, who might just as easily present an “impressionistic
landscape,” as he would “a painting which gave to a traditional Maori motif the
jeweled richness of color which one associates with medieval stained glass,”
or talk about his work in terms clearly related to European and Pākehā mod-
ernisms of the 1950s and 1960s.56 In Rosemary Vincent’s 1964 article about
Muru in Te Ao Hou magazine, she reported that the artist thought execution
to be more important than subject (figure 5.7). She compared him to Van
Gogh, whom “we don’t remember . . . for his ability to draw so much as for
his unusual and highly original technique,” and noted that Muru’s philosophy
of painting was based on that of Pablo Picasso, who said, “I do not seek but
I find.” Such references to modernist masters, however, also emphasized the
particular relationship that modernist Māori artists such as Muru constructed
with customary Māori art. As Vincent quoted Muru, “I feel the old masters
have done an excellent job; therefore there’s no point in trying to better what
they did. But the creative avenues leading from traditional Maori art are still
open for the artist to explore.” 57
This is a good reminder that an exhibition history of modernist Māori art
reveals the active negotiations by artists, curators, critics, and viewers not only

FIGURE 5.7 Selwyn Muru in Wellington, 1964. Photograph
by Ans Westra, Ans Westra Proof Sheets, m784, National
Library of New Zealand, Wellington.
of issues such as the art/artifact classification and the values and possibilities
of different spaces such as the marae, the museum, and the art gallery, but
also of the very idea of “modernist Māori art” — a category that can only be
used in this chapter because of the negotiations of value performed during
this critical fifteen-year period. Putting Indigenous modernism on display did
more than make such practices visible to contemporary audiences. Exhibits of
modernist Māori art were fundamental to how the category of Māori art itself,
including both customary and modernist art, was negotiated and established.
Notes
1. Damian Skinner, “Indigenous Primitivists: The Challenge of Māori Modernism,”
World Art 4, no. 1 (2014): 67–87.
2. Damian Skinner, The Carver and the Artist: Māori Art in the Twentieth Century
(Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008).
3. Skinner, The Carver and the Artist, 16–46.
4. Jeffrey Sissons, “The Traditionalisation of the Maori Meeting House,” Oceania 69,
no. 1 (1998): 37.

6. Harry Dansey, “Maori Artists Make Mark as Professionals,” Auckland Star, Sep-
tember 3, 1966.
7. Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, “Gordon Tovey,” in Tovey and the Tovey Generation
(Porirua, NZ: Pataka Porirua Museum, 2000), 4.
8. Carol Henderson, A Blaze of Colour: Gordon Tovey, Artist Educator (Christchurch,
NZ: Hazard Press, 1998), 171.
9. Ngahiraka Mason, Turuki Turuki! Paneke Paneke! When Māori Art Became Con-
temporary (Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery, 2008), 15.
10. Mason, Turuki Turuki! Paneke Paneke!, 20.
13. “Show by Maori Artists,” Auckland Star, May 29, 1958, 4.
14. H. M., “Maori Goes in for Abstract Painting,” Auckland Star, June 10, 1958, 1.
15. Maharaia Winiata, “The Future of Maori Arts and Crafts,” Te Ao Hou 19 (1957):
34.
16. CHP, “Maori Painters at Art Gallery,” Waikato Times, November 30, 1964.
17. A. S. F., “Modern Art and the Maori,” New Zealand Listener, May 5, 1967, 6.
18. Ans Westra, “Ngaruawahia Festival of the Arts,” Te Ao Hou 46 (1964): 29.
19. Conal McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori: A History of Colonial Cultures of Display
(Wellington, NZ: Te Papa Press, 2007), 124–25.
20. Westra, “Ngaruawahia Festival of the Arts,” 29.
21. Michael King, Te Puea: A Biography (Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977),
127, 144.
22. King, Te Puea, 146.
23. “Reviving Maori Art and Craft Is Dead Loss, Says Maori,” unsourced newspa-
per clipping, 1966(?), Arnold Wilson Artist Files, E. H. McCormack Research Library,
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
24. Ans Westra, “Para Matchitt: Painter and Sculptor,” Te Ao Hou 45 (1963): 26.
25. “First Maori Festival of the Arts,” Te Ao Hou 46 (1964): 4
26. McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 145.
27. Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, “Buck Nin and the Origins of Contemporary Maori
Art,” Art New Zealand 82 (1997): 62.
28. Buck Nin and Baden Pere, New Zealand Maori Culture and the Contemporary
Scene 1966: An Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture Derived from Maori Culture
(Christchurch, NZ: Canterbury Museum, 1966.), n.p.
29. Peter Tomory, Contemporary Painting in New Zealand (Wellington, NZ: Queen
Elizabeth II Arts Council, 1964), n.p.
30. Nin and Pere, New Zealand Maori Culture, n.p.

33. Cherry Andrew, “Christchurch Exhibition of Maori Art,” Te Ao Hou 58 (1967): 39.
34. A. S. F., “Modern Art and the Maori,” 6.
35. A. S. F., “Modern Art and the Maori,” 6.
36. Skinner, The Carver and the Artist, 123.
41. The Work of Māori Artists, exhibition catalog (Wellington: New Zealand Māori
Council, 1969), n.p.
42. “Maori Council Art Display,” Dominion, September 2, 1969.
43. Sir Hamilton Mitchell, Chairman, nag Committee of Management, memoran-
dum, to Mr. Booth, Secretary, NZ Māori Council, August 21, 1969, mu 7/10/1: Maori
Art Exhibition, Te Papa Archives, Wellington, New Zealand.
45. Quoted in McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 212.
46. Witi Ihimaera, “Conference at Te Kaha,” Te Ao Hou 74 (1973): 22.
47. Rowley Habib, “Artists on the Marae,” Te Māori 5, no. 1 (1974): 34–35.
49. Ihimaera, “Conference at Te Kaha,” 22–23.
50. Anne McLaughlin, “Cliff Whiting: Art Is Part and Parcel of His Life-Style,” Te
Maori 6, no. 6 (1974): 25.
52. Rosemary Vincent, “Selwyn Muru’s Paintings Win Wide Acclaim,” Te Ao Hou
46 (1964): 25.
53. “Maori Painter Adds Acting to His Laurels,” Wellington Evening Post, October 3,
1964.
54. Mac Vincent, “The Aucklanders Diary,” Auckland Star, May 3, 1963.
55. M. J. A., “The Art of S. F. Muru,” New Zealand Listener, July 12, 1963, 11.
56. Vincent, “Selwyn Muru’s Paintings,” 25.
57. Vincent, “Selwyn Muru’s Paintings,” 26–27.

MODERN IDENTITIES
PART II
NICHOLAS THOMAS
6 “ARTIST OF PNG”
Mathias Kauage and Melanesian Modernism
Precursors
In artistic modernism’s canonical European expressions, the movement was
stimulated powerfully, albeit in contradictory and much-debated terms, by
ethnography and specifically by renewed interest from the late nineteenth cen-
tury in the arts of Africa, Oceania, and Native America. In certain of its Oce-
anic expressions, artistic modernism was likewise stimulated by ethnography,
but in quite a different sense: fieldwork’s generative traffic in information, de-
scription, and representation called for local artists to take novel approaches
that, in some instances, were modernist or led to modernist practice.
In 1962–1963, anthropologist Anthony Forge commissioned a group of
more than 150 paintings on paper by Abelam artists, those of Papua New
Guinea’s Sepik region. Forge was engaged in a sustained ethnographic study of
art, visual communication, and social organization in the region; his inquiries
centered on questions of style, and he was undertaking a sort of experiment.
The men who had collectively painted the great façades of Abelam houses now
created, for him, what were in effect samples, images representative of the
motifs and compositions of the much larger works integral to the preeminent
architectural form of Abelam society (figure 6.1). The group of samples repre-
sented, for the mildly positivistic anthropologist, a dataset, one that a doctoral
student at the London School of Economics would later analyze.1
In commissioning these works, Forge was enacting a method employed,
or at any rate improvised, by ethnographers in Oceania since the late nine-
teenth century (and by eminent counterparts such as Franz Boas elsewhere).
F I G U R E 6 . 1
Kuanimbandu, Tots, ca. 1960.

Painting on paper, 20 × 15 in.
(51 × 38 cm). mss 411, Anthony
Forge Papers, Mandeville
Special Collections Library,
uc San Diego.
A. C. Haddon in the Torres Strait, C. G. Seligman in Papua, W. H. R. Rivers
and A. M. Hocart in the western Solomon Islands, and later Ronald Berndt
among Yolgnu in northern Australia had all provided paper and materials
to Indigenous informants and encouraged them to illustrate ceremonies and
narratives.2 In some cases, the Indigenous collaborators did so by adopting the
conventions of European drawing, for example, by representing ritual struc-
tures in profile. In other cases, they transposed to paper forms and designs
otherwise painted onto bodies, bark, and — in Abelam — houses and sculpted
figures, scaling them down and adapting them to the proportions of the sheets
provided.
These works can be seen from two (and no doubt more) perspectives. In
one sense, they were part of the corpus of data generated in diverse media
by ethnography, along with field notes, responses to questions, photos and
moving images, audio recordings of narratives, sketch maps of settlements
and gardens, and genealogical diagrams. Yet in another sense, they were novel
artistic creations. If, indeed, the articulations of custom and diagrammatic
representations of social relations that fieldwork produced were also novel in
their conceptual form, and not simply transcriptions of cultural knowledge
164 N icholas T homas

that already existed, the drawings and paintings were visual works that em-
ployed new media, novel and adapted conventions, and original concepts.
Works from the Torres Strait, Papua, and the western Solomon Islands func-
tioned in ways that customary art had never done, in the sense that they were
descriptive and illustrative. They represented ancestral ritual activities and
customary warfare, practices that had been abandoned or suppressed. They
were therefore images that engaged memory and documented custom from
the aftermath of ruptures — specifically, the ruptures of colonial pacification
and conversion to Christianity. The drawings recalled and imaginatively re-
vived practice. In some cases, if not all, they were affirmations of tradition, ex-
pressing and celebrating a customary aesthetic, or a form of sociality, through
two-dimensional imagery and new materials. In multiple respects, therefore,
from the late nineteenth century onward, drawings from the Pacific were ex-
pressions of modernity and a modernization of consciousness.
Although reproductions of a few works appeared in ethnographic publica-
tions, the drawings themselves were preserved (if at all) in anthropological ar-
chives. They entered neither the visual culture of their communities, nor that
of the anthropologists’ societies. While Melanesian masks, sculptures, and
other customary works were extensively displayed in the great ethnographic
museums of Europe and North America, the commissioned ethnographic im-
ages, with a few intriguing exceptions, would essentially disappear.
Over the last twenty years, a sense of the richness of anthropological col-
lections has steadily grown; artists, Indigenous people, and researchers from
various disciplines have increasingly brought extraordinary historic photo-
graphs, texts, and graphic work “into the light” (as Brook Andrew has put it),
but these kinds of works on paper have only recently been more fully pub-
lished and represented through exhibitions.3 Until now, they were significant
simply because they were created, not because they had circulated and entered
or shaped public imagination.
Port Moresby
Just five to six years after Forge’s experiment, a new cultural conjuncture arose
in Papua New Guinea, specifically in the capital, Port Moresby. By the end of
the 1960s, in the context of global decolonization, the University of Papua New
Guinea (upng) had been established, and those who taught there were well
aware that their students would be the first leaders of an independent nation.
In 1967, Ulli Beier was recruited from Nigeria to teach literature. He was well
“ A rtist of P N G ” 165
known for having mentored and encouraged writers, particularly through the
Mbari Artists and Writers Club, established in 1961, and the magazine Black
Orpheus, which provided an early publication outlet for writers such as Wole
Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. Georgina Beier, Ulli’s wife, had worked exten-
sively with painters and sculptors, similarly encouraging the creation of new
images and expressions appropriate to an independent nation. By the time the
Beiers left for Papua New Guinea (PNG), the Mbari Art Gallery had presented
some seventy-five exhibitions representing not only Nigerians, but artists
from Ghana, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere. Some artists
now considered major African modernists, such as Ibrahim el Salahi and Ma-
langatana, had their first exhibitions outside their own countries there.4
In Port Moresby, Georgina Beier was shocked by the complacency and rac-
ism of the colonial community and by the mediocrity of the local expatriate
art scene. She quickly found work to do, at first conducting drawing and paint-
ing workshops with inmates in the colony’s psychiatric asylum at Laloki, then
going on to produce arresting limited edition prints from works by several
artists there, notably Tiabe, Mathias, and Hape.5
Soon afterward, Georgina was introduced to Timothy Akis, a man in his
late twenties from Tsembaga, in the Simbai Valley, who had worked as an
assistant and an informant to linguists and ethnographers, including Ann
Rappaport and Georgeda Buchbinder. Like those who had assisted Haddon,
Seligman, Forge, and others, Akis had often produced sketches while provid-
ing information, not least to illustrate matters that were hard to explain in Tok
Pisin (PNG pidgin, the lingua franca). Beier subsequently wrote that at first
she had been impressed by the intensity of Akis’s personality rather than by his
work, but he had great energy and worked intensively with her over the course
of a six-week period in Port Moresby. In February 1969, at the end of his stay,
an exhibition was mounted at the upng. Following a group show dedicated to
the work of Laloki artists, this was the first exhibition to present the work of
a single Melanesian artist. It was a founding event, one of the beginnings of
a modern and modernist Melanesian art world. Akis’s drawings could have
easily disappeared into an anthropological archive; instead his practice was
offered to the public, interpreted, affirmed, and in due course marketed.
It is important to ask why, exactly, Akis’s work received this treatment. What
were the motivations of the expatriates, without whom this artist would not
have been encouraged to create work in this form, nor present it to the public?
His situation is distinct from that of other Indigenous artists, whose mentors
aimed primarily to foster a craft industry, to encourage communities to pro-

duce objects, including artworks, that could be marketed in hopes of enabling
more self-reliance, especially among remote, welfare-dependent Aboriginal
people. No doubt, interests were diverse in the university environment at this
time, and some people in the art world were certainly working on local eco-
nomic empowerment. But the predominant interest in Aboriginal artworks
seems not to have been sociologically framed nor economically driven; rather,
the interest was focused on fostering a new public culture shaped by Papua
New Guineans themselves. To this end, the works were not offered for sale,
though some were later acquired and displayed by upng, and the Beiers re-
tained at least eight others.6
Ulli Beier wrote an introductory text to the 1969 exhibition of Akis’s art,
stressing the originality and the personal nature of the works, “owe[d] nothing
to the traditions of his people, whose artwork consisted mainly of geometric
shield designs.” 7 In Georgina Beier’s later reflections, she stressed that the artist
“was never sidetracked by European influences. . . . [He] depicted the world he
knew intimately — the animals that inhabited the Simbai valley: the cassowar-
ies, bandicoots, lizards, sugar gliders and snakes.” 8 These commentaries were
and are apt: Akis’s signature was indeed the vivid and distinctive image of one
such animal or another, though he went on to depict human-animal hybrids,
creatures of the imagination, and humans in strange predicaments, bearing
thorns or squeezed between boulders (figures 6.2 and 6.3). But in making
these seemingly straightforward observations, the Beiers inaugurated a new
frame and language for Melanesian art, which had formerly been understood
almost exclusively in ethnological, curatorial, or antiquarian terms. Now, Akis
could be presented as an individual artist, authentic precisely because he owed
nothing to either tradition or European art, while being responsive to his
environment, to what he knew. In a manner at once modest and audacious,
between a backyard studio and improvised university galleries, the Beiers and
their local partners created an art scene, soon supported by and documented
in a local critical literature — the magazines Kovave and Gigibori.9 Shortly
thereafter, the artists began to receive international exposure, through dealer
and university gallery shows arranged opportunistically and inexpensively in
Australia, Nigeria, and the United States.10
Anxious that Akis not feel isolated among a crowd of expatriates at his ex-
hibition opening, the organizers invited the Papua New Guinean laborers and
cleaners who worked on the university campus to the February 1969 event.
Among them was Mathias Kauage, a Chimbu man, at the time about twenty-
five, who had an immediate sense that he could follow Akis’s example. He had
FIGURE 6.2 Timothy Akis, Untitled, ca. 1970. Ink on paper, 32.4 × 27.5 in.
(82.5 × 70 cm). University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology. Gift of Professor Marilyn Strathern, 2009.43.
F I G U R E 6 . 3 Timothy Akis, Man i hait namil long tupela ston
[Man hiding between two stones], ca. 1977. Screenprint, 31.4 × 27.5 in.

(80 × 70 cm). University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology
and Anthropology. Acquired with the support of the Art Fund,
maa 2011.74.
a friend present some of his drawings to Georgina, who was unimpressed yet
quickly warmed to the man, as she had initially reacted to Akis and his work.
“Kauage visited us every evening bringing bundles of awful drawings. They
were clumsily executed with no originality, except on one occasion he had
drawn a spider, hiding in the corner. . . . I ask[ed] him to draw more spiders,
but he didn’t. Finally I said: ‘Kauage, come every evening, you are welcome.
Have your beer, we can talk, but don’t bring any more drawings.’ ” 11 But Kauage,
like Akis, drew with great intensity, swiftly moving away from the copies he
had made of illustrations in English children’s books to imaginary creatures,
male and female figures, horses and riders. He soon began to fill in figures and
FIGURE 6.4 Mathias Kauage, Magic Fish, 1969. Screenprint, 30 × 35 in. (76 × 89 cm).
University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Gift of Professor
Marilyn Strathern, 2010.674.
faces with dynamic patterning, bars, chevrons, zigzags, checked fields, and
concentric motifs. As well as many drawings, he produced, with Georgina’s
assistance, a series of woodblocks in the latter months of 1969, which broadly
foreshadowed the style he would sustain; though on larger sheets of paper,
his imagery became lighter as well as more mobile and dynamic (figure 6.4).12
The Beiers went back to Nigeria from 1971 to 1974 before returning to PNG
to establish the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies. Over the next two de-
cades, they moved between PNG, Australia, and Germany, periodically revis-
iting West Africa. In Bayreuth, Ulli was founding director of Iwawela House,
like all the Beiers’ endeavors a catalytic institution, ahead of its time in show-
casing what would later be called “world art,” as well as theater and literature.
It is unclear how much work Kauage produced in Georgina Beier’s absence,

F I G U R E 6 . 5 Mathias Kauage, Pasindia trak [Passenger truck], ca. 1977. Screen-
print, 28 × 41 in. (71 × 104 cm). University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology

and Anthropology. Acquired with the support of the Art Fund, 2011.45.
but what he created from 1974 onward was accomplished and ambitious in a
new way. Helicopter appears to have been his first work representing modern
transport; he went on to depict planes, one of which had brought the first mis-
sionary to his district. He also invented the motif of a passenger bus in profile,
replete with people, which he reworked and adapted in a number of different
pieces. These were images of the city; he was painting modern Melanesian life.
It is worth reflecting on what the urban environment might have meant to a
man from the Highlands at the time (figure 6.5).
In No Money on Our Skins: Hagen Migrants in Port Moresby, an early and
rich study in urban anthropology, Marilyn Strathern drew attention to the dif-
ficulties migrant workers seemed to have when asked to explain why they had
left home and come to the city. “Positive statements about the town are rarely
heard. And yet in much of their behaviour many individuals show a strong,
if not permanent commitment to town life. But when it comes to speaking
about it, they tend to be off hand, saying that they will stay till they decide to
go, or that they like it well enough. . . . [B]eing ‘of town’ confers no real status,
either from the point of view of the rural society, nor in any unambiguous way
among migrants themselves.” 13 Highlands laborers were, in other words, un-
able to represent urban life in positive moral terms. In town, wantoks (mem-
bers of the same language group) might gather to mingle and provide mutual
support, but they struggled to represent sociality, or social value, in the city
setting.
Kauage saw town as explicitly corrupting in the sense that Melanesian girls
and women were prone to embrace Western dress, seek out wealthy white men,
and become prostitutes. A series of works from the late 1970s represent such
women. These ebullient images convey the pride and beauty of their subjects,
but Kauage’s exegeses of the sexual politics — now patently problematic from
the vantage point of postcolonial feminism — amount to a lament regarding
this aspect of modernity. “When I first came to Port Moresby in 1964, I didn’t
see any Papua New Guinean girls driving cars. Today there are plenty driving
all kinds of cars and with all kinds of decorations and chasing after rich men,”
he commented in 1977; of a 1978 print of a woman going to market, “Golm has
really fancied herself up. . . . Look at her. She should be ashamed.” 14 Without
the caption supplied by his quoted comments, the judgmental character of
the works themselves would hardly be as self-evident. Kauage’s younger con-
temporary David Lasisi created didactic images that presented problems of
self and identification between tradition and modernity. The Whore made the
modern Melanesian woman a figure of shame and of the corruption of city
life; Kauage appears to have shared Lasisi’s misgivings, but his style did not
render his images as vehicles for this kind of moral critique.
The artist’s most important works of the mid-1970s were two colored screen
prints, Independence Celebration 1 and 4, which were based on paintings made
at the time of ceremonies marking Papua New Guinea’s independence from
Australia in September 1975 (figure 6.6). (The paintings themselves were
bought by expatriates at the time and have not been traced.) The moment
was one of great festivity, and Kauage’s images reflect that joy; his motif is the
passenger truck, which is now a vibrantly colored bearer of dancers, of a col-
lectivity, of people invested in celebrating independence.
The significance of these works is that they are the first in Kauage’s oeuvre,
and indeed the first in Melanesia, to represent a political event in the modern
sense, that is, a happening in the narrative of a nation and its affairs. As such,
they might be compared with works by modern African and Asian artists who
likewise represent and narrate the passages from colonialism to decoloniza-
tion. Yet, if comparisons are made, for example, with the work of Tshibumba
Kanda Matulu, from Zaire, they only make apparent that Kauage’s response to
the event is oblique.15 The African artist depicted the ceremony that actually
effected the transfer of power, including the speech of the leader of the new

FIGURE 6.6 Mathias Kauage, Independence Celebration 4, 1975. Color
screenprint, 20.5 × 30 in. (52.2 × 76.4 cm). University of Cambridge Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology. Gift of Professor Marilyn Strathern, 2009.29.
nation; Matulu artistically enacted the nation’s chronology and its characteris-
tic mode of personification. Other than flags, which become increasingly con-
spicuous, like stage decorations, in Kauage’s paintings, he appears indifferent
to the notion of nation and its defining expressions, but he was evidently en-
tranced by the spectacle, by the excitement and the presence of independence
on the street. We could identify a sort of populism here: the artist is interested
less in the abstractions of government and its official narratives than in the
drama and the experience of the new order from the perspective of the man
or woman who lives in Port Moresby. But he is never a social or documentary
artist; unlike the South African township painters, he does not depict shabby
but vital urban environments; he does not try to represent the way people live
and work. His visual art seems rather to present a phenomenon or a moment
that is in some sense exemplary.
The 1970s and early 1980s were a high point for printmaking in Papua New
Guinea, and both Akis and Kauage produced a host of impressive works over
the decade: Kauage’s included further mobilizations of the “passenger truck”
motif, in which the vehicle assumes the form of a display board on which the
decorated faces of a group of people fill the available space. In a 1979 screen-
print, Man draiwim tripela member bilong hilans (Man driving three members
[of parliament] from the Highlands), the interest in representing national po-
litical life resurfaces; the vehicle is adorned with unspecific but dynamic flags.
Artist of PNG
Kauage subsequently spent time with the Beiers in Bayreuth and Sydney,
and during these periods, when he was evidently most directly supported
by Georgina, he produced outstanding paintings, especially during the late
1980s and early 1990s. One series was represented by two works acquired by
the Australian Museum in Sydney in 1987, importantly but belatedly bringing
him to the permanent collection of a major public institution.16 The paintings
represented the life and death of the politician Iambakey Okuk, of interest to
Kauage because both he and Okuk were Chimbu, extending the artist’s inter-
est in the representation of the nation’s political affairs. One work featured
Okuk campaigning, emerging from a helicopter in customary dress to bestow
gifts on supporters. Kauage’s commentary, presumably transcribed around the
time the work was purchased, stated that the painting shows
Okuk with Missus [i.e., his wife] Nahau Runi and Stephen Taku who
are down below inside the helicopter. They’ve put pig’s teeth and kina in
their noses. They are campaigning, going around all the places in Papua
New Guinea in the helicopter. They throw away money to all the people.
They go around Papua, New Guinea too. New Guinea, Papua, it’s the
same, they throw the kina [banknotes] down onto the grass and all the
ground. The flag is there, they’ve fastened spears to the helicopter. If a
bighead man is walking about looking for a fight, the spears are ready,
that’s why they’re there.17
This was thus an account of the vitality and efficacy of a national leader.
The second painting represents Okuk’s son, who had been studying in the
United States when he learned of his father’s death, arriving at the airport (fig-
ure 6.7). Kauage’s account is intriguingly tangential:
[The young man] came to 7 mile [a point on the road] with his bicycle.
He took the bicycle, thinking ‘Is papa dead or is it a lie?’ He didn’t ride
the bicycle to parliament, not yet. He sat down, thinking ‘Is my papa
dead, or is he sick?’ Then he rode the bicycle to parliament, he didn’t
take a car or something; no, he went by bike. ‘Papa is inside parliament
at a meeting,’ he thought, ‘He is not dead.’ That’s what Okuk’s son

FIGURE 6.7 Mathias Kauage, Okuk’s Son at Moresby Airport, 1987. Acrylic on canvas,
64 × 74 in. (162 × 183 cm). Courtesy and copyright Australian Museum, e081510.
was feeling in his belly. But when he saw his papa in the coffin, he
understood.18
In this case, a distinction needs to be made between the “work” of Kauage’s

commentary and the work that is the painting itself. Kauage’s story represents
an empathetic and psychologically insightful effort to grasp the sense of disbe-
lief that those who lose parents and loved ones often feel. But neither the par-
ticular work, nor Kauage’s visual art as a whole, attempts to convey the inner
mental state or reflections of the persons depicted. Further, though paintings
in general often image, for instance, the composure, piety, or anguish of sub-
jects, painters do not typically seek to represent specific thoughts. It may be
obvious that a story is often the verbal and narrative counterpart to a visual
image, but in this case the key questions are, What kind of image has Kauage
produced? And in what sense is it a counterpart to the talk that might circulate
around a figure such as Okuk?
Kauage had been in Sydney in 1988, the year of the bicentenary of white
settlement, marked both by public pomp and much contention around the
settler nation’s history. While the anniversary was that of the First Fleet’s ar-
rival, not that of Captain Cook’s 1770 visit in the Endeavour to Botany Bay, the
foundational status in national history of the famous explorer meant that he
loomed large in public imagining, which Kauage responded to by adapting
his approach in rendering passenger trucks and airplanes to resemble the tall-
masted ship. He went on, in the early 1990s, to produce some of his strongest
later paintings, a series representing the defining aspects of Papua New Guin-
ea’s colonial and postcolonial history. One work depicts a missionary leading
a service, and another, Australian medical officers giving a group of school-
children injections. A third, entitled Buka War, dramatizes the confrontation
between the Papua New Guinea Defence Force and the Bougainville seces-
sionists in 1990, when long-standing grievances gave way to a guerilla war,
the Pacific counterpart to Biafra, which brought to the fore the discontents
of decolonization that insiders and locals already knew too well (figure 6.8).
Biting the Doctor’s Arm was also personal: the boy resisting the needle is
supposed to be Kauage himself, and the scene a Chimbu village (figure 6.9).
But the space in the world that the village occupies is indicated in the upper
righthand part of the painting by the flag of the independent nation. This is an
anachronism in that at the time the incident took place, presumably during
the artist’s boyhood in the 1950s, the flag, featuring the bird of paradise, had
yet to be designed, let alone officially adopted. But in another sense its inclu-
sion is absolutely appropriate: the image is one of a history that belongs to
Papua New Guinea. His inscription, “Kauage 1969–1994,” refers to the span of
the artist’s career, beginning in 1969 and continuing in the year the work was
painted. Though a painter having an interest in signaling his or her situation
in art history is nothing unusual, Kauage’s painting notably celebrates a story,
a nation, and the accomplishments of the artist all at once.
Kauage had thus progressed from quirky figures of his imagination to
scenes of modern Melanesian life, before becoming a kind of national history
painter. He would go still further. The Glasgow city museums had acquired
several of his works from his London dealer, Rebecca Hossack, following
an exhibition there in the northern summer of 1994. A new institution, the
Gallery of Modern Art, opened in Glasgow in 1996, and Kauage was brought

FIGURE 6.8 Mathias Kauage, Buka War, 1990. Acrylic on canvas, 49 × 69 in.
(125 × 175.5 cm). Glasgow Museums. Permission from Rebecca Hossack Gallery,
London.
FIGURE 6.9 Mathias Kauage, Biting the Doctor’s Arm, 1994. Acrylic on canvas,
49 × 68 in. (125 × 175 cm). University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology. Acquired with the support of the Art Fund and the V&A Purchase
Fund, 2010.364.
F I G U R E 6 . 1 0 Mathias Kauage, Kauage Flies to Scotland for the Opening of
New Museum of Modern Art in Glasgow, 1999. Acrylic on canvas, 47 × 72 in.
(120.5 × 183.5 cm). Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London.
across for the event, where he performed for and met Queen Elizabeth II.19
Such institutional inaugurations are, needless to say, moments when civic life
and the worlds of art and culture connect, as well as moments of diplomacy
and ceremony involving distinguished guests, visiting artists, and others.
Kauage was fully aware of the consequence of the occasion and celebrated it
in a magnificent painting in 1999, featuring himself and the queen, with the
Qantas aircraft that had brought him to Britain for the occasion. The Queen’s
handbag has undergone translation into a PNG bilum, or string bag, an em-
blem of Melanesian womanhood (figure 6.10).
Again, Kauage’s signature is interesting: “Kauage Mathias O.B.E. / Artist
P.N.G. 1999,” that is, “Artist of PNG”; several earlier and contemporaneous
works, including paintings in the collection of the Bristol Museum and Art
Gallery, bear similar inscriptions. Kauage was, in other words, increasingly
conscious of his status as an artist “of PNG,” an artist whose work responded
to the state of his country, a representative of one nation in a world of nations.
Yet the climate for art in Papua New Guinea became increasingly difficult.
The modest but catalytic level of support that had empowered a new move-

ment in the years immediately before and after independence was reduced,
as was the local market. While Kauage and his friends had for a period been
permitted to show and sell work in the foyer of one of the more prominent ho-
tels, some change in policy led them to be displaced at first onto the pavement
outside and then across the street, where today artists producing Kauage-style
works, among them some of his relatives, display paintings on a chainlink
fence in the hope of selling them to professionals, expats, and tourists. Kauage
died in 2003, “for no reason,” Georgina Beier told me, meaning of an illness
that might have been readily treated with better medical care.
True Falsity
Kauage’s art was emphatically modern, but his modernism was also distinc-
tively Melanesian. During the years 1979–1981, Georgina Beier recorded a
series of Kauage’s “stories,” narratives merged with commentaries on a range
of issues, which she translated from Tok Pisin and published (see also figure
6.11). One of the short texts reflects on a visit to the Art Gallery of South Aus-
tralia in Adelaide and other art venues in that city.
I went to Adelaide. I looked at paintings in museums, in galleries. I went

around looking. I look at this one, then another one: on this picture
there is a man walking about, there’s bits of grass here and there. That’s
all. They don’t make any lines. They take the brush and throw on the
paint, they don’t make any designs. They get a lot of money, some are
$6,000, some are $8,000 or something. I look at one of them — a boat
with sails. They don’t work at the space, their work is like a fraud: in the
middle there was lots of space and nothing on it, it’s not filled up. . . .
[M]any of them are false, truly false.
In New Guinea my boy Chris also wants to be an artist. I’ve talked
to him many times. He makes pictures, but he follows the fashion of
the whites, he makes his pictures look real. I say, “Alright, but put some
of the marks that belong to you and me. Don’t make them look like
nothing.”
He wants to be an artist now. He can’t be the same as me. Our marks
belong to the past, to our papas and their papas.20
This remarkable passage implies that Kauage understood his work in terms
that could be seen to reverse those of the preceding commentary, that echo
the usual contextualization of this work. Various catalogs and a film have
F I G U R E 6 . 1 1
Mathias Kauage, ca. 1990s

photograph by Ulli Beier.
Author’s files, courtesy of
Georgina Beier.
been entitled New Images from New Guinea; I suggest that Kauage was, in
important and profound senses, an artist of modernity. Yet this is precisely
what he would seem to deny, in asserting the embeddedness in tradition of
his “marks,” the association of those marks with the past, and the inability of
his son to sustain quite this kind of art. These comments are more perplex-
ing than they might appear to a reader unacquainted with the art traditions
of New Guinea. Such a reader might assume that Kauage’s paintings are like
those from central Australia or Arnhem Land, which are essentially transpo-
sitions of sacred ancestral designs, formerly painted on other media, or drawn
in sand. To the contrary, one of the distinctive features of the work of Kauage
(and, for that matter, Akis) is that although Highlands cultures are renowned
for body decoration, they did not feature painted houses or boards, or other
artifacts visually patterned in a manner that inspired either artist.
Kauage’s text is revealing in another fashion. The essentially vacuous and
false nature of the paintings he encountered in South Australia lay in their lack
of “marks,” their lack of “design,” their spaces not being “filled up.” Which is
to allude, conversely, to the nature and effect of his own “filling up,” of what
we might call the façades of his trucks, helicopters, and airplanes, since be-
ing replete with imagery is precisely the quality that defines these vehicles.
The “marks” that do the “filling” are of two kinds. Some amount to abstract

or seemingly abstract design that has a geometric and dynamic character.
Otherwise they are face motifs. Some of the artist’s figures are individualized
(Kauage himself, the queen), but those I call his façades are not; to the con-
trary, they are comparatively homogeneous.
In almost all of Kauage’s works, the people depicted bear stylized versions
of the famous body decorations for which the Papua New Guinea Highlands
are renowned. Chimbu aesthetics — those of Kauage’s people — were arguably
similar to those of Mount Hagen. A classic account by Marilyn Strathern fo-
cused on “the act of display”: “Achievements of certain kinds have emphatic
value in Hagen culture; above all the acquisition of wealth and demonstration
of influence bring men prestige and make them big. The capacity for achieve-
ment is a personal matter, but for an individual’s success to be of public sig-
nificance he depends upon the involvement of his clansmen. . . . Occasions of
formal display are always the concern of the group, and what is displayed is the
sum of individual effort . . . wealth, strength and power.” 21 In these contexts,
decorations act as “a medium of display,” their deployment at once potent and
anxious, an affirmation of solidarity, an assertion of political vitality that is al-
ways risky, since spectators may judge decorated men unimpressive if they do
not appear big, if their skin appears dull rather than glossy. Performances ap-
pear to celebrate an accomplishment, but they may be considered ineffective
and inauspicious. They are staged for others but need to convince the dancers
themselves: displays “have repercussions in their social and political relations
with others, indicate their inner resource and point to future destiny.” 22 For
Wahgi, Michael O’Hanlon cited the adage “handsome is as handsome does”:
the decorated body revealed the performers’ inner moral state.23
All these Highlands societies differed, of course, but broadly shared these
aesthetic precepts. As Kauage said, “We don’t sing every day, we stay in shirt
and trousers. But when the time comes to decorate, all the men change, they
belong to the spirit time. We look at them. Are his decorations no good, or is
he a winner? That’s what we are thinking.” 24 It is striking that in a painting such
as Biting the Doctor’s Arm, everyone who forms part of the scene is “in bilas,”
that is, decorated in some manner, though the schoolchildren, nurse, and doc-
tor would not have been. Kauage’s painting constitutes a ceremonial occasion,
an event. This painting and others depict events in the form of achievements,
and stand as achievements themselves.
I suggested earlier that works on paper by the informants and collabora-
tors of various ethnographers from Haddon onward, works that recalled and
re-created a range of Melanesian ceremonies, amounted to a kind of hidden
history of Melanesian modernism: they were novel in their techniques and
media, and they also expressed a modernization of consciousness, at least in
the specific sense that they often celebrated great customary activities that had
been suppressed or abandoned; they thus dwelt on rupture and loss. Yet the
implicit baggage carried by the notion of the precursor is of course mislead-
ing. Despite the direct analogy between Akis’s situation and that of, say, Ango,
who drew for Rivers and Hocart while also producing curiously Europeanized
sculpture, often on commission for colonial officials, there are some senses
in which the earlier works on paper are more modern than their “successors.”
Kauage responded in a remarkable way to the history of his nation, the
wider history of Australia and the Pacific, the theater of the global art world,
and even the great events of European politics (a painting I have not dis-
cussed, in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, features the Brandenburg Gate
and relates to German reunification). Yet in another sense, his approach to
all these subjects was shaped, to a profound extent, by what might be called a
Highlands aesthetic of self-decoration. The comments that Ulli and Georgina
Beier made, in framing Akis’s accomplishment, that he “owed nothing” either
to his own tradition or to European art, could not rightly be applied to Kauage,
whose conceptions of value and effect in art derived, he insisted, from “[his]
papas and their papas.” Throughout its history, Melanesian “modernism” has
been replete with paradox.
Coda
Kauage’s works did not at first, or mostly, enter the collections of art institu-
tions or individual connoisseurs. In 1979, at age eighteen, when I moved to
Canberra to begin undergraduate studies in archaeology and anthropology,
my mother gave me two prints, one each by Akis and Kauage, bought presum-
ably in a Sydney gallery. These were framed, and over my student years, they
moved from house to house, sharing the walls with activist screenprints, some
made by friends at Australian National University (anu), reflecting support
for international solidarity, gay liberation, and other causes. From the mid-
1980s, when I finished my PhD and got my first appointments in Cambridge
and then back in Canberra, the prints moved between various flats and offices,
until finally I gifted them to anu when I moved to London in 1999.
Earlier in the 1970s, Marilyn Strathern had acted as a kind of agent for
Georgina Beier, helping support the artists by finding buyers for prints among

friends and colleagues, including Chris Gregory, Jack Goody, and Edmund
Leach; some were bought by individuals and then presented to the Depart-
ment of Social Anthropology in Cambridge. In Adelaide, Basel, and Berlin
during this period, ethnographers, development economists, geographers,
and others with PNG connections likewise bought prints and paintings,
which populated our homes and workplaces. Along with baskets and textiles,
they constituted a visual culture of connection, an evocation of progressive
interests in the past and future of Melanesia.
In July 1994, Kauage had a show at the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery in Fitz-
rovia, London, which featured the series of “history” paintings I discussed,
some of which were subsequently acquired by the Gallery of Modern Art,
Glasgow. Georgina Beier was at the opening party, and so was the artist, who
had dedicated a good part of the afternoon to decorating himself with paint
and feathers. Michael O’Hanlon and I exchanged wry remarks on what we
took to be a performance of exoticism. Such observations were natural enough,
given the preoccupation with otherness and its staging that marked theory
and museum talk at the time, and even reasonable, given that, bare-chested
and painted, Kauage certainly did cut an exotic figure even by the standards
of nearby Soho, and he knew that. Yet in another sense, I at least missed the
point. Kauage was not in bilas primarily because he wished to parade a Papua
New Guinean identity. He was decorated because his art and its exhibition
represented an occasion, an achievement, that he had to mark in this manner.
The occasion was the kind that might prompt one to ask, as he had put it, “Are
his decorations no good, or is he a winner?” A winner he surely was.
Notes
I wish to thank: Michael O’Hanlon for conversation over many years around aspects
of ‘the modern’ in Papua New Guinea; Marilyn Strathern, for her donation of works by
Akis, Kauage and others to the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in 2010,
which prompted me to follow up longstanding interests in these artists, and for reading
a draft of the text; and above all Georgina Beier who has been extraordinarily generous
with archives, conversation and reflections upon Kauage and upon Papua New Guinea
in the period discussed here.
1. Anthony Forge, “Style and Meaning in Sepik Art,” in Primitive Art and Society,
ed. Anthony Forge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 169–72. The paintings
are archived with Forge’s papers in the Mandeville Special Collections Library of the
University of California, San Diego. The student study was that of Sheila Korn, “The
Structure of an Art-System” (PhD diss., University of London, 1974).
2. These works are in the collections of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropol-
ogy, Cambridge (Torres Strait, western Solomon Islands); the British Museum (Papua);
and the University of Western Australia (Arnhem Land). See Peter Brunt and Nicholas
Thomas, Art in Oceania: A New History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2012), 16.
3. The Indigenous Australian artist Brook Andrew has drawn extensively on imagery
derived from anthropological archives in his primarily photo-based work over the last
twenty-five years. See the artist’s statement in Nicholas Thomas and Brook Andrew,
The Island (Cambridge: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2008).
4. Ulli Beier, Decolonising the Mind: The Impact of the University on Culture and
Identity in Papua New Guinea, 1971–74 (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2005), is a fasci-
nating memoir that is broader in scope than the title implies. Adele Tröger, ed., Geor-
gina Beier (Nuremberg: Verlag für moderne kunst, 2001), is also important though
primarily an artist’s monograph rather than a study of Georgina Beier’s practice as a
catalyst and mentor.
5. The best discussion of these early initiatives is Melanie Eastburn, Papua New
Guinea Prints (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2006), a publication prompted
by the National Gallery’s acquisition of a substantial collection from the Beiers. Con-
sidering the gallery also holds works gifted by or bought from several other individuals
in the PNG region, it probably holds a larger and more representative collection of
modern work from Papua New Guinea than any other art institution. The Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge also holds about eighty original draw-
ings and prints by multiple PNG artists; some beaten coppers by Mathias Kauage from
the early 1970s; and other pieces of sculpture, mostly dating from the end of the 1960s
to the early 1980s.
6. Eastburn, Papua New Guinea, 16. These eight were among the works that the Na-
tional Gallery of Australia acquired from the Beiers.
7. Quoted in Eastburn, Papua New Guinea, 16.
8. Quoted in Eastburn, Papua New Guinea, 16.
9. Kovave was the first of these magazines, officially launched in November 1969.
Ulli Beier arranged for it to be professionally printed in Brisbane, though it was mainly
sold through the upng bookshop; its emphasis was primarily literary, with the excep-
tion of a special 1974 issue edited by Georgina Beier, “Modern Images from Niugini,”
which was dedicated to visual art. “Niugini” was a pidginized version of the coun-
try’s name in vogue at the time. Gigibori was the journal of the Institute of Papua New
Guinea Studies. First published in 1974, it carried a mix of literary contributions and
essays on wider topics.
10. The Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles (an art school that dated back to 1918)
hosted what was described as the “first worldwide exhibition” of “contemporary New
Guinea art” in January and February 1971. The poster featured work by Sukoro and
Tiabe (also illustrated by Eastburn, Papua New Guinea, 6 and 9, respectively). Geor-

gina Beier told me (in December 2014) that this exhibition had been arranged through
“a friend of a friend.”
11. Georgina Beier, “Kauage: Inventing His Own Tradition,” public lecture at the
opening of the exhibition Kauage: Artist of Papua New Guinea, Museum of Archaeol-
ogy and Anthropology, Cambridge, March 17, 2009.
12. There is no monograph dedicated to Kauage’s work, though it is discussed more
or less briefly in many publications, including early texts by Georgina Beier and Ulli
Beier, as well as in more recent commentaries. The earliest is perhaps an exhibition
brochure: Georgina Beier, Contemporary Art from New Guinea at the Aladdin Gallery,
Sydney, September 1969, archives of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropol-
ogy, Cambridge. See also Georgina Beier, “Kauage,” Kovave 3, no. 2 (1972); and Beier,
“Modern Images from Niugini.” Other texts include Mathias Kauage, a short catalog
of a retrospective, including a brief essay by Ulli Beier. Beier, Decolonising the Mind,
80–96, includes detail not otherwise published. Kauage featured in survey exhibitions,
such as Luk Luk Gen! Contemporary Art from Papua New Guinea, toured by the Perc
Tucker Gallery, Cairns (Queensland, Australia), from 1990; the catalog of the same
title was edited by Hugh Stevenson and Susan Cochrane. While a major compendium
of Oceanic art, published as late as 1993 (Adrienne L. Kaeppler, Douglas Newton, and
Christian Kaufmann, L’art Océanien [Paris: Citadelles et Mazenod, 1993], still the larg-
est such book) could omit modern art altogether, more concise surveys published soon
afterward did feature contemporary art from Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, and
elsewhere. My own Oceanic Art was probably the first general book to situate Kauage
and his contemporaries within a broader Pacific art history; likewise, Anne D’Alleva
did so soon afterward in Art of the Pacific (London: Everyman Art Library, 1998).
13. Strathern, No Money on Our Skins: Hagen Migrants in Port Moresby (Port Mo-
resby: New Guinea Research Unit, 1975), 112, 418.
14. Both quotations in Eastburn, Papua New Guinea, 33.
15. See Johannes Fabian, Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in
Zaire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
16. The second of the works referred to here receives considerable emphasis in the
catalog of Pieces of Paradise, an innovative 1988 exhibition at the Australian Museum,
curated by the archaeologist Jim Specht. The show was advanced in that it addressed
a host of questions ranging from aesthetics to the history of collecting and colonial
hybridity in material culture, and concluded with a section on “The New Pacific,” in
which Kauage’s work, and a portrait photograph of the artist by Ulli Beier, loomed larg-
est in a discussion that also mentioned Akis among other artists of the independence
period. Though preceded by the PNG art magazines cited earlier, this exhibition was
the first large survey of Pacific art that included modern work; and the catalog was the
first publication by any public museum to feature it.
17. Kauage, quoted in exhibition text, in relation to painting e086991, archived at
Australian Museum Collections, accessed May 1, 2015, http://collections.australian
museum.net.au.
18. Kauage, quoted in Jim Specht, Pieces of Paradise (Sydney: Australian Museum,
1988), 45.
19. On this occasion, either Kauage personally or the Papua New Guinean govern-
ment presented the queen with a portrait, Kauage’s Missis Kwin, 1996, now in the Royal
Collections Trust (rcin 407778).
20. Georgina Beier, trans. and ed., Kauage’s Stories (Sydney: Migila House, 2006), 19.
This key source for Kauage’s ideas and imagination appeared first in a German version:
“Kauage erzählt” appeared in the exhibition catalog Mathias Kauage, and then in 1998,
printed by the Ray Hughes Gallery in Sydney. A copy of the 2006 edition is in the
archives of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge.
21. Marilyn Strathern, “The Self in Self-Decoration,” Oceania 49 (1979): 244.
22. Strathern, “The Self,” 256.
23. Michael O’Hanlon, Reading the Skin: Adornment, Display and Society among the
Wahgi (London: British Museum Press, 1989).
24. Beier, Kauage’s Stories, 15.

IAN McLEAN
7 MODERNISM AND THE ART
OF ALBERT NAMATJIRA
He spoke in quiet, correct English — not in pidgin — the result of his having

been born at the Hermannsburg Mission and grown up in its school. . . . We talked
for a while of things that interest painters, and I told him I had been an art
student. . . . This increased his interest, and the discussion became technical,
with Albert surprising me by his wide knowledge of painting and of painters. . . .
Here was a man, a full-blooded aboriginal, with, I could see, an intellect.
V I C H A L L | remembering meeting
Albert Namatjira for the first time in 1942
In the 1940s and 1950s an Indigenous Australian artist was for the first time in
the limelight. No Australian artist, Indigenous or otherwise, ever had or has
received such media attention. Albert Namatjira’s very celebrity made him a
figure of modernity, as did his status as the first fully professional Indigenous
artist and the founder of an art movement, dubbed “modern Australian Ab-
original art” by friend and artist Rex Battarbee in 1952.1 Namatjira cannot be
avoided in the history of modern Australian art, yet his very presence troubles
its narratives and those of modernism more generally.
Namatjira’s first one-person exhibition occurred in 1938, a year after Hitler’s
Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich and a year before a large exhibition of
similar European modernist art in Australia. Both these large exhibitions were
media events that brought into sharp focus the nexus between modernism
and primitivism, so it is not surprising that Namatjira’s art was received in
the context of his Aboriginality and his art’s apparent modernism. At the time
these were mutually exclusive — and therefore linked — concepts, and because
there seemed nothing Aboriginal about his work, the apparent modernism of
his art came under the more intense scrutiny.
The Aboriginality of the artist may have also touched a nerve in the com-
plex currents that gathered force in mid-twentieth-century Australia (and
indeed the world). In the years after World War I, an emerging provincialism,
cast in the ideology of nationalism by both conservative and progressive quar-
ters of Australian culture, sought inspiration from local situations. And while
the more avant-garde tendencies of surrealism and its primitivism had little
traction in Australia, a growing number of critics (especially in literature) and
artists advocated the indigenization of Australian culture, which after World
War II became something of a fashion. Indigenous art and myth, it was rea-
soned, provided a tradition or heritage for Australian culture that made up
for its lack of classical monuments. Moreover, in the twenties and thirties,
Australian art critics were sharply divided between supporters of modernism
and an antimodernist faction that sought solace in classical Western virtues,
but most artists followed the British tendency of seeking common ground
between modernism and tradition — what Clement Greenberg would have
dubbed a diluted “middlebrow taste,” which, he argued, came into its own at
this time.2 Australian highbrow taste, be it a conservative classicism or mod-
ernist progressiveness, found no redeeming features in Namatjira’s art. Yet,
his art appealed enormously to the emerging middlebrow taste in Australia,
perhaps because it found a common ground between what hitherto had been
the incommensurable differences of Indigenous and Western culture in the
context of an emerging provincial nationalism.
Highbrow critics of conservative and modernist persuasion agreed that not
only was Namatjira’s art un-Aboriginal it was also unoriginal. Nevertheless, its
Westernness, even if unoriginal and therefore unmodern, was difficult to dis-
credit. There was a general consensus that he “stood alone” among Aborigines
“as an artist in the Western romantic tradition.” 3 Of course, there was some-
thing very modern about being the first Aborigine to paint so convincingly in
a Western style even if his Westernness and modernism were a sham.
Such was the conundrum presented by Namatjira’s art that Battarbee under-
standably claimed the story of his friend and painting partner “is like fiction.” 4
But it was a true story. Born Elea, a carpet snake, at the Lutheran Hermanns-
burg Mission in central Australia in 1902, when his parents converted in 1905
he was baptized with the name Albert. At this time converted Arrernte were
given a single Western name to signify their new status. Having rights to his
188 IAN McLEAN

FIGURE 7.1 Albert Namatjira, Mt. Hermannsburg with Finke River, ca. 1940.
Watercolor on bean wood, 4.7 × 10.1 in. (12.1 × 25.8 cm). Photograph by Flinders
University Art Museum. Flinders University Art Museum Collection, Adelaide.
Gift of Helene and Dudley Burns, 1988, from the collection of the late Reverend
and Mrs. F. W. Albrecht. © Namatjira Legacy Trust, 2018.
father’s tjurunga — namatjira, the flying ant — he also took this name in 1938
when he had his first exhibition, as if the name Albert Namatjira was a suitable
transcultural signifier for a modern artist and his modern Aboriginal identity.
Namatjira learned watercolor technique from Battarbee in 1936 (see, e.g.,
figure 7.1 and plate 5). In 1939 he became the first Indigenous artist whose work
had been acquired by a state art gallery. By 1950 he was Australia’s best-known
living artist, despite residing in remote regions far from the art centers of Syd-
ney and Melbourne. His paintings commanded high prices, the newspapers
could not get enough of him, and he is the only Australian painter to have
ever been mobbed by autograph seekers.5 Royals visited him, he was the guest
of honor at Lord Mayor luncheons, and his death in 1959 was experienced as
a national tragedy. Namatjira, the person, and his art struck a nerve in the
psyche of a young modern nation. Today his watercolors attract record prices
at auctions. In short, his legacy has endured, and he remains one artist whose
name nearly every Australian knows. He is, in this sense, Australia’s Picasso.
Whatever thoughts Namatjira had on the matter, the Aboriginality of his art
was the first thing to go, because in the art world logic of the day, it couldn’t
be Aboriginal and modern. Although he had a large popular following, as well
as a small group of influential supporters who could put some pressure on
MODERNISM AND THE ART OF NAMATJIRA 189

art world institutions, neither conservative nor progressive elements in the
art world could fit him into the categories of their thinking. The Art Gallery
of South Australia purchased an example of his work in 1939 as part of its
modern Australian, not Aboriginal, collection (which it did not collect any-
way), but it was the only state art gallery to do so. Despite his fame, Namatjira’s
paintings were never included in the increasing number of Aboriginal art ex-
hibitions held in his lifetime. Nor were they included in official exhibitions of
Australian art. For curators, his example troubled each category, as if, like the
categories of primitive and modern, those of Australian and Aboriginal were
mutually exclusive. Only in recent times, when postcolonial theories began to
frame notions of both Aboriginal and Australian identity, has Namatjira’s art
found a central place in official discourse.
The style and subject matter of Namatjira’s paintings correspond to a mid-
twentieth-century pastoral modernism (as I am calling it), which was very
popular with middlebrow taste in Australia, as well as in other countries,
during the two decades after World War I. In applying the pared down formal-
ism of modernism to the sacral intentions of the picturesque, pastoral mod-
ernism is a middlebrow version of the Return to Order (Le rappel a l’ordre)
that reengaged the Western avant-garde in its classical roots after the trauma
of the war. In Australia it was also the cultural front of a growing nationalist
mood that embedded national consciousness in a distinctive depopulated
primordial Australian landscape — what one enthusiastic writer called “the
Big Country beyond.” 6 While pastoral modernism also appealed to certain
conservative ideologues, in an astute analysis, conceptual artist Ian Burn — a
prominent figure in the New York branch of Art and Language — observed
that its practitioners generally sought to marry modernist formal concerns
with what by then was a popular impressionism. As well, he observed, their
preference “for greater formal unity and iconic power” favored outback im-
agery, because here — as in Hans Heysen’s painting The Land of the Oratunga
(1932) — the land was pared back and skeletal: “The forms were simpler and
more abstract . . . even the most naturalistic depiction of a desert wasteland
could look surreal.” 7 In the years after World War I, continued Burn, such
“images of this inland landscape had begun to take grip of the popular imagi-
nation, providing a potent modern symbolism of the antiquity of the land and
a new sense of national heritage” that met the patriotic sentiment of this time.8
Hans Heysen is the most celebrated artist associated with Australian pas-
toral modernism. His landscapes of central Australia, which he began paint-
ing in the late 1920s, were praised for giving “the sensation of an unalterable
190 IAN McLEAN

FIGURE 7.2 Albert Namatjira, Central Mt. Wedge, 1945. Watercolor over pencil
on woven paper loosely attached to composition board, 11.4 × 15.4 in. (29 × 39.2 cm).
Photograph by Queensland Art Gallery. Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.
© Namatjira Legacy Trust, 2018.
landscape, old and young as Time — a landscape of fundamentals, austerely

Biblical, and yet for us intimately associated with our aboriginal stone age.” 9
Namatjira acquired the conventions of pastoral modernism from Battarbee’s
Heysenesque manner (see figure 7.2). Bernard Smith, in his seminal history
Australian Painting, first published in 1962, placed Namatjira and two of his
followers as late practitioners of this Heysenesque manner. They are the only
Aboriginal artists discussed in Smith’s history, because Smith, like other critics
of his day, did not consider their art to be Aboriginal.10 Burn would also com-
pare Namatjira’s paintings to those of Heysen.
If in the mid-twentieth century Battarbee called Namatjira’s art “modern,”
he did not mean it in a theorized Greenbergian sense. It was modern simply
because at the time, the term was a synonym for contemporary Western and
especially French-type art. In the mid-twentieth century, when social evolu-
tionist notions of progress and primitivism still figured large in the popular
imagination, modernism exemplified something Western and contemporary,
an art of today. Battarbee was well aware of the irony in his claim, however, and
of Namatjira’s philosophical challenges to the founding categories of Western

thinking and its modernity, as well as the social and political challenges to
the then apartheid-like policies of the Australian nation-state. Battarbee was a
firm advocate of the policy of assimilation (as it was then called), advocated by
Indigenous civil liberty organizations and their allies, which gained increasing
traction in the mid-twentieth century. In the inaugural issue of the first Indig-
enous newspaper, in April 1938, the Abo Call declared: “We do not want to go
back to the Stone Age. Representing 60,000 Full Bloods and 20,000 Halfcastes
in Australia, we raise our voice to ask for Education, Equal Opportunity and
Full Citizen Rights.” Namatjira and his people were then wards of the state,
without the rights of movement, property, inheritance, political representa-
tion, or social welfare enjoyed by Australian citizens.
Even though Namatjira did not make traditional Aboriginal art, in the ra-
cial theory of social evolutionism that underpinned mid-twentieth-century
theories of art, he had not escaped his Aboriginality. Claims that he was a
pseudo-modernist, advanced by both conservative and modernist critics,
rested on his Aboriginality. The conservative critic Harold Herbert wrote,
“Although he be the first aborigine to exhibit paintings in a purely realistic
manner there is no need for a fanfare of trumpets. . . . Japanese art was spoiled
in this manner. It became Europeanised Japanese. . . . Japan has not improved
its art by European influences.” 11 More biting was the criticism from modernist
painter Paul Haefliger: “Through having learnt so dexterously our Western
outlook, Albert Namatjira has become less of an artist.” We should not, said
Haefliger, “praise him for having lost his native capacity to feel.” 12 Deploring
“that aborigines should be taught in the European manner,” Haefliger believed
that we should “instill in them a love and a respect of the art of their fore
fathers, and encourage them in their natural expression.” 13
Author Mary Durack (who mixed in modernist circles), commented in
her 1946 review of a Namatjira exhibition: “They took a fine, primitive artist
and turned him into a polite and conventional echo of our civilisation.” 14 Even
Battarbee tended to agree. He believed that in learning “to paint as well as a
white artist,” Namatjira had lost “his aboriginal sense of decoration,” and so
his Aboriginal sensibility.15 Battarbee was more taken by Namatjira’s follower,
Edwin Pareroultja. The man, said Battarbee, was a “genius,” because in retain-
ing his Aboriginal sensibility he had all the qualities of a genuine and original
modernist. “The outstanding feature of this artist is that he is himself, a being
full of colour, strength, and emotional feeling, and his work is vital. It gives
one a shock at first sight, because it is new. . . . His work is like that of Gauguin
. . . yet he has never heard of Gauguin or his work.” 16
192 IAN McLEAN

The art world tended to agree. Pareroultja was the second Indigenous
artist to have work purchased by a state art gallery. The National Gallery of
Melbourne bought a painting, Mt. Sonder from Ormiston, in 1946, and the
Art Gallery of New South Wales bought another, Amulda Gorge, in 1947. Mel-
bourne and Sydney were the centers of Australian modernism, and the high-
brow guardians of each gallery had refused to purchase works by Namatjira
despite a public outcry.
Namatjira was not just any Aboriginal, he was also a Western Arrernte.
Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen’s acclaimed study of the Arrernte, pub-
lished in 1899, provided the prototype of the primitive in turn-of-the-century
European scholarship from Frazer to Durkheim and Freud.17 During Namat-
jira’s lifetime, this scholarly discourse was central to debate around kinship,
totemism, and tribalism, providing a general background and frame to mod-
ernist artists’ interests in primitivism. Few Indigenous groups were so thor-
oughly studied and widely known. And they were widely known, thanks to
Spencer and Gillen, as the most primitive people on the planet.
Spencer was also scathing of the Hermannsburg Mission, believing that it
had corrupted the Western Arrernte and destroyed their culture. This provided
the art critics with a way out. Namatjira was a “mission black,” a “trousered na-
tive,” and thus neither Aboriginal nor Western. The more Western Namatjira’s
art looked, the shabbier it seemed, especially to the professionals in anthropol-
ogy and the art world. In 1976 the U.S. anthropologist Nelson Graburn char-
acterized Namatjira and his Arrernte followers as “conquered minority artists
[who] have taken up the established art forms of the conquerors, following and
competing with the artists of the dominant society.” Graburn pronounced it
“assimilated fine arts . . . characteristic of extreme cultural domination.” 18
By the 1970s the art world had lost interest in Namatjira. With the ascen-
dency of Greenberg’s theory of modernism in the 1960s, the faux middlebrow
pastoral modernism of Namatjira and his followers seemed beside the point.
After Namatjira’s death in 1959, his art, along with that of Heysen and other
pastoral modernists, quickly dropped off the agenda. Moreover, modernism
was now something to be surpassed rather than fought over. The emergence
of postcolonial theory and the Indigenous contemporary art movement in
the last two decades of the twentieth century brought renewed interest in
Namatjira’s art but not as a signifier of modernism. The interest had shifted
to its Aboriginality. Previously denied, the Aboriginality of his art was now
proclaimed. In 1992 Sylvia Kleinert argued that Namatjira’s paintings “appro-
priate the landscape tradition of non-Aborigines to recreate the totemic sites

symbolically and pass on traditional knowledge by reaffirming land rights.” 19
Other critics made similar claims: “By mastering the art of landscape paint-
ing,” wrote Philip Jones, “he was the first Aranda [Arrernte] man to take a
European cultural item and, in a subversive sense, to make it his own.” 20
In a highly original essay, Ian Burn and Ann Stephen showed, through a
comparison of Namatjira’s paintings and those of Heysen, how Namatjira was
no mindless mimic but made pastoral modernism his own. Their close pic-
torial analysis drew attention, for the first time, to the formal characteristics
of Namatjira’s Aboriginal way of seeing country. Heysen “monumentalizes”
the landscape, creating a “grandeur of forms,” whereas Namatjira “articulates
a rich mosaic of textures, of surfaces rather than forms of the landscape.” 21
Unlike Heysen’s work, they often lack a single focus point and instead “feel as
if they have been composed in from the edges, resulting in an overall symmet-
rical tension across the surface.” A “heightened stimulus [is] given to borders,”
creating an effect of the “picture crowding in from the edges and wrapping
itself around the viewer, forcing the peripheral vision of western perception to
be no longer peripheral.” 22 Pushing “our eyes up into the landscape,” Namatjira
made us feel “in rather than outside, detached and contemplating it.” Heysen’s
paintings, it goes without saying, do the opposite. Further, Namatjira’s “visual
emphasis on edges reinforces the feeling of his paintings being objects.” And
instead of giving priority to forms such as tree trunks in the landscape, as
Heysen does, “for Namatjira the overall landscape has priority. . . . We even
discover trunks reading as negative space.” 23 As well, “his pictures . . . do not
privilege the purely visual . . . but rather the haptic quality, inferring not only a
different kind of perception but also a different configuration of the senses.” 24
Burn and Stephen note, “The more we analyze his paintings, the more con-
vinced we become that the artist is covering the surface in a different way[,]
one which has little conformity to Western picture-making as applied to land-
scape painting.” 25
Burn had a keen eye, and as generalizations, his readings are difficult to
refute. Nevertheless, his and Stephen’s comparisons can seem a little forced,
and in seeking to determine essential differences in the way each artist, and
by inference culture, sees — “a different kind of perception but also a different
configuration of the senses” — misses the transcultural achievement of Namat-
jira’s paintings, as indeed Burn and Stephen’s most interesting conclusion tes-
tifies: “What becomes curious then is how like Western landscape his finished
pictures are.” 26 This conundrum provided Burn and Stephen with their main
insight: that Namatjira’s art is “a model of inter-cultural exchange able to ar-
194 IAN McLEAN

ticulate a complexity of its own cultural reality” — as if in pastoral modernism
Namatjira had found a common ground between Western and Arrernte ways
of seeing country.27 Thus Burn and Stephen agree with the old accusations that
Namatjira copies Western art, but they add a twist: “Namatjira did not simply
see with Western eyes but was mimicking that regime of vision as an access
to a particular knowledge.” 28 In Namatjira’s art, Western pastoral modernism
morphs into the “counter-colonial strategies” of postcolonialism.
Arguably these recent claims say more about the state of art criticism and
the influence of Namatjira’s art in the 1990s than they do about its meaning and
function in the mid-twentieth century. How much, we might ask, has Burn’s
conceptualism played a role in his readings of Namatjira’s art? Moreover, the
qualities that they discerned in Namatjira’s paintings curiously echo those in
the landscapes of archetypal Western modernists such as Cézanne, Van Gogh,
Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso. A more useful way of understanding the im-
petus behind Namatjira’s art might be to consider it in the context of Western
Arrernte history rather than that of Western modernism or postcolonial the-
ory. What if his paintings were a response to local Arrernte politics rather than
either a mimicry or subversion of Western modernism?
Western Arrernte Modernity

Modernity is not simply imposed on the world from powerful centers. It has
to be translated or remade in the image of the locality into which it is thrown.
The choice facing Indigenous people with the challenge of European colonial-
ism was not to simply abandon their old ways and adopt new Western ones
or to resist the new in the name of the old. Both choices were elements of In-
digenous tactics, but generally, the overarching strategy of Indigenous people
was to make from modernity something of their own through transcultural
processes in which they fashioned their own modern practices.
Generic to all modernities is the conflict between the old and the new, which
creates a profound sense of temporal discontinuity between present and past.
Modernity’s rupture brings into being the radical difference of the old and the
new, as if the ancient and the modern are caught in a binary opposition and
without genealogical ties. At Hermannsburg in central Australia, this rupture
was expressed in the difference between “heathen” and “Christian” times, and
was played out in an iconoclastic struggle concerning appropriate imagery
and symbols.29 Namatjira’s way of making images, I argue, played a central
role in resolving this struggle and thereby invented an Arrernte modernism.

Understanding the nature and meaning of Arrernte modernism requires, as it
inevitably does of all art movements, knowledge of its historical context — in
this case, of the particular modernity and the political and aesthetic struggles
it engendered at the Hermannsburg Mission.
With the completion of the Overland telegraph line in 1872 — three thou-
sand kilometers of dusty track and cable connecting eleven telegraph stations
between Darwin and Port Augusta, each manned by a handful of Europeans —
the gates of modernity were opened in central Australia. The telegraph line’s
tenuous infrastructure was enough of a foothold to attract European cattle
men, prospectors, anthropologists, and missionaries to this Indigenous
stronghold. The latter, in particular, were the vanguard of modernity in this
part of the world. Among the first to arrive were two Lutheran missionaries,
Herman Kempe and Wilhelm Schwarz, who had traveled halfway around the
world from Germany. The journey out to Adelaide was relatively quick, but
the final leg up to the center of Australia nearly killed them. The 360-kilometer
train trip to Port Augusta didn’t take long; however, the remaining 2,100 kilo
meters took twenty-two arduous months, most of it on foot across some of the
most inhospitable country in the world. On the June 4, 1877, with a contract
worker named Mirus and two thousand livestock, they set up camp at a place
the Arrernte called Ntaria, 130 kilometers west of the telegraph station that
would eventually become the township of Alice Springs. Here, on a grassy
plain, the missionaries began building the rudiments of their new life.
The local Aborigines were, as always, moving about their estate seasonally.
Ntaria was a summer camping ground, so it was rarely occupied in the middle
of the year. We know from Tjalkabota’s account, the only surviving Aboriginal
report of these early days, that the arrival of the missionaries was keenly ob-
served. They were believed to be spirits returning to the place where they had
died long ago, and the sheep that accompanied them were devils.
The locals initially thought it best to keep a distance and hope that these
spirits and devils would move on, but after two months, they decided to make
contact. On August 4 two Aboriginal men, “powerful figures with noble
beards,” went forward to test the waters. The missionaries gave them gifts —
clothes, flour, and meat — as was expected in such a situation. But the Arrernte
remained cautious. Back in their camp, they fed it to the dogs to see if they
would die.30 And so the artifacts of modernity received their first test.
By the end of another cycle of seasons, the missionaries and sheep clearly
weren’t going away. Their number had increased substantially. There were now
three missionaries, their wives — white women were a rare occurrence in the
196 IAN McLEAN

contact zone — seven permanent laborers, several of whom also had wives,
and also several local hired help, including a few Aborigines — such as Tjalk-
abota and his father, Tjita — employed as shepherds. Five buildings had been
erected, and the mission was well and truly established as a forward post of
European modernity.
By 1896 the mission was the largest settlement for hundreds of kilometers.
The number of Europeans was much the same, but the Indigenous population
had skyrocketed. Up to 150 were living and working there as builders, shep-
herds, cooks, and in other laboring jobs.31 The mission had become a micro-
cosm of the regulatory institutions of European modernity: a school, a shop,
a magistrate and post office, a substantial catering service, a research center
that investigated anthropology and linguistics, a sizeable agribusiness with a
construction and transport arm, and a modern management system with a
head office in a distant center.
Tjalkabota’s memory of first setting foot on the mission in 1878 when he was
a child reads like science fiction: “When we came we saw the buildings already
standing, three of them. I couldn’t imagine how they could do this. What is
this? . . . I felt the buildings with my hands, asking myself, ‘How did they do
this?’ ” 32 The Arrernte were impressed that the mission shared everything with
them, providing food, shelter, clothing, and medicine, and protected them
from police and pastoralists. Though many Arrernte were at first hesitant to
engage with the mission, when the first large consignment of white flour and
sugar arrived in November 1879, large numbers suddenly appeared, staying
until the supplies ran out. From that point, the mission became an accepted
part of the place; that is, the Arrernte began to assume ownership of it.
If the mission protected the Arrernte from the more devastating aspects of
colonialism, it was no less a colonial regime, in which the mores of modernity
challenged Indigenous traditions. The gift of such a large quantity of flour and
sugar was perhaps the first time that the Arrernte sensed a new order on the
horizon and tasted, quite literally in this instance, modernity. By this I mean
they digested the import of modernity, that they felt its order of power and
regulation, in Foucault’s sense of how the practices of modernity infiltrate the
daily lives of its citizens by distributing power in a measured way around a
putative norm.33 In Ntaria processed foods became the new raw ingredients of
a modern sedentary lifestyle.
More importantly, modernity also infiltrated their lives in the very language
systems that the mission introduced in its translations of prayer books and
biblical texts. Producing an Arrernte written language involved intense intel-

lectual engagements between the two groups about linguistic, theological, and
anthropological matters. In this way, each party contributed to a transcultural
milieu that itself was the fabric of a new Arrernte modernity, rather than an
imposed European one.
Despite the mission’s benign regime, it was not all milk and honey. The
mission was plagued by droughts, and its Indigenous population, not used
to living in such concentrated numbers, was plagued by epidemics. But the
greatest challenge occurred in the arena of theology. Here, modernity’s rep-
utation for revolution — and in this case, it was an Arrernte revolution led by
converts — was most evident and of great import for Namatjira’s modernism.
Revolution and crisis are concepts dear to European modernists and their
war on tradition, but they can be misleading lenses in understanding what
happened at Ntaria. European modernity assumes that the two great social
revolutions in mankind’s history were the shifts from a hunter-gather to an
agrarian economy, and the subsequent shift from an agrarian to an industri-
alized economy. At Ntaria the Western Arrernte had little difficulty making
these shifts; indeed they took to shepherding and droving cattle like fish to
water. They also had little difficulty engaging in cross-cultural research, espe-
cially of a theological nature. Such speculation was the lifeblood of Arrernte
intellectual life. Claude Lévi-Strauss described the Arrernte “taste for erudi-
tion” as “intellectual dandyism.” 34 In his characteristic manner, Lévi-Strauss’s
irony — which relies on the perceived primitiveness of the Arrernte — was
meant to challenge Western assumptions about its own sense of difference.
The clash of cosmologies that occurred on missions can also be exagger-
ated. The very love of theological dispute shared by both parties produced
remarkable compromises. Both sides agreed that the two key terms in each
cosmology, Altjira and God, signified the same idea: a transcendent creative
force that is ever present and continually incarnated in the world.35 The
ethnographer Francis Gillen, postmaster in charge of the telegraph station
at Alice Springs, translated Altjira as Dreamtime, and this, or Dreaming, as
it is now more usually rendered, has become its most accepted translation.
Kempe, who first attempted to translate the term, said it meant “everlasting
existence.” 36 In this way the processes of translation reconfigured a theological
artifact of European modernity into an Indigenous worldview. In the Arrernte
Bible, God is translated as Altjira.
These processes of translation also reflected Indigenous notions of tempo-
rality, in which history is a series of eternal returns and not a series of con-
vulsive revolutions or discontinuities. Thus the missionaries were initially
198 IAN McLEAN

perceived as returning Arrernte ghosts, and when this proved not to be the
case, their strange ways and beliefs were rapidly incorporated into practices
that conformed with, rather than challenged, Arrernte cosmology. God was
simply Altjira by another name, and a new ancestral pantheon from the Bible
was introduced into the Dreaming. Yet, for Tjalkabota (who chose Moses as
his Christian name) — the leading figure among the new converts — the ex-
change was not this simple. At issue for him were the symbols in which Altjira
now manifested. Focusing his iconoclastic zeal on the tjurunga, he delivered
a standard sermon titled “Churinga or Christ.” 37 For him, the translation did
require an aesthetic revolution.
Tjurunga, which are the most powerful symbols of Altjira and authority in
traditional Arrernte society, deeply embedded in its social politics, are uncre-
ated secret sacred engravings on stone or wood that are literal incarnations of
Altjira. The term can also refer to the songs and ceremonies with which these
engravings are associated. Ancestors dropped tjurunga during their wander-
ings and left traces of Altjira in the places (totemic sites) they visited. These
sites can also be called tjurunga. Its function is impregnation, or the continu-
ity of life. Tjurunga are, quite literally, the seed from which one is conceived.
Those left by wandering ancestors transform into spirit children who jump
into women as they pass by. Following his initiation, a young man is reunited
with his personal conception tjurunga, which would have been retrieved by
the old men after his conception. He may also inherit his father and mother’s
tjurunga and receive others through kin relations and from his knowledge of
tjurunga songs and ceremonial cycles. The possession of tjurunga is the basis
of power and authority in traditional Arrernte society. Women and the unini-
tiated are never allowed to see them, even though each is assigned one.
Tjalkabota insisted that Altjira or God now manifested in a new set of
symbols associated with the mission: biblical images and Lutheran songs and
ceremony that everyone could see. His battle against tjurunga was essentially
a revolution about symbols, not cosmology or the sacred. But it was also a
battle about politics and power, as the tjurunga confer authority on the old
men. Tjalkabota led a democratic movement aimed at shifting power from the
old men to the congregation of men and women of all ages. In this respect, he
truly was a revolutionary in the modern social sense of the term.
Tjalkabota’s obsession with tjurunga is very evident in his autobiography. In
one of his many rants against them and the claims of the old men, he related
his initiation, which occurred in the summer of 1892–93. As well as circum-
cision and other painful ordeals, the ceremony involved the presentation of

each initiate’s tjurunga. The rukata (novices), said Tjalkabota, believed that
the tjurunga were made by men, rather than “uncreated.” As well, the rukata
were not impressed by their iconography. “We spoke like this. ‘These are not
pictures. We have seen God’s picture. We have also seen Jesus’s picture, and
that of the Holy Spirit. But this [tjurunga] isn’t a picture. This is of no real
consequence.’ . . . I held onto God’s word and the Christian songs more than
onto the tjuringa and heathen songs.” Only Tjalkabota challenged the old
men, much to their annoyance. “Stop arguing with us,” they said, “or we will
harm you.” 38
While Tjalkabota rejected the tjurunga, he did not reject ancestral power or
its manifestation as images. Rather, ancestral power (Altjira) had returned in
a new aesthetic form, which brought with it a new politics. Like the old men,
Tjalkabota used pictures and songs as his central pedagogical tools: “Then they
said, ‘How is it that you two have come with so much paper?’ I said, ‘To show
you pictures. God in heaven is alive. We have brought you this to show you.’
They were amazed when they saw Jesus dying on the cross, Jesus suffering. I
also showed them God’s creation. The two of us also sang in front of them.” 39
Throughout Australia Aborigines understood that European law was in
scribed on paper and not on stone, wood, or the land.40 Tjalkabota chose pa-
per, or pepe — the Bible and missionary teaching pictures for biblical stories
printed on paper — over the tjurunga stone. To this day, Western Arrernte
Christians see themselves as the people of pepe.41
The converts never did defeat the old men (i.e., their fathers). They had to
wait for them to die. This had largely occurred by the mid-1920s, when the
new Christian generation assumed leadership. A terrible drought gripped
the land, as if the very country was mourning the death of the old men and
the gathering silence of the corroborees, the performances they had led on the
Finke riverbed. Carl Strehlow, who died in 1923, had supported the old men,
not the young converts. When F. W. Albrecht, Strehlow’s replacement, arrived
in 1926, the converts pushed him to take a hard line against the tjurunga, “Here
we praise God,” they said, “not tjuringas.” 42 Namatjira’s uncle and classificatory
father, Titus Renkaraka, was counted among the converts.43 He had inherited
the role of traditional ceremonial leader of Ntaria and the nearby Mananga-
nanga tjurunga storehouse after the death of his father, Loatjira, in 1924. As
one Arrernte man said of Titus, “He might be Christian, but still in charge
of the place.” 44 In 1928, Titus convinced Albrecht to desanctify the Mananga-
nanga cave. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, that is, in
200 IAN McLEAN

Untitled (Landscape with Two Snakes and a House), 1938.
F I G U R E 7 . 3 Collin,
Drawing in charcoal and color pastels, 9.9 × 14.6 in. (25.2 × 37.1 cm). Frances
Derham Collection, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Gift of Frances
Derham, 1976–86.
the name of Altjira, the tjurunga were brought out and shown to the uniniti-
ated, thus breaking the age-old taboo. The drought broke in the next year.
According to Paul Carter, this was followed by an equally epochal event.
To guard against future droughts, a pipeline was constructed from the nearby
sacred Kaporilja Spring to the mission. It altered, said Carter, “not only the
physical but the metaphysical landscape,” as the “efficacy of the totemic an-
cestor lodged there drained away.” 45 Yet manifestly, its efficacy had been in-
creased not decreased, even if the totemic ancestor — in this case, the Rainbow
Serpent — now seemed to speak in a new voice and with new symbols. The tju-
runga and the spring were not simply deterritorialized. Their ancestral power
was reterritorialized, or literally rechanneled. When the water first gushed
down the pipes on the first day of October in 1935, it shot six to seven meters
in the air, like two Rainbow Serpents leaping upward, as one schoolboy vividly
remembered in his drawing (figure 7.3).
That moment remains imprinted on the collective memory of the place as if
it were a miracle, an ancestral event. Water is the most important resource in

central Australia and the principal element about which the Dreaming stories
revolve. Altjira was revitalized; the Rainbow Serpent had stirred. As if to en-
sure its continued potency, a ceremony occurs every October in an amphithe-
ater marked, somewhat like a tjurunga design, in concentric circles of stone
surrounding a large white cross on a pedestal. Does the cross transcend the
tjurunga design, as one non-Aboriginal pastor suggested, or have both been
incorporated into a new hybrid liturgy?46
One answer is found nearby, on the bed of the Finke River, where there
reputedly is a flat piece of stone with indentations in its surface, something like
a tjurunga. It is, say the Arrernte, the footprint of Jesus, who walked this way
before the missionaries. In this ancestral story, “The missionaries came not
to bring a new story, but rather to remind the Arrernte of a story . . . that was
already there.” 47
After witnessing the desanctification of the Manangananga cave, Namatjira
— who with his father was part of the Christian faction — volunteered to pros-
elytize among the bush missionaries. He found his true calling a few years
later, however, when the mission established an artifact workshop. These
momentous events were also associated with visits of modernist artists from
Melbourne, who around this time began to show an interest in the mission.
They had been stirred by Spencer’s writings on the Arrernte, an impressive In-
digenous art exhibition in Melbourne in 1929, and a newfound interest in the
Australian outback as the new nation-state sought to delineate the essential
character of its identity. The recent completion of the railway to Alice Springs
also helped.
From the early 1930s, several artists (and other dignitaries), including Bat-
tarbee, began visiting the mission. Battarbee’s paintings of the area elicited
much interest from the Aborigines, and the pipeline was the idea of a group
of Melbourne-based artists, who helped raise money for it by selling their
paintings to ensure Hermannsburg had permanent water and thus insulate it
from future drought. Thus, the miracle of water was a direct gift of Melbourne
modernism, of which Battarbee was the most prominent representative at the
mission. Further, the mission had begun to develop links with the Western art
world at the very moment that it had embarked on a new post-tjurunga era
under the auspices of a Western aesthetic system — the Lutheran teaching pic-
tures favored by Tjalkabota. In this new climate, Namatjira convinced himself
that he could make Western-type paintings in the manner of Battarbee’s pas-
toral modernism, completing his first effort in May 1935 while the pipeline was
202 IAN McLEAN

being laid. With the tjurunga now dethroned, he gave the Western Arrernte a
new set of pictures made from water and paper.
More than one commentator has noted how closely Namatjira’s landscapes
emulate the look of the Lutheran teaching pictures that Tjalkabota, the evan-
gelist, held dear to his heart, especially the pictures for biblical stories set in the
desert.48 This, in part, explains Namatjira’s attraction to pastoral modernism,
which employed the sacral intentions of picturesque composition and light.
When painting this desert landscape, Heysen said that he “was made curi-
ously conscious of a very old land where the primitive forces of Nature were
constantly evident.” 49 Similarly, the iconic forms and shimmering tones of
Namatjira’s compositions animate the presence of Altjira, which in traditional
body and ground painting was also produced through such visual effects. As
Heysen painted a melancholy loss in which the animating forces of the land-
scape are old and weary, however, Namatjira’s painted a country alive and fully
animated, as if Altjira still stirred beneath the ground (figure 7.4). This was
his gift to his own people: he provided them with a tangible alternative to the
tjurunga, one that spoke directly to this place and its ancestral sites.
Altjira was written not only in the tjurunga but also in the land. Tjalkabota
may have waged war on the tjurunga, which he believed were manmade, but
he respected the sanctity of the land, which was God made. Like the tjurunga,
Namatjira’s landscapes are totemic-scapes. In this respect, like the pipeline,
Namatjira’s art reterritorialized the tjurunga in the form of an Arrernte
modernism.
The central importance of land as the bearer of cosmological meaning is
evident in the widespread Western Arrernte belief that God’s law is not every-
where, but only in their country. “God had given his country to a particular
people and they were the Western Arrernte. . . . In these Arrernte Christian
eyes, the mission had retrieved this law for the Western Arrernte, and the Ar-
rernte had realized it as pepe,” rather than tjurunga.50 In other words, God’s law
worked in the same way as the traditional law of the ancestors. It was embed-
ded in a particular place.
Like Tjalkabota, Namatjira was a practicing Christian. He belonged, how-
ever, to a later generation that softened Tjalkabota’s radical aspirations. Like
many converts, Namatjira retained an allegiance to the local totemic sites and
their stories, and he liked to relate the Dreaming or tjurunga stories of the
sites he painted. He did not, like some of his followers, paint Christian scenes
or embed tjurunga designs in his landscapes. His art offers a compromising

FIGURE 7.4 Albert Namatjira, Whispering Hills, 1952. Watercolor on paper,
14.3 × 20.5 in. (36.3 × 52 cm). Newcastle Region Art Gallery Collection. Purchased
by the Newcastle Region Art Gallery Foundation, the Newcastle Gallery Society,
and public donation, 2009. © Namatjira Legacy Trust, 2018.
position that accepts Tjalkabota’s modernizing ideology but without its icon-
oclastic divisiveness.
Today Namatjira’s art is the most visible legacy of the Arrernte revolution at
Ntaria. A collection of his and his followers works hangs in a makeshift gallery
at Hermannsburg on the old mission site, and recently a large gift of his paint-
ings to the National Gallery of Australia has cemented his legacy. The style of
painting he pioneered continues to be practiced by Arrernte artists and has
become the brand of Arrernte identity, as if it offered a modern pictorial lan-
guage in which the eternal inscriptions of Altjira in the land are repeated in
fugitive washes of color on paper. In this way Namatjira distilled the eternal in
the present, thus accomplishing what the old men had always sought: continu-
ity. In his paintings the conflict between Tjalkabota and the old men achieved
a workable truce.
The revolutionaries never did succeed in stamping out the tjurunga. The
Manangananga cave was made a taboo site again in the mid-1950s, and a vast
number of the old tjurunga are now stored in restricted access in the Strehlow
Research Centre in nearby Alice Springs — a new type of cave regulated by the
bureaucratic procedures of modernity — and the old ceremonies continue. The
art world has also significantly changed, in part because of the sort of conun-
drums posed by artists such as Namatjira. The founding principles of Western
modernism and its war with tradition no longer hold. Today traditionalism —
or “neotraditionalism” (the use of traditional Indigenous iconography and art
styles in the context of modern media and formats) — is a dominant feature
of Aboriginal contemporary art, especially in the so-called Western Desert
school of painting that originated at Papunya, where Namatjira spent his last
days. Today’s Namatjira school of painting is now the traditional Arrernte
way. Nonetheless, in Namatjira’s time, his watercolors appeared as anything
but traditional.
Despite modernity’s claims of temporal rupture, tradition continuously
reappears as a sort of return of the repressed, in both the current neotradi-
tionalism of Western Desert acrylic paintings and in the earlier primitivism of
Western modernism. Modernism was Janus faced. It could take on the guise
of the past and the future, but each is a window onto the eternal present. Given
the imperative of Indigenous artists to retain continuity with Dreaming, it
makes sense that Aboriginal contemporary art tends to be neotraditional.
Yet, Dreaming demands continuity with the future as well as with the past.
Perhaps, when the future begins to offer more promise and takes on a shape
that Indigenous artists feel they can own — as is beginning to happen in some

quarters — Indigenous contemporary artists will, like their Western counter-
parts, flirt more promiscuously with the future and worry less for tradition.
Notes
Epigraph: Vic Hall, Namatjira of the Aranda (Adelaide: Rigby, 1962), 13.
1. Rex Battarbee, Modern Australian Aboriginal Art (Sydney: Angus and Robertson,
1951).
2. Ian Burn, National Life and Landscape: Australian Painting 1900–1940 (Sydney:
Bay Books, 1990); Clement Greenberg, “The Plight of Our Culture,” in Affirmation and
Refusals, 1950–56, vol. 3 of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed.
John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 122–52.
3. Philip Jones, “Namatjira: Traveller between Two Worlds,” in The Heritage of Namat-
jira: The Watercolourists of Central Australia, ed. Jane Hardy, J. V. S. Megaw, and M.
Ruth Megaw (Port Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1992), 98.
4. Battarbee, Modern Australian Aboriginal Art, 10.
5. “Albert Namatjira Mobbed by Autograph Hunters in Melb.,” Barrier Miner, Feb-
ruary 27, 1954, 11.
6. Ernestine Hill, Australia, Land of Contrasts, ed. Sydney Ure Smith (Sydney:
J. Sands, 1943).
7. Ian Burn and Ann Stephen, “Namatjira’s White Mask: A Partial Interpretation,” in
Hardy, Megaw, and Megaw, The Heritage of Namatjira, 265.
8. Burn and Stephen, “Namatjira’s White Mask,” 265.
9. Lionel Lindsay, quoted in Colin Thiele, Heysen of Hahndorf (Adelaide: Rigby,
1968), 203.
10. Bernard Smith and Terry Smith, Australian Painting, 1788–1990 (Melbourne:
Oxford University Press, 1991), 115.
11. Harold Herbert, “Aboriginal Art: Albert Namatjira,” Argus, December 5, 1938, 2.
12. Paul Haefliger, “Technique of Namatjira: Water Colours by Aboriginal,” Sydney
Morning Herald, March 15, 1945, 8.
13. Paul Haefliger, “Aboriginal Artist’s Work on Show,” Sydney Morning Herald, No-
vember 25, 1947, 9.
14. Mary Durack, “Art and Aboriginal,” West Australian, December 14, 1946
17. Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1899).
18. Nelson H. H. Graburn, “Introduction: The Arts of the Fourth World,” in Ethnic
and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World, ed. Nelson H. H. Graburn
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 7.
206 IAN McLEAN

19. Sylvia Kleinert, “The Critical Reaction to the Hermannsburg School,” in Hardy,
Megaw, and Megaw, Heritage of Namatjira, 243.
20. Jones, “Namatjira,” 112.
22. Burn and Stephen, “Namatjira’s White Mask,” 267–68.
27. Burn and Stephen, “Namatjira’s White Mask,” 278–79.
29. Diane Austin-Broos, Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past: Invasion, Violence, and
Imagination in Indigenous Central Australia (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
2009), 95.
30. Tjalkabota, in Paul G. E. Albrecht, From Mission to Church, 1877–2002: Finke
River Mission (Ntaria [Hermannsburg]: Finke River Mission, 2002), 242–43.
31. See Albrecht’s report in From Mission to Church, 307–40. Also see John Strehlow,
The Tale of Frieda Keysser: Frieda Keysser and Carl Strehlow, an Historical Biography,
vol. 1, 1875–1910 (London: Wild Cat Press, 2011), 563.
32. Tjalkabota, in Albrecht, From Mission to Church, 244.
33. Tim Rouse made a similar argument: Rouse, White Flour, White Power (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7–8.
34. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1966), 89.
35. See Anna Kenny, “From Missionary to Frontier Scholar: An Introduction to
Carl Strehlow’s Masterpiece, Die Aranda-und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien
(1901–1909)” (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2008), ch. 5.
36. See Sam D. Gill, Storytracking: Texts, Stories, and Histories in Central Australia
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 87.
38. Tjalkabota, in Albrecht, From Mission to Church, 274–75.
39. Tjalkabota, in Albrecht, From Mission to Church, 286.
40. See Penny Van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of
Writing in Australia (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006).
41. See Austin-Broos, Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past.
42. Barbara Henson, A Straight-Out Man: F. W. Albrecht and Central Australian Ab-
origines (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1994), 48.
44. Henson, A Straight-Out Man, 53.
45. Paul Carter, The Lie of the Land (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 49.

46. Diane Austin-Broos, “Translating Christianity: Some Keywords, Events and
Sites in Western Arrernte Conversion,” Australian Journal of Anthropology 21, no. 1
(2010): 27.
47. Austin-Broos, “Translating Christianity,” 27.
48. For example, see Jones, “Namatjira,” 110–11.
49. Hans Heysen, “Some Notes on Art,” Art in Australia 3, no. 44 (June 1932): 18.
50. Austin-Broos, Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past, 81.
208 IAN McLEAN

NORMAN VORANO
8 CAPE DORSET COSMOPOLITANS
Making “Local” Prints in Global Modernity
Vogue magazine, May 15, 1954: Tucked inside this handbook of jetset consump-
tion, sandwiched between elegant willowy women in Mainbocher prints, an
advertisement sponsored by the Canadian government travel bureau, and
dapper men with chiseled jawlines, is an effusive review article by the art critic
and cultural writer Aline B. Saarinen: “Canada: Contemporary Eskimo Stone
Carvings” (figure 8.1). Saarinen, the former critic at Art News and current
art critic at the New York Times (as Aline Louchheim), was captivated by the
first traveling exhibitions of contemporary Inuit sculpture to tour the United
States. Beginning in the fall of 1953, nearly two dozen American venues offered
contrasting ways of contextualizing the presentation of Inuit carving; from
the ethnographic setting of the Cranbrook Institute of Science in Bloomfield,
Michigan, to the august high modernism of the Phillips Collection in Wash-
ington, D.C., the contradictory discourses of “modernist primitivism” featured
prominently in the promotion and in audience responses. Spellbound by the
“extraordinary quality” of the “vigorous and engaging” carvings, Saarinen
described the works as being “startlingly sympathetic to our most sophisti-
cated modern aesthetics,” reminiscent of “early Lipchitz or . . . the genius of
Henry Moore and John Flannagan [sic].” 1 Vogue entreated its nearly 400,000
style-conscious American readers to their first glimpse of Inuit art with a
potent narrative linking global tourism, Canada’s North, the anxieties of con-
sumption, and the presumed links between “the primitive” and “the modern.”
“The thrill of discovering contemporary Eskimo stone carving today,” wrote
Saarinen, “is akin to the excitement people must have felt at the beginning of
our century when they first looked at African Negro sculpture.” 2
F I G U R E 8 . 1
Aline B. Saarinen, “Canada:

Contemporary Eskimo Stone
Carvings,” Vogue, May 15,
1954, 64. Copyright Conde
Nast.
This complicated intersection of modern aesthetics and worldly objects,

mass consumption and travel, and the contradictory discourses of modernist
primitivism are the preconditions to the emergence of a fine-art Inuit print-
making movement that began in the Canadian Arctic in the late 1950s. This
chapter tracks the origins of fine-art printmaking in the eastern Arctic and sit-
uates the production of Inuit stone-cut relief and stencil prints within broader
discourses of a colonial modernity, Cold War politics, and government-
sanctioned assimilation policies. I argue that Inuit artists, working with the
assistance of non-Indigenous cultural intermediaries, made aesthetic and
artistic decisions that strengthened their “local” identities in an increasingly
interconnected world by strategically deploying familiar tropes of modernist
primitivism in ways that implicitly challenged the culturally reductive as-
sumptions of a universal modernism and the inherently colonial politics of
primitivism. Entangled in conflicting art world discourses, including a Cold
War cultural nationalism, and drawing from a cosmopolitan array of global
artistic references and mass print journalism, Inuit print studios became an
arena in which Inuit identities could be explored, reconfigured, and negoti-
ated in the modern world. The success of Inuit printmaking in southern mar-
kets and the development of Arctic print studios provided the economic and
210 N orman V orano

organizational impetus for the establishment of Inuit-owned business cooper-
atives that contributed to broader sociopolitical autonomy.3
This case study further serves to illustrate a broader point concerning the
intercultural history of aesthetic modernism itself, foregrounding its capacity
to bring together disparate cultures, classes, and political orientations under
a common visual field, but frequently based on mutual misunderstandings,
unshared meanings, and (mis)appropriations, a point that I develop in the
concluding remarks of this chapter.
To date, while there have been numerous chronicles of Inuit printmaking
as well as monographs on graphic artists and studios, relatively few scholars
have attempted to situate the emergence of Inuit graphic arts within larger art
historical narratives of postwar modernism and modernity.4 For a little over
fifty years, fine-art printmaking studios have operated in the eastern Canadian
Arctic where they have had a profound effect on the lives of Inuit. In northern
communities suffering from chronically high unemployment coupled with the
legacy of government-orchestrated assimilationist policies, the print studios
provided a meaningful intergenerational connection and sense of cultural
stability, as well as a vehicle for individual and collective expression.5 Print-
making has launched the careers of three generations of Inuit graphic artists
(many of whom are female) and has also provided broader opportunities for
community-based cooperative entrepreneurship and professional develop-
ment in business management.6 After five decades of print production, Arctic
print studios are enmeshed in a sprawling global supply chain that includes
traditional washi makers in Japan, wholesale distributors in metropolitan
centers, a coterie of business and technical advisors — and, of course, a set of
scholars. From a modest start in the late 1950s, annual releases of Inuit prints
have become an autumn ritual for many high-end commercial art galleries
across North America, while public museums around the world increasingly
acquire Inuit graphic arts to explore Inuit ethnology, history, and culture.
While the number of print studios in the Arctic has peaked and waned over
the last five decades, the community of Cape Dorset has remained the most
prolific and, as such, is the focus of the study here. Not only is Cape Dorset the
“birthplace” of Inuit printmaking, consistently releasing annual collections of
prints since its inaugural 1959 catalog, but artists from this community, such as
Kenojuak Ashevak, Pitseolak Ashoona, Kananginak Pootoogook, and Pudlo
Pudlat, among many others, have won national and international acclaim for
their graphic works.
Early attempts to historicize Inuit printmaking are attributed to James
C ape D orset C osmopolitans 211

Houston, the artist and cultural intermediary who introduced printmaking to
Cape Dorset in the late 1950s while employed as an area administrator for the
Canadian government.7 From 1949, Houston worked tirelessly in the Arctic to
establish the formal marketing structure for Inuit sculpture and handicrafts.8
When the markets for Inuit sculpture across North America expanded in the
mid-1950s, the federal government supported a slate of new northern arts and
crafts endeavors to broaden the commercial potential of Arctic arts through
diversification into other media.9 By 1956, Houston and a small group of Inuit
men in Cape Dorset — Osuitok Ipeelee, followed by Lukta Qiatsuk, Kanangi-
nak Pootoogook, Egyvudluk Pootoogook, and Iyola Kingwatsiak — began ex-
perimenting with rudimentary hand-block fabric and paper printing, with the
intent of selling northern-themed gift cards and wrapping paper in southern
markets. While fabric printing continued into the 1960s (without much finan-
cial success), the leap from gift paper to “fine art” limited edition printmaking
was made possible after Houston spent three months studying hand-block
printing in Japan in late 1958. He returned to Cape Dorset armed with the tech-
nical and artistic knowledge of sophisticated modern printing techniques, and
the studio blossomed.10
Around this time, Houston published his first article on the start of In-
uit printmaking, “Eskimo Graphic Art,” which appeared in the pages of the
journal Canadian Art. Timed to coincide with the release of Cape Dorset’s
first annual collection of prints in early 1960, the article was republished as a
stand-alone government-issued pamphlet to promote Inuit graphic arts as an
important art form that would allow Inuit to “better express themselves” in a
rapidly changing world. Citing the artists’ “remoteness from outside art train-
ing,” the article presented printmaking as a “new and natural development”
that grew out of the “traditionally Eskimo” art of sealskin clothing applique.11
The article strategically downplayed Houston’s complicated role as the cultural
intermediary who introduced printmaking to Cape Dorset, an omission that
foreshadows Houston’s canny ability to navigate the rigid strictures of “au-
thenticity” in the 1950s art world, and to creatively explore themes that would
resonate with or at times challenge the desires and expectations of audiences.
Enlarging on this in his 1967 book, Eskimo Prints, Houston spun a more engag-
ing yarn about the start of printmaking that would be repeated for decades to
come: In winter 1957, wrote Houston, Osuitok Ipeelee, a notable carver, noticed
the identical designs of two cigarette packages and remarked that it must have
been tiresome for someone to repeatedly paint the same image. Unable to suf-
ficiently explain the method of mechanical printing used to create the packag-
212 N orman V orano

ing, Houston demonstrated the intaglio process by rubbing lamp soot into an
incised walrus tusk and then pulling a few reasonably clear reproductions on
tissue paper. Like a flash of lightning, the idea of printmaking was thus born:
“ ‘We could do that,’ [Osuitok] said, with the instant decision of a hunter. And
so we did,” wrote Houston.12 While his article assured readers — not without
some basis in fact — that Inuit graphic arts drew from vibrant graphical tradi-
tions in ivory incising and sealskin appliqué dating back millennia, Houston’s
historical account glossed over the government’s long-standing interest in
developing “Eskimo crafts” and the complicated global influences that Inuit
artists were navigating. Quite possibly to burnish the image of the brand-new
Cape Dorset print studio with a more long-standing and “authentic” pedigree,
or to play into the ancient links and presumed affinities between Inuit and East
Asian cultures, Houston did mention having studied in Japan, a point that he
furtively discussed in earlier newspaper interviews.13
Digesting Modernism — Magazines in the Arctic

Houston’s captivating anecdote about Ipeelee’s “discovery” of printmaking
belies a constellation of influences, including the global forces of modernity
as well as the diffusion of an aesthetic modernism and modernist primitiv-
ism, notably through mass print culture. As noted by other scholars, pop-
ular magazines have played an invaluable role as carriers and incubators of
artistic modernism around the world, including the formation of a “taste
culture” for Native American modernist arts in the early and mid-twentieth
century.14 Popular magazines and art journals — particularly Canadian Art
and London’s Studio Magazine, the latter being distributed and read across
the Commonwealth — helped key cultural brokers shape an effective domestic
and international marketing strategy for Inuit sculpture in the 1950s.15 It is no
surprise, then, that the birth of printmaking in the Canadian Arctic owes a
debt to several key magazine articles, which created a texture of explicit refer-
ence about modernism and primitivism that “activated” the print studio.
In Houston’s 1996 memoir, he recalled that after initial experimentation
with printmaking in Cape Dorset, he sought more training in Japan after read-
ing a “British art magazine that had mentioned and shown the work of several
contemporary Japanese printmakers and discussed their techniques.” 16 The
identity of this magazine remains a mystery, although evidence strongly sug-
gests that he encountered the widely available article “Japanese Print Revival,”
published in the July 23, 1956, edition of Time magazine.17 Among the Japanese

artists discussed, all of whom were on the cutting edge of Japan’s sōsaku hanga,
or “creative print” movement, was Shikō Munakata, who had gained consider-
able international exposure after receiving prizes at the 1955 São Paulo Biennial
and the 1956 Venice Biennale. The article acknowledged Munakata’s role as one
of the principle revivers of the “neglected” art of printmaking in Japan, which
according to the Time reviewer was previously composed of “cheap prints of
almond-eyed prostitutes, grimacing kabuki actors and brawling porters,” a
tradition that became an “early victim in Japan’s Westernization drive.” 18 One
of the latent messages of the Time article — that contemporary printmaking
can be a bulwark against the perceived homogenizing effects of social moder-
nity while simultaneously having the capacity to “recharge” enervated artistic
traditions — would have undoubtedly appealed to Houston’s sensibilities and,
more important, his desire to find a new medium for Inuit creativity. The Time
article highlighted Munakata’s interest in and engagement with Western mod-
ern painting, lauding his break with Japan’s established ukiyo-e print tradition
through a twofold process of adopting a more expressively individual style
and eliminating the division of labor that characterized the ukiyo-e process
(in which a separate draftsperson, block cutter, and printer were used to make
prints). Such appropriations of modernist visual styles, working methods, and
processes were not deemed incompatible with Munakata’s identity as a Japa-
nese artist, at least not in the international arena of art biennales and the world
press. Rather, they endowed his and other contemporary Japanese printmak-
ers’ works with a worldly sensibility, poetically captured by James Michener
who described this amalgam of Eastern and Western aesthetic compulsions
as existing “between the inner world of Japan and the outer world of Paris,”
a cosmopolitan metaphor that calls to mind the French modernist interest in
Japanese prints in the late nineteenth century.19 At a time of unprecedented
level of interest in Japanese prints, the Time reviewer made the apt pronounce-
ment that “hanga [block printing] is beginning to bloom again.”
Redolent with the possibilities of combining elements of Western aesthetic
modernism and “traditional” non-Western arts to create a hybrid form that
resonated in the contemporary world, the Time article clearly opened a con-
ceptual door for Houston. But it was likely just one catalyst of many. An earlier
source of inspiration is strongly implied by a 1955 memo Houston wrote to
his superiors in Ottawa, in which he revealed his intention to “successfully
introduce [in the Arctic] a graphic art of native concept like they have in the
Congo or Haiti.” 20 This furtive comment invites more questions than can be
addressed here concerning the identity of the art in question. Nonetheless,
214 N orman V orano

FIGURE 8.2 Ellis Wilson, To Market, Haitian Peasants, ca. 1954. Oil with
turpentine on panel, 22.4 × 28.8 in. (56.8 × 73.2 cm). North Carolina Museum of
Art, Raleigh. Purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina, 69, 29.1.
the memo was drafted shortly after a 1954 trip Houston took to New York
City with his wife, Alma, to publicize the first traveling exhibition of Inuit
carving to the United States, and the Houstons could very well have seen the
celebrated exhibition Impressions of Haiti, by the African American painter
Ellis Wilson, then on view at the New York Contemporary Arts Gallery (figure
8.2).21 Given Houston’s capacious interests in non-Western arts (but limited
exposure to African or Haitian graphic arts), it is plausible that he mistook
Wilson for a Haitian graphic artist when he spelled out his ambitions for Inuit
graphic arts some months later in his government memo. Regardless, Hous-
ton bore witness to the widespread institutionalization of non-Western arts in
North American museums under the rubric of “primitive arts” and clearly saw
an opening for Inuit graphic art.
Houston’s decision to study in Japan was rooted in his genuine appreciation
for the Japanese modern printmakers then fashionable in the art world. As
he recalled, “I decided that since the best printmakers in the world were in
Japan, I should go there and learn from them, and pass on what I learned to

my Inuit colleagues.” 22 A 1958 newspaper report, published as Houston was
readying for his departure to Japan, confirmed his intention to tap “Japan’s
vast fund of knowledge of hand-block printing . . . for methods whereby prints
can be made of Eskimo-incised carvings.” 23 Yet this decision to study in Japan
suggests a more complicated interest in “the primitive” that imagined essen-
tialized racial links between Inuit and Asian civilizations in both ancient and
contemporary times. Such links were explored by scientific anthropologists
and physical archaeologists, such as Smithsonian-based Henry Collins and
Aleš Hrdlička, yet they also had a more dubious place in popular expressions
of Alaskan Eskimos and, to a lesser degree, Canadian Inuit, through the re-
ductive imagery of Hollywood films, in a process Anne Fienup-Riordan de-
scribes as an “Eskimo Orientalism.” 24
A fulsome account of Houston’s three-month visit to Japan, between late
October 1958 and late January 1959, is beyond the scope of this chapter, but
some details are warranted. He did not, as he initially wanted, study with
Munakata (who was busy preparing for his first American solo exhibition)
but rather studied five nights a week with Un’ichi Hiratsuka, an eminent and
senior printmaker who had been Munakata’s teacher in the 1930s and was re-
vered in Japan as one of the principle founders of the sōsaku hanga movement
in the twentieth century. As Hiratsuka later recalled, Houston was a capable
student, and they had a productive relationship, which included many dis-
cussions about Inuit art.25 Houston learned hand-block direct printmaking as
well as hand rubbing, kappazuri stencil printing, and tool and paper (washi)
making. He made short visits to the studios of many other sōsaku hanga artists
around Tokyo, including Munakata, Kichiemon Okamura, Yoshitoshi Mori,
Keisuke Serizawa, and Sadao Watanabe. He became acquainted with Japan’s
popular mingei, “folk crafts,” scene — then regarded as a national movement —
by meeting its principal philosopher, Soetsu Yanagi. Like Houston, Yanagi
reveled in the antimodern possibilities of craft and Indigenous arts and came
to appreciate ancient Korean wares and Ainu cultural expressions through the
problematic lens of an “Oriental Orientalism,” or Japan’s “other.” 26 While Hous-
ton wrote sparely about his travels through Japan, his oft-repeated claim that
he returned to the Arctic bringing the “tools, the papers and the techniques”
he learned in Japan omits an important detail: he returned to Cape Dorset
with more than a dozen Japanese prints.27 These Japanese prints were framed
and exhibited around the Houstons’ Cape Dorset residence and pinned to the
walls around the print studio, remaining visible during the Houstons’ dura-
tion in the community over the next several years.
216 N orman V orano

The prints by Hiratsuka, Munakata, Okamura, and Mori were pedagogical
and inspirational, as the Inuit printmakers in Cape Dorset began to create
new prints in limited editions for wide release. By juxtaposing several of the
Japanese prints brought to the Arctic and the Inuit prints created afterward,
we can better understand how Inuit printmakers navigated a range of exter-
nal influences to establish their identities as Inuit artists in an increasingly
interconnected world system. While the Inuit artists undoubtedly drew from
their own cultural traditions, the comparisons underscore the degree to which
aesthetic modernism provided the visual field on which these intercultural
borrowings took place. In terms of their convergences, the Cape Dorset print-
makers admired the stark flatness and the bold, expressive style of the Japa-
nese prints, among other features discussed in the examples below. The Inuit
artists clearly adopted the Japanese method of adding a name seal, or “chop,”
to identify the artist, printer, and studio, but they reconfigured their name
seals to use syllabic Inuktitut rather than Japanese characters. Given that the
retail prices of Cape Dorset prints were in the same range as the prints by Mu-
nakata, “$6–$55 each,” and had a comparable edition sizes, the Cape Dorset
studio likely gleaned fundamental aspects of their own business model from
modern Japanese printmakers.28 Yet there are striking differences between the
Japanese and Cape Dorset prints as well, showing that Inuit printmakers selec-
tively or strategically borrowed and adapted influences, actively trying visual
elements of the Japanese prints but abandoning those they deemed incompat-
ible with their aesthetic or cultural values. Because of the lack of wood in the
Arctic, the Cape Dorset print studio resourcefully used the few materials at
hand, creating print blocks with locally quarried stone rather than wood, as
the Japanese artists used. The Cape Dorset artists also pursued their own set
of thematic concerns, basing their prints exclusively on drawings created by
men and women from the community, depicting Arctic animals, Inuit myths,
and a variety of Inuit cultural practices, all of which steadfastly avoided the
intrusion of modernity.
Hiratsuka’s woodcut print Katsura Rikyu Amano Hashidate [Stone lantern]
(figure 8.3) is a typical example of the unmodulated black-on-white prints
he had begun to produce almost exclusively since the late 1930s, after he es-
chewed color and tonal variation. This work, acquired by Houston directly
from the artist and then taken to the Arctic, can be productively compared
to Lukta Qiatsuk’s Owl, the first stone-cut print produced in Cape Dorset
after Houston’s return from Japan (figure 8.4). Hiratsuka’s development to-
ward stark black on white emerged from his interest in sumi-zuri (black ink)

painting as well as his admiration of the jagged but flat black-on-white prints
of German expressionists Ernst Kirchner and Emil Nolde, to which he was
exposed through circulating art magazines. Hiratsuka saw that the perfect
harmony of tones was to be found in this excruciatingly restrictive combi-
nation of black on white — no gray, no shading — which, he felt, could permit
every artistic effect. While Inuit women had a comparable graphic tradition
in silhouette-like appliqued “skin pictures” sewn on bags and garments using
bleached (white) and unbleached (dark) sealskin, the work by Hiratsuka and
Munakata must have enlarged the aesthetic and artistic possibilities of this
restricted aesthetic.29 Qiatsuk’s Owl demonstrates a far more sophisticated ap-
proach toward positive and negative space than the experimental Cape Dorset
prints created prior to Houston’s visit to Japan, which typically overlaid simple
silhouette-like shapes on a colored background. By contrast, Qiatsuk flattens
and animates the owl’s plumage by rendering it as a series of rhythmically in-
terlocking jigsawlike shapes that dance on the surface of the picture plane,
akin to Hiratsuka’s treatment of pebbles and water on Katsura Rikyu Amano
Hashidate. In both cases, the artists use black and white not to evoke static,
concrete forms but to create the appearance of shimmering movement over an
indeterminate space and to break the solidity of objects. Roughly one-quarter
of Cape Dorset’s first annual collection is black on white, in keeping with the
aesthetic philosophy expressed in Hiratsuka’s monotone prints.
Though Qiatsuk was the draftsperson, block cutter, and printer for Owl,
it would be erroneous to believe that the Cape Dorset print studio adopted
the sōsaku hanga “self-printing” production method, which eliminated the
division of labor in the execution of a print to emphasize the individuality
of the printmaker. After attempting then rejecting the self-printing method,
the Cape Dorset studio adopted clear distinctions between draftsperson and
printer, a process that reflected the nineteenth-century ukiyo-e method that
Hiratsuka regarded as being antithetical to the modern. Nevertheless, that the
Cape Dorset studio rejected this form of modernist production while con-
tinuing to find value in the modernist “look” of sōsaku hanga demonstrates
that in the peripheries of the art world, aesthetic modernism can take on
vastly different meanings, with at times apparently contradictory ideological
commitments. In Cape Dorset, the ukiyo-e division of labor was a more flexi-
ble method that satisfied local needs, permitting the widespread participation
of women in the graphic arts program as designers (while men cut the print
blocks and pulled the prints), as well as the possibility of interrupting a print
run mid-edition in order to hunt as the season or weather permitted.30 This
218 N orman V orano

F I G U R E 8 . 3
Un’ichi Hiratsuka, Katsura

Rikyu Amano Hashidate
[Stone lantern], 1958.
Woodcut print on paper,
15.7 × 13.7 in. (40 × 35 cm).
Canadian Museum of
History, Gatineau, Quebec.
Gift of Alice W. Houston.
Copyright Keiko Hiratsuka
Moore.
F I G U R E 8 . 4
Lukta Qiatsuk, Owl, 1959.

Stone-cut print, 12 × 14 in.
(30.6 × 35.9 cm). Canadian
Museum of History,
Gatineau, Quebec. Copy-
right Dorset Fine Arts.
reordering of a modernist production method into a locally oriented system
that reinforced the Inuit traditional value of pijitsirniq (to serve) speaks to
the processes by which, as Daniel Miller identified in another context, a local
culture is produced by the “consumption” of a global institution, in this case,
global modernism.31
A second comparison yields yet another instantiation of how Inuit print-
makers attempted and rejected a Japanese technique. Man Carried to the
Moon (figure 8.5), based on a drawing by Kellypalik Mungitok and printed by
Qiatsuk in 1959, depicts a shamanic scene possibly associated with an incest
taboo. Stylistically, Man Carried to the Moon calls to mind many of Munaka-
ta’s prints, which were brought to the Arctic, such as The Sand Nest (figure
8.6), which comprises similarly angular, flat, and expressive contours with a
strong emphasis on a bold central motif. But Man Carried to the Moon was
published as an inked monotone in an edition of thirty, and as a much rarer
rubbing in an edition of ten, both editions printed from the same low-relief
stone print block. Documentary research reveals that Houston had learned a
hand-rubbing technique while studying in Hiratsuka’s studio in Japan several
months before returning to Cape Dorset.32 That Man Carried to the Moon was
printed in both formats suggests that Houston encouraged Inuit printmakers
to attempt a variety of techniques he had learned in Japan. The Inuit print-
makers essentially rejected the rubbing technique, however, in favor of the
“cleaner” inked technique, which permitted no tonal variation. Cape Dorset
printmaker Kananginak Pootoogook explained that the Cape Dorset studio
attempted only two “rubbings” (both in 1959) in more than fifty years of print-
making because the technique “looked messy” to the printmakers, and an
Inuk would never want to have a messy page because it would be seen as a
mark of bad workmanship.33 As with the sōsaku hanga approach, the rejection
of rubbing illustrates a highly selective appropriation of certain modernist
modalities and a rejection of others that are deemed incompatible with Inuit
traditional values, such as “good workmanship.” As those working at the Cape
Dorset print studio came from a culture of subsistence hunters who lived in an
unforgiving environment, where “messy” work, such as an improperly sewn
seam or a poorly carved harpoon tip, could mean the difference between a
successful hunt or starvation, life or death, it is understandable that they re-
jected the spontaneous expressive effects of a frottage-like rubbing technique.
Just as Houston came to appreciate Japanese prints through the lens of Time
magazine, Inuit printmakers also digested and made use of representations
of their own culture reproduced in popular magazines. Qiatsuk’s 1959 Cape
220 N orman V orano

F I G U R E 8 . 5 Kellypalik
Mungitok, Man Carried to

the Moon, 1959. Stone-cut
rubbing (block cut and
printed by Lukta Qiatsuk),
17.9 × 23.4 in. (45.5 × 59.5 cm).
Canadian Museum of History,
Gatineau, Quebec. Copyright
Dorset Fine Arts.
F I G U R E 8 . 6 Shikō
Munakata, The Sand Nest,

1938 (printed 1958). Woodcut.
Private collection. Copyright
Shikō Munakata.
Dorset print Eskimo Whale Hunt (figure 8.7) was clearly modeled after the in-
cised sculptural image that had been featured prominently in Saarinen’s Vogue
article, published five years earlier. Evidently, Inuit printmakers took a great
interest in globally circulating magazines, and although neither Qiatsuk nor
Houston ever discussed the Vogue connection in their own published recol-
lections, we may speculate on possible motivations and meanings behind the
studio’s sourcing of this image from the pages of a glossy American magazine.
The Vogue link suggests how the imprimatur of authenticity offered by mass
print media can be a powerful component of the iterative process of image
making for artists in the peripheries of modernism, who have little or no ac-
cess to the museums, galleries, and other instruments of a taste culture found
in major cities. The barriers of geography and language in these peripheries
suggest that magazines play an inordinately valuable role in the dialectical pro-
cess of dramatizing and communicating cultural difference in a global setting,
finding what Richard Wilk describes as a “structure of common difference”
in the arena of arts and culture.34 While photo-laden magazines such as Life
and Time were widely distributed across the North (the pages were frequently
stuck to the insides of igloos as decorative wallpaper), the Vogue review was
“culturally dense” for the artists in Cape Dorset; published on occasion of the
first American tour of Inuit carving, it provided an index of American tastes as
it signaled the penetration of Inuit carving into a massive new export market.
Success in the American marketplace provided an enormous morale boost for
Inuit artists, giving clear evidence of the long-term viability of Inuit carving
and printmaking as an economic and social enterprise.
Qiatsuk’s artistic appropriation from the pages of Vogue may have been a
purposeful attempt to demonstrate the studio’s cosmopolitanism, an expres-
sion of a shared comodernity with Vogue readers, and as such, a deliberate
challenge to prevailing primitivist discourses that situated Inuit art out of
modern time and in an ethnographic present. Sourcing an image directly from
Vogue quietly invalidates the assumed “remoteness” of the artists, central to
the primitivist myths frequently deployed by the promoters of and commen-
tators on Inuit art, and well-rehearsed in Saarinen’s Vogue review. Such inver-
sions point to what Harald Prins labeled the “primitivist perplex,” describing
the ambiguous and at times paradoxical quality of representations that allow
otherwise damaging stereotypes of Indigenous culture to have socially or po-
litically redeeming values when strategically deployed by Indigenous peoples
themselves.35
The Vogue link reveals an approach to commoditization in Cape Dorset
222 N orman V orano

FIGURE 8.7 Lukta Qiatsuk, Eskimo Whale Hunt, 1959. Stone-cut (block cut
and printed by Lukta Qiatsuk), Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, Quebec.
Copyright Dorset Fine Arts.
that would have rubbed uneasily against notions of value in the primitive art
world, in which the commercial motivation of the non-Western artist chal-
lenges the work’s authenticity. In the 1960s, the financial motivation behind
the Cape Dorset print endeavor was acknowledged on a limited basis under
the morally recuperative banner of productive entrepreneurship, but such

discussions were attenuated. In a 1988 interview, Houston reflected on having
to explain to the artists the principles of a cash economy, since previous Inuit-
settler trade was based on cashless exchange. After telling the printmakers
“two white fox equals one print,” the following morning Houston returned to
the studio to find a drawing of a large dollar bill, “in line with an Eskimo belief
that bigger is better.” 36 Under such a lens, the Vogue quotation can be read as a
pragmatic use of a publicly authenticated (through commoditization) expres-
sion of “culture.”
The financial motivation to create commoditized images of Inuit culture is
only part of the picture, of course. Beyond this, we must also keep in mind the
human need for cultural reproduction — a desire for stability and continuity
that takes on a distinctly political imperative during the enormous rupture
of colonial modernity.37 As a result of the federal government’s assimilation
policies, a shifting economy, and a mandatory residential school system that
culturally dislocated generations, Inuit were increasingly moving off the land
and into settled communities in the late 1950s, changing a way of life known
since precontact times. These transformations caused tremendous social and
cultural upheavals, throwing into disarray the previous systems of Inuit au-
thority, social life, and patterns of subsistence hunting. During this maelstrom
of oftentimes painful change, the production of Inuit art helped to define a rep-
ertoire of symbols and motifs, or nalunaikutanga, that contributed to shared
yet malleable concepts of an Inuit identity.38 As Nelson Graburn argued, Cape
Dorset prints have made an unprecedented contribution to an emerging his-
torical consciousness in the North, as images of a remembered past have been
supplanted by images of “somebody else’s remembered past.” 39 Such images of
Inuit life were also exploited, in the interests of Arctic sovereignty, economic
development, and nation making, by the federal government’s publications,
films produced by the National Film Board of Canada and the Hudson’s Bay
Company, as well as a host of other endeavors that reflected private and public
interest in Canada’s Arctic.40
These various strategies of appropriation, invention, and reconfiguration
proved wildly successful, even as the prints registered as “authentic primitive”
for audiences. The financial impact of the print studio in Cape Dorset was
immediate and profound. Test marketed at an exhibition in Stratford, Ontario,
in summer 1959, the prints were officially shown to the public at the Montreal
Museum of Fine Arts in February 1960, then released for general sale through
galleries across Canada and the United States later that summer.41 Sales of
the 1959 collection netted $20,000 (unadjusted for inflation) for the studio,
224 N orman V orano

a tremendous source of income during a time of economic hardship; just one
year later, a representative of the Department of Northern Affairs reported
to distinguished guests at Ottawa’s Quota Club (including Prime Minister
John Diefenbaker) that the second annual Cape Dorset print collection in
1960 brought $63,000 to the community.42 The print studio officially incorpo-
rated as a community-owned business cooperative and hired its own artistic
director, Canadian artist Terrence Ryan. With Houston leaving the Arctic to
begin another career in 1962, Ryan guided the studio over the next four de-
cades, weathering the many ups and downs of the art world with surprising
resilience as the co-op expanded into other business sectors. The hiring of
Terry Ryan was the first time in history that an Inuit-owned business hired a
settler-Canadian (Qallunaat), and it marked the start of a new era of greater
Inuit participation in the management over Arctic resources and development
through the cooperative movement.
While these examples demonstrate that Inuit printmakers were finding
inspiration in and navigating through a panoply of global sources, the ever-
presence of cultural intermediaries and the magazines they brought north
remain a distinguishing feature of these engagements. These complicated
linkages provide a stark contrast to the promotional texts produced by the
principal promoters of Inuit prints —
the federal government, galleries,
journalists — who frequently obscured the degree to which contemporary In-
uit were entangled in a world art system and at the crossroads of deep cultural
change. As the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts director Evan Turner wrote in
the 1963 Cape Dorset print catalog, “Because the Eskimo are fundamentally
naïve or ‘primitive’ artists and consequently, as is the case with all such artists,
their work emerges full blown and has little or no subsequent evolution.” 43
Visions of the North for “A Northern Vision”

Houston’s interest in Japan underscores the ever-present geopolitical forces
that brought Japanese prints into the North American consciousness during
Japan’s postwar reconstruction, when the sale of Japanese prints helped revi-
talize Japan’s economy and promote cultural understanding between the West
and Japan.44 While the fear of communism in the East figured into American
policy toward postwar Japan, Canada’s own brand of Cold War cultural na-
tionalism shaped in the 1950s had a central focus on Arctic sovereignty and
subsequently influenced the development and popularity of Cape Dorset
prints. Not only was the federal government interested in making and ex-

porting symbols of Canada as a “northern power” in the 1950s and 1960s — a
job well suited to Inuit art — but the government was interested in sponsoring
traveling art exhibitions that would advance its ideological Cold War objec-
tives in Eastern Europe. Cape Dorset prints played a modest role in realizing
Canada’s Cold War cultural ambitions, enlisted to carry out a variety of “in-
formation activities” behind the Iron Curtain. In what follows, we can see that
shortly after Cape Dorset prints were released to the public in 1960, the federal
government quickly introduced Arctic prints into new contexts, inviting their
further recontextualization and appropriation.
In 1958, the military and political value of Canada’s North became a topic
of enormous public interest and rhetoric during Prime Minister John Diefen-
baker’s snap federal election. With his populist and fiery oratory, Diefenbaker
hammered the same slogan across Canada: “A Northern Vision.” 45 As much
an ideological as an economic platform, the “Vision” countered anxieties
about Arctic sovereignty with the ambitious promise of remaking Canada’s
North into a resource-rich beacon of national development. While critics,
then and now, saw the vision as more rhetoric than reality, its political potency
was undeniable: Diefenbaker returned to power on March 31, 1958, with the
then-largest majority government in the history of Canada’s Parliament. Ca-
nadians were indeed looking north with a newfound confidence and unbound
optimism.
Yet, concern about the Canadian Arctic had been steadily growing in ad-
ministrative and policy circles since the World War II. The federal govern-
ment’s laissez-faire approach to Arctic administration, which characterized
Canada’s interwar years, shifted dramatically in 1952 when Liberal Prime Min-
ister Louis St. Laurent adopted a centralized and inherently colonial Eskimo
Affairs Committee to oversee a slate of new policy initiatives.46 Composed
of senior bureaucrats, arctic scientists, and military officers, as well as other
agencies with a vested interest in the North, such as the Catholic and Protes-
tant Churches, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police, the committee attempted to orchestrate a methodical and orderly
transition to modernity in the Arctic. For the next ten years, from 1952 until
early 1963, the Eskimo Affairs Committee drafted and implemented sweeping
public policy and development programs that attempted to tackle the varied
problems in the Arctic, from the health and welfare of its Indigenous popula-
tion, resource extraction, and infrastructure development, to high Arctic se-
curity, and a welter of other issues that were appearing with greater frequency
in the pages of newspapers and news magazines. Houston’s employment in
226 N orman V orano

the North was as a result of the Eskimo Affairs Committee recommendation
to create the position of northern service officer as an extension of the civil
service in the Arctic.
In this context, the government sponsored traveling exhibitions of Inuit
art around the world, including venues in the United States, Western Europe,
South America, the Middle East, and, most surprisingly of all, Communist
Europe. During the tour through Communist Europe starting in 1960, the
Cape Dorset prints entered new receptive contexts and took on contradictory
and varied meanings, at a great remove from the intent of the artists. The head
of the External Affairs Information Division, Archibald Day, was the main
architect behind this tour, enlisting Houston to pick artworks and draft exhi-
bition texts. Given Day’s professional background, it is understandable why
he would see Inuit art as a useful instrument to foment a Canadian identity
abroad while advancing foreign policy objectives: from 1949 to 1950, Day was
a secretary to the influential diplomat and statesman (and soon governor gen-
eral of Canada) Vincent Massey during the Royal Commission on National
Development in the Arts, Letters and Science. This commission released
a series of recommendations in 1951, known later as the Massey Report, for
strengthening a national identity through the arts (although the report made
no mention of Inuit art). In addition to Houston, Day enlisted the services of
his colleague Robert Ford — a poet, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union,
and a specialist in Russian literature — to help script the main didactic mes-
sages of the exhibition and navigate the cultural complexities in Communist
Europe.
Paradoxically, the initial impulse to use Inuit art as a diplomatic tool was
because of its perceived “apolitical” character. As early as 1954, John Mc-
Laurin Teakles, Canada’s chargé d’affaires in Prague, optimistically noted to
Ford and Day that the Czech government had recently organized exhibitions
of French nineteenth-century painting and Chinese art — “neither of which
have any political message.” He believed that an Inuit art exhibition would be
a step toward establishing more reasonable relations with the Czech govern-
ment, yet one “which they would find difficult to exploit.” 47 External Affairs
acknowledged that such exhibitions could be effective propaganda, provided
their narratives were tailored to reinforce the value of the individual small-
scale entrepreneurship, and the importance of multiple cultural traditions
within the nation-state — messages that would have had a distinctly political
potency in Communist Europe, which was then actively suppressing expres-
sions of “folk” and national cultures. By late 1959, the exhibition Canadian

Eskimo Art crossed into Poland and wove through eight cities, followed by
three stops in Czechoslovakia and six more in Yugoslavia before concluding
in the Soviet Union in 1962. The exhibition included twenty-five brand new
prints from the Cape Dorset 1959 annual release, along with some ninety stone
and ivory carvings. Photographs from exhibition openings suggest they were
well-attended diplomatic events, with television and radio reporters watching
the tour at every stop. Much like the first tours of Inuit sculpture through the
United States in 1953–54, the installation styles varied from the starkly modern
display at Palác Dunaj Exhibition Hall in Prague to more “ethnographic” ori-
entations. Films such as Angotee, Land of the Long Day, and The Living Stone
were shown, and a prodevelopment pamphlet written by External Affairs ti-
tled “Land of the Eskimo” was translated and freely distributed. From venue to
venue, Canadian embassies engaged their host communities by enlisting the
services of trusted “locals” to help the exhibition integrate comfortably with
local customs.
On several occasions throughout the tour, the Canadian embassies inten-
tionally wove Inuit carvings and prints into debates about modern and primi-
tive arts — debates that had distinctly political overtones. When the exhibition
toured Prague in May 1961, the Canadian legation hired Josef Flejšar, one of
Czechoslovakia’s most important twentieth-century graphic artists, noted for
his theater posters and incorporation of folk-life in his modern linear designs,
to lay out the exhibit and design an advertisement. Flejšar, then associated
with the Czech avant-garde group Balance, at times found himself at odds
with official government monitors.48 In the poster for Uméní Kānādských Es-
kymáků (figure 8.8), Flejšar recontextualized designs from Kellypalik Mungi-
tok’s print Blue Geese on Snow (figure 8.9) by simplifying the goose forms into
abstract linear elements collapsed into a single plane floating over an indeter-
minate field, a stylistic device the artist frequently exploited. While Flejšar’s
group, Balance sought to incorporate new technical advances in printmaking
with modernist innovation and Western styles, many of the group members
were seen as “inherently subversive” because they actively worked against the
state-supported socialist realism.49
Continuing this effort to encode Cape Dorset prints as “modern” across
Eastern Europe, the Canadian embassy turned to Stanislaw Zamecznik, an-
other modern graphic artist, along with the local Society of Art Historians, to
coordinate the installation Canadian Eskimo Art in Warsaw in October 1960.
At considerable professional risk, Zamecznik had organized a major Henry
228 N orman V orano

FIGURE 8.8 Josef Flejšar,
Uméní Kānādských Eskymáků,
1961. Serigraph on paper.
Library and Archives Canada.
Copyright Josef Flejšar.
FIGURE 8.9 Kellypalik Mungitok,

Blue Geese on Snow, 1959. Stencil.
Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau,
Quebec. Copyright Dorset Fine Arts.
Moore exhibition in Warsaw the preceding year. Through the coordinated

efforts of the embassy and Zamecznik, numerous visitors readily saw affinities
and parallels between Inuit and European modern art, notably Henry Moore,
as can be gleaned from the visitor responses registered in the exhibition guest
book.50
The Canadian government’s selection of Flejšar and Zamecznik as “cultural
brokers” in Czechoslovakia and Poland was not a coincidence but rather a
carefully coordinated effort to exploit the presumed affinities between Inuit
and modern art, and in so doing, discredit Communist governments’ officially
sanctioned repressive aesthetic programs. Canada’s ambassador to Poland,
Jean Delisle, ruminated on the possible benefits of bringing Inuit art behind
the Iron Curtain:

One might argue that Eskimo art is not the most refined and representa-
tive type of Canadian art to show in these parts. I suggest, nevertheless,
that it would call attention to a more interesting and praise-worthy
phase of Canadian art development. It would impress the Poles favour-
ably, I think, to learn that we are not only drawing minerals and material
wealth from our northerly territories but also a valuable form of cultural
enrichment. They might even not fail to reflect that this is a rather
superior sort of achievement to the ones with which northern Siberian
waste remains associated in terms of labour and concentration camps.51
The prints from Cape Dorset were thus thrust into Canada’s Cold War
propaganda efforts, and served to inspire graphic artists in Eastern bloc na-
tions, who acknowledged the value of the prints through the lens of modernist
primitivism, and who saw in these works a shared human experience not un-
like their own struggle for freedom and individualism.
Modernism as Intercultural “Attractor”

Andreas Huyssen acknowledged, “In the most interesting ways, modernism
cut across imperial and postimperial, colonial and decolonizing cultures.” 52
The start of printmaking in Cape Dorset is but one rather extreme instanti-
ation of Huyssen’s point: that in complicated and scarcely predictable ways,
modernism’s aesthetic ideologies as well as the artistic forms typically associ-
ated with Western modernism opened spaces of intercultural encounter across
vastly different socioeconomic, cultural, political, and nationalist lines — Inuit
graphic artists in Cape Dorset established a “new” tradition of printmaking
in the face of radical upheaval; Japanese sōsaku hanga modernists combined
their nineteenth-century print traditions with Western currents; modern
European artists in Eastern bloc states found new avenues to pursue anti-
Communist political struggles.
The accumulation of such details is now setting the stage for a broader
theorization about the persistence of modernism as a catalyst of artistic
self-invention in cross-cultural contexts. The network of actors involved in
the history of Cape Dorset printmaking suggests that modernism — that set
of aesthetic ideologies, plastic forms, and critical attitudes toward modernity
and tradition — operated as a type of cross-cultural “attractor” in colonial and
postcolonial contexts, conjoining different cultures under a common visual
field. But the common visual field was marked by major disjunctions, whereby
230 N orman V orano

different agents drew wildly disparate and often incommensurable mean-
ings from such modernist appropriations, political orientations, and social
agendas. I borrow the word “attractor” from Serge Gruzinski’s study of the
intellectual and cultural dynamics that underlie the mixing of Indigenous and
settler cultural productions in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Mexico.53
While tracing the widespread adoption by Mexican Indigenous painters of
two ostensibly European artistic genres, mythological paintings and gro-
tesques, Gruzinski explains these “attractors” as the result of a combination
of material objects and ideas that allow disparate components to fit together
and take on layers of different and oftentimes contradictory meanings in in-
tercultural contexts, while triggering movements of conjunction and disjunc-
tion. Aesthetic modernism operated in a similar way to the grotesques and
mythological paintings in the early colonial era in the Americas: acting as a
type of attractor, it provided a set of aesthetic and visual ideas that opened the
door to cross-cultural artistic exchanges. These exchanges were often with un-
shared meanings, creative misunderstandings, gross asymmetries of colonial
power, and little or no common ideological platform. With its extraordinary
capacity to integrate multiple cultural meanings and objectives, as though it
were endowed with its own energy and organizational abilities, the birth of
printmaking in the Canadian Arctic would auger aesthetic modernism as one
of the quintessential intercultural attractors of the twentieth century.
Notes
1. Aline B. Saarinen, “Canada: Contemporary Eskimo Stone Carvings,” Vogue,
May 15, 1954, 64–65, 104–5.
2. Saarinen, “Canada,” 104–5. In the 1970s, the term “Eskimo” came to be replaced by
the endonym “Inuit” in the eastern Arctic. Although “Eskimo” remains used in parts of
Alaska, it will be used here only when citing historical sources.
3. Nelson H. H. Graburn, “Commercial Inuit Art: A Vehicle for the Economic De-
velopment of the Eskimos of Canada,” Inter-Nord, no. 15 (December 1978): 131–42.
4. For chronicles of Inuit printmaking, see James Houston, “Eskimo Graphic Art,”
Canadian Art 17, no. 1 (January 1960): 8–15; James Houston, Eskimo Prints (Barre, MA:
Barre, 1967); Richard C. Crandall, Inuit Art: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2000). For monographs on artists or the studio, see Jean Blodgett, Kenojuak (Toronto:
Firefly Books, 1985); Jean Blodgett, In Cape Dorset We Do It This Way: Three Decades of
Inuit Printmaking (Kleinburg, ON: McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 1991); Leslie
Boyd-Ryan, ed., Cape Dorset Prints: A Retrospective of Fifty Years of Printmaking at the
Kinngait Studios (San Francisco: Pomegranate Communications, 2007); Helga Goetz,

The Inuit Print: A Travelling Exhibition of the National Museum of Man, National Muse-
ums of Canada, and the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs (Ottawa: National
Museum of Man, National Museums of Canada, 1977). For Inuit graphic arts in the
context of art historical narratives of postwar modernism and modernity, see Norman
Vorano, ed., Inuit Prints, Japanese Inspiration: Early Printmaking in the Canadian Arctic
(Gatineau, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2011).
5. Nelson H. H. Graburn, “Inuit Art and the Expression of Eskimo Identity,” Ameri-
can Review of Canadian Studies 17, no. 1 (1987): 47–66.
6. Nelson H. H. Graburn, “Traditional Economic Institutions and the Acculturation
of the Canadian Eskimos,” in Studies in Economic Anthropology, ed. George Dalton
(Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association, 1971), 107–21; Marybelle
Mitchell, From Talking Chiefs to a Native Corporate Elite: The Birth of Class and Na-
tionalism among Canadian Inuit (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996),
177–78.
7. Houston, “Eskimo Graphic Art”; Houston, Eskimo Prints.
8. Nelson H. H. Graburn, “The Discovery of Inuit Art: James Houston, ‘Anima-
teur,’ ” Inuit Art Quarterly 2, no. 2 (spring 1987): 3–5; James Houston, Confessions of
an Igloo Dweller (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996); Virginia Watt, “The Beginning,”
in Canadian Guild of Crafts, Quebec: The Permanent Collection, Inuit Arts and Crafts,
c. 1900–1980, edited by Virginia Watt (Montreal: Canadian Guild of Crafts Quebec,
1980), 11–15.
9. Susan Gustavison, Arctic Expressions: Inuit Art and the Canadian Eskimo Arts
Council, 1961–1989 (Kleinburg, ON: McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 1994), 12–28;
Helga Goetz, “Inuit Art: A History of Government Involvement,” in In the Shadow of
the Sun: Perspectives on Contemporary Native Art, ed. the Canadian Museum of Civili-
zation (Hull, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1993), 367–70.
10. Vorano, Inuit Prints, Japanese Inspiration.
11. Houston, “Eskimo Graphic Art,” 9.
12. Houston, Eskimo Prints, 11.
13. McKeown, “New Art from the North,” Ottawa Citizen, weekend magazine, Feb-
ruary 27, 1960, 36–37; “Japanese Influence Sought for Canadian Eskimo Art,” Montreal
Gazette, October 16, 1958, 49.
14. Bradford R. Collins, “Life Magazine and the Abstract Expressionists, 1948–1951:
A Historiographic Study of a Late Bohemian Enterprise,” Art Bulletin 73, no. 2 (June
1991): 283–308; Ian Gordon, “Mass Market Modernism: Comic Strips and the Culture
of Consumption,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 14, no. 2 (December 1995):
49–66; Elizabeth Hutchinson, The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Trans-
culturation in American Art, 1890–1915 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009),
97.
15. Norman Vorano, “Creators: Negotiating the Art World for over Fifty Years,” Inuit
Art Quarterly 19, nos. 3/4 (fall/winter 2004): 10–11.
232 N orman V orano

16. Houston, Confessions of an Igloo Dweller, 270.
17. “Japanese Print Revival,” Time 68, no. 4 (July 23, 1956): 64–65.
18. “Japanese Print Revival,” 64.
19. James Michener, The Modern Japanese Print: An Appreciation (Rutland, VT:
Charles E. Tuttle, 1968), 12.
20. As quoted in John Ayre, “Review: Confessions of an Igloo Dweller,” Inuit Art
Quarterly 11, no. 1 (spring 1996): 43.
21. Steven H. Jones and Eva F. King, “Ellis Wilson, a Native Son,” in The Art of Ellis
Wilson, by Albert F. Sperath et al. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 19.
22. Houston, Confessions of an Igloo Dweller, 270.
23. “Japanese Influence Sought,” 49.
24. Ann Fienup-Riordan, Freeze Frame: Alaska Eskimos in the Movies (Seattle: Uni-
versity of Washington Press, 1995): xi–xii.
25. Un’ichi Hiratsuka, “Mr. Houston, Who Acquired the Print Techniques,” Readers
Digest [Japan], November 1962, 52–53.
26. Yuko Kikuchi, “Hybridity and the Oriental Orientalism of ‘Mingei’ Theory,”
Journal of Design History 10, no. 4 (1997): 343–54.
27. Houston, Confessions of an Igloo Dweller, 270. See also Houston, Eskimo Prints,
18; Mary D. Kierstead, “Profiles: The Man,” New Yorker, August 29, 1988, 40.
28. “Japanese Print Revival,” 64.
29. James Houston, “Skin Appliqué and Stencil Prints,” in Arctic Clothing: Alaska,
Canada, Greenland, ed. J. C. H. King, Birgit Pauksztat, and Robert Storrie (Montreal:
McGill Queen’s University Press, 2005), 139–41.
30. Leslie Boyd-Ryan, “Sanaunguabik — The Place Where Things Are Made,” in In
Cape Dorset We Do It This Way: Three Decades of Inuit Printmaking, edited by Jean
Blodgett (Kleinburg, ON: McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 1991), 14.
31. Daniel Miller, introduction to Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the
Local, ed. Daniel Miller (London: Routledge, 1995), 12.
32. Journal of Alastair Grant, 1958–1959, private collection.
33. Kananginak Pootoogook, personal communication with the author, March 26,
2009.
34. Richard Wilk, “Learning to Be Local in Belize: Global Systems of Common Dif-
ference,” in Miller, Worlds Apart, 118–19.
35. Harald Prins, “Visual Media and the Primitivist Perplex: Colonial Fantasies, In-
digenous Imagination, and Advocacy in North America,” in Media Worlds: Anthropol-
ogy on New Terrain, ed. Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), 58–74.
36. Kierstead, “Profiles,” 40.
37. Pierre Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction,” in Knowl-
edge, Education and Cultural Change, ed. Richard Brown (London: Tavistock, 1973),
71–112.

38. Nelson H. H. Graburn, “ ‘Nalunaikutanga’: Signs and Symbols in Canadian Inuit
Art and Culture,” Polarforschung 46, no 1 (1976): 1–11.
39. Nelson H. H. Graburn, “Weirs in the River of Time: The Development of Histor-
ical Consciousness among Canadian Inuit,” Museum Anthropology 22, no. 1 (1998): 29.
40. Peter Geller, Northern Exposure: Photographing and Filming in the Canadian
North (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004).
41. Leslie Boyd-Ryan, “Titiqtugarvik: The Place to Draw,” in Cape Dorset Prints, 28.
42. McKeown, “New Art from the North,” 36.
43. West-Baffin Eskimo Co-operative, Eskimo Graphic Art (Cape Dorset: West-
Baffin Eskimo Cooperative, 1963), n.p.
44. Asato Ikeda and Ming Tiampo, “The Transnational History of Japanese Wood-
block Prints,” in Inuit Prints, Japanese Inspiration: Early Printmaking in the Canadian
Arctic, ed. Norman Vorano (Gatineau, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2011),
19.
45. Kerry Abel and Ken S. Coates, Northern Visions: New Perspectives on the North in
Canadian History (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2001).
46. Peter Clancy, “The Making of Eskimo Policy in Canada, 1952–62: The Life and
Times of the Eskimo Affairs Committee,” Arctic 40, no. 3 (September 1987): 191–97.
47. John McLaurin Teakles to the Under Secretary of State for External Affairs, Ot-
tawa, July 28, 1954, file 9703–4-40, pt. 1.2, vol. 8290, rg25, Library and Archives Can-
ada, Ottawa.
48. Lenka Sykorova, “Český Divadelní Plakát, 1968–1989: Vizuální Semiotika” (mas-
ter’s thesis, Charles University, Prague, 2008), 22–24.
49. James Aulich and Marta Sylvestrova, Political Posters in Central and Eastern Eu-
rope, 1945–1995: Signs of the Times (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999),
34, 7.
50. A. D. Small, “Entries in the book of visitors to the Exhibition of Canadian Es-
kimo Art,” memorandum, Department of External Affairs, March 15, 1961, 3, 4, 9703–4-
b-40, rg25, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa.
51. Jean Delisle, charge d’affaires, Warsaw, to the Secretary of State for External Af-
fairs, Canada, “Canadian Exhibition of Eskimo Art in Europe,” January 17, 1956, file
9703–4-40, pt. 3.1, vol. 7210, rg25, Library and Archives Canada.
52. Andreas Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World,” New
German Critique 34, no. 1 (winter 2007): 6.
53. Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization
and Globalization, trans. Deke Dusinberre (New York: Routledge, 2002).
234 N orman V orano

C H I K A O K E K E -A G U L U
9 NATURAL SYNTHESIS
Art, Theory, and the Politics of Decolonization

in Mid-Twentieth-Century Nigeria
In the late 1950s, a group of students at the Nigerian College of Art, Science and
Technology (ncast), Zaria, formed the Art Society with the goal of grounding
their work in imagined local Nigerian artistic and cultural traditions. Given
students’ colonial-era art training and experience, the reclamation of tradi-
tional, or indigenous, Nigerian arts and visual cultures was an unprecedented
move, which raised the stakes on debates about the relationship between
modern art and politics, culture and colonization, tradition and innovation,
collective aspirations and individual visions. Inspired by the momentous
atmosphere of decolonization, as well as the earlier ideological and cultural
perspectives of francophone Negritude and international pan-Africanism,
the Art Society proposed natural synthesis as a theoretical framework for a
modernist art that both acknowledged its members’ rigorous Western-style
academic training and recognized the value of Nigerian artistic traditions
as resources for their formal experimentation and conceptual interests. This
chapter offers a close reading of Uche Okeke’s primary text on natural synthe-
sis and the artworks it enabled. It argues that the Art Society understood form
and style as substantial grounds for articulating a politics of art and culture in
the postcolony, and that in the context of decolonization, nationalism became
a catalyst for new formal experimentation, which eventually led to the making
of postcolonial modernism.
Nationalism, Decolonization, and the Artistic Avant-Garde
While nationalism has frequently been seen as having compromised or, worse,
antagonized the project of the European modernist avant-garde, especially in
the wake of the Russian Revolution and the Nazis in Germany after World
War I, it played a largely catalytic role in the emergence of modernism in so-
cieties under colonial rule. Moreover, as Benedict Anderson has argued, na-
tionalism’s radical potential in the colonies was not a given, nor did it offer the
counteroffensive against the universalizing tendencies of imperialism, which
had led, for example, to the transformation of early intellectual elites in India
and elsewhere into champions of Victorian values, or what Anderson calls,
“Anglicized colonial subjects.” 1 However, as Partha Chatterjee has argued,
nationalism’s role in the making of anticolonial and, ultimately, postcolonial
modernity is indexed in the work of Indian nationalists who remobilized the
praxis and rhetoric of European modernity in their bid to chart an alternative,
postcolonial Hindu modernism.2 Chatterjee’s argument is relevant not least
because, from the beginning of the twentieth century, India’s struggle with
empire and transformation as a modern state was seen by African nationalists
as a viable model for postcolonial African political and cultural modernity.3
Moreover, just as the intellectual elite in Nigeria looked to India in its struggles
against the British colonial regime, there were parallels also in the cultural
manifestations of these forms of political engagement in the two countries.4
One thing is certain: whether seen through the eyes of the Anglicized colonial
subject, or through those of the cultural nationalist, the view of the modern
among colonial-era Africans was anything but singular. And the uses of in-
herited traditions as well as those imposed by or appropriated from Europe
were always multilayered, complex, labile, and even paradoxical, reflecting
the shifting grounds of modern and postcolonial subject making during the
twentieth century.
But how, specifically, did nationalism fund a theory of artistic modernism
that became ascendant in Nigeria by the mid-twentieth century? We can trace
a path that began with the work and ideas of the early portrait painter Aina
Onabolu in the first decades of the twentieth century, through to ideologies
of modern black / African subjectivity, and finally to the modernist theory
laid out in Uche Okeke’s foundational text “Natural Synthesis,” presented days
after Nigeria gained independence from Britain on October 1, 1960. This chap-
ter thus constructs a historical context for Okeke’s theory and argues that it
authorized a modern, postcolonial aesthetic and artistic subjectivity that was
236 C hika O keke -A gulu

invariably part of a wider project of cultural self-assertion and nationalist re-
sistance to colonialism during the 1950s and 1960s.
In May 1920, just before Onabolu traveled to England for training at
London’s St. John’s Wood School of Art, he published a pamphlet in which
he laid out his vision of artistic modernism in colonial Nigeria.5 As the only
recognized black artist working in Lagos, Onabolu’s text is remarkable in its
apology for a realist-modern art in Lagos and Nigeria and for its rejection of
past indigenous artistic traditions. While he identified studio photography as
an appropriate medium for a resolutely modern artistic practice, he was also
concerned with its limitations as an artistic rather than a documentary form.
Photography to him was a thoroughly modern medium, its representational
possibilities unprecedented, particularly in a west African context, domi-
nated, as it then was, by what he saw as impoverished indigenous traditions
of nonmimetic imagery. Yet, as the product of the mechanical action of the
camera — what he called “science or skill” — photography could only result in
rigid, lifeless representation. It lacked the power to create the pictorial drama
that painting and “Art” could produce with the aid of one-point perspective
and such compositional devices as tonal gradation, harmony, focus, and em-
phasis.6 His attraction to portraiture as a modern form was determined by
the need to create visual biographies and testimonies to the historic lives of
men and women in the vanguard of imagining a new, modern black subject
and society (figure 9.1). No other task was more important for the modern
artist than to seize and redeploy the unprecedented representational facility
of portraiture in the academic style. It would mark a decidedly progressive
shift away from the crude figuration of ancestral arts that had failed to yield
effective and accurate visual testimonies to the modern lives of Africans.
Moreover, Onabolu’s portrait painting was an artistic response to the
prevailing European racism. He was aware that the near absence of pictorial
naturalism — which required sophisticated technical skills and an intellectual
apprehension of the relationship of forms in space — in traditional African art
was seen by European philosophers, scientists, travelers, clerics, and ordinary
folk as proof that African people lacked the mental capacities of civilized peo-
ples of the North Atlantic. Onabolu’s insistence on demonstrating mastery of
naturalistic portraiture was his counterargument to claims about the African’s
antipathy to reason and logical thinking, understood to be manifested by
his inability to master a realistic mode of representation. In the hands of the
black man, Onabolu believed, this pictorial mode was a powerful antiracist
statement, a strident gesture demonstrating his intellectual sophistication,
N atural S ynthesis 237

FIGURE 9.1 Aina Onabolu, Sisi Nurse, 1922. Oil on canvas.
25.2 × 16.1 in. (64 × 40.8 cm). Photo courtesy Art House, Lagos.
Copyright Estate of Aina Onabolu.
technical refinement, and perhaps more important, his manifest humanity.
Moreover, if civilization is measured by the ability of artists to master realistic
representation, Onabolu was convinced that his portraits constituted a form
of radical action meant to demolish a fundamental basis of racism and colo-
nialism. The elite Lagosians who were laying the groundwork for a nationalist
decolonization movement after World War I read the artist’s work in this light,
recognizing its artistic merit and, more crucially, its ideological and political
value.7 Onabolu’s portrait painting of black men and women, as a pictorial
reconstitution of their subjectivity, is thus both an archive-making project and
an antiracist humanist argument.
Here, then, is the paradox of modernist art in Nigeria at the moment of
its invention: in relation to the trajectory of the contemporaneous European
modernist turn toward semantic abstraction in the work of Pablo Picasso,
Wassily Kandinsky, and others, Onabolu’s practice and theory of modern
art could be seen as an anachronistic attempt to recuperate a discredited,
or passé, mode of seeing or imagining the world pictorially. His naturalistic
portraiture is thus anything but modern and modernist. Yet Onabolu’s work
was a logical and radical response to tradition by an artist whose encounter
with colonial modernity compelled his rejection of traditional Yoruba masks
and sculptures as “still crude destitute of Art and Science” and belonging to
a moribund ancestral order.8 While he, like many black Africans of his day,
accepted the unflattering view of African artistic traditions held by Europe-
ans outside the narrow circle of artists and scholars prepared to acknowledge
its value as “primitive art,” Onabolu wished to assert his modern subjectiv-
ity by adopting the pictorial mode most compatible with the experience of
modernity: photography’s realism. But given what he saw as photography’s
creative and artistic inflexibility, academic portraiture recommended itself
as modernity’s quintessential visual mode.9 Discredited as it was among the
European avant-garde, academic portraiture helped him recalibrate and ar-
ticulate a position distinct from his ancestral arts as well as dissociate himself
from colonial Europeans’ disparaging views about Africans’ artistic and intel-
lectual capabilities. The colonial encounter, one might say, brought with it the
resources with which Onabolu and his European counterparts could develop
a pictorial language that spoke to their particular, even discrepant, experi-
ences of modernity; the antithetical direction of their aesthetic speaks to the
specific historical contexts from which their work emerged. To put it baldly:
academic portraiture was the pictorial language of early colonial modernity
in the same way that abstraction was for Europe’s imperial modernity. The

crucial point here, beyond the anachronistic status of naturalistic figuration
as a modernist formal language in the early twentieth century, is that Onabolu
asserted his right to determine what artistic form, mode, or language was ap-
propriate to his project of articulating the experience of colonial modernity
and of representing its agents and arbiters. More broadly, his work suggests
that the will-to-abstraction associated with the European avant-garde was not
the only mode through which their contemporaries in other parts of the world
expressed their experience of modernity.
Onabolu’s appropriation of academic portraiture as the pictorial mode of
early twentieth-century modernism in Nigeria is important to our consider-
ation of Uche Okeke’s understanding of the stakes of postcolonial modernism
at the midcentury, and his attempt to articulate its relationship to anticolonial-
ist ideology and politics. My point is not to claim a correspondence between
the two artists’ formal choices; rather, I suggest that they both recognized
their place within the larger process of sociopolitical transformation of their
society and the shifting grounds of artistic subjectivity in Nigeria. It is their
total immersion in the changing dynamics of nationalist politics that connects
artistic projects that can seem vastly different and even radically antithetical if
their work is examined strictly at the level of its formal style or its relationship
with indigenous Nigerian art traditions. As I have suggested in my reading of
Onabolu, during the early decades of the twentieth century, academic portrai-
ture simultaneously marked a decisive break from traditional Yoruba art and
indexed the emergence and self-assertion of Africans thoroughly grounded in
the practices and politics of colonial modernity. At the same time, the midcen-
tury politics and ideology of decolonization funded Okeke’s theory of natural
synthesis, which advocated a vigorous and reflexive reclamation of indigenous
art forms to establish a critical distance from European political, cultural, and
artistic hegemony. Both Onabolu and Okeke formulated and argued for what
they considered the appropriate direction of new work that would represent
progress in the art, culture, and society of their time. In this sense, they can be
considered important members of the intellectual and artistic vanguard of, re-
spectively, the early colonial and immediate postindependence era in Nigeria.
As I have argued in an earlier study, Postcolonial Modernism, Sylvester Og-
bechie and Osa Egonwa are in error in suggesting that the work and ideas
of Okeke and his Art Society group were inspired by the teachings of Ken-
neth C. Murray, the most significant antagonist of Onabolu’s modernism.10
The problem is the misrecognition of the different politics motivating these
important players in the history of the modern in Nigeria, as well as an easy,

if ultimately unsustainable reading of their uses of and relationships with “the
traditional.” Murray, hired to establish art education in colonial secondary
schools following the release in 1925 of a memorandum on education in the
British colonies, was convinced that the primary goal of formal education was
to train a generation of artists who would update and sustain African tradi-
tional arts and crafts for the new age. His vision for art in Nigeria was thus an-
timodern because of its disavowal of the prerogative of Nigerians to embrace
modernity and to fashion artistic forms according to their own experiences
and sensibilities. Whereas Murray’s pedagogy presupposed the primacy of
native artistic traditions despite — or because of — their admirable incompat-
ibility with the colonial present, Onabolu called for a total break from the art
of the past. Okeke, armed with a modernist sensibility, saw traditional arts
and crafts only as formal and conceptual resources for the new work called
for in the era of decolonization. Onabolu and Okeke are thus joined by their
emphasis on an artistic practice and on pictorial modes expressive of their
experience of modernity and by their assertion of the modern artist’s freedom
to determine to what extent, if at all, ancestral artistic traditions should figure
in their work. This very question — the value estimation of these traditions
in the p resent — that made the difference in how they imagined artistic mod-
ernism in Nigeria. As suggested earlier, their responses to this problem were
themselves informed by the changing contexts of sociopolitical subjectivity in
early and mid-twentieth century Nigeria.
Uche Okeke and Natural Synthesis

In August 1960, while preparing work for the Nigeria Exhibition, a fairlike
event at Victoria Island, Lagos, organized to celebrate Nigeria’s independence,
Okeke, Nwoko, and fellow Art Society member Bruce Onobrakpeya discussed
their art and their vision for Nigerian art after independence in a nationally
broadcast Federal Radio of Nigeria interview with ace journalist Deinde
George. This interview is significant not least because Okeke used it, as his
diary notes indicate, to publicize his initial ideas about the theory of post
colonial modern art he was formulating at the time: “We are faced with alien
artistic medium of expression in painting and have continued to experiment
with them [sic], thereby giving new expression to our art forms. Thus by way
of natural synthesis of old and new we strive to evolve what may well be New
Nigerian Art.” 11 This statement indicates that Okeke’s ideas about postcolonial
modernism in Nigeria, elaborated in his well-documented speech to the Art

Society soon after the Nigerian Exhibition opening on October 1, emerged
gradually. And though the radio interview was the first time he used the term
“natural synthesis” to describe the procedural tactic of postcolonial modern-
ism, he had already proposed its basic outline in September 1959 when, as the
newly elected president of the Art Society, he presented to the group a speech
he would later title the “Growth of an Idea.” 12 This earlier text situates Okeke’s
emergent aesthetic theory within the politics of decolonization and makes
clear the political stakes of modern art in postcolonial Nigeria. It also shows
the expanded ideological and discursive field within which he envisioned his
soon-to-be formulated theory of natural synthesis.
Framed as an evaluation of the Art Society’s first year of activities within
and beyond the college, “Growth of an Idea” anticipated the group’s transfor-
mation into a “great organisation of national significance,” a collective that
must, by dint of hard work and despite what he called the inadequate colo-
nial educational system, “champion the cause of art” in independent Nige-
ria. Citing José Clemente Orozco and the early twentieth-century Mexican
modernists as an inspiration, Okeke associated political sovereignty — just
twelve months away — with cultural independence and artistic originality.
In one of the poignant moments of this short text, he described the task
awaiting the Art Society and its generation: “This great work demands will
power, originality, and above all, love for our fatherland. We must have our
own school of art independent of European and Oriental schools, but draw-
ing as much as possible from what we consider in our clear judgment to be
the cream of these influences, wedding them to our native art culture.” 13 The
direct and impassioned mixture of nationalist fervor catalyzed by imminent
political independence and an incipient aesthetic theory inspired by cultural
pride echoes the controversial arguments made by Frantz Fanon during the
Second International Congress of Black Writers and Artists in held Rome in
1959. Fanon’s unprecedented critique of Negritude, later published as the es-
say “On National Culture,” took aim at what he saw as Negritude’s politically
indefensible and naïve focus on international race-based solidarity at a time
when the sovereign nation-state was, indisputably, the operational framework
for the modern world’s economic and political systems.14 According to him,
“This historical necessity of men of African culture to racialize their claims
and to speak more of African culture than a national culture will tend to lead
them up a blind alley.” 15 In fact, Fanon’s memorable claim that “Every culture
is first and foremost national” is at the root of Okeke’s thoughts about artistic
modernism in decolonizing Nigeria and specifically his call for artists to par-

ticipate in the making of a new culture — developed from the amalgamation
of “native” and “alien” traditions — for the new nation.16 Nevertheless, Fanon’s
view of Negritude’s racialism and its apparent failure to articulate a clear rela-
tionship among its cultural ideas, national identity, and political sovereignty
is absent in Okeke’s own understanding of Negritude and national culture as
elaborated in his “Natural Synthesis” text of 1960, to which I now turn.
The tone of this text, theatrically upbeat and exhortatory, says much about
Okeke’s personal estimation of both the Art Society and art’s importance in
the life of a newly independent nation, as well as, more generally, about the
widespread euphoria felt by Nigerians for whom the future promised nothing
but infinite possibilities. The Art Society’s well-publicized performance at the
ongoing Nigeria Exhibition, however, undoubtedly had much to do with his
tone of address. He was clearly convinced about the pivotal cultural role he and
his group had been entrusted with as the new stars on the national scene: “Our
new nation places huge responsibilities upon men and women in all walks of
life and places much heavier burden on the shoulders of contemporary art-
ists.” 17 Even so, Okeke characteristically punctuated his seemingly boundless
optimism with cautious references to the daunting obstacles the emergent ar-
tistic and cultural avant-garde must confront. Paying as much attention to the
promise of sovereignty as to its attendant anxieties reveals Okeke’s intellectual
realism, which constitutes the foundation of his cultural ideology and aesthet-
ics. Consider, for instance, the embrace of newness implied in his assertion at
the beginning of “Natural Synthesis,” that “young artists in a new nation . . .
must grow with the new Nigeria . . . or perish with our colonial past.” Yet at
the same time, he seeks a return to an imagined past, “our old special order,” in
which the artist performed ritual acts to resolve social problems.18
In another instance, he aligned himself with Fanon’s anti-Negritude call for
a national culture, yet argued that Nigerian artists must lead the cause of both
Negritude and African personality: “Whether our African writers call the new
realization, Negritude, or our politicians talk about the African Personality,
they both stand for the awareness and yearning for freedom of black people
all over the world.” 19 Clearly, Okeke’s estimation of Negritude’s value to decol-
onizing Africa was far more positive than Fanon’s. Okeke read the movement’s
Afrophilia not merely as racial indulgence, as Fanon had implied, but as a
radical political act of building vital emotional structures of feeling that would
guarantee and sustain the idea of collective belonging within the context of a
newly independent Africa. Moreover, in the Art Society’s focus on the specific
arts and cultural practices of Nigeria’s diverse ethnic groups, it went beyond

Fanon by recognizing the truth of the “national” in Africa, which is often re-
garded as not just a less authentic basis of identity politics than the ethnos,
but also conditioned by the competing interests of its powerful constituent
ethnicities. Surely then, for Okeke, the theoretical and ideological proposi-
tions of Negritude and Fanon’s critique of them were not to be taken at face
value; rather it was important to extract from both positions elements that
might be useful in addressing the concerns of artists confronted with the need
to articulate the formal conditions and cultural ambitions of new Nigerian art.
Although Okeke’s description of what he meant by the term “natural synthe-
sis” is surprisingly short, he offered one of his poems as capturing its essence:
Okolobia’s sons shall learn to live

from father’s failing;
blending diverse culture types,
the cream of native kind
adaptable alien type;
the dawn of an age — the season of salvation20
While Okeke describes the kind of synthesis he imagined as “natural,” because

it “should be unconscious not forced,” his poem belies the intellectual nature
of the artistic endeavor he effectively called for. Consider the first two lines
of the poem. He urges Okolobia’s sons — stand-ins for present-day people —
to learn, to examine and process both the burdens and the benefits of their
ancestral heritage, with the objective of deciding what elements from that
heritage must be combined with relevant elements from the West to develop
a progressive modern and postcolonial art and culture. What Okeke is asking
for is not unreflexive and unconscious action. Rather, the poem suggests a ra-
tional process made possible only through readiness to acknowledge — against
the natural pressures of social conditioning — that not everything ancestral is
useful or should be celebrated as heritage in the present.
Okeke also dwells on the purpose of the modernist work resulting from
the process of natural synthesis. Scornful of the notion of art for art’s sake,
which he ascribes to the “international art philosophy” of European artists, he
argues, quite puzzlingly, that postindependence Nigeria calls simultaneously
for “functional art and art for its own sake.” 21 He does not explain the condi-
tions under which a self-reflexive modernist art could exist in postcolonial
society but focuses, rather, on the task of functional art, noting that it ought
to do work similar to that of great religious art. This ritual functionality, ac-

cording to him, “could constitute the base line of most rewarding creative ex-
perience.” 22 He does not indicate whether he had in mind European traditions
of religious art, ranging from medieval iconolatry to the art commissioned by
the Catholic Church during the Renaissance, or ritually efficacious ancestral
African arts. He did, however, compare the work of postcolonial modernists
with artists of the “old order,” who solved social problems with “religious ar-
dour.” In other words, he does not necessarily imagine a modernist art in the
political-instrumentalist mode of Russian constructivism in the wake of the
October Revolution or of communist realism during China’s Cultural Revolu-
tion. Instead, he demands that it address the psycho-spiritual needs of citizens
in an increasingly secular modern society. This paradoxical insistence on a
new art that derives its raison d’être from an old religious order as an anti-
dote to the mechanistic and materialist ethos of the postcolonial age recalls
the spiritualist ambitions of the Blaue Reiter and other European avant-garde
groups during first decade of the twentieth century, at the onset of high in-
dustrialization and the first mechanized global war. More important, perhaps,
this argument for a neoreligious modernism in the face of a new, largely sec-
ular sociopolitical order is indicative of its aporia and vaunted ambitions in a
society quite unsure of art’s place as an important contributor to the task of
nation building or societal regeneration.
All these considerations, crucial as they are to our understanding of Okeke’s
theory of modernist art in the postcolonial society, ought not displace the
broader significance of his natural synthesis as an argument for a melding of
tradition and the new that should result from the colonial encounter. The idea
of mixing as an active process of choice making might have been seen as a
pathology of colonialism or neocolonialism, resulting in an inability to live
authentically in either the inherited indigenous realm or in the alien Western
world that was much caricatured in colonial writing and discourse. In Okeke’s
reframing of this process as natural synthesis, however, he returns agency to
the postcolonial artist and subject, and he locates authenticity in the very act of
a dispassionate and combinatory mining of the useful elements of both tradi-
tions. Only this approach, his poem implies, could yield the glorious new age
of the sovereign nation. In artistic terms, it would produce a modernism em-
bedded in the long artistic traditions of Nigeria and Africa and yet seamlessly
tied to the experimental rigor and formal ambitions of the twentieth-century
modernism inaugurated by the Parisian avant-garde. Natural synthesis is
Okeke’s attempt to argue and account for this unprecedented brand of work,

inspired by the rhetoric and experience of political sovereignty, at once un-
apologetically new in terms of its formal language and assertive about its di-
verse, allegedly contradictory indigenous and alien cultural referents.
Postcolonial Modernism and Primitivism

How, then, did the theory of natural synthesis translate into particular formal
expressions in Nigeria during the 1960s? Although emerging modernist work
in Nigeria and elsewhere on the continent during that decade clearly reveals
similar attitudes to formal experimentation and cultural orientation, I touch
here only on the work of Okeke and his Art Society colleague Demas Nwoko.23
In their work, I argue, the artists assert their status as modernist artists by
simultaneously mining the archives of ancestral and appropriated/Western
traditions of image making, achieving the blending of the “native kind” and
“alien type,” anticipated by Okeke’s poem. Their work, unlike Onabolu’s,
announced its debt to “our old order” yet was not beholden to it; although
borrowing the experimental sensibilities of the European avant-garde, natural
synthesis could not be reduced to its rampant formalism and self-reflexivity.
I conclude this chapter with some thoughts on how this modernist turn to
the art of the past, which can seem to resemble primitivist art, is, in fact, its
negation.
A few months after delivering his “Natural Synthesis” speech to the Art
Society, Okeke began to seriously consider what might constitute, in art, “the
cream of the native kind,” as expressed in his 1960 poem. He began research
on uli, the traditional body drawing and mural painting exclusively done by
Igbo women, even taking lessons from his own mother. One painting, the
Smithsonian National Museum of African Art’s Ana Mmuo (1961), is the only
work in which he clearly, though tentatively, explores the behavior of organic
line and shapes, as well as the abstract pictorial language similar to those fea-
tures of uli.24 Unlike anything he had painted before or during his final year
at art school in Zaria, this work suggested new stylistic possibilities to him,
encouraging him to train himself in the ways of uli drawing. The result was
the total transformation of his personal style. By late 1961, he had produced his
remarkable Oja Suite.
The Oja Suite consists of several small ink on paper drawings, which are
based on Igbo mythology, fauna and flora, and genre scenes, all well-rehearsed
themes in his previous work. The Oja drawings feature the abstract patterns
and hatched lines deployed in the wildly imaginative, phantasmagorical forms

of his better-known Igbo Folk Tales drawings of 1958. In contrast, however,
the organizing formal elements in the Oja drawings are the spiral and the or-
ganic line that Okeke associated with uli body drawing. This form of body art,
rendered traditionally with nonpermanent dark ink extracted from various
tropical plants, features numerous abstract linear motifs adapted from natural
flora and fauna as well as from cosmic bodies.25 Excellence in uli art practice is
measured by an artist’s inventiveness, her ability to deploy both a large range
of stock motifs and to create new ones, her competence in marking lines of
great lyrical elegance, and the extent to which her compositions show a dy-
namic balancing of negative and positive space.
The extent of Okeke’s internalization of uli aesthetics, its design and com-
positional sensibilities, and his translation of the lessons of this art form into
his own decidedly modernist practice are in full display in the Oja Suite and
in other pen and charcoal drawings from 1962 and after. In Owls, From the
Forest, and Head of a Girl (all 1962), the dramatic stylistic transformation that
occurred that year is unmistakable.26 His previous drawing series — Igbo Folk
Tales — was defined by the use of delirious patterning to compose fantastical
figures set against a plain background, thus marking a clear boundary be-
tween figure and ground. In the drawings of the Oja Suite, in contrast, singular
lyrical lines negotiate sinuous paths across the picture plane, often ending in
spirals that stand in simultaneously for decorative marks and for anatomical
or structural features of his subjects. The Oja drawings show Okeke’s newly ac-
quired sensitivity to the poetic organization of negative and positive space. Art
historian Chike Aniakor’s memorable description of traditional uli drawing
and painting is equally applicable to Okeke’s Oja drawings: “The line dances,
spirals into diverse shapes, elongates, attenuates, thickens, swells and slides,
thins and fades out from a slick point, leaving an empty space that sustains it
with mute echoes by which silence is part of the sound.” 27
While Okeke’s experiment with uli yielded its most compelling pictorial
language in pen and charcoal drawings, his painting was no less deeply trans-
formed in 1962. His Zaria-period painting — perhaps with the exception of
Ana Muo and a mural of a similar style he painted in the courtyard of the
Mbari Artists and Writers Club, in Ibadan — reveals what one might call his
formal meditation on various trends in early twentieth-century expressionist
painting; the works feature strongly modeled, highly stylized figures combined
with flat areas of color and very subtle brushwork. After the Oja Suite he used
the paintbrush as if it were a drawing tool loaded with paint. In Crucifixion
and Primeval Forest (1962), the calm compositional certitude and well-formed

elements and color shapes of his earlier paintings have given way to a roiling
surface of thick arching lines of color. In the drawings, the pen, gliding over
the paper surface, seems compelled by independent centripetal forces to form
elegant spiral lines; in the paintings, the brush lines seem more determined to
form spirals or segments of spirals but fail because of the relative clumsiness of
the brush as a drawing tool.
Okeke based the spiral form and arcing lines that proliferate in his drawings
and paintings on the agwọlagwọ (the coil motif symbolic of the sacred python)
and the okala isinwaọji (the abstracted dorsal view of the gaps in a trilobed
kola nut). But he strips these motifs of their uli lexical contexts, investing them
with his own formal polysemy. In other words, the agwọlagwọ in Okeke’s pic-
torial system can simultaneously represent eyes, tendrils, and moon (in Owls),
as well as hair locks, mouth, and eyes (in Head of a Girl). Besides this play
with the lexical possibilities of his uli-based forms, the drawings and paintings
testify, in the poetry of their constituent lines, to his interest in the lyrical ges-
tures associated with traditional uli art. As his research in the traditional form
revealed, the visual expressiveness of uli kinesthesia — deportment of the body
while making the art — invoke the poetry of melodic song and dance. Thus,
following Okeke’s experimentation with uli, the act of drawing or painting be-
comes a complete gestural performance that nevertheless leaves traces of the
action on paper or board, like the indexical marks left by a dancer or python
on sand. By engaging in this lyrical mark making, Okeke not only arrived at a
modernist and articulate personal style, but also contributed to the perpetua-
tion of uli art’s mythopoesis, which for him was crucial to securing his sense of
an Igbo and, by extension, Nigerian cultural and artistic identity.
Whereas natural synthesis authorized Okeke’s experimentation with uli
in 1962, Nwoko’s style evolved more gradually, culminating in his terra-cotta
sculptures of 1965. In late 1964, Nwoko began to research ancient and surviv-
ing Nigerian terra-cotta traditions, especially those of ancient Nok and Ife, as
well as traditional kiln technology from north-central Nigeria. These projects
brought his work into alignment with that of Okeke and the theory of natural
synthesis.
Nwoko had a particular interest in built structures as part of the total mani-
festation of a people’s art and cultural experience. His research into terra-cotta
led him to investigate the technological inventions responsible for the struc-
tural and surface qualities of different pottery traditions in Nigeria, so that
he could understand how an apparently rudimentary clay building and firing
processes resulted in the sophisticated formal qualities associated with Nok

FIGURE 9.2 Demas Nwoko,
Titled Woman, 1965. Terra-cotta.
Artist’s collection. Photograph by
the author.
and Ife terra-cotta, and then extract aspects that could influence his own mod-
ernist practice. In 1965 Nwoko designed and constructed a kiln that attained
higher temperatures while producing surface textures and coloring similar to
those found on Nok terra-cotta. Although Nwoko failed in his goal of turning
the new kiln design, born from Nigeria’s indigenous traditions, into a viable
model for contemporary kilns in the new nation, he nevertheless used it to
produce the remarkable series of sculptures that arguably marked the height
of his artistic achievement.
Despite Nwoko’s study of Ife terra-cottas, Nok provided the stylistic model
for his sculptures, which reflect the characteristic large perforated pupils, tu-
bular and highly simplified anatomical parts, and stump-like hands and feet of
the Nok style. In works such as Adam and Eve, Philosopher, and Titled Woman
(figure 9.2), all 1965, Nwoko seems to have successfully unlearned both the
academic figuration taught in Zaria and the post-Zaria stylization based on
Igbo sculpture. The result is a kind of figural archaism shorn of the techni-
cal and compositional refinements of modernist sculpture, even in its most
“primitive” moments — for example, in the work of Constantin Brancusi and
Alberto Giacometti. While Nwoko’s use of the terra-cotta medium no doubt
encourages our perception of these series as products of an ancient culture,

the relatively small scale and lack of decorative elements on the figures’ sim-
plified and archetypal attires readily remind us of antiquities recovered from
archaeological fieldwork. This is key to understanding Nwoko’s ideological
investment in this corpus, for although most of his terra-cottas depict contem-
porary Nigerian and African subjects, his use of this archaic style places mod-
ern Nigeria within a time-space coextensive with its prehistoric cultures. In
other words, rather than depict figures or characters from Nigeria’s imagined
past, as normative nationalist mythmaking frequently does, he archaizes the
present to make an even more effective claim. Against any charges that Nigeria
is a colonial invention of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, Nwoko’s
figures declare, “We are an old people.”
Once Nwoko developed the 1965 terra-cotta sculptures and thus effectively
realized the theory of natural synthesis that had inspired Okeke’s experi-
mentation with Igbo uli, he began to make his own demands of his medium,
testing its technical bounds. In his 1968 sculptures, with their strangely ba-
roque figuration, he introduced surface textures and embellishments that
emphatically mark them as products of a modernist imagination. These in-
novations seem also to mark a darker response to the outbreak of civil war.
For whereas the classic simplicity of the 1965 figures still have a strong echo of
Nok, works such as Soldier (Soja) (figure 9.3) and Dancing Couple (Owambe),
both from 1968, show advanced disfiguration, as if the artist’s vision of post-
colonial Nigeria, still effectively positive in 1965, had turned to a nightmare
populated by characters with strange bodily deformations. They are denizens
of the imagined community riven by the Biafra War of 1967–70. Even when he
attempted a light-hearted subject such as Enuani Dancers (1968), the angled
limbs and squished facial features of the two figures lost in the rhythm of the
dance suddenly seem like bodies in rigor mortis. In these sculptures, mastery
of the medium through formal experimentation runs in parallel with critical
commentary about the fate of the postcolonial nation torn by military inter-
vention, pogroms, and civil war.
As these examples show, postcolonial modernists identified indigenous
cultures and arts as important sources for ideas, theories, aesthetics, and tech-
niques needed for the invention of new art that could meaningfully articulate
the experience of modernity after colonialism. This process was neither as
unconscious nor as natural as Okeke’s theory implied. Given the long history
of twentieth-century modern art, however, and particularly the phenomenon
of primitivism in colonial Europe — infamously described by William Rubin
as the product of an “affinity of the tribal and the modern” — scrutiny of the

FIGURE 9.3 Demas Nwoko,
Soldier (Soja), 1968. Terra-cotta.
Artist’s collection. Photograph
by Demas Nwoko. Copyright
Demas Nwoko.
uses that African modernists like Okeke, Nwoko, and their contemporaries
made of “indigenous” art is inevitable.28 Did they not indulge in a form of
primitivism when they, resolutely modernist and immersed in the experience
of modernity, were attracted to art forms and ideas that predated the modern
age? Might we even regard them as postcolonial primitivists, not just modern-
ists? The simple answer is no. On the contrary, their postcolonial modernism
is antiprimitivism.
This is not the place to rehearse decades-old debates and analyses of prim-
itivism, which has come to mean many different things, ranging from the
cultural and historical primitivism that resulted from social Darwinist ideas
informed by the ideology of colonialism and slavery before it, to the aesthetic
primitivism that emerged from the European avant-garde attraction to so-
called primitive societies and arts in the age of empire.29 My concern is with
the latter sort of primitivism, which has been recognized as fundamental to the
aesthetics and ideology of Parisian modernism, and often cited as the precursor
of all twentieth-century modernisms.30 The primitivism of the historical avant-
garde was defined first by dissatisfaction with Western modernity overtaken by
a cataleptic crisis, and second, by the yearning for the savagery and premodern

lifeways ascribed to expressive cultures and peoples from the farthest reaches
of empire and civilization. Aesthetic primitivism begins with alienation from
Western society and is followed by attraction to/appropriation of the other,
the not-self — all within what Sieglinde Lemke calls “the dynamics of cultural
difference from the perspective of the West.” 31 I would argue that the postcolo-
nial modernism of Okeke, Nwoko, and other midcentury artists in Morocco,
Sudan, Ethiopia, Egypt, and elsewhere on the continent had little if anything
in common with this form of aesthetic primitivism. These African modernists
saw in the indigenous arts and cultures of their imagined communities sites
for cultural self-assertion in the wake of what Paul Tiyambe Zeleza described
as the “violence of intimate histories” of the colonial encounter.32 That there
can be instances of othering — the primary condition for primitivism — outside
European modernist contexts, is demonstrated by the Indian modernists of the
Santiniketan School, including Nandalal Bose, Ramkimkar Baij, and Zainul
Abedin, who, as Iftikhar Dadi has noted, believed that “the natural inheres
in the rural landscape of Eastern Bengal and the primitivist identity with the
Santhal tribes.” 33 An unmistakable aesthetic (and cultural social) primitivism
also appears in the work of South African modernist Irma Stern, who went
on numerous expeditions into the African hinterland in search of exotic na-
tives in Namaqualand, the Congo, and Zanzibar to find subjects for her own
anthropo-expressionist paintings. These two examples, however diverse, show
the dynamics of veiled condescension and exoticization of the represented na-
tive other at the heart of the historical avant-garde’s primitivism. In contrast,
the Art Society artists did not celebrate in their work the naturalness of the
indigenous peoples or their lack of access to modernity’s resources and ciphers.
Rather, they subjected the artistic assets provided by Nigerian cultures past and
present to the process of synthesis, or combinatory refinement, with the goal of
producing a visual language appropriate to the period and experience of polit-
ical sovereignty.
Looking back to the projects of Onabolu and Murray reveals that, as an
apologist for experiential modernity, Onabolu’s rejection of the past and in-
digenous arts and cultures was so total that he excluded any subject that might
insinuate them. Murray, on the other hand, as an admirer of the theory of
indirect rule promulgated for Nigeria by the archcolonialist and racist Lord
Lugard, promoted Nigerian indigenous cultures and designed a curriculum
for government schools that was meant to revive the carving, weaving, and
other traditional crafts of Nigerian peoples.34 The task of the painting pro-
duced under his tutelage was to celebrate authentic native life — the closest

thing in modern Nigerian art to the Santiniketan primitivism — but without
the technical sophistication Murray associated with Western corruption of the
African’s natural artistic abilities. Natural synthesis, then, was an argument
against Murray’s pedagogical and aesthetic primitivism, as it shifted mod-
ernism’s task from that of representing the cultural difference or native au-
thenticity of Nigerian peoples to demonstrating how the postcolonial artistic
imagination can develop new visual language from the productive synthesis
of the “native kind” and the “alien type,” as part of a wider process of symbolic
self-assertion.
Notes
1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
2. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial His-
tories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Similarly, Lagos Victorians,
by the turn of the twentieth century, became the early anticolonialists, using legal
means to check the powers of the colonial regime, for instance, on the question of
land tenure in Lagos. In fact, black Victorians such as the leading nationalist Herbert
Macaulay “had mastered European education, techniques and culture so that he was
capable of meeting the colonial masters and beating them at their own games.” See
G. O. Olusanya, “Henry Carr and Herbert Macaulay: A Study in Conflict of Principles
and Personalities,” in History of the Peoples of Lagos State, ed. Ade Adefuye, Babatunde
Agiri, and Akinjide Osuntokun (Lagos: Lantern Books, 1987), 282.
3. See “Amritsar and Ijemo: A Parallel and Suggestion,” Lagos Weekly Record, August
7, 1920, 5.
4. Modernism in India was no doubt much more complex in part because of the
scale and longer history of Indian encounters with Western modernity, and India’s
much more elaborate class, caste, economic, and political differentiation. And al-
though I argue in the last section of this chapter that the primitivism of Bengal’s San-
tiniketan School ran counter to the antiprimitivist sensibility of the Art Society, the
Mumbai-based Progressive Artists Group, led by Francis Newton Souza, shares some
similarities in art and ideas with the Art Society.
5. Aina Onabolu, Short Discourse on Art (Lagos: privately printed, 1920).
6. Clearly, he was either unaware or uninterested in the work of pictorialist photog-
raphers, from Margaret Robinson in England to the Stieglitz circle in the United States,
who aimed to deploy these painterly techniques to their photographic work.
7. The leading nationalist Herbert Macaulay, after seeing Onabolu’s work in an exhi-
bition by students of St. John’s Wood, described it as a “clear, marvellous vindication of
our struggle — a manifestation of our much repeated feelings that Africans are capable

politically, intellectually and creatively.” Quoted in Ola Oloidi, “Art and Nationalism in
Colonial Nigeria,” in Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, ed. Clémentine Deliss
(Paris: Flammarion, 1995), 193.
8. Onabolu, Short Discourse, 14.
9. Onabolu was particularly concerned about what he believed to be the photo-
graph’s impermanence and instability as a medium.
10. See Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in
Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 41–42.
11. Quoted in Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism, 141.
12. Uche Okeke [Christopher Uchefuna], “Growth of an Idea,” in Art in Development
— A Nigerian Perspective (Nimo, NG: Asele Institute, 1982), 1.
13. Okeke, “Growth of an Idea,” 1.
14. This is also what Ian McLean meant when he described the nation-state as “the
characteristic sociality of modernity.” See Ian McLean, “Aboriginal Modernism in Cen-
tral Australia,” in Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers, ed. Kobena Mercer (London: InIVA,
2008), 76.
15. Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture,” in The Wretched of the Earth (New York:
Grove Press, 1966), 173.
16. Fanon, “On National Culture,” 174.
17. Uche Okeke [Christopher Uchefuna], “Natural Synthesis,” in Okeke, Art in De-
velopment, 2.
18. Okeke, “Natural Synthesis,” 2
19. Okeke, “Natural Synthesis,” 2.
21. Okeke, “Natural Synthesis,” 2, my emphasis.
23. I examine this wider field of postcolonial modernism in my book Postcolonial
Modernism, particularly in chapters 4–6.
24. See Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism, 104.
25. The mural painting was made with earth pigments that produced red, yellow,
and white, with black made from charcoal, and occasionally blue from washing blue.
For more detailed analysis of uli art and process, see Obiora Udechukwu, “Ọgwụgwa
Aja Iyiazi, Nri 1984,” Uwa ndi Igbo 1 (1984): 55–60; Obiora Udechukwu, “Lyrical Sym-
bolism: Notes on Traditional Wall Painting from Agulu” (bachelor’s thesis, University
of Nigeria, 1972).
26. See Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism, 190–91.
27. Chike Aniakor, “What is Uli?: The Emergence of a Modern Art Idiom,” in Uli Art:
Master Works, Recent Works (New York: Skoto Gallery, 1995), n.p.
28. William Rubin, ed., “Primitivism” in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal
and the Modern (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984).

29. Kingsley Widmer once described aesthetic primitivism as “primitivistic,” while
he identified cultural and historical primitivism with primitivism proper. Following
Robert Goldwater, he argues, as have many scholars since, that both primitivisms have
little to do with each other. See Widmer, “The Primitivistic Aesthetic: D. H. Lawrence,”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 17, no. 3 (1959): 344. To me, these are all strained
attempts to absolve and distance artists and writers from the culture of racism and
colonization that provided the material and many of the ideas that informed their own
perspectives on the world outside Europe.
30. Ruth B. Phillips recently summed up this view: “Aesthetic primitivism served,
I would argue, as the primary engine of modernism’s global dissemination.” See Phil-
lips, “Aesthetic Primitivism Revisited: The Global Diaspora of ‘Primitive Art’ and the
Rise of Indigenous Modernisms,” Journal of Art Historiography 12 (2015): 1–25, https://
arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/phillips.pdf.
31. Seiglinde Lemke, “Diaspora Aesthetics: Exploring the African Diaspora in the
Works of Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence and Jean Michel Basquiat,” in Mercer, Exiles,
Diasporas and Strangers, 140.
32. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “The Violence of Intimate Histories: Africa and the Eu-
ropean Colonial Encounter,” in Who Knows Tomorrow, ed. Udo Kittelmann, Chika
Okeke-Agulu, and Britta Schmitz (Cologne: Walther König, 2010), 583–95.
33. Iftikhar Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (Chapel Hill: Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, 2010), 105.
34. I do not suggest that Murray’s pedagogical investment in Lugard’s political ideol-
ogy meant that he shared the latter’s well-known racism. Indeed, accounts of Murray’s
life in Nigeria indicate that he was quite at home with life and cultures of the peoples
among whom he lived and died.

MODERN MOBILITIES
PART III
W. JACKSON RUSHING III
10 BEING MODERN, BECOMING NATIVE
George Morrison’s Surrealist Journey Home
To the best of my knowledge, the first Native American artist to form a signif-
icant response to expressionism, cubism, and surrealism was the celebrated
Chippewa modernist George Morrison, who was born in 1919 in Chippewa
City, Minnesota, a now vanished Indian fishing village along the North Shore
of Lake Superior.1 After a long and fruitful career as a teacher and a practicing
artist, he died in 2000 at Red Rock, the home and studio he and his second
wife, the artist Hazel Belvo, built on the Grand Portage Reservation, overlook-
ing the lake. As a child he spoke only his Native language until he began grade
school at age six. While attending an Indian boarding school in his youth, he
took up reading, drawing, and carving, and he was supported subsequently
by appreciative teachers.2 After graduating from high school, he attended the
Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design)
on a scholarship from 1938 to 1943, where he began making regionalist images,
as did both Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache) and Jackson Pollock. In 1941,
however, Morrison was impressed with a Pablo Picasso retrospective at the
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, later recalling that he “had a tendency to like
more modern concepts.” 3 Having heard the call of modern art — he liked to de-
scribe himself as a “liberal person” — Morrison continued a journey that took
him, first, from the American woodlands to Minneapolis, and then to New
York, Paris, the south of France, and to academic appointments on the U.S.
East Coast and elsewhere. In his youth Morrison dreamed of the bohemian
life in Manhattan, which he ultimately lived, and with gusto at that; he also
relished his time in France in the early 1950s and wished he had stayed longer.
From 1943 until 1963, when he joined the faculty at the Rhode Island School
of Design for seven years, Morrison led an itinerant life, mostly based in New
York, but punctuated with fellowships and visiting teaching appointments in
France, Minnesota, elsewhere in the Midwest (at the Dayton Art Institute, for
example), and on the East Coast. He was simultaneously a willful expatriate,
whose work was keenly responsive to place, and a Chippewa native son of
Minnesota, longing to be in his own country, to which he returned in 1970 to
be near his people.4 How to explain this paradox: journeying away from home
for greater cosmopolitanism, only to experience psychological and spiritual
homesickness? As the poet Robert Hass has written, “Longing, we say, because
desire is full of such endless distances.” 5 It helps if we see Morrison as part of
an American tradition, in which young men and women from the “provinces”
(such as Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, and Janis Joplin) seek greater artistic
freedom for themselves in urban centers (on Broadway, in Greenwich Village,
or on the Left Bank in Paris). Of Morrison’s wanderlust in particular, Adelheid
Fischer wrote, “An aspiring artist, he observes, needs not only the resources of
his roots, but also ‘a looking at the world in a broad sense.’ ” 6 And what of that
homeland, in which he was so deeply rooted?
Being born Chippewa in 1919 meant many things, surely, and no doubt
what it meant varied from person to person and place to place. As Morrison
grew up, to him it meant a mixture of loss and survival, and an ever-increasing
consciousness of class and ethnicity. Although he had “many recollections
of a happy childhood with families and neighbors,” he and his siblings expe-
rienced poverty, hunger, and poor health in a declining village.7 They spoke
“Indian,” he noted, until they began grade school and began to be “American-
ized.” He had virtually no access to traditional forms of art and remembered
that Indigenous crafts were disappearing, along with the “smattering of Indian
stories” that remained. And although his grandmother practiced herbal medi-
cine, which, he speculated, might have been “a spiritual thing, like a fetish,” his
“family never did have many Indian customs.” 8
As I look back on my childhood, it was a time of transition. Indians had

lost the best of the old world and could not fully cope with the new one.
White civilization was encroaching on our lives. We attended white
schools and were taught to imitate white people’s ways. Our old mystical
rites were no longer being performed because they conflicted with
church teachings. Our people viewed the church, I think, as a substitute
for what they’d lost. People will take spiritual consolation wherever they
260 W . J ackson R ushing I I I

can find it. Remnants of the old life survived, however. Fragments of the
superstitions and lore I heard as a child stayed with me.9
As poor survivors of the Great Depression, he and his siblings knew racial
prejudice as well, which rose on occasion to belligerent discrimination. “For
many years,” he stated, “Indians lived hard.” In the face of such colonial duress,
is it any wonder that his parents, who understood “their situation,” wanted
their children to behave like white people? “In other words,” he recalled, “not
be too Indian. But how can one change his color?” In the face of all this, he
found it remarkable that various tribes survived: “I think that their strong art
and philosophies gave the people strength. You can’t kill that.” 10
Even today it takes nearly five hours to drive from Grand Marais, where
Morrison attended high school, to the Twin Cities, where he began to study at
the Minneapolis School of Art in 1938. In the late 1930s, the cultural and psy-
chological distance between the two places must have felt substantial. Given
his experience up to that point, it seems highly unlikely that he would have
imagined any advantage in being an Indian artist. On the contrary, besides
discovering he had a natural predilection for expressionism, cubism, and sur-
realism, he had an equally natural urge, triggered by the poverty and racism he
had known in the rural woodlands on the North Shore, to trade provincialism
for cosmopolitanism, especially in terms of aesthetics.
The art historical analysis of the influence of so-called primitive art on
modernism in general and on surrealism in particular is well established. And
if it is not exactly a closed sequence in the Kublerian sense, for some read-
ers, at least, it may lack the critical urgency it once had.11 Less well known or
understood, in some quarters, is the history of the conscious absorption and
subsequent transformation of modernist principles and aesthetic strategies by
Indigenous artists.12 This was a global phenomenon, but my training and in-
terests have been focused on modern and contemporary Indigenous art pro-
duced in the United States and Canada, and in this instance I am concerned
with surrealism in particular. And yet, I want to acknowledge the consistent
dialogue in his art over decades between intellect, order, and structure (cub-
ist imperatives) on the one hand, and visions, emotions, and improvisation
(characteristics of expressionism and surrealism) on the other.
From 1943 to 1946 Morrison studied at the Art Students League (asl) in New
York City, where his “conversion” to a modernism that synthesized expres-
sionism, cubism, and surrealism was swift and complete. He was aware also of
the influence of non-Western traditions on modernist primitivism, recalling
B eing M odern , B ecoming N ative 261

with specificity the impact of African, Polynesian, Inuit, and American Indian
art on “modern painters, particularly the cubists.” 13 He arrived in Manhattan
in the midst of a world war, when the mythmakers of abstract expressionism,
including Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Richard Pousette-Dart, Pollock,
and Mark Rothko, were experiencing a crisis of subject matter, which they
resolved in part by turning to ancient and tribal myths and imagery, drawing
especially on Native American objects found in books and accessible in New
York museums.14 His fellow students at the asl included Peter Busa and Helen
DeMott, who formed part of New York’s so-called Indian Space Painters, a
group of white artists, including Oscar Collier and Steve Wheeler, both of
whom Morrison knew, who were quite clear about their debts to Native Amer-
ican forms, images, and plastic principles.15 Working parallel to the emerging
abstract expressionism, the Indian Space Painters represented a competing
paradigm of avant-garde abstraction, but they, too, drew inspiration and sus-
tenance from Northwest Coast, Pueblo, and Peruvian art. Although Morrison
recalled being flattered that in this group of artists “everyone knew I was In-
dian,” he did not share their depth of interest in Native American art.16 He had
not had any particular exposure to it back in Minnesota, so like his New York
contemporaries, he encountered it in books and museums. That much they
had in common. And although he looked with them at the volumes of the
Bureau of American Ethnology, with an eye for texts and images about Na-
tive art, at that time Morrison did not incorporate such material into his own
work, even though it fascinated him.17 Morrison “was keenly aware of the low
regard extended by the professional art establishment to Native American ‘ar-
tifacts’ in his youth,” and he told Ann Gibson in 1991, “I never thought Indian
art could measure up — although now I think just the opposite.” 18 Clearly, in
the 1940s and for many years thereafter, he felt he could not (in Richard West’s
words) “be a major American artist and Indian artist at the same time.” 19
I expect there was another issue at work in Morrison’s refusal to participate
in the primitivists’ use of Native American–derived images and designs or to
assert his Indian heritage as a component of either his art or his artistic identity.
What if his peers had asked him to recount Chippewa myths or to share eso-
teric knowledge about rituals, shamanism, or ceremonial objects, all of which
interested them? He, whose grandfather James Morrison Sr. was an elder and
founder in 1895 of St. Francis Xavier Church, and whose father, Jim Morrison,
translated French hymns into Chippewa, led prayer ceremonies, and sang at
wakes in the church? Even if he had wanted to, he could not share that which
had not been given him.20 The dominant culture, which often envisions Na-

tive Americans in an ethnographic present, has a way of making Indigenous
people feel inauthentic for not being and living exactly like their ancestors.
Did he sometimes feel, in those New York years, not Indian enough? Perhaps.
But this much is certain: with his sharp taste in clothes and his cosmopolitan
passion for jazz and modern art, he hardly embodied the raw, mythic spirit
that primitivists identified in Native American art, especially since they had
no demonstrable interest in contemporary Indian art, preferring instead mu-
seum objects whose patination invoked for them primal nature and atavistic
memory. It was not his style to write a defiant manifesto. Instead, he quietly
refused to construct himself or be constructed as a “primitive.” Not only was
Morrison averse to being primitivism’s “other,” he was determined to be fully
in and of artistic modernity.21
Thus we see precious little overt primitivism of the tribal kind in Morrison’s
work in this period. With a couple of notable exceptions, he did not use overtly
totemic forms until the late 1970s, after his return to Minnesota. And yet, im-
ages or figures did not need a direct tribal correspondence for him to conceive
of them as being totemic. In 1960, looking back on the 1940s, he stated that
the “content, stemming from my initial stimulus,” included “totemic images
of animate objects.” 22 Even so, the rarity of tribally inspired primitivist imag-
ery in his work testifies to the fact that Morrison was not interested in either
veristic or ethnographic surrealism.23 What he did know of surrealism he
often learned firsthand. Living in New York during the war years, Morrison
haunted the 57th Street galleries, where he encountered the surrealism and ex-
pressionism of émigré artists he admired.24 What he chose to embrace was the
productive radicality of surrealism’s creative principles, especially the idea of
creating out of the subconscious via psychic automatism (the painterly equiv-
alent of automatic writing) and frottage (rubbing). For example, expressionist
figuration and linear energy are especially intriguing in Three Figures (1945),
one of several psychologically charged pictures about a wartime love triangle
in which he was involved. Morrison remembered that the work emerged out
of the process of drawing and painting, that “it was all very subconscious,” and
that a “dreamlike Surrealism [was] creeping in.” 25 Similarly, an untitled ink
on paper drawing from 1945 (figure 10.1) reveals just how thoroughly he un-
derstood the strain of surrealism issuing from André Masson, Joan Miró, and
Arshile Gorky, which emphasized freely generated organic forms. Character-
ized by intuitive freedom and aesthetic resolution, it represents a sophisticated
engagement with the kind of abstract surrealism produced by Masson, Miró,
and Gorky. In fact, close inspection suggests it might actually be a reproduc-

tion of a Miró drawing to which Morrison added his own spontaneous marks.
His response to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dream of Calamity
(1945), shown in the Walker Art Center’s First Biennial Exhibition in 1947, is
similarly au courant in terms of international style (in this instance, a mix of
expressionism and Picassoid surrealism).
Like his friend, the Dutch-born American abstract expressionist Willem
de Kooning, Morrison had his first solo show in Manhattan in 1948, which
included Whalebone (1948), a compelling and intriguing still life. As an ad-
olescent artist exploring the interstitial zone between woodland and water,
Morrison had harvested found objects along the shoreline of Lake Superior,
including driftwood, bones, and other organic materials, so he accepted easily
the surrealist practice of cognitively dissonant juxtapositions. Thus Whale-
bone, whose intense color remains as fresh and vivid as the day it was made,
is perhaps, with the exception of his Starfish (ca. 1943–45), the only school of
Paris-style still life in captivity to feature whalebone.26 The wine bottle, the
driftwood, and the whalebone, which reads as a sculptural objet d’art, are sit-
uated ambiguously in a cubist space generated by oil-rich planar patches of
color in the background.
From the mid-1940s onward, Morrison made numerous works on paper
featuring surrealist landscapes that reflect an awareness of the art of both
Gorky and Gottlieb. In later years he recalled that he felt “charged” being in
New York in this transitional moment, when cubism and surrealism were
shifting into abstract expressionism (as in Gottlieb’s work).27 His watercolor
Abstract Composition is dated 1950, but in terms of form and content, it clearly
belongs to what Robert Rosenblum called the surrealist phase of abstract ex-
pressionism, or even better, what Lawrence Alloway called the “biomorphic
40’s.” 28 According to Alloway, one of the primary sources for the importance
of biomorphism in New York painting in the midforties (when Morrison was
enrolled in the asl) was the surrealism of such artists as Masson and Miró.
Biomorphic art “emerged in New York,” Alloway wrote, “as the result of a
cluster of ideas about nature, automatism, . . . and the unconscious.” 29 The
primacy for Morrison of these subjects, sources, and processes — nature, the
unconscious, and automatism — is demonstrated by his near constant refer-
ence to them over six decades in interviews, artist statements, and his memoir,
Turning the Feather Around (1998).
The jam-packed (or “manic”) cluster of organic shapes in Abstract Compo-
sition is generated freely and then structured loosely by a linear web, evoking
the vertical face of a rocky shoreline or the earth’s strata. Again, Alloway has

F I G U R E 1 0 . 1 George Morrison, Untitled, 1945. Ink on paper, 7.6 × 5 in.
(19.3 × 12.7 cm). Collection of Dr. Robert and Frances Leff.

FIGURE 10.2
George Morrison, Black
and White Patterned
Forms, 1952. Ink on paper,
10.75 × 8.38 in. (27.3 × 21.3 cm).
Collection of the Minnesota
Museum of American Art. Gift
of George Morrison, 96.10.14.
observed, “Crowded and manic biomorphism is directly linked to automa-

tism, which was cultivated by the Surrealists as a means of direct access to the
Unconscious mind. The ideal of direct action was most clearly recognized in
drawing.” 30 Morrison noted of this period in his work, “Surreal elements, im-
ages from the subconscious, began to appear in my drawings and paintings.” 31
Vital, irregular, and elemental, Abstract Composition, with its pleasing inter-
play of colors, including lemon yellow, pale plum, and rusty brown, reminds
us that modernist primitivism can be biological as well as tribal.
Morrison’s awareness of European modernism deepened when a Fulbright
Fellowship in 1952–53 enabled him to study, work, and exhibit in Paris (at Gal-
erie Jeanne Bucher) and in the south of France, where he made numerous
small works on paper that often started with automatic drawing. He observed,
however, that the work became “more formal in the end. Not haphazard; it’s
all organized . . . making little cubistic sections.” 32 Black and White Patterned
Forms (1952), a synthetic cubist pen and ink drawing made in Paris (figure
10.2), has a sharp, flat clarity that suggests a cognizance of Henri Matisse’s
cut-outs (originally published in 1947) or the surrealists’ fascination with the
“decorative” patterns they admired in Oceanic relief sculpture.33 Overall, these
images are abstract, playing with positive and negative space in a provocative

way, even as their flatness is akin to that of a decal. Stacked vertically, the con-
figurations, especially the central one, hint at totemic art and may reflect the
inspiration modernist primitivism found in African sculpture. In this, Black
and White Patterned Forms has a curated or collected quality, which explains
why we cannot identify any particular model, either ethnographic or modern,
that it emulates specifically. Robert Goldwater, who authored the first schol-
arly study of modernist primitivism in 1938, discussed this phenomenon in
terms of African art and the primitivist sculptures of Constantin Brancusi,
and his conclusions are instructive in the context of Morrison’s mysterious
drawing.
According to Goldwater, an African sculpture might gather in visual form
the idea, notion, or memory of a human, divine ancestor, or god of some sort.
Searching for a single discursive referent (narrative prompt for object or im-
age making) is pointless because “these overlapping meanings inherent in the
African sculpture exist simultaneously and thereby give the sculpture its total
significance.” Goldwater was convinced that Brancusi appreciated this “collect-
ing of meanings [in an object], some of which can be determined because . . .
they are the reason for its creation, whereas other meanings cannot be traced
because they come into being with the fact of its creation.” Thus, although we
can relate Black and White Patterned Forms indirectly, at least, to examples of
African, Oceanic, and modern art, its overriding originality — the filtering of
collected meanings through Morrison’s consciousness — allows us to accept
our inability to “pin down any precise formal derivation” even as we recognize
the production of new meaning in its totality. To borrow, then, from Gold-
water, we understand Black and White Patterned Forms as a “symbolic object
that is at once allusive and self-sufficient.” 34 Similarly, the curious menagerie of
pictographs and pictorial fragments seen in a related work, Geometric Vertical
Forms (1952), drawn at Cap d’Antibes, recalls Morrison’s explanation that in
imaginative studio art, “you let your subconscious suggest.” 35
The overt primitivism of Morrison’s drawing New York (1954) is a curious
anomaly in his oeuvre. The totemic personnages are atypical for Morrison,
and they may suggest an interest not only in the sharp, jagged, violent forms
of certain surrealists in the late 1940s (e.g., the Chilean Roberto Matta and
the Cuban Wifredo Lam), but also in Louise Bourgeois’s totemic sculptures,
such as The Winged Figure (1948).36 Bourgeois was married to Goldwater, New
York’s leading authority at midcentury on tribal art and modernist primitiv-
ism. Morrison might have seen The Winged Figure installed at the Peridot
Gallery in Manhattan in 1950, or given that he was living in Duluth in 1954

and exhibiting in Minneapolis, perhaps he saw her personnages in the Walker
Art Center’s 1954 exhibition Reality and Fantasy, 1900–1954.37 In an artist state-
ment published by the Walker in Design Quarterly (1954), Bourgeois described
works such as The Winged Figure in terms applicable to Morrison’s New York:
“The look of my figures is abstract, and to the spectator they may not appear
to be figures at all. They are the expression, in abstract terms, of emotions and
states of awareness.” Given the mix of sex and violence — or at least the poten-
tial for both — in Morrison’s New York, perhaps he understood and appreci-
ated what Bourgeois meant when she wrote, “My sculptures might be called
‘confrontation pieces.’ ” 38 The one-off quality of New York and the time and
place of its creation affirm the likelihood that it is an homage to Bourgeois,
even as its dense hatching, crosshatching, and linear entanglements link it to
his earlier surrealist explorations.
Morrison came of age artistically in the emergent abstract expressionist
milieu in New York in the mid-1940s. By the mid-1950s his paintings often
consisted of spontaneously generated, thickly impastoed, scintillating sur-
faces that synthesize action/gestural and color field painting. In terms of style,
subject matter (the existential act of painting), and aesthetic results, his work
was a constituent element of the diverse yet unified community known as the
New York school.39 Furthermore, if we apply the three criteria of intentional-
ity, process, and quality, which I believe are often used in judging the merits
of artwork, Morrison’s painting should never be excluded from serious, sub-
stantive discourse on abstract expressionism. Morrison was only a few years
younger than first-generation abstract expressionists Richard Pousette-Dart
and Robert Motherwell. He was six years older than Joan Mitchell, whose first
solo exhibition in 1950 at what is now the Minnesota Museum of American
Art came two years after his (and de Kooning’s) in 1948. Although the first-
and second-generation nomenclature is somewhat artificial, it has had staying
power, and I rehearse this fragment of lineage to underscore, as Ann Gibson
has done, that canon formation is shaped, intentionally or otherwise, by eth-
nicity (“race”), gender, and sexual orientation.40 In short, quality alone cannot
account for Morrison’s exclusion from major exhibitions and books that sur-
vey abstract expressionism, especially since contemporaneous critical reviews
of his art were typically laudatory, and major museums acquired his work. His
first solo show, for example, was reviewed positively in both Art Digest and the
New York Sun. The former characterized Morrison as a promising “painter of
mysteries and tensions.” Describing the work as having both “sensuous and
intellectual appeal,” the unnamed critic (JKR) noted the “boldness and clarity”

of his “strong and curiously evocative landscape” paintings.41 And Helen Carl-
son wrote in the New York Sun, “Unconsciously or otherwise, these figures
and forms derive from the ideography of Morrison’s forebears.” She added that
“even the crude compelling harmonies of [his] earth tones . . . might have been
fired to the canvases centuries ago in the primitive kilns of his ancestors.” 42 Re-
calling this review nearly half a century later, Morrison commented, “Critics
will refer to my Indian background to try and make sense of the work. I wasn’t
pushing it, but they found it anyway.” 43
The critical reception of Morrison’s work continued to be strong through-
out the fifties. Some of the paintings in his 1954 exhibition at Grand Central
Moderns, his dealer in Manhattan, were featured in a solo show in November
that same year at the Tweed Gallery of Art (now the Tweed Museum of Art)
at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Reviewing the show favorably for the
Duluth News-Tribune, Earl Fineberg called the work “magical modernism.”
Marrying his perception of the work’s elemental magic with his knowledge
of Morrison’s origins, Fineberg constructed the artist as either a sophisticated
primitive or a primitive sophisticate. The “formal abstract elements fall into
landscape patterns that suggest a primitive identification of spirit and world.
That Morrison is a Chippewa Indian may have something to do with his view
of the visible world, if one remembers that through travel, education, and
influence the artist is among today’s most sophisticated abstract composers.”
Reflecting the impress of Sigmund Freud, Fineberg wrote, “Phrases like totem
and taboo, mana and magic leap to mind as one sees construction after con-
struction that share a primitive formalism with nature, but are anything but
illustration.” 44 The fact of Morrison’s Chippewa ancestry seems to have limited
the possibility of recognizing in the work a modern identification of spirit and
world.
In 1957 Morrison was included in the James Gallery Invitational in New
York City that also included de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Mitchell, Mother-
well, and Rothko. That same year, he had another solo exhibition at Grand
Central Moderns from which the Whitney Museum of American Art ac-
quired The Antagonist (1957), a major painting. Eventually he had twelve solo
shows in Manhattan — a remarkable feat for any artist in any generation. In
1959 Morrison had a one-person exhibition at the Kilbride-Bradley Art Gal-
lery, which was an important space for advanced art in Minneapolis, and
John K. Sherman’s review in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune was positive and
astute. Describing Morrison as a “Minnesotan-turned-New Yorker,” Sherman,
who wrote drama, music, and arts criticism for more than forty years, noted

the artist’s national reputation and the acquisition of his work by “the most
important collections in this country and abroad.” Morrison’s paintings, he
observed, revealed “an experienced skill in setting up the counterpoint and
tensions which induce you to gaze for a long time, seeking out the secrets
there.” Curiously, the word “abstract” never appears in the review, even as
Sherman repeatedly ascribes musical value to Morrison’s art, which touches
viewers deep inside, inviting them to consider carefully the secrets beneath
the surface.45 Wanting the work to stand on its own terms without any special
pleading, Morrison was pleased that the review did not make any reference to
his Indian background in positing the significance of the exhibition.46
Like many other New York school artists with whom Morrison socialized
and occasionally exhibited, particularly Franz Kline, surrealist automatic
drawing evolved in Morrison’s hands into the freely improvised gestures of
so-called action painting. Even modestly scaled works on paper could em-
body the exuberance, exhilaration, and openness of this method of working.
Indeed, it was his contention “that even a small drawing can be an important
work of art.” 47 Part of the abstract expressionist ethos was the existential and
autonomous quality of each studio encounter with process and materials; this
partly explains the variety of moods and effects Morrison was able to gener-
ate with his jazzlike improvisations, which could result in intimate works on
paper, such as Grey, Black and White Lines (1959; figure 10.3), created in Prov-
incetown on the Atlantic shore, where he often spent the summer. Brushy,
open, and linear, the work hints at Chinese calligraphy and the bold black-
white-gray dramas he admired in the work of his friend Franz Kline. In such
works Morrison was seeking to capture an “inner thing”: “That was part of the
Action Painting school, where you begin with the act of painting itself, then
images began to emerge. Almost like subconscious painting.” 48
Morrison had long been a conflicted expatriate yearning to go home. After
teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design for seven years, he returned to
Minnesota and his Native roots in 1970, when he joined the University of Min-
nesota to teach studio art and American Indian Studies. This homecoming
only intensified his commitment to nature, automatism, and the unconscious,
as in seen in Surrealist Landscape (1985), a mixed-media work on paper. The
abstracted landforms, water, and high horizon line visible in this large quirky
drawing are essential components of Morrison’s iconography of the North
Shore of Lake Superior. The spontaneous linear entanglements witnessed
here are explicated by his comment that much of his work “emerged out of
scribbles,” which he related to French automatic drawing, “influenced by the

F I G U R E 1 0 . 3 George Morrison, Grey, Black and White Lines, 1959. Gouache
and ink on paper, 14 × 10.8 in. (35.5 × 27.3 cm). Collection of the Minnesota
Museum of American Art. Gift of George Morrison, 96.10.20.
associative thinking deriving from psychoanalysis.” 49 These image-producing
scribbles, he explained, combined frottage and automatic drawing and re-
sulted in arbitrary patterns.
Along with the Horizon series paintings and drawings he started in the
1980s, Morrison is best known, perhaps, for a series of monumental wood
collages (and a series of totems as well, discussed below), including Cumulated
Landscape (1976; plate 6). Puzzled together from found objects harvested on
the beach at Provincetown, the first collage began in summer 1965. Although
they are gridded, like Gottlieb’s pictographs, and have a latent cubist struc-
ture, he made them intuitively, without preparatory drawings. They all have a
clear sense of proportion, with a horizon line approximately one-fourth of the
way down from the top. I am tempted to call them the sculptural equivalent
of automatic drawings, but Morrison described them as “paintings in wood
. . . derived from nature, based on landscape.” And even though the first was
made on the Atlantic shore, he recognized that the collages “may have been
inspired subconsciously by the rock formations on the North shore” of Lake
Superior.50 These award-winning wood collages symbolize the whole of Mor-
rison’s career, in which memories of specific places, in nature or in the mind,
are realized in a visual language based on mastery of international avant-garde
paradigms. Cumulated Landscape characterizes the series in its dynamic bal-
ance of part and whole. The collages are analogies for the self, a society, or
the natural world. Almost immediately the wood collages found a wide and
welcoming audience, including curators and museum directors, corporate
and private collectors, art award jurors, and the general public.51 The honesty
and plainspoken quality of the collages were surely key to their popularity.
The subject matter, on the surface at least, no pun intended, would seem to
be the materials and processes of art itself. The audience is thus given a direct
encounter with aesthetic form — no iconographic analysis required. Indeed,
the collages announce themselves without pretension or conceptual difficulty.
Nothing needs to be demystified. Cumulated Landscape, for example, is typical
in that it is not really the abstraction (reduction, concentration) of anything. It
is exactly what it appears to be: carefully composed pieces of found wood. And
therein lies part of the appeal of the collages for corporate culture, especially
in Minnesota: they are inspiring, not threatening, and they speak directly of
the relationship between art and natural resources.52 Morrison presumed that
their initial appeal was the tactility of the wood itself, “since the grain is always
important.” 53
The grand wood collages were time and labor intensive, so Morrison ex-

trapolated their aesthetic principles in numerous exhibitions of drawings,
rubbings, and lithographs. Two such drawings from 1982 are especially inter-
esting in the context of surrealism. Brown and Black Textured Squares (1982)
is inscribed in Morrison’s hand: “Brown and Black Textured Squares — Started
By Placing At Random — Changing In Shape & Direction As Progression To
End — Landscape — Minneapolis-11-14-82.” A perhaps unfinished drawing,
9 Black Squares, 11 Brown Squares (1982), has its process documented at the
bottom also: “9 Black Squares, 11 Brown Squares — Partly Frottage — After
Arp — MPLS-8-25-82.” Morrison’s admiration for the surrealist Jean Arp is
revealed in his sketches as well. In the latter part of his career, Morrison was
given to detailed inscriptions on his drawings, not only dating them but in-
dicating also where they were produced and sometimes commenting on the
process, frequently using such words as surrealism, automatism, and frottage.
In doing so he balanced improvisation and abstraction, which signal the sub-
conscious, with the specificity of place and archival documentation, which
suggest order and structure. When drawings similar to these two were exhib-
ited at the University of Minnesota in 1983, he emphasized their immediacy:
“Drawing became an intimate source of personal expression — first as a means
of social narration and place description, then progressing toward a probing
of the subconscious through surrealist automatic techniques to record an in-
ner solitude and loneliness.” 54 In short, surrealist automatism may have given
him a way to express his alienation (modernist subjectivity), in general, and
his deracination from, and reconnection with, traditional Chippewa culture
in particular.
The series of monumental vertical totems Morrison began making in the
mid-1970s signified a shift in his intentions regarding the potential for Indige-
nous content in his work. The context for this shift included his participation
in urban Indian culture in the Twin Cities, such as his limited role as a fund
raiser for the emerging American Indian Movement. The first totem, the regal
Red Totem I (1977), resulted from a commission from the curator Evan M.
Maurer for The Native American Heritage: A Survey of North American In-
dian Art (1977), a watershed exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Like
all Morrison’s standing totems, Red Totem I is a wood mosaic appliqué that
imitates carving. Morrison explained that he had been thinking on the one
hand about totem poles as a kind of public art that announced history, and
on the other about the possibility of turning his horizontal wood collages into
four-sided vertical forms. Furthermore, he recalled, “I chose a red earth color
called Indian Red to assimilate a certain Indianness because, otherwise, it’s

just a modern, abstract version of a totem pole.” Plus, he felt the earthy red
gave the totem “potency and Indian feeling.” 55
He had multiple sources of inspiration for his totems. Always sensitive to
words and language, the origin of the word “totem” must have surely held spe-
cial significance for him, since he identified increasingly with his own heritage
after his homecoming in 1970, even as he continued to evolve an anthropo-
logical consciousness. He stated, for example, “Totem is a Chippewa word
that means ‘family mark.’ Totemic imagery may be common to native peoples
all over the world. Such vertical structures are found in the Taula forms in
Minorca, linga structures in India, Stonehenge in England, and those of the
ancient Olmecs in Mexico.” 56 Thus, although each totem is unique, like the
wood collages, they all clearly belong to the same “clan.” But his ethnographic
desire to revisit ancient art forms (manifest in studious notes and images in his
sketchbooks) was synthesized with a mastery of modernist formalism, which
was immediately self-evident. When Red Totem III and Red Totem IV (both
1978) were included in a groundbreaking traveling exhibition of contemporary
Native art in 1981, Confluences of Tradition and Change/24 American Indian
Artists, the art historian and critic Allan M. Gordon, a specialist in African
American aesthetics, praised them for indicating “new directions for a dis-
tinctive type of Native American sculpture” that aligns with “Constructivist-
Minimalist systems.” 57
Poor health from the mid-1980s onward generally, although not exclusively,
kept Morrison from working on anything large scale, and many of his most
poignant objects from that period are intimate and prismatic drawings that
are proof positive of his unwavering commitment to a surrealist process and
content. In an untitled drawing from 1995 (plate 7), the three bands of a hard-
edged color field do double duty as the abstraction of land, water, and sky,
on top of which float totemic, biomorphic, surrealist forms. Their glyph-like
character reminds us of Morrison’s keen interest, documented many times
in his sketchbooks, in pre-Columbian relief sculpture and other ancient and
tribal forms, reflecting both a modernist universalizing anthropological im-
pulse and his increasing articulation of a Native identity.
The shapes seen in yet another untitled drawing from 1995 might be parts of
a cryptic alphabet, the abstraction of elemental biological critters, or the liber-
ated fragments of a visionary map. And the clarity of the shapes fails to mask
their thematic and organic connection to the biomorphic forties. Indeed,
Mark Rothko’s 1947 description of his multiforms seems appropriate here:

They are unique elements in a unique situation.
They are organisms with volition and a passion for self-assertion.
They move with eternal freedom, and without need to conform with or to violate
what is probable in the familiar world.
They have no direct association with any particular visible experience,
but in them one recognizes the principle and passion of organisms.58
In 2004, the Anishinabe literary critic Gerald Vizenor proposed that the
quirky shapes in drawings such as these might refer to the spirits of Chippewa
cosmology, such as Mishapishoo, the underwater panther (which was the sub-
ject of a woodlands-themed mosaic Morrison created for the Daybreak Star
Center, Seattle, in 1977).59 The artist had indicated as much in 1998 when he
noted, “Individual titles often use the idea of spirit forms. All those shapes and
things that come from the images . . . can relate to spirits. The shapes might
suggest objects in the lake coming out of the water. Often they’re irregular,
shaped like an amoeba — organic forms that relate to clouds or puddles.” 60 In
using the underwater panther as a sculptural theme to represent woodlands
culture, and in referring to spirit forms rising up out of the lake, Morrison
was interlacing (modernist) artistic practice with oral traditions. He believed
that the “original meaning of Indian art begins with tribal meanings” and
that many Native “sculptures had a religious or spiritual meaning.” 61 In dis-
cussing Morrison’s Native modernism, art historian Bill Anthes has invoked
the philosopher Scott Pratt’s idea of emplacement, in which the Indigenous
homeland is the fundamental ground out of which oral traditions derive their
meaning.62 For Morrison, emplacement meant “a natural attraction to where
you were born, your locale. Like the lake or woods for me.” Building a home
and studio at Red Rock was to be rerooted in his place of origin — the literal
ground of his Chippewaness: “The lake has certain magical qualities for me
in the sense that I like to be near it. To be part of it.” 63 The constant reiteration
of land, shoreline, water, horizon, and sky at Red Rock in the Horizon series
paintings and related drawings gave form to an indivisible bond between self
and place. Because he made so many of them over two decades, collectively
they function like a visual mantra: I am home again, I am home again, I am
home again.
By the time of his death in 2000, Morrison was a much-celebrated artist
with a compelling exhibition history, including a dozen solo shows in New
York City. In 1990 he had been the subject of Standing in Northern Lights, a
retrospective organized by the Tweed Museum of Art and the Minnesota Mu-

seum of American Art that was also shown at the Plains Art Museum (then
located in Moorhead, Minnesota). The title of the exhibition is an English
translation of Wah Wah The Go Nay Ga Bo, a name dreamed for Morrison by
his cousin Walter Caribou, an elder of the Grand Portage Chippewa, as part
of a healing ceremony.64 In the late 1980s, as Morrison struggled with illness,
he was pleased with the results of an exhibition he had longed for: sixty-seven
works in a wide variety of media spanning forty-four years of artistic practice.
He had also been claimed by a younger generation of Native artists as a found-
ing father of Native modernism and was thus featured prominently in several
important group exhibitions, including Our Land/Our Selves: American In-
dian Contemporary Artists, an exhibition of 375 works of art by thirty artists
representing thirty-one tribes. Curated by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and
organized by Nancy Liddle for the University of Albany Art Gallery, the show
had a dozen venues (1991–1993). In 1999 Morrison was named the inaugural
Master Artist in the new Fellowship for Native American Fine Art established
by the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis. When in 2004 he was honored post-
humously in a two-person exhibition with Allan Houser that helped inaugu-
rate the new National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.,
founding director W. Richard West Jr. (as noted above) wrote that Morrison
had in fact proved that it was “possible to be a major American artist and
Indian artist at the same time.” 65
Part of what makes these accolades and achievements so compelling is that
they are prompted by a lifetime of artworks that never made any concessions
to the clichés of a market-driven Native “style.” Because he had an unwavering
commitment to a surrealist process that he practiced for almost sixty years,
authenticity and integrity are the twin characteristics that unify Morrison’s
diverse creations. As a card-carrying modernist inspired by the natural world
to probe the subconscious, he made abstract equivalents for a synthesis of
perception, conception, feeling, and memory. As such his personal aesthetic
philosophy was a poetic one: “I always see the horizon as the edge of the world.
And then you go beyond that, and then you see the phenomenon of the sky
and that goes beyond also, so therefore I always imagine, in a certain surrealist
world, that I am there, that I would like to imagine for myself that it is real.” 66
After his homecoming in 1970, Morrison was re-regionalized as a Native son

of Minnesota — a state in which he and his work are much beloved — and was
increasingly enmeshed in the “world” of Native American art. After leaving

both his New York gallery and his appointment at the Rhode Island School of
Design, what we might call the mainstream East Coast memory of his signifi-
cance gradually diminished as his importance as a Native modernist increased
in equal measure. The old adage “out of sight, out of mind” might be appli-
cable here. In a recent review of Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison,
the traveling retrospective exhibition of his work I curated for the Minnesota
Museum of American Art (2013–2015), the art critic Mary Abbe described
him as “Minnesota’s best known and most successful American Indian art-
ist,” when in fact, he is arguably Minnesota’s best known and most successful
artist, no ethnic qualifier required — especially if exhibition history is a key
criterion.67 Even so, Abbe’s statement is true, although it reflects, intentionally
or otherwise, the divide in Morrison’s critical reception and historiography:
before and after 1970, he was a either New York school modernist or a co-
founder of Native modernism (which was never his intention), but not both.
As the growing awareness of multiple modernisms makes clear, this binary
distinction is artificial and can no longer be tolerated.
Notes
1. Although many Great Lakes Indigenous peoples now refer to themselves as either
Ojibwe or Anishinabe, many still self-designate, as did Morrison, as Chippewa. He was
an enrolled member of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. This essay
is based in part on a lengthier one in W. Jackson Rushing III and Kristin Makholm,
Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
2013), 11–62. See also W. Jackson Rushing III, “George Morrison’s Surrealism,” Journal
of Surrealism and the Americas 7, no. 1 (2013): 1–18.
2. Recalling his days as a boarding school student in Wisconsin, Morrison stated:
“I had always worked with my hands — drawing, copying, inventing — and was inter-
ested in commercial art. I began reading history and art history, architecture, sculpture
and music.” Quoted in Jane B. Katz, ed., This Song Remembers: Self-Portraits of Native
Americans in the Arts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 56.
3. George Morrison, Turning the Feather Around: My Life in Art, as told to Margot
Fortunato Gault (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1998), 50, in which he
recalls seeing a Picasso exhibition in 1939. The records of the Minneapolis Institute of
Arts suggest, however, that Morrison was likely thinking of Picasso: Forty Years of His
Art, organized by Alfred H. Barr for the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1939),
which was on view in Minneapolis February 1–March 2, 1941. Stephanie Kays, e-mail
to the author, June 4, 2012.
4. In fall 1969 he wrote a letter to the federal Office of Economic Opportunity, ex-
pressing both an interest in a job on the Grand Portage Reservation and his willingness

to give up his teaching position at the Rhode Island School of Design. “At this time,” he
wrote, “nothing would suit me better than to be of help to my people and particularly
to my own reservation.” George Morrison to Jim Wilson, November 10, 1969, George
Morrison Archives, Minnesota Historical Society (gm/mhs).
5. Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas,” in Praise (New York: Ecco Press, 1979),
4–5.
6. Adelheid Fischer, “George Morrison,” arts Magazine 7, no. 2 (February 1984): 22.
7. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 23, and quoted in Katz, Song Remembers,
53.
8. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 29, 24, 37.
9. Morrison, quoted in Katz, Song Remembers, 55–56.
10. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 35, 31–32, 45, 56.
11. See, for example, the enlarged edition of Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Mod-
ern Art, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1986); Eliza-
beth Cowling, “The Eskimos, the American Indians, and the Surrealists,” Art History 1,
no. 4 (December 1978): 484–500; Evan Maurer, “Dada and Surrealism,” in “Primitiv-
ism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, edited by William Ru-
bin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 535–93; Susan Hiller, ed., The Myth of
Primitivism: Perspectives on Art (New York: Routledge, 1991); W. Jackson Rushing III,
Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch eds., Primi-
tivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003); and Dawn Ades, ed., The Color of My Dreams: The Surrealist
Revolution in Art (Vancouver, BC: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2011).
12. See, for example, W. Jackson Rushing III, Allan Houser: An American Master
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004).
13. Morrison, quoted in Katz, Song Remembers, 56.
14. Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde, chapters 5 and 6.
15. For Indian Space, see Ann Gibson, “Painting Outside the Paradigm: Indian
Space,” Arts Magazine 57 (February 1983): 98–104; Sandra Kraskin et al., The Indian
Space Painters: Native American Sources for American Abstract Art (New York: Baruch
College Gallery, 1991); and Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-
Garde, 137–56. Of the Indian Space painters, only Steve Wheeler insisted, absolutely
unconvincingly, that he had no interest in Indigenous sources.
16. Morrison, quoted in Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 64.
17. See Gibson, Abstract Expressionism, 64, 215n31.
18. Gibson, Abstract Expressionism, 64–65.
19. W. Richard West Jr., “Foreword: The Art of Contradiction,” in Native Modernism:
The Art of George Morrison and Allan Houser, edited by Truman T. Lowe (Washington,
DC: Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, 2004), 8.

20. According to Morrison’s friend and colleague Evan M. Maurer, except for a
reference to red Jasper as his totem stone, the artist “never claimed any special knowl-
edge” about Native spirituality; telephone interview, March 21, 2012.
21. In the wake of the Museum of Modern Art’s primitivism debacle in the mid-
1980s and in a critique of the equally, if differently, problematic Magiciens de la Terre
exhibition in Paris (1989), Rasheed Araeen wrote that Western humanism had failed to
recognize “the modern aspirations of the ‘other.’ ” See his essay, “Our Bauhaus, Others’
Mudhouse,” Third Text 3, no. 6 (spring 1989): 14.
22. George Morrison, artist statement, Dayton Art Institute (1960), Ryerson Library
Pamphlet File, Art Institute of Chicago.
23. Veristic surrealism, associated in particular with Salvador Dali’s “critical para-
noia,” is typified by meticulously represented images of nightmarish content (e.g.,
hand-painted dream photographs). I am using the term ethnographic surrealism
somewhat reductively here to stand in for surrealists such as Max Ernst, who appropri-
ated Northwest Coast and Hopi imagery into his modernist primitivism. For a more
expansive understanding, see James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-
Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1988), especially chapters 4, 9, and 10.
24. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 63.
26. The school of Paris refers to international modern art in Paris between the world
wars. Often cubist/expressionist in orientation, it was characterized as having “a cer-
tain high level of professionalism with a modernist bent.” See H. Harvard Arnason and
Daniel Wheeler, History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986), 249.
27. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 59, 63.
28. Robert Rosenblum, Mark Rothko: Notes on Rothko’s Surrealist Years (New York:
Pace Gallery, 1981), 5–9; and Lawrence Alloway, “The Biomorphic 40’s,” ArtForum 4
(September 1965): 18–22, reprinted in Topics in American Art Since 1945 (New York:
Norton, 1975), 17–25. Page citations are from the 1975 edition.
29. Alloway, “Biomorphic,” 20.
30. Alloway, “Biomorphic,” 18.
31. Morrison, quoted in Katz, Song Remembers, 58.
33. For Matisse’s cut-outs, see especially Henri Matisse, Jazz (New York: George
Braziller, 1985). On surrealism and Oceanic art, see Maurer, “Dada and Surrealism,”
546–57, and passim; Rosalind Krauss, “Giacometti,” in Rubin, “Primitivism” in 20th
Century Art, 517–19.
34. Robert Goldwater, “Judgments of Primitive Art, 1905–1965,” which appeared first
in Tradition and Creativity in Tribal Art, ed. Daniel Biebuyck (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1969), 24–41, reprinted in Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art, 293.

36. For the primitivism of Matta and Lam, see Maurer, “Dada and Surrealism,” 582,
585.
37. See Josef Helfenstein, Louise Bourgeois: The Early Work (Champaign: Krannert
Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2002), 30, 143.
38. Bourgeois, “Artist’s Statement,” 18, quoted in Helfenstein, Louise Bourgeois, 34.
39. The New York school is an alternate designation for abstract expressionism that
is style neutral and establishes the site of production, New York City. The downside of
the New York school label is that it may overemphasize unity; we often teach and write
not just about the commonalities of abstract expressionism, but also about its differ-
ences and discontinuities. See Sidney Simon, “Concerning the Beginnings of the New
York School, 1939–1943: Interview with Robert Motherwell,” in Abstract Expressionism:
A Critical Record, edited by David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), 33–45.
40. Gibson, Abstract Expressionism, 59.
41. JKR, “George Morrison Debut,” Art Digest 22 (May 1, 1948): 19.
42. Helen Carlson, quoted in Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 81.
43. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 81. For a similarly primitivist reading (in
the European press) of his first solo exhibition, see Rushing and Makholm, Modern
Spirit, 14.
44. Fineberg, “Morrison Exhibit Hung in Tweed,” Duluth News-Tribune, Novem-
ber 7, 1954, Tweed Museum of Art Archives.
45. John K. Sherman, “George Morrison’s Art Lyrical and Subjective,” Minneapolis
Star-Tribune, February 13, 1959.
48. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 111–12.
49. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 99. In addition to his exposure to surre-
alist creative principles in New York and Paris, beginning circa 1954 Morrison under-
went three years of psychoanalysis after the dissolution of his first marriage.
51. Rushing and Makholm, Modern Spirit, 29–30.
52. Rob Silberman, “A Long Look at the Art of George Morrison,” Artpaper 10 (Sep-
tember 1990): 17.
54. George Morrison, “The Artist’s Statement,” in George Morrison: Entries in an
Artist’s Journal, ed. Lyndel King, exhibition catalog (Minneapolis, MN: University Art
Gallery, 1983), n.p.
55. Morrison, quoted in Katz, Song Remembers, 58, 60.

57. Allan M. Gordon, “Confluences,” in Confluences of Tradition and Change/24
American Indian Artists (Davis, CA: Richard L. Nelson Gallery, 1981), 6.
58. Mark Rothko, “The Romantics Were Prompted,” Possibilities 1 (winter 1947–48),
reprinted in Shapiro and Shapiro, Abstract Expressionism, 398.
59. Gerald Vizenor, “George Morrison: Anishinabe Expressionism at Red Rock,” in
Lowe, Native Modernism, 45.
62. Bill Anthes, Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960 (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 90.
63. Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 150, 149.
64. The other name Caribou dreamed for him was “Turning the Feather Around”;
see Morrison, Turning the Feather Around, 167.
65. West Jr., “Art of Contradiction,” in Lowe, Native Modernism, 8.
67. Mary Abbe, “Hymns to the Horizon: Art of George Morrison at Minnesota His-
tory Center,” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, February 19, 2015.

PETER BRUNT
11 FALLING INTO THE WORLD
The Global Art World of Aloï Pilioko

and Nicolaï Michoutouchkine
Every period has had its genuine travellers: I could quote one or two among
those who enjoy public favour at the present time. But my aim is neither
to condemn hoaxes nor to award diplomas of genuineness, but rather to
understand a moral and social phenomenon which is especially peculiar to
France and, even here, has made its appearance only very recently.
C L A U D E L É V I -S T R A U S S | Tristes Tropiques
In 1946, at the age of seventeen, Nicolaï Michoutouchkine painted a still life

of unusual violence (figure 11.1). It depicted a plucked cockerel splayed on
a tabletop with its head cut, the knife nearby covered with the same blood-
red pigment the artist used to sign his name. The signature has been twice
transliterated, from its original Russian alphabet and from the Latin spelling
(Mishutushkin) used by his parents in France. They were Cossack exiles who
had fled the reprisals of the 1917 Communist Revolution, eventually settling in
Belfort, France, where the artist was born. Although a teenage work, the paint-
ing was clearly of some personal importance to the artist, for he kept it his
entire life. It still hung in the library of his studio-home on the South Pacific
island of Efate, in Vanuatu, the year of his death. Perhaps the image conveyed
something of his sense of cultural displacement in the Cossack diaspora; or
his adolescent disenchantment with European civilization, which he had just
witnessed destroying itself during World War II; or perhaps his anxiety about
his emerging sexual identity as a young gay man. Whatever the case, a few
FIGURE 11.1 Nicolaï Michoutouchkine, Cockerel with Its Head Cut, ca. 1946.
Oil on plywood, 16.5 × 22.8 in. (42 × 58 cm). Collection of Aloï Pilioko. Image
courtesy of Aloï Pilioko.
years later, he would leave France to embark on a traveling adventure that

would traverse the globe and last the rest of his life.
Michoutouchkine’s Cockerel with Its Head Cut might be set alongside an-
other painting, Crucifixion of a Cockerel (1964; figure 11.2), by his partner and
protégé, the Indigenous modernist Aloï Pilioko. Both paintings convey an
image of the violence and transformation of their modern identities through a
common motif — a figure perhaps of the empathy or attraction that drew them
to each other in a lifelong partnership. Cockerels, peacocks, doves, pigeons,
and other birds are prevalent figures in Pilioko’s work. He is known for his
fondness for these creatures and other animals. He grew up with them in his
village of Alele on the island of Wallis, and they surround him today in the
studio-home he created with Michoutouchkine in Vanuatu. Pilioko feeds and
observes the birds everyday, delights in their personalities and idiosyncrasies,
and misses their company when he travels (in the past taking tape recordings
of their clacking to keep him company and to remind him of home).1 They are
his intimates and the inspiration for his art. Crucifixion of a Cockerel is thus
a deeply felt painting that substitutes for the figure of Christ an image of the
F alling into the W orld 283

F I G U R E 1 1 . 2 Aloï Pilioko, Crucifixion of a Cockerel, ca. 1964. Oil on hardboard,
25 × 20 in. (64 × 51 cm). Private collection. Image courtesy of Aloï Pilioko.
artist’s avian friend and alter ego. The image is a kind of surrogate self-portrait,
which comments ironically on the historical and ontological transformations
that underlie his modern identity as a Wallisian and a Catholic.
This chapter is about the unique artistic partnership formed in the South
Pacific between this unlikely pair from opposite sides of the world. Pilioko
was one of the first Pacific Islanders to embrace self-consciously an identity
284 P eter B runt

as a modern artist in the late 1950s and early 1960s, contemporaneously with
a handful of Māori modernists in Aotearoa New Zealand. But unlike other
modernisms in the Pacific, which were framed in national or ethnically spe-
cific terms around contested relationships to place — Māori modernism in
Aotearoa New Zealand; Aboriginal desert painting in Australia; settler mod-
ernisms in both countries; indigenous modernisms in Papua New Guinea and
Hawaii — the project of Pilioko and Michoutouchkine was profoundly global.
Both men were émigrés and travelers. Both were subjects of historical diaspo-
ras, Michoutouchkine of Russian Cossacks after the revolution, and Pilioko
of Polynesian migrants after World War II. They met “on the road,” and for
over four decades, they pursued interlinked careers of almost perpetual travel
together, Michoutouchkine as a collector, exhibitor, and promoter of Oceanic
art, and Pilioko as an “artist of the Pacific,” famous for the originality and ex-
uberance of his drawings, paintings, and tapestries.2 In making this contrast,
I do not mean to suggest that as travelers and émigrés, their project was not
entangled with questions of place, home, nation, and indigeneity; it clearly
was, although in different ways for each of them. But the nature of those en-
tanglements cannot be understood apart from the mobile and cosmopolitan
character of their lives together, and the global scope of the histories that
brought them, serendipitously, into relation with each other — a geography
that became the social canvas of their project together.
The two men met in 1959 in Nouméa, New Caledonia, on the outskirts of
the French colonial empire. Michoutouchkine was an artist who had set out
from Paris in 1953 on a traveling adventure that would take him through Italy,
Greece, and the Middle East (Palestine, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran,
Afghanistan, Pakistan), then to India for two years from where he traveled to
Nepal, Burma, Ceylon, Thailand, Vietnam, and finally, via Australia, to New
Caledonia in 1957 (forced to return to French territory by obligations to fulfill
military service). He would later call his travels in Asia his “pilgrimage to the
East,” and there was indeed something of the spiritual quest about them. He
visited Orthodox monks on Mount Athos in Greece and Buddhist monks in
the Himalayas, made “pilgrimages” to sacred sites in India, Nepal, and Burma,
and produced hundreds of sketches and paintings of temples, shrines, wor-
shippers, sacred landscapes, and Buddhist and Hindu deities.3
But there was also something much more profane about his travels. What-
ever charge he drew from the exoticism of other places and cultures, his travels
were facilitated by his role, in part, as a travel reporter, armed with a camera
and letters of introduction, and intermittently sending stories, sketches, and

photographs back to French newspapers and magazines, like the Belfortian
Sun (his hometown paper) and Paris Match.4 He was also himself “news,” the
subject of newspaper articles in the places he traveled through that rehearsed
his interesting journey and commented on his exhibitions and travel plans.
Importantly, his status as a quasi-journalist gave him entrée to French embas-
sies and diplomatic circles that in turn introduced him to local counterparts,
politicians and social elites. He used these networks to garner support for ex-
hibitions of his work — sometimes including local artists as well — improvised
in venues like embassy rooms, local art societies, educational offices, faith cen-
ters for religious diplomacy, and the like. In India, unesco and the Ministry
of Education sponsored an exhibition in New Delhi; the World Fellowship
of Buddhists and the Ceylon Society of the Arts supported an exhibition in
Ceylon (where newspaper reviewers commented favorably on his efforts
as a Westerner to capture the authentic feel of Buddhist spirituality); the
Australian ambassador attending an exhibition in Rangoon recommended
Michoutouchkine’s enterprise to the Australian Ministry of External Affairs in
Canberra — events that opened further opportunities to travel and exhibit. Pol-
iticians, ambassadors, and religious leaders — the Dalai Lama, King Mahendra
of Nepal, Prime Minister Jawaharal Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi, the
prime minister of Ceylon Bandaranaike, and many others — visited or opened
his exhibitions, signed his travel books, and posed for photographs.5
There is not space in this chapter to elaborate on these encounters or their
relationship to the politics of regional decolonization, but suffice to say they tap
a vein the artist would exploit for the rest of his life; namely, the willingness of
cultural agencies and diplomatic organs of nation states to mount exhibitions
of artworks and cultural objects that speak across their borders, demonstrate
outside perspectives on their own traditions, or expose their own communi-
ties to the artistic traditions of others. The puzzle of Michoutouchkine is that
he had no official mandate for these ventures; they originated entirely from
his own initiative for reasons that remain within the realm of the personal,
about which we can only speculate. But whatever those reasons were, his exhi-
bitionary projects found fertile (if shallow) ground among public officials and
political elites willing to host and stage them. Exploiting such relationships in
future travel became his modus operandi.
His sojourn in Nouméa, however, changed the context of his traveling ad-
venture and shifted its focus in several important ways. First, it brought him
back to French colonial territory at a time when his Frenchness represented
the dominant colonial culture. Second, it brought him near the Indigenous
286 P eter B runt

cultures of the Pacific, inciting further traveling ambitions and inaugurating
a new passion for collecting and exhibiting Indigenous artifacts as “works of
art.” Third, it brought him into a milieu of modernist practice in the French
Pacific, part of the global dispersal and local cross-pollination of artistic
modernism, in which he would become an important agent. In this context,
he established a makeshift art gallery in an old colonial villa on the Nouméa
waterfront — the first art gallery in the Pacific Islands outside large settler
states like New Zealand and Hawaii — attracting traveling artists and galva-
nizing a small heterogeneous community of local supporters: Francophone
expatriates, “caldoche,” “demis,” and migrant Islanders. And finally, traveling
to Nouméa brought him into contact with Aloï Pilioko, with whom he would
form a lifelong friendship and artistic partnership.
Pilioko was also a young man on the move, exploring the environs of the
French Pacific. In 1957, at the age of twenty-two, he left his home island of
Wallis (in French Polynesia) to work on a copra plantation on Efate, in the
New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), before moving again to find work in Nouméa,
where he came upon Michoutouchkine’s art gallery.6 His travels to that point
were part of a general outmigration of French Polynesians from small outer
islands and rural villages to urban townships, made possible by the relaxation
of colonial labor laws after World War II, one of the first moves toward de-
colonization. But Pilioko also had subjective reasons to depart: he wanted to
explore the world and expand the horizon of his experiences and opportuni-
ties, previously confined to life on Wallis. Mobility in space was counterpart to
freedom of the mind and imagination, the latitude to roam and wander having
been suppressed under colonialism. Pilioko was also a gay man escaping — or
at least taking his distance from — the domination of French Catholicism on
Wallis, where Marist priests and nuns had effectively administered the terri-
tory and controlled the strict and often punitive education system since the
early nineteenth century.7 The hegemony of colonial Catholicism on Wallis
was not interrupted until World War II (when thousands of American troops
were stationed there), and it only dissipated with emigration and decoloniza-
tion after the war. Pilioko’s exit from Wallis and eventual arrival in Nouméa
should not be interpreted, however, as a transition from “traditional” village
life to modern town. As James Clifford cautions, we need to be “wary of binary
oppositions between home and away, or a before/after progress from village
life to cosmopolitan modernity.” 8 Wallis was already modern in the sense that
modernity had transformed its way of life, though not by eradicating Indige-
nous culture, nor replacing it with something entirely in the image of France

or French Catholicism. As historians Robert Aldrich and John Connell have
pointed out, of the island territories of French Polynesia, Wallis was “paradox-
ically the most quickly and thoroughly changed by Catholicism, yet also the
one where other elements of French culture have been slowest to infiltrate.” 9
Many aspects of Indigenous culture continued to thrive on the island: Walli-
sians spoke their own language; they retained the authority of their hereditary
“kingship” and system of titled chiefs; they had their traditional cuisine and
medicinal knowledge; they still practiced art forms like house building and
mat making. Moreover, emigration was a collective and cultural movement to
neighboring regions of the French Pacific, in effect expanding the geography
of Wallisian communities in various urban satellites. Travel back and forth
was possible and commonplace. Pilioko’s movements in the 1950s retained his
connection with migrant siblings and other Wallisians. His encounter with
Michoutouchkine’s art gallery, on the other hand, exposed him to an unfamil-
iar but fascinating subculture of itinerant modernists in the milieu that I call
“island modernism.”
Modernism was a minor and marginal practice in the French Pacific in the
1950s and 1960s, but it was not absent, nor was it dissociated from the net-
works that were beginning to link contemporary artists as a global commu-
nity.10 Nouméa, Port Vila, and Papeete were host to a small but active network
of mainly French expatriate artists, a few Anglophones and other Europeans,
and a smattering of urbanized Islanders. They worked, exhibited, and social-
ized within these townships, moved between them, and made traveling forays
from them to visit other Pacific Islands. They were a loose and heterogeneous
group of deterritorialized individuals, whose distance from the institution-
alized art world of the “center” gave their activities a certain energy and
freedom. Within this network Papeete was something of a hub. The advent
of commercial air travel (the town opened a new airport in 1962) and French
investment in the postwar development of a tourist economy brought an in-
flux of expatriate professionals, contractors, administrators, entrepreneurs,
military personnel, holidaymakers, pleasure seekers, and, of course, artists.
The town hosted, for example, an abstract artists collective established in 1962
by French expatriate Frank Fay. The collective sponsored local exhibitions;
facilitated the itineraries of traveling artists moving between Paris, Tahiti,
and other islands; and published an independent journal, the Tahiti Centre
for Abstract Art, distributed to subscribers in Port Vila, Nouméa, Honolulu,
Auckland, Sydney, and Paris. The twelfth edition, published in 1965, illustrated
works by Fay, Pierre Soulages, Mark Rothko, and Larry Poons, and announced
288 P eter B runt

the group’s selection for participation in the Seventh São Paolo Biennale in
1967.11 The dominant aesthetic ideology within this milieu, not surprisingly,
was modernist primitivism. Most artists carried stereotypical ideas about
the South Pacific as the locus of idealized forms of life (simpler, easier, more
natural), counterposed to the European cities they had “escaped,” and the
source of “primitive art” traditions threatened by modernity but admired for
their authenticity and emulated (by some) in their own artistic experiments.
Michoutouchkine emulated Paul Gauguin in both his “escape” from Paris and
his depiction of self-possessed Islanders with languid brown bodies relaxing
in the sun. So did his compatriot Robert Tatin, who also left Paris after the
war, moving first to Papeete, then Nouméa, and finally Port Vila, painting
everyday scenes of Islander families in a vaguely postimpressionist style, as
they shared a meal at home or had a picnic at the bay, with modern yachts in
the background. His paintings do not elide the modern life of the Pacific but
nonetheless represent it in ways that convey the sense of communality and
leisured living, which postwar modernity allegedly threatened.12 It would be
easy to dismiss these clichés and attitudes as patently colonial, but the milieu
of Island modernism was more complicated. On one level, it exemplifies what
Daniel J. Sherman has described as “the continuing potency of cultural prim-
itivism in French society [including its Pacific Territories] during the three
decades after World War II, the period of its most intense and wide-ranging
embrace of the modern.” 13 That “potency” lay not simply in the persistence of
irrepressible myths but in their postwar resurgence, recoded by the tourist
industry, the art market, the museum and gallery world, the entertainment
and leisure industry, and the fashion world.14 Island modernism was its own
particular hotbed of cultural primitivism in all those ways. On another level,
however, the locality of the discourse in the Pacific Islands rubbed it against
the historical currents of local modernities, political decolonization, cultural
resurgence, and Indigenous modernism.
Pilioko’s encounter with Michoutouchkine’s gallery in Nouméa exposed
him to a novel and exciting artistic subculture, which stirred a desire to make
art himself in a similar manner. He was encouraged in this by Michoutouch-
kine, who later described Pilioko’s encounter with the “new world” of art
as akin to that “experienced by the first people who had the chance to dis-
cover that they could make designs with mud and clay on the walls of caves,
where our ancestors used to live.” 15 The analogy, of course, echoes modernist
primitivist ideas about the primordial sources of authentic art making, but it
infantilizes Pilioko and obscures his historical identity as a modern person.

It is true that Michoutouchkine’s art gallery and the subculture surrounding
it were unlike anything Pilioko had seen before. But I would argue that the
“scene” made sense to him; indeed it made sense of him. Most of the peo-
ple in it shared a complicated relationship to France, as he did. Most had left
“home,” as he had, and were “on the road,” as he was. They were strangers on
other people’s land, as he was, land that had been colonized by France, as his
had been. But what did “France” or “being French” mean beyond the limits
of his experience of French Catholicism on Wallis? Where did these impe-
rial dictates permitting him to emigrate and work come from? And what was
the “Pacific” these artists were so interested in, full of Islanders like himself, a
region he too was only beginning to discover? Pilioko entered that milieu of
artists to explore his modern identity — eventually to become its most original
and accomplished exponent.
His formation as a modernist, however, began not in Nouméa but on the
island of Futuna.16 Michoutouchkine’s art gallery was a short-lived affair;
he closed it a few months after it opened to take a position as the manager
of a trading store on Futuna, near Wallis. In doing this, he was continuing
his travels, now directed toward the Pacific Islands, with the added intent of
expanding his collection of Oceanic artifacts, begun during his time in New
Caledonia. Soon after he left Nouméa, the story goes, Pilioko visited him in
Futuna while en route to visit relatives in Wallis (its “sister” island). The visit
turned into a two-year sojourn together, painting, exploring, living with the
locals, and consolidating their future partnership — although its romantic
phase was brief: “only at the beginning,” according to Pilioko.17
The time spent on Futuna changed both their lives. For Michoutouchkine,
it shifted the tenor of his traveling adventure from its former aimlessness and
escapism, and he acquired a sense of purpose. He would amass a collection
of Oceanic artifacts with the idea of establishing a museum of Oceanic art
in the Pacific Islands for Pacific Islanders, on the pretext that Islanders at the
time did not (yet) recognize or appreciate the aesthetic and heritage value of
their artistic traditions. The assumption was that the latter were either dying
out or given to other purposes. Although never realized in the terms he orig-
inally imagined it, Michoutouchkine would pursue this goal in various ways
for the rest of his life.18 A corollary objective was the role such a collection
could play in his return to France, which he was already planning in the early
1960s.19 He would be the impresario of exhibitions of Oceanic art gathered
by his own hands and exhibited in France and in other countries around the
world. Pilioko, his protégé, would be an accomplice in these plans, a traveling
290 P eter B runt

F I G U R E 1 1 . 3 Aloï Pilioko, Futunian Dancers, 1961. Oil on hardboard, 15 × 48 in.
(38 × 122 cm). Collection of the artist. Image courtesy of Aloï Pilioko.
companion, a Pacific Islander who could open doors of welcome that might
otherwise remain closed, and whose work could be exhibited alongside his
own as a crucial part of these exhibitions.
For Pilioko, the sojourn in Futuna marked his immersion into the ways of
Western art making and consolidated his commitment to becoming a full-time
artist in the modern sense of the term — unprecedented for a Pacific Islander
at the time. Significantly, his “initiation” as such took place in Futuna, which is
to say, in his own neighborhood, among his own people. His first oil paintings
depicted things he knew from the familiar world of the village — plants, flow-
ers, birds, and animals. He painted them with an expressive immediacy that
reflected their central place in his imagination, and they would become part of
his permanent visual lexicon as his art developed. But he was also interested in
observing and depicting people and the cultural life of the island, exemplified
in a painting entitled Futunian Dancers (1961). In this somewhat awkward but
ambitious little painting, he attempts to convey his impression of a costumed
dance that he had witnessed during a local festival organized by the Catholic
church (figure 11.3).
In 1961 their project began in earnest. The two artists left Futuna and reset-
tled on the island of Efate, where they managed to acquire a long-term lease
on a section of customary land near Port Vila. Calling it Esnaar, the property
became their studio-home, storage center, and base of operations. Between
1961 and 1967, the artists embarked on an intensive phase of traveling, exhibit-
ing, collecting, and art making in the Pacific Islands before leaving for France
and other parts of Europe. Their opener was a debut exhibition at the Port
Vila Cultural Center, repeated in the hall of the French Institute of Oceania
in Nouméa and (in 1962) the Papeete Museum in Tahiti. Staged within the ur-
ban network of artists discussed earlier, their exhibition — especially Pilioko’s

F I G U R E 1 1 . 4 Pilioko
(second from right) with

carvings, Santa Ana,
Solomon Isles, 1963. Image
F I G U R E 1 1 . 5 Nicolaï
Michoutouchkine (left)
and Aloï Pilioko (right),
Honiara, Solomon Isles,
1963. Michoutouchkine
and Pilioko archive. Image
work — commanded attention. Local newspapers immediately recognized the

originality and cross-cultural significance of his work as an Indigenous artist
working in a Western mode in an art scene dominated by Europeans. Mean-
while, between these exhibitionary events, the artists made forays to various
Pacific archipelagoes, traveling on passenger ships, interisland ferries, cargo
boats, commercial airlines, private schooners (on which they hitched rides),
and whatever other means of transportation could be co-opted for their pur-
poses. Relying on diplomatic contacts, church networks, personal referrals,
and a sense of mission, they visited dozens of islands in the region, mounting
ad hoc exhibitions in colonial museums, town halls, school rooms, airport
lounges, churches, ship cabins, village plazas, hotel lobbies, and the like. They
292 P eter B runt

made friends with the locals, shared meals in people’s homes, toured sights of
interest, and acquired artifacts through trade, purchase, and gift. They ven-
tured into rural regions in New Caledonia; they traveled through the rest of
the Society Islands and parts of the Tuamotus; they made collecting forays into
the New Hebrides (Efate, Espiritu Santo, Malekula, Vao, Atchin, Walla, Am-
brym, and Rano.). In 1963 they ventured beyond the French Pacific, visiting the
British Solomon Islands, including outer islands like Tikopia, Santa Ana, and
Bellona (figures 11.4 and 11.5). The following year they exhibited in Adelaide,
Sydney, Canberra, Tonga, and Fiji, and mounted a major collecting expedition
to eastern New Guinea in 1964, visiting the Maprik region, the Sepik, and the
Highlands (figure 11.6). In 1965 they visited Rotuma, Samoa, Wallis, Futuna,
FIGURE 11.6 Snapshot from

Michoutouchkine’s collecting
expedition to northeastern New
Guinea (exact location unknown),
January 1964. Michoutouchkine
and Pilioko archive. Image courtesy
of Aloï Pilioko.

and every one of the Marquesan Islands (mounting exhibitions in each). In
1966, they returned to exhibit again in Papeete, Port Vila, and Nouméa.
These were audacious undertakings, driven on one level by Michoutouch-
kine’s ambitions to create an Oceanic art museum and stage his return to
France. His collecting activities, however, should not be misconstrued as some
kind of rampant pillage, though they absolutely depended on his privileged
position in island contexts at the time. The traffic in “tribal” artifacts has a long
history in the Pacific, including the enormous boom during World War II.
After the war, artifacts were readily obtainable for anyone who wanted them
badly enough to travel to their source, whether that was a village, a local fes-
tival, a marketplace, or a tribal art depot. Private dealers and collectors were
active in the region. Postwar development initiatives encouraged village cot-
tage industries to produce local “arts and crafts” for sale to tourists and retail
agents. Many anthropologists coupled fieldwork with acquiring collections.
Furthermore, the recoding of Oceanic art as “art” by early modernists, radi-
cal and culturally challenging before the war, became increasingly normative
after the war, legitimated by exhibitions like Arts of the South Seas (1946), at
the Museum of Modern Art; 40,000 Years of Modern Art: A Comparison of
Modern and Primitive (1949), at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London;
and Primitive Arts from Artists’ Studios (1967), at the Musée de l’Homme in
Paris. The universalization of art as a category across all cultures gave new
impetus to institutional expeditions, like those of the Barcelona Museum and
the Museum of Primitive Art in New York in the 1960s, and prompted the
ambitions of private collectors and entrepreneurs like Michoutouchkine.
His Pacific exhibitions were also innovative and generative. They were
staged in places where art exhibitions were generally unfamiliar, but mounted
for locals in a way that appealed to them, encouraging the revaluation of lo-
cal arts and crafts.20 They inspired local artists, like Tivoa Vise in Tonga and
Semisi Maya in Fiji, and were devoted to the cosmopolitan principle of exhib-
iting the artistic diversity of the region to itself. The exhibitions juxtaposed
traditional items (like food bowls, spoons, masks, combs, pig tusks, mats, pad-
dles, and tapa cloth) with contemporary works in Western formats by Pilioko
(a modern Pacific artist), Michoutouchkine, and a couple of other artists who
exhibited in this period with them: Frank Fay, who showed abstract sculp-
tures; and a Tahitian woodcarver, Mara, originally from the Austral Islands.
In this respect Michoutouchkine and Pilioko were “carriers” of a globalizing
impulse at work in the very concepts of “art” and “exhibitions.” And local peo-
ple demonstrated interest in the proposition. In Suva, for example, a Rotuman
294 P eter B runt

artist who visited the exhibition at the Fiji Museum in December 1964 was
taken by what he saw and invited Pilioko and Michoutouchkine to Rotuma
for the Christmas-related Fara celebrations. They went, staying with a local
family and spending the days painting and sketching local sights so that their
exhibition could reflect the place where it was staged. The show was hosted by
local nuns — the Sisters of Our Lady of Nazareth — who sent out hand-typed
invitational leaflets announcing the display of “paintings and decorative work
inspired by the people and scenes of Rotuma” by two “visiting artists” to be
staged on a single day — January 15, 1965 — at St. Michael’s Primary School. The
exhibition was a local event. Dignitaries gave speeches. The social elite dressed
up. Lots of people came, interested to see works of art by a fellow Polynesian
and the objects from the wider region in Michoutouchkine’s collection. Some
brought examples of their own handicraft to show and compare.21
For Pilioko, the sheer heterogeneity of the cultures, histories, and moder-
nities he encountered had a profound influence on how he saw his role as a
modern artist. He came increasingly to identify as an artist of the Pacific, a
painter of its “modern life,” a kind of Polynesian flaneur, at once immersed
in and witness to the region’s complex modernity. This is not to say that he
stopped being Wallisian or rejected his roots as a Wallis Islander. Rather, his
gaze as a Wallisian was turned outward in every possible direction. Observing
eyes were a signature motif in Pilioko’s work. Moreover, as a traveler in the
Pacific, he came to apprehend the historical and geographic scope of his iden-
tity as an Islander. He met ancestral Polynesian cousins who lived in tropical
villages like his own, and who had comparable languages, cultural practices,
and colonial histories. In the Society Islands and the Marquesas, he met Is-
landers who spoke French as he did; in Tonga and Samoa, he was fascinated to
see the islands and meet the people from whom Wallisians and Futunians had
historically originated; in the New Hebrides, where he had become a recent
resident, he was acquainting himself with Melanesian (and Polynesian) neigh-
bors. In all these places, he was an artist conversing with locals about artifacts
of interest to them from other parts of the Pacific. Tahitians, for example, were
interested to see tapa cloth from Tonga and Wallis because they had stopped
making it. As utopian as it may sound, Pilioko was discovering the Pacific’s
cosmopolitanism and interconnections in the act of sharing it with his friend.
The period was also one of intense artistic experimentation for Pilioko, as
he began to search for more adequate formal means to represent his encoun-
ter with the Pacific and with himself as an Island modernist. He wanted to
overcome the “dilemma” identified by Vilsoni Tausie between “traditionalism”

on the one hand and imitating Western art on the other.22 It was in Rotuma
in 1965 that he made his artistic breakthrough in the invention of what he
called his needle paintings: tapestries of colored wool embroidered on sack-
ing from copra bales. The technique came from the modernity of the Pacific,
colored wool having long been adopted by Island women and incorporated
into customary textiles. Women in Wallis and Futuna used it to decorate the
edges of woven mats, and Pilioko had witnessed similar techniques used by
women in Tonga, Samoa, Nouméa, and Rotuma (and in many other places in
the Pacific). This multilocality gave the technique a pan-Pacific resonance that
transcended any single location. The use of copra sacking was also a brilliant
solution to the matter of his artistic identity as an Island modernist, alluding
to his experience as a copra plantation laborer on Efate and signifying the cen-
trality of the copra industry to the colonial Pacific as a region embedded in a
system of world markets. It was a postcolonial masterstroke on Pilioko’s part
to turn copra sacks — metonymy of a declining colonialism — into the signa-
ture medium of his new identity as an artist in a burgeoning new system of
global art markets and world art display.
Toward the end of 1966 Michoutouchkine and Pilioko were poised to depart
for France and a new phase of their double act in the northern hemisphere.
Works from Michoutouchkine’s collection and by Pilioko were to be included
as part of a contemporary art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris
called Comparisons 67, and two specifically Oceanic exhibitions featuring the
collection and their contemporary work were lined up at the Abbey Prémon-
trés in Pont-à-Mousson and the Belfort Museum in Michoutouchkine’s home-
town. Pilioko had been awarded a scholarship by the French government to
study art in France, which he would use to train with the jewelry designer Line
Vautrin. A gallery in Palm Springs in the United States expressed interest in
exhibiting his tapestries, and other international opportunities were begin-
ning to open up. In July 1966 the Tahitian newspaper Les Nouvelles announced
a “world premiere” of Pilioko’s tapestries at the Baume, a small shop-front
gallery in Papeete.23 In many ways, the show marked the culmination of his
formative years as an artist in the Pacific and the bridge to an expanded world
of museums and exhibitions, which he and Michoutouchkine would each ex-
ploit on his own terms. A photograph of the Baume exhibition gives a sense
of the vibrancy of Pilioko’s tapestries. They are presented as decorative wall
hangings composed of patterns derived from tapa cloth designs and stylized
images of birds, fish, and figures from Christ’s Passion rendered in flowing
embroidered lines (figure 11.7). Not visible in the photograph but included
296 P eter B runt

FIGURE 11.7 Exhibition of tapestries by Aloï Pilioko, July 1966. The Baume,
Papeete. Image courtesy of Aloï Pilioko.
in the exhibition was the tapestry Tattooed Women of Bellona, Solomon Isles
(1966; plate 8), inspired by visits to the Solomon Islands and the drawings of
nineteenth-century Russian explorer and scientist Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay.
Michoutouchkine’s return to France with Pilioko was the beginning of a
new phase of their exhibitionary project in other parts of the world. They
exhibited in France, Switzerland, Sweden, and Mexico in the 1970s, as well
as returning to locations in the Pacific like Fiji, New Zealand, Port Vila,
Nouméa, and Papeete. From 1979 to 1987 they completed an extraordinary
series of exhibitions in the former Soviet Union — Michoutouchkine’s ances-
tral homeland — supported by the USSR Academy of Sciences and Ministry of
Culture and staged in primarily ethnographic museums in Moscow, Lenin-
grad, Khabarovsk, Novosibirsk, Erevan, Sardarapat, Frunze, Samarcande, and
Warsaw.24 In a sense their roles in this period were reversed, with Michou
touchkine playing host to his Polynesian friend, showing him his regional
“neighborhood,” while also discovering it for himself (figure 11.8).
Michoutouchkine and Pilioko inhabit different positions, one might say, in
the continuum — or discontinuum — between diaspora and indigeneity. In the
case of Michoutouchkine, what is striking in the overall trajectory of his trav-
els is the degree to which they were animated by what James Clifford calls a

FIGURE 11.8 Aloï Pilioko and Nicolaï Michoutouchkine in Red Square,
Moscow, 1980. From USSR photo album, Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive.
Photographs by Peter Brunt. Images courtesy of Aloï Pilioko.
kind of “homing” or “indigenous desire.” 25 Home was never a straightforward

place for the artist, born in the Cossack diaspora and opting for a life of con-
tinual travel. From 1961, however, those travels became more like looping re-
turns toward different — and equivocal — sites of “home,” rather than the free
wandering of the nomad. On the one hand, they were returns to the landscape
of what he called “old Europe”: to the home of his youth, his parents’ exile,
his Russian roots, his history.26 His tour through Russia reconnected him to
an ancestral homeland he had never seen. He saw cultures and peoples who
were both strange and strangely familiar to him, who spoke the language of
his upbringing. He met a previously unknown brother, the child of his father’s
first marriage, not heard from since his father’s exile (the message was “if you
want us to survive, do not write”), as well as a niece, the grandchild of another
of his father’s relationships.27 In multiple ways he discovered Russia and his
“Russianness,” an identity that became increasingly important to him since
298 P eter B runt

his permanent residence in Vanuatu. The irony of these returns is the role that
collecting and exhibiting Oceanic art played in bringing them about. What-
ever meaning those exhibitions had for Pacific Islanders, they were agents in
Michoutouchkine’s reconnection with his own indigeneity and its turbulent
history.
On the other hand, his travels were also returns to the Pacific and his
studio-home at Esnaar, a “home” of his own construction, made over as a
tourist destination and given to the rituals of hospitality to a constant stream
of guests and visitors. Today it is a memorabilia museum of his travels with
Pilioko, its gardens furnished with some of the remaining works from their
collection. But it is also a place overshadowed by the decolonization of the
New Hebrides during the span of his residence. Between 1961 and 1980, the
New Hebrides went from a French-British colony, where settlers and expatri-
ates could make themselves “at home,” to the independent state of Vanuatu,
in which political and cultural power shifted back to its Indigenous inhabi-
tants. After independence and the fall of the Soviet Union, Michoutouchkine
attempted to connect these disparate sites of home — to suture, as it were, the
wounds of history — by positioning himself and his exhibitions as ambassa-
dors of the new Oceania. He became a kind of cultural envoy for Vanuatu
and recast his exhibitions to represent the postcolonial nation and its Pacific
neighbors in Russia, France, and wherever else they traveled. His final effort in
this vein was perhaps the most poignant. He commissioned a bronze bust me-
morializing Vasily Mikhailovich Golovnin, the first Russian navigator to visit
the New Hebrides, who had landed in Tanna in 1809 and engaged in peaceful
exchanges with the Natives. Sculpted and cast in Russia, the bust was erected
in a formal diplomatic ceremony on the Port Vila waterfront in 2009, the year
before Michoutouchkine died, and dedicated to the memory of his refugee
parents.28
For Pilioko, by contrast, the connection to home was never existentially
broken, despite migration and travel, despite modernity and becoming a mod-
ernist. As a traveler his sense of being Wallisian went with him. He became a
“man of the world” precisely because he knew the place he came from, which
was never in question. Pilioko embodies what Clifford calls, at the other end
of the continuum, a “specifically indigenous kind of diasporism,” of “dwelling-
in-travel.” 29 Moreover, as a migrant in Vanuatu, Pilioko was actually not that
far from home and by no means a new arrival. Regional connections predating
European colonization by more than a thousand years linked the archipelago
to a history of earlier Polynesian travelers and settlers, such that parts of Van-

uatu are genetically, culturally, and linguistically Polynesian. Pilioko was not
a stranger in the region, where these historical and genealogical connections
are known and matter. He was in constant touch with family members and
other Wallisians. And Esnaar for Pilioko was a completely island place, lushly
planted, by the sea, full of roosters and other animals, hospitable, and adapted
to the business of making art.
From Pilioko’s origins in a church-and custom-dominated island colonized
by France, he came to assert a radical autonomy over his own life, choosing to
live it as an artist, an individual, a cosmopolitan, and an openly gay man. One
work that might sum up the artistic authority he acquired over his own identity
is Self-Portrait with Bracelets (1974; plate 9), a joyous, exuberant tapestry that
is the foil to Crucifixion of a Cockerel (see figure 11.2). Pilioko loves animals,
but he also loves clothes and jewelry. One reporter in the 1970s described him
as having “groovy taste in kofu, the Wallisian word for gear.” 30 Throughout
his life, he has always been a fashionable and stylish dresser, and in ways that
became increasingly flamboyant. In the tapestry he depicts himself as a figure
dancing around the letters of his name, which have been disaggregated and
“set free” to serve as decorative motifs in their own right, motifs that can be
twisted, exaggerated, colored, and curled at the artist’s whim and pleasure. The
portrait captures a lightness of being associated with camp self-display, an-
other dimension of his radical indigeneity. Pilioko may have always remained
a Wallisian, but he was a Wallisian like no other.
Notes
Epigraph: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Weightman and Doreen
Weightman (London: Jonathan Cape [1955] 1973), 16.
Many people have helped me in my research for this chapter. In particular I would
like to thank Aloï Pilioko and his nephew George Pilioko for hosting me at Esnaar
in 2013 and 2014 and allowing me access to Nicolaï’s scrapbooks and photo albums. I
have referenced these as the Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive, Port Vila. I am also
grateful to Max Shekleton in Nouméa for sharing his personal archive on the artists,
referenced as the Max Shekleton archive, Nouméa. My perspective in this chapter is my
own, but I have benefited enormously from conversations with Aloï Pilioko, Max Shek-
leton, Kirk Huffman, Chief Jerry Taki, Lissant Bolton, Elena Govor, George Pilioko,
Emmanuel Kasarhérou, Nicholas Thomas, Leonie Brunt, Mark Adams, my colleagues
in the Multiple Modernisms project, and the late Paul Gardissat. For help with trans-
lations, I thank Pauline Charrier, David Maskill, and Elena Govor; also Olga Suvorova
of Russian Keys, Wellington. Research for this chapter has been supported by grants
300 P eter B runt

from the Research and Leave Committee, Victoria University of Wellington, and the
Leverhulme Fund.
1. As he did on visits to the Soviet Union between 1979 and 1981, USSR scrapbook,
Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive, Port Vila.
2. The artists’ story is recounted in dozens of newspaper articles and magazines.
Three key sources for their general narrative are a biography of Michoutouchkine by
Marie Claude Teissier-Landgraf, The Russian from Belfort: Thirty-Seven Years’ Journey
by Painter Nicolaï Michoutouchkine in Oceania (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, Uni-
versity of the South Pacific, 1995); a short booklet on Pilioko by Michoutouchkine,
Aloï Pilioko: Artist of the Pacific (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the
South Pacific, undated [c. 1980]); and an exhibition catalog accompanying a 2007 ret-
rospective of their work at the Tjibaou Cultural Center with essays by eight authors on
various aspects of their life and work; see Gilbert Bladinières, ed., Nicolaï Michoutouch-
kine et Aloï Pilioko: 50 ans de création en Océanie, exhibition catalog (Nouméa, New
Caledonia: Éditions Madrépores, 2008). The reference to Pilioko as an “artist of the
Pacific” is from W. G. Coppell, “Pilioko, Creator of an Artistic Alliance,” Pacific Islands
Monthly, July 1976, 45.
3. On Michoutouchkine’s travels in Asia, see Teissier-Landgraf, Russian from Belfort,
1–6, 79–87; and the Asia scrapbooks, Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive, Port Vila.
4. Tessier-Landgraf, Russian from Belfort, 81.
5. The details in this account are gleaned from newspaper clippings, exhibition post-
ers, and invitations in the Asia scrapbooks, Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive, Port
Vila. For general accounts of Michoutouchkine’s travels in Asia, see Teissier-Landgraf,
Russian from Belfort; and Gilbert Bladinières, “Nicolaï Michoutouchkine, amoureux de
la couleur,” in Bladinières, Nicolaï Michoutouchkine et Aloï Pilioko, 13–23.
6. Michoutouchkine, Aloï Pilioko. This book has no attributed author but it is with-
out doubt written by Michoutouchkine.
7. See Robert Aldrich, France and the South Pacific since 1940 (Hampshire: Mac-
Millan Press, 1993); and Robert Aldrich and John Connell, France’s Overseas Frontier:
Départements et Territoires d’Outre-Mer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992)
8. James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 52.
9. Aldrich and Connell, France’s Overseas Frontier, 180.
10. There are no scholarly studies on this milieu as such. I posit it on the evidence
of documentation in the Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive. For short biographies
of artists active in the urban French Pacific, see Bernard Villechalane and Jean-Jacques
Syllebranque, Peintres de Nouvelle Caledonie du Vanuatu et des Wallis (Nouméa, New
Caledonia: Les Editions du Cagou, 1981). For a general account of the art historical
implications of coming to grips with global modernism, see Andreas Huyssen, “Geog-

raphies of Modernism in a Globalizing World,” New German Critique 34, no. 1 (winter
2007): 189–207.
11. Tahiti Centre for Abstract Art, no. 12 (1965), Michoutouchkine and Pilioko ar-
chive, Port Vila.
12. Villechalane and Syllebranque, Peintres de Nouvelle Caledonie, 97–104.
13. Daniel J. Sherman, French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945–1975 (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3.
14. Sherman, French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, especially the final chap-
ter, “Trouble in Paradise: Tourism and the Myth of Preservation in French Polynesia,”
153–90.
15. Nicolaï Michoutouchkine, interviewed by Marjorie Crocombe, “Aloi Pilioko and
Pacific Art,” Pacific Islands Monthly, March 1973, 75–76.
16. See Christian Coiffier, “Futuna, catalyseur de la symbiose des deux artistes:
Aloï Pilioko et Nicolaï Michoutouchkine,” Le Journal de la Société des Océanistes,
nos. 122/123 (2006): 173–86; Christian Coiffier, “Le séjour à Futuna 1959–1961,” in Bla-
dinières, Nicolaï Michoutouchkine et Aloï Pilioko, 79–81; and Teissier-Landgraf, Russian
from Belfort, 21–30.
17. Pilioko, personal communication, September 3, 2013.
18. Michoutouchkine first wanted to create a museum in Futuna (see Teissier-
Landgraf, Russian from Belfort, 29), then in Wallis, and finally on his property at Esnaar
near Port Vila. Architectural plans for an ambitious purpose-built structure were pre-
pared in the early 1970s in collaboration with Professor Jean Gabus, director of the
Museum of Ethnography, Neuchâtel, Switzerland, but the project was never realized.
The collection of several thousand pieces is today widely dispersed, with only a fraction
remaining in Esnaar. Since the 1960s, works were loaned to hotels, airports, and friends
in the French Pacific. Some works have been gifted to museums in Europe and Russia,
and some 350 works are on long-term loan to the Museum Pasifika in Bali, Indonesia
(which opened in 2006). But none of this constitutes the museum Michoutouchkine
originally envisioned.
19. Correspondence with the Belfort Museum, Michoutouchkine and Pilioko ar-
chive. Further, Pilioko had been awarded a scholarship in 1964 by the French govern-
ment to study art in France.
20. Exhibition brochure, Honiara, Solomon Islands, 1963, Pacific scrapbooks,
Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive, Port Vila. The brochure described Michout-
ouchkine’s collection as “a travelling private collection for the revival of local arts and
crafts and not for sale.”
21. Pacific scrapbooks, Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive, Port Vila.
22. Vilsoni Tausie, Art in the New Pacific (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies and the
South Pacific Commission, 1980), 58.
23. Les Nouvelles, July 30, 1966, Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive, Port Vila.
302 P eter B runt

24. On their exhibitions in the Soviet Union, see Ludmilla Ivanova, “Souvenirs de
Russie,” in Bladinières, Nicolaï Michoutouchkine et Aloï Pilioko, 141–42; Ludmilla Iva-
nova, “N. N. Mishutushkin and Exhibition: Ethnography and Art of Oceania,” Ethno-
graphic Quarterly, no. 2 (2010): 97–110 (English translation courtesy of Olga Suvurova,
Russian Keys, Wellington); Teissier-Landgraf, Russian from Belfort, 51–64; Ethnogra-
phy and the Art of Oceania, exhibition catalog (Moscow: Ministry of Culture of the
USSR/Academy of Science of the USSR, 1989); and numerous newspaper articles and
photographs in the Michoutouchkine and Pilioko archive, Port Vila.
25. Clifford, Returns, 76.
26. “Old Europe” is a phrase used on a postcard, dated July 28, 1978, Max Shekleton
archive, Nouméa.
27. See Teissier-Landgraf, Russian from Belfort, 51–64; and Ivanova, “N. N. Mi-
shutushkin and Exhibition,” 108.
28. Ivanova, “N. N. Mishutushkin and Exhibition,” 110.
29. Clifford, Returns, 52.
30. “A Picasso of the South Pacific,” Sydney [?] Daily Telegraph, April 26, 1973. Clip-
ping in Max Shekleton archive, Nouméa.

ELIZABETH HARNEY
12 CONSTELLATIONS
AND COORDINATES
Repositioning Postwar Paris in Stories

of African Modernisms
Deep in the bowels of the South African National Gallery, archival traces of
the life of Gerard Sekoto are now held in orderly rows of identical cabinets.
A painter of remarkable talents, Sekoto’s best-known oils and pastels focused
on both intimate and routine moments of modern life in the storied multi
racial, multireligious communities of urban South Africa that were destroyed
or forever altered by the encroachment of apartheid policies. Born in a small
mission station in the Transvaal in 1913, Sekoto studied to be a teacher at Grace
Dieu, a Diocesan college near Pietersburg. He then joined the teaching fac-
ulty at Khaiso High School in Polokwane, where, by good fortune and fate, he
befriended emerging modernists such as Nimrod Ndebele, Louis Makenna,
and, most importantly, Ernest Mancoba, a painter well ensconced in the
burgeoning New African Movement at Fort Hare University.1 Most accounts
agree that Sekoto’s connections with Mancoba afforded access to liberal white
art circles, where he received training and steady patronage while living in
Sophiatown, Johannesburg (1939–42); District Six, Cape Town (1942–45); and
Eastwood, Pretoria (1945–47).2 Mancoba’s bold relocation to Europe soon pro-
vided impetus for an adventurous and restless Sekoto to follow suit. He left his
homeland in 1947, living out an often penurious life in Paris, where he died in
1993 (figure 12.1).
Encouraged by a devoted biographer in his later years, Sekoto recounted his
F I G U R E 1 2 . 1 Gerard Sekoto, Street Scene, 1942. Oil on board, 12.9 × 17.7 in.
(33 × 45 cm). Iziko Museums of South Africa. Copyright the Gerard Sekoto

Foundation/dalro.
thoughts and experiences in a series of letters, making his story particularly

familiar to historians of African modernism.3 But even before that biographi-
cal volume appeared in 1988 (and an equally engaging biography in 2001), the
artist had shared his thoughts on art and life in the pages of Présence Africaine
(1959, 1969) and Time magazine (1949).4 In published form, these poignant
writings reveal a life spent juggling the melancholy of exile and the demands
of creativity. As a long-time resident in Paris, he became well known within
the itinerant communities of African expatriates, many of whom frequented
his home or joined him in the bars and cafés of Saint Germain.5 Though absent
from South Africa for most of his life, by the time of his death, the University
of the Witwatersrand had awarded Sekoto an honorary degree (in 1989), and
within a decade, he had been given no fewer than three retrospectives, the
latest occurring in spring 2014.6
In the hushed and musty silence of a museum storeroom in Cape Town,
C onstellations and C oordinates 305

however, the sharp contours of this life are blurred, the weight of his absence
made most palpable in the heft of a battered suitcase, placed high atop one
of the cabinets. Numerous accounts from those close to the artist cited the
centrality of this suitcase in his quotidian life. For years, he stashed many a
receipt, review, sheet of music, snapshot, letter, or sketch within it.7 After he
died, it was found beneath his bed. Perhaps no greater symbol of mobility
exists in our modern age of migrations. An object replete with spiritual and
material resonance, a piece of luggage is a symbol “either of utopian new be-
ginnings or of endings deemed tragic,” a temporary, make-do place of belong-
ing and an embodiment of unfulfilled homecomings.8 Irit Rogoff has argued
that the “suitcase is seen as the moment of rupture, the moment the subject is
torn out of the web of interconnectedness that contained him or her through
an invisible net of belonging.” 9 For Sekoto, it marked the literal and emotional
journey outward to a life of exile, where he broke free of the strictures that
constrained his artistry and circumscribed his modernity.10
Sekoto’s recollections bear a telling resemblance to those of another pio-
neering African modernist, Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian, a painter of
Armenian-Ethiopian parentage who spent over a decade in Paris in the late
1950s and early 1960s. In contrast to Sekoto, Boghossian arrived with funding,
knowledge of French, and a ready-made community of Armenians that shel-
tered him in the city. After a brief sojourn in London, he chose Paris to attend
classes at the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts and La Grande Chaumière
(1957–66). Over his many years of practice, he testified to the critical role his
time in Paris played in the shaping of his work.11 More precisely, it was his
introduction to the inner circles and salons of black modernism and politics,
including acquaintance with Sekoto, that proved most educational. These two
artists surely knew one another in Paris, as evidenced by a photo held within
Sekoto’s archive (figure 12.2) and in interviews with the younger Boghossian,
who referred to the senior South African as the “elder.” But the nature of this
relationship, and of those forged among many other artists in postwar Paris
from former colonies within the crumbling French empire and beyond, has
yet to be adequately examined.12
In this chapter I look at the overlapping experiences of these two modern-
ists, both residents in Paris in the immediate postwar era and subsequently
claimed as pioneering modernists in new African nations, from which they
had lived in exile for most of their lives. Through the lens of two overlapping
yet divergent practices, I ask fundamental questions about how we write the
histories of the circuitous and constellated relations that characterized mo-
306 E lizabeth H arney

F I G U R E 1 2 . 2 Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian (left) and Gerard Sekoto (right)
in a Parisian café, 1965–1967. Photographer unknown. Iziko Museums of South

Africa. Copyright the Gerard Sekoto Foundation.
dernity at mid-twentieth century. I build on well-established conversations

about the “transmodernity” of black Paris in the preceding interwar years,
when black students, artists, performers, and writers from the continent,
the Caribbean, and America advanced counterdiscursive models of mod-
ernist subjectivity in response to the established European epistemes of “the
Other.” 13 The artistry of these two painters speaks to the pleasures and pains of
exile, so poignantly detailed by Edward Said as a condition that is “strangely
compelling to think about but terrible to experience.” 14 While each arrived
in Paris and stayed for various reasons, displacement and migrancy brought
forth “awareness” and a “plurality of vision” that enabled them to view the
world “contrapuntally.” 15 A tight focus on these two pioneers is intentionally

“biographical,” highlighting enunciation and place making as radical, antico-
lonial, and antiprimitivist efforts. Though their work is viewed as “outmoded”
in some art historical quarters, documenting the lives of these modernists is a
critical step in understanding the complex, contradictory, and contested con-
stitution of colonial modernity and its aftermath.
Rather than assuming a singular modernity bracketed or tempered by a set
of alternative modernities, this chapter envisions a multisited, entangled set of
coordinates, wrought by the unevenness of imperial capital and characterized
by the possibilities of cosmopolitanism.16 It seeks to recognize different and
often overlapping registers of belonging — to nation, race, or ethnicity; ideo-
logical or political space; generation or profession; cosmopolitan, diasporic,
or exilic communities. This focus might encourage further reflection on how
the repatriation of Sekoto’s archive from France to South Africa has shaped
contemporary tellings of South Africa’s modernism (and those of his moder-
nity and indigeneity).17 What does it mean to repatriate his legacy to a national
space that he lived away from for most of his life, and that did not recognize
him as a citizen, yet one that figured large in his imagination? How does the
historical narrative change when we view Skunder Boghossian’s works from
Addis Ababa circa 1960 rather than or in addition to the lens provided by
postwar African American or Parisian arenas?
Within the growing scholarship on nationalist and postcolonial modern-
isms, has the revaluation of these modernists’ legacies threatened to erase
their contributions to cosmopolitan modernist networks in postwar Paris,
London, or Dakar? Perhaps we could reimagine or resituate Sekoto as a great
observer of postwar French culture, “subjecting Paris to the gaze and the
commentary of the Black African outsider,” as writers in the literary genre of
“Parisianism,” or “migritude fiction,” chose to do, delineating the complicated
site of black modernity within the Hexagon.18 Perhaps, through his sketches,
he was able to reverse the colonial gaze, critique a deeply flawed French mo-
dernity, and, at the same time, clear a space for himself within an imaginable
decolonial humanism.19
It has been more than thirty years since Serge Guilbaut wrote his now fa-
mous work on How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1985).20 With the
passage of time, the intrigues of international Cold War politics may have
shifted, but the general assessment of the decline of artistic practice in Paris
in the wake of the war’s horrors and the rise of American power has been
slow to change. Even the growing art historical scholarship in response to his
writings, with its revised attention to nouveau réalisme, lettrism, art brut, the

Situationist International, and the visual cultures around 1968, has repeatedly
failed to assert a more textured and subtle view of the cosmopolitan realities
in which their subjects operated.21 Indeed, despite many years of postcolo-
nial and postmodernist theoretical challenges, the scholarship, market, and
popular understandings of postwar European art are only just beginning to
register the presence and intellectual labors of these artists. Achille Mbembe’s
efforts to recharacterize postwar French history as inherently transnational,
and Hannah Feldman’s masterful volume From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing
Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962 (2014), in which she argues that
postwar culture should be approached “as equally rooted in the experiences of
the colonies as it is in those of the metropole,” have gone some way in rectify-
ing this lacuna.22
In Okwui Enwezor’s groundbreaking exhibition The Short Century (2001),
he encouraged his audiences to reassess the influence of the Algerian rev-
olution on the tenor of later liberation movements, civil rights activism,
anti-Vietnam protests, and student strikes. Here, in the exhibitionary world
detailed by Enwezor, Africa and its migrants are not marginalized but, rather,
central to twentieth-century intellectual and political history.23 Similarly,
Paul Gilroy has recently insisted that we need to recognize the long-standing
“pockets of South in the West” to better understand the valences of contempo-
rary diaspora.24 Yet, even Gilroy’s paradigm shift fails to make sufficient room
for the connective tissues of the postwar moment that sees artists moving be-
tween and across hitherto impenetrable divisions of empire. Historian Tony
Ballantyne’s work on the social formation of the British Empire is helpful here
in its highlighting of the circulation of ideas and individuals through modes of
“horizontal mobility.” 25 By identifying forms of movement and cultural traffic
that linked colonies within the “periphery,” he breaks the multiple moderni-
ties and postcolonial models with their center-periphery axes. While he envi-
sions this lateral movement as occurring within the arc of the British Empire,
it is becoming increasingly apparent that a closer examination of connections
in places like postwar Paris, Mexico City, Havana, or Moscow will show im-
perial borders to be porous and movements to be categorically inter-and
transnational as well as tricontinental.26 A peripatetic artist such as Skunder
Boghossian, for example, was present and active in more than one modernist
hotspot, participating in the Negritude circles of Paris, then contributing to
the black arts movement in Atlanta and Chicago, while looking toward phil-
osophical and formal practices emanating from Latin America. He was what
theorist Nestor Canclini might call a modernist “cross-pollinator.” 27

A South African in Paris
Before leaving South Africa, Sekoto harbored ambitious plans for a life of
travel, later noting, “I had worked out a programme but kept it to myself since
I was not sure what lay ahead. My intention was to work for a couple of years,
make a rapid tour of Europe and return to Paris to digest the tour. Later, I
wanted to make a slower tour through certain African countries and then
come back again to France to make a synthesis of my personal feelings and
then finally settle in one part of Africa.” 28 In 1983, after close to forty years of
life in Paris, he recalled the details of his early days in Europe, writing,
When I was in London, I stayed in a youth hostel with a piano and I

used to amuse myself with it. An Indonesian man said “look, if you
are going to Paris, and it does not matter that you are a painter, I have
a friend who owns a restaurant. I will give you his address and you go
and see him. . . . And that is where I struck on the job of piano player.
. . . It was easy at the time. . . . [I]t was then that a Martiniquan chap,
a medical student, advised me to come and live in the Saint Michel
area. . . . I wandered by chance into a club on rue Jacob with a Jamaican
photographer friend of mine — they had a piano and I started playing, I
landed another job.29
What is remarkable about this anecdote is not the easy manner in which a
black painter from South Africa slips into employment as a jazz pianist on the
Left Bank of Paris, but the extent to which his story of exile within a highly
cosmopolitan, postwar milieu is not unique. Here, in one short paragraph,
modernity’s cross-cultural character and networked nature is on display.
While we do not know the identities of the Jamaican photographer, the Indo-
nesian man, or the Martiniquan student, their overlapping worlds remind us
to pay close attention to what Eric Wolf called the “bundles of relationships”
at the heart of history.30
Gerard Sekoto and Skunder Boghossian were not the only ones to make
their way to Europe. They soon found companionship with Brazilian Wilson
Tiberio, Ivoirian Christian Lattier, Senegalese Papa Ibra Tall and Iba Ndiaye,
and many others from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and the Near East,
all of whom immigrated to the city of light, supported by a mix of state and
private sponsorship, and driven by ambition or obligation, curiosity or wan-
derlust. They shared sidewalk cafés, drawing studios, dance clubs and gallery
spaces with African American artists like Herbert Gentry, Ed Clark, Harold

Cousins, and Beauford Delaney, whose better-known presence abroad was
sponsored by the GI Bill or supported by white American philanthropy.31
Some salons are well known to have nurtured cross-cultural exchanges in
this critical era of decolonizing modernity — those of Madame Rousseau, an
avid collector of “tribal” materials, who gathered surrealists and colonial art-
ists alike; of the Nardal sisters from Martinique, who hosted African, Carib-
bean, African American, and Middle Eastern writers; of André Breton, whose
weekly café meetings attracted European, Caribbean, and Latin American
modernists; and of Ossip Zadkine’s atelier, held within the walls of La Grande
Chaumière, which was a gathering point for African, Latin American, Na-
tive American, and African American artists — the last group having met him
during his stay over the war years at the Art Students League in New York.32
As their biographies attest, all these artists had linkages (some solid, some
tenuous) with a plurality of avant-gardist and political and cultural activist
circles; most frequented the École des Beaux Arts, or less conventional art
schools such as Académie Julien or La Grande Chaumière. The latter school
poses a fascinating set of possibilities for the study of overlapping, intersect-
ing, and mutually synthesizing modernist practices, as it hosted so many so-
journing artists in its daily live-model open-sketching classes. Anyone with
a few centimes could attend. This practice of rotating and undocumented at-
tendance, of course, makes tracing the threads of relationships formed within
its halls opaque and, therefore, all the more intriguing. As historian Arlette
Farge observed more generally of the archive, “The physical pleasure of the
rediscovered trace is followed by the doubt mixed with impotence caused by
not knowing what to do with it.” 33
Yet reexamining this postwar archive, reimagining Paris as a deeply trans
national space of shared desires, allows one to position these artists as cocre-
ators of a modernism that was consciously international, albeit locally framed
within their diasporic networks. They developed their practices in the shadow
of the Algerian revolution, within the psychic and political struggles of de-
colonization and “third-worldism,” and against the backdrop of postwar so-
ciocultural revolutions and developing Cold War politics. These sociopolitical
factors demanded consideration of art’s potential for action and efficacy.34
Poignant accounts of life in immediate postwar Paris left by expatriates and
exiles such as James Baldwin and Es’kia Mphahlele, and later by photogra-
pher Gordon Parks, paint a picture of a rough yet invigorating place, where a
shared sense of survival (along the breadlines or in the unheated flats) fostered
a certain openness toward cosmopolitanism.35 Sekoto notes, “In the city of

Paris, everybody has the right to make himself at home, without being ordered
about or told what to do. The individual is not encircled by barbed wire, which
might attract the attention of the intruder. It is this unguarded ‘togetherness’
which has always drawn people who desire personal freedom. The presence of
this wisdom has thus strengthened my self-confidence and increased my re-
spect for this great metropolis, which I now consider and feel to be my second
home after Africa.” 36 Skunder Boghossian recounts a similar response to his
decade in Paris: “At the time, Paris was a cultural centre, a place where cultures
intersected. It was a part of one’s normal growth to go there to get caught in
these currents, and they would in turn bring you to other currents, and so on.
One could make out a definition for oneself, the world, and the universe right
there in Paris. You had the brightest minds from Africa and the diaspora at the
time. There they would come together and talk for the first time about their
various experiences.” 37
Thus, while this chapter tells the story of just two men making their way
through the circuitry of modernity, it also, inevitably, provides glimpses into
histories big and small, central and peripheral, interconnected and overlap-
ping. Indeed, this story enables us to question how empire figured within the
character of postwar European artistic practices and philosophical debate
(even as a denial or a willful forgetting) and stands in contradistinction to the
received narratives of postwar art history. But, I argue, the associations that
these exiled and “colonial” artists made with one another within the spaces of
diaspora and the orbit of emergent midcentury nationalisms are as relevant to
our reframing of modernity as any rewrite of European modernism.
The Coordinates of Pan-Africanism and Transmodernity

Soon after their arrivals in Paris, both Gerard Sekoto, in 1947, and Alexander
Boghossian, in 1957, were swept into the circles of black intellectuals debating
decolonization, pan-Africanism, and cultural revaluation. Sekoto, like many
other young artists at the time, attended the first and second Negro Artists and
Writers congresses, held in Paris (1956) and in Rome (1959), while Skunder
made it to the second. These critical events, organized by Alioune Diop,
founder of the cultural journal Présence Africaine, gathered a formidable ar-
ray of intellectuals from the black Atlantic to “create the inventory of black
cultures and to analyze the responsibilities of western culture in colonization
and racism.” 38
Pablo Picasso was asked to design the poster for the first conference in 1956.

F I G U R E 1 2 . 3 Gerard
Sekoto, poster for the Second

Conference of Negro Writers
and Artists, Rome, 1959. Iziko
Museums of South Africa.
Copyright the Gerard Sekoto
Foundation/dalro.
As self-consciousness around modern international blackness continued to

shift, however, at the end of the decade, the organizers asked Gerard Sekoto
to design the advertisement for the second gathering in Rome (figure 12.3). At
that conference, he also delivered a thoughtful testimony on the plight of the
South African modern artist. In language that drew on pan-Africanist prec-
edents, he told his audience, “While the South African Negro artist is being
exposed from day to day to scenes that have taught him to close his eyes and
hide his tears . . . [i]n art, the colour line is a lie, and could be a crime when it
is imposed upon the minds of human beings.” 39 Christine Eyene has asserted,
“To place Sekoto’s art within the time frame of, and in relation to, Negritude is
important in grounding the relevance of his oeuvre within a French and pan-
African narrative. But it also exposes it to the criticism and contradictions
that affected and characterised the Negritude movement.” 40 Her attempt to
recuperate his legacy within a broader pan-African milieu is tinged with dis-
appointment as she grapples with Sekoto’s seemingly uncritical stance. Much
has been written on the limited criticality and self-primitivizing of Negritude’s
proponents, by contemporaries and more recent critics, but surely the most

interesting questions she can now ask have to do with how Sekoto’s growing
exposure to black internationalism, engagements in pancolonial circles, and
Negritude discourse manifested themselves in his work.41
As is well known, in 1966 Sekoto ended his exile from Africa, traveling with
his friend, Brazilian painter and activist Wilson Tiberio, to Senegal for the Pre-
mier Festival mondial des arts nègres, an occasion positioned as the successor
to the congresses in Europe and now seen as a key antecedent to the multiple
biennials on the continent today. Sekoto was invited at the request of president
Léopold Sédar Senghor (in part through the connections the artist had made
with Senghor’s nephew in Paris), and his presence was documented in the lo-
cal press.42 Taken by the colors and rhythms of Senegalese life, particularly in
the southern rural region of Casamance, Sekoto stayed on after the festivities,
as a guest of the president. Notes from the period indicate that he relished the
experience of living among blacks who moved about freely in their daily lives
and who, after recent struggles of decolonization, could dream of postcolo-
nial futures. Yet because of the prevalence of Islam and the unfamiliar local
customs and languages (not much French was spoken in rural areas), Sekoto
remained an outsider, sketching from the sidelines, as he had often felt himself
to be within his adopted home of Paris.
The copious sketches Sekoto made in the Casamance region suggest a con-
tinuing reliance on the medium of drawing, whose succinctness and speed
allowed him to chronicle the everyday (figure 12.4). Until quite recently, critics
opted to see the works of his Senegalese sojourn, if they have considered them
at all, as romanticized, perhaps misguided mediations of an authentic Africa
rather than as insightful observations of a modern milieu.43
This period represents perhaps the most understudied part of the migrant
nature of Sekoto’s work. Both the artist and Senghor characterized his output
from this period as a “return to sources,” if not quite a return home.44 In sev-
eral detailed sketches, Sekoto seems to synthesize his multisited modernist
experiences. The masquerades, whose choreography and composition he had
studied, coexist with or are superimposed over urbane Toucouleur market
women and the classical bridges that span the Seine (figure 12.5). So, like other
aesthetic practices emerging out of the discursive space of Negritude, Sekoto’s
sketches are consciously hybrid — presenting a whimsical, reimagined heri-
tage and a compelling look at the modes of Senegalese modernity. Multiple
accounts have read the sheer volume of Sekoto’s sketches in the village squares
of Senegal and in local Parisian bars and jazz clubs as evidence of an unfo-
cused mind, a weakening of purpose, and a lack of grand artistic gesture — pen

F I G U R E 1 2 . 4 Gerard Sekoto, Senegalese Women, 1966. Gouache on paper,
14 × 22 in. (36 × 55 cm). Iziko Museums of South Africa. Copyright the Gerard
Sekoto Foundation/dalro.
or pencil replaces the brush, Left Bank bohemia supplants the social realism
of the black townships.45 While South Africa continued to be a central muse in
Sekoto’s choice of subject matter, particularly in the poignant watercolor series
Memories of Sharpeville (1960; figure 12.6) and in his many writings, the recent
publication and exhibition of a wider array of his work has made it clear that
local Parisian life consumed much of his attention. Even in his days in South
Africa, sketching had always been a part of his process. In his letters he noted,
Although much of the time I would feel scared to enter too deep into
the most dangerous seeming hide-outs of District Six, I hovered within
arm’s length, observing and making sketches in a very acrobatic style.
This meant making quick sketches in such a manner that an observer
would imagine I was noting down some forgotten names of articles
I needed to buy or notes I had to attend to. But shortly I would go to
the studio to work upon these sketches on pieces of paper, which were
reminders to me.46
This early and repeated reliance on sketching must also be attributed to ques-
tions of safety and access. A black man remaining in one spot, deeply con-

F I G U R E 1 2 . 5 Gerard Sekoto, Untitled, 1969. Drawing in ink, 4.7 × 7 in.
(12 × 18 cm). Iziko Museums of South Africa. Copyright the Gerard Sekoto
Foundation/dalro.
templating his surroundings, was a prime suspect for security forces. He had
to show correct papers even to traverse sections of his city for inspiration, let
alone in pursuit of materials or markets. And by Sekoto’s account, the preva-
lence of sketching during his Parisian days was intentional. “Throughout all
these years I have been in a lot of places drawing street-scenes, café-scenes,
metro-scenes, market-scenes and dance-scenes but I am going to revise all
these in time. At first, I deliberately economized my Johannesburg and District
Six bright colours and applied them later after having thoroughly observed my
new surroundings and being in better command of construction.” 47
The existing literature on Sekoto’s long career has favored a narrative arc
that moves from mastery of material, technique, and vision in his early years
in South Africa to waning talent and stagnation caused by hardship, heart-
break, and isolation in his Paris years, yet key interventions by friends and
colleagues, such as Christine Eyene, George Hallett, Es’kia Mphahlele, and
Noel Chanbanyi Manganyi, focus on his enduring humanity, his critical en-
gagements with other exiles, and his commanding painting practices.48 Repo-
sitioning our reading of postwar France (as Hannah Feldman might have it)
as a waning colonial power still at war, and Paris as a colonial space in which
“the specter of ‘empire’ guided the self-identification of its residents as well

F I G U R E 1 2 . 6 Gerard Sekoto, Memories of Sharpeville, 1960. Watercolor on
paper, 12 × 19.3 in. (30.5 × 49 cm). Iziko Museums of South Africa. Copyright the
Gerard Sekoto Foundation/dalro.
as their social and political interactions,” may enable us to envision Sekoto’s

repeated engagement and fascination with his adopted capital’s quotidian life
as an agency “embedded in the act of occupying and utilizing city spaces.” 49
“Falling under the Influence” — Surrealism and the Politics

of Postwar Blackness
Barely out of his teenage years, the Ethiopian painter Alexander “Skunder”
Boghossian, son of a well-connected Armenian family in Addis Ababa, re-
ceived a generous bursary from Emperor Haile Selassie to study in London
at St. Martin’s School of Art and the Central School of Art (1955–57). Though
he remained there only briefly before heading to Paris, he often credited his
short time in these formal academies as critical to finding “a visual grammar
to apply to his heritage.” 50 In particular, his well-developed drawing skills re-
mained central to his imagining of compositional space. The young painter
enjoyed a successful solo exhibition at Galerie Lambert in 1964. But despite
early acclaim and wide renown (his works were first collected by the Musée de
l’art moderne in 1963 and the Museum of Modern Art soon thereafter), critical
understanding of the place of his work within broader histories of modernism
remains nascent and speculative.51

Boghossian’s story is typical of a generation of Ethiopians educated largely
abroad through government bursaries during the 1950s and repatriated to
form the backbone of Selassie’s civil service and creative class.52 Son of a close-
knit immigrant community of professionals, who were multilingual, educated,
and cosmopolitan, he was also privy to the spirituality and artisanship of the
Orthodox Armenian and Ethiopian churches.53 Skunder’s father was a mem-
ber of the Imperial Guard who fought against and was later imprisoned by the
Italians for much of the artist’s early childhood. His father’s imprisonment left
an indelible antiimperialist mark on the young boy.
Boghossian’s early art training in Ethiopia is not unlike that of others in
early to mid-twentieth-century colonial environments.54 He found a mentor
first in Stanlislaus Chocknajki, a Polish-Canadian art historian and amateur
watercolorist who became a key figure in the workings of the local art world,
and later in French-Canadian writer and filmmaker Pierre Goubet, who
provided Boghossian with access to a library of reproductions of European
modernist works.55
Skunder moved to Paris in 1957 and spent almost a decade there, studying,
networking, and teaching at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where
he worked under the maître d’atelier surrealist, Henri Goetz.56 Though he re-
turned to Addis Ababa for a mere three years to teach in the art academy and
to exhibit in embassies and fledgling galleries before departing permanently
for the United States, Boghossian’s influence on the art scene in Addis Ababa
was profound. He is still remembered as one of the three pioneering Ethiopian
modernists (the other two were Aferwerk Tekle and Gebre Kristos Desta).57 As
one critic argued, “Skunder’s work came to be regarded not as an individual’s
creation, but as simply Ethiopian.” 58
Skunder’s time in Paris in the company of Madame Rousseau and Negritude
circles (which included prominent anthropologists and exponents of existen-
tialism and leftist politics) encouraged him to explore the riches of African
heritage. Unsurprisingly, the visual language in which he chose to describe
this awakening drew from vanguardist and reigning ethnographic theories
of mentalité primitive, which emphasized the mystical, the irrational, and the
fetishistic. He remembered,
Most important (in Paris) I discovered two things: first African Art
and then Paul Klee. For a year I made daily visits to the African section
of the Musée de l’Homme, studying the masks, the totems, and fetish
dolls. This wasn’t a study of forms for me, I was discovering African

Art, apart from my Ethiopian tradition; and all that I absorbed became
part of me as well as my painting. After this, came Klee. In his work, I
found everything — magic, poetry, humour, mysticism. His language of
significant signs spoke to me, and I began to see a range of possibilities
in a line and how much it could convey. In his masks, I also saw a soul in
close communication with the roots of Africa.59
Under the circumstances of colonial modernity, artists from outside Europe

often appraised local aesthetic forms, materials, or genres through the medi-
ation of modernist primitivism. Skunder’s reflections recall those of Nigerian
modernist Uche Okeke, with his concerted efforts to reimagine local available
forms to suit an antiprimitivist and anticolonial politics needed for the mo-
ment of decolonization and nation building.60 They also bring to mind the
musings of George Morrison or Bill Reid, both of whom, under very different
circumstances, harnessed silenced or reenvisioned Indigenous heritage for
their own modernist practices.61
For Boghossian and Sekoto, these reflections were refracted through the
lens of black Paris and the distinctive European bundling of ethnography and
vanguardism. As Skunder stayed in Paris, he increasingly aligned himself with
the politics and practices of surrealism, drawn particularly to its Caribbean
translations in the works of Léon Damas, Etienne Léro, Aimé Césaire, and
Wifredo Lam.62 While the radical anticolonialism and antiracism of Euro-
pean surrealists like Breton, who had famously co-organized, with the Anti-
Imperialist League, the Truth about the Colonies exhibition in 1931 and, thirty
years later, drafted the Manifeste des 121 (1960) to protest the treatment of
Algerians by the French during the war, surrealism in the hands of black
modernists could act as a weapon of the culturally dispossessed. The political
freedoms brought into play through surrealist fragmentation, imaginative
reassembling mixed with humanist sentiment spoke strongly to Boghossian,
whose own sense of belonging to pan-African circles rested on a dissection
and reassertion of multiple measures of heritage.
As one critic argued, “Skunder reinterprets the aesthetic function with a
happy mingling of antiquity and modernity, using modern materials (acrylic,
gouache, spray paint, etc.) upon surfaces employed by his ancestors (animal
skin).” 63 Notably, critics see Boghossian’s modern imagery not as a diminish-
ment of authentic traditions but rather as a modern play on ancient heritage.
“Antiquity” used here implies a knowable and venerable history of artistic
practice, while the use of the term “tradition” in the literature refers primarily

F I G U R E 1 2 . 7 Skunder Boghossian, Spring Scrolls, 1983–1984. Acrylic on canvas,
50.3 × 71.7 in. (128 × 182.2 cm). Photograph by Franko Khoury. National Museum

of African Art, Smithsonian Institution. Museum purchase, 9-18-1.
to ahistorical practices. The reception of Boghossian’s canvases skirts, to some

extent, the labels of “primitive” and “tribal” — this unique positioning, coupled
with the lack of colonial rule in Ethiopian modern history, afforded him a
place apart.
Some authors have described Boghossian’s surrealist proclivity as an in-
stance of “falling under the influence” of the movement, while others suggest
that it aligned “naturally” with the mystical aesthetics inherent in Ethiopian
magical scrolls, to which the young painter might be linked through a primor-
dial relationship (figure 12.7).64 For example, in an early review of his works
in America, critic Tritobia Benjamin argued that Skunder “drank from the
succulent substance of creativity. . . . [T]he spirits of his ancestors embraced
him and formed the basis of an art, significant and enriching, imbued with
power.” 65 In Boghossian’s painted hide scrolls, which seem to be arrested at the
moment of unfurling, as if about to offer guidance or solace, one can glimpse
iconographic and formal references to long-established visual traditions (fig-
ure 12.8). And yet, according to friend and critic Solomon Deressa, the artist’s
concerted investigation of these forms probably took place not in Addis, but in
the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.66

FIGURE 12.8 Skunder Boghossian, Ju ju’s Wedding, 1964. Tempera and metallic
paint on cut and torn cardboard, 21 × 20 in. (53.5 × 50.8 cm). The Museum of
Modern Art, New York. Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund.
Perhaps Boghossian furthered his relationship to surrealism through a

friendship with Max Ernst and his work under Henri Goetz. Skunder’s en-
gagement with the ideas of this movement is best illustrated by his magnifi-
cent and densely crafted work Night Flight of Dread and Delight (1972), where
fantastical cosmic spirits seem to hover within a crystalline structure between

F I G U R E 1 2 . 9 Skunder Boghossian, Night Flight of Dread and Delight, 1964. Oil
on canvas with collage, 56.6 × 62.6 in. (143.7 × 159 cm). North Carolina Museum
of Art, Raleigh. Purchased with funds from the North Carolina State Art Society,
Robert F. Phifer Bequest.
our world and theirs (figure 12.9). Like many of his masterpieces, the charac-
ters in this work reside only temporarily in the spaces they inhabit and are in
danger of shifting or reforming before our eyes. Other works, such as Time
Cycle III (1981), are influenced by ritual objects made in bark that Skunder
encountered during one of his west African sojourns (plate 10). In Time Cycle
III, the artist seems intent on destabilizing narrative time, presenting a cosmic
arena that questions the permanence of our memories and our hold on time’s
passing.
Though Boghossian’s work is often compared to that of Afro-Cuban painter
Wifredo Lam, there are conflicting accounts as to whether the two ever met.
Certainly, however, they shared a number of friends within the Parisian art
world, notably André Breton, Amedeo Modigliani, and André Masson. Bog-
hossian’s recollection of his stirring encounter with a small piece by Lam,

exhibited in the window of a London gallery, reads as a classic modernist
epiphany.67 He wrote,
In passing I just happened to look in a small gallery. I saw a drawing

in the window that actually gave me a bodily shock. So impressed by
the dramatic play of forces and the supernatural quality in the work,
I really couldn’t move. I don’t know how long I stood there. That was
Lam. When I finally went inside, I was startled again by Matta. In his
paintings there was cosmic coordination in space and time and his
metallic rhythms vibrated in such a way that the canvases seemed to
move. The effect of all this was confusion about my work but eventually
that confusion became a suggestion.68
In Boghossian’s account of his encounter with Lam’s work, we have further

evidence of the productive and generative possibilities brought forth by the
cross-pollination of visual forms and mythologies available to him as a mod-
ernist in Europe at midcentury through the works of other sojourning artists,
refracting experiences of oppression and resistance.
For artists from areas long relegated by art history to be “beyond the pale”
of the modern, “influence” is read as a mark of “derivativeness” and therefore
a stain their proponents must continue to expunge.69 The kind of encounter
Boghossian describes, in which an artiste-flâneur experiences both intellec-
tual and somatic effects in front of a work of art produced by another modern-
ist from outside the metropole, goes some way toward rescuing his work from
this assumption.70 As Benjamin argued in her early review of his works for an
American audience, “His stay abroad did not produce a mime of foreign mod-
els; instead, those trends of modern art were digested, massaged, and molded
into his own style.” 71
In a similar vein, Solomon Deressa labored to explain comparisons between
Boghossian’s and Paul Klee’s oeuvre, writing, “It is strange that this erroneous
tracing of an artistic family tree should have proceeded, if not with Skunder’s
active encouragement, definitely with his acquiescence. Nor is this the first
time that Skunder has let stand a misreading of the pedigree of his work. It is
possible that he reads all comments on his work as irrelevant. It is also possible
that he feels out of his element in the realm of words.” 72 At pains to explain
the manner in which the artist contributes to narration of his place in mod-
ernism, Deressa finally argues on grounds of coincidence, noting that both
modernists appear to be “tapping from the same well but with very differ-
ent motivations.” 73 In such instances, one is struck by the richness contained

within the web of modernity. We know, for instance, that Boghossian read
Klee’s published journal, and we also know that Klee credited his time in Tuni-
sia as the moment that pushed him toward true abstraction. Under the weight
of entangled French primitivist and orientalist imaginaries, a North African
sojourn could “stand in” for other parts of the continent. On a purely formal
level, Klee’s interest in language and inscription, music and notation, design
and detail seemed to parallel the aesthetic pursuits of the Ethiopian painter.
During this fruitful decade in Paris, Skunder also made important links
to America, befriending Merton Simpson, the well-known African Ameri-
can painter, collector, and gallerist.74 Through overlapping expatriate circles,
which often came together in Parisian jazz clubs, Boghossian arrived with
introductions to communities of African American modernists. After a mere
three years in his post in the School of Fine Arts in Addis, in the late-1960s he
moved to Atlanta, a site that the artist remembered in his later writings as the
Paris of African American culture.75 He recalled, “Atlanta was very transitional
period for me. It allowed for a continuation of my own efforts in finding my
heritage. I was in another part of the world among African people who were
experiencing self-discovery.” 76
In America, Skunder’s developing practice intersected and engaged with
the Chicago AfriCOBRA movement. Eventually, his interactions with ab-
stractionist Jeff Donaldson led him to a long-term post at Howard Univer-
sity. When Ethiopia underwent its socialist revolution, followed by the Red
Terror, Skunder’s expatriate meanderings became those of a permanent exile.
At Howard University and in his Atlanta circles, he was considered “a real
brother” — hailing from a place never colonized, with a strong history of black
monarchy and Christianity.77 From that time, his works have been received
broadly and largely uncritically as visions of lost heritage and the mysteries
of the spirit. From his base in Washington, D.C., Skunder continued to cir-
culate within a pan-African sphere, making numerous long trips to Nigeria
and parts of central Africa, from which he drew material and spiritual and
visual inspiration. And though the artist had first become acquainted with
Latin American arts and artists in Paris and London, a subsequent life of
multiple migrations aided him in deepening the linkages he envisioned be-
tween the shared histories of capitalist oppression and cultural struggle that
informed their arts. Contextualizing his works within a larger African Ameri-
can or tricontinental sphere presents interesting challenges of translation and
misreading. These relationships and his sustained attention to the modernist

expressions of Latin America suggest intriguing possibilities for transmodern
scholarship and invite our further attention.
“Vantage Points from which the World Appears Black”:

Migrant Artists in Paris in the 1950s
Several elements unite the stories of Boghossian and Sekoto. Both received
their first artistic training with expatriates or European-educated mentors.
Both asserted a fervent connection to jazz, the consummate pan-African art
form of the twentieth century — Sekoto was an acclaimed pianist and com-
poser, while Boghossian demonstrated a long and dedicated invocation of the
musical form in his canvases and statements.78 Both demonstrated considered
and varied engagements with École de Paris aesthetics, which were solidified,
in part, by their extended sojourns or settlement in Paris. And finally, both
experienced lifelong exile from their homelands and enjoyed long-standing
presence in cosmopolitan expatriate circles. But perhaps most striking is how
both suffer from a kind of hypervisibility within the emerging canon of Afri-
can (or indeed global) modernisms, seen as responsible for “sketching a new
African destiny into being.” 79 Their ascendancy rests on different, local his-
torical narratives, but their intellectual and visual legacies feed a widely held
nostalgia for modernist projects and economies of desire cut short or derailed
by political, economic, and social strife.
Sekoto’s social-realist paintings of the mid-1940s have been read not sim-
ply as a singular creative practice but rather as documentary evidence of or
witness to a vanished life in Sophiatown or District Six — a captured vision
of what a successful multiracial South Africa might have been. A newspaper
editorial of 1989 illustrates the shift toward nationalist reclamation, asserting,
“When the Van Wouws and the Coertsers and the Pierneefs are turfed out of
the state and municipal galleries (or at least taken down a peg or two), Sekoto
and a few other neglected artists will take their place. Sekoto will be elevated
to the status of the Giotto of the people’s tradition in South African painting.” 80
Similarly, Boghossian’s whimsical, highly poetic canvases, with their mod-
ernist nods to local artistic vocabularies (particularly Ethiopian liturgical man-
uscripts, scrolls, and paintings), helped define the tenor of the Addis Spring,
a brief era of cultural renaissance in the 1960s in which young intellectuals,
often fresh from studies abroad, dreamed up a modern cultural framework for
their nation. These creative freedoms and utopian visions were cut violently

short by the socialist revolution of 1974. As Solomon Deressa (who purport-
edly coined the term) lamented, “Ethiopia picked its way through darkness
into spring that turned out to be an all-too-short Indian summer.” 81 Of course,
these localized modernisms are always already hybrid in nature, and certainly
within urban centers like Johannesburg and Addis, they rested on a syncretic
set of diverse ideas, images, objects, and peoples.
In the developing literature on African modernisms, the focus has tended
to center on national art schools and movements, rather than on the practices
of migrant modernists, whose peripatetic lives made them hard to pin down,
and whose studies, either in the academies and art schools of former empire
or in institutions of a growing cold war divide, did not easily support the ex-
igencies of decolonial politics.82 And yet, the foment of cultural awakening
occurring in postwar Paris was such that one could declare, “There are indeed
vantage points from which the world appears black — and not half-bad at that.
Paris of the mid-sixties was it.” 83
Heterochronologies and Archipelagoes

In his recent writings on the politics of visual time, Keith Moxey briefly con-
siders Sekoto’s early oil paintings but struggles to place them within a familiar
time and space of modernism. He writes, “Sekoto belongs to another tempo-
rality. His time was not synchronous with that of metropolitan modernism
and never can be. . . . [H]e was a contemporary of Jackson Pollock, yet these
artists’ circumstances could not have been more different. If Sekoto worked
in the period known as modernity, yet did not belong to it because he was
prevented from participating in one of its characteristic features, artistic mod-
ernism, how do we negotiate the time that separates them?” Moxey concludes,
“Modernity, along with modernism, is a distinctly western affair. If the colo-
nized globe took on many of the economic and industrial, not to mention the
political and cultural trappings, of the colonizers, there remains little doubt as
to where the center of artistic life shines brightest.84
Purportedly advanced in the spirit of a new global art history that seeks
to uncover the antecedents of our contemporaneity and calls for a sensitive
reading of the heterochronologies of global modernity, this perspective and
others like it confirm just how much work we have ahead of us. Moxey’s wider
argument calls Sekoto’s temporal relationship to modernism into question, in
part because of his chosen medium and “style” — a purposeful adherence to
painted figuration and social-realist readings of the everyday in a period when

abstraction was coming to dominate European and North American modern-
isms. As we have seen, Sekoto’s aesthetic choices were tied to his need to make
visible the challenges of African subjects during the era of decolonization.
This struggle is modern and modernist. While synchronous with the post-
war abstraction of Pollock and the New York avant-garde, Sekoto’s work does
not fall within the narrow stylistic and conceptual parameters Moxey, Hans
Belting, and others maintain for their putative “modernism.” The inclusionary
tactics of the global contemporary and its presumed antecedents in the age of
multiple or alternative modernisms still leave little space for narratives that
position canonical modernism as always already cosmopolitan, accumulative,
and emulative. The currency of heterochronology, in other words, has yet to
fully acknowledge that measures of time are produced through encounter and
interaction, rather than primordial difference.
Although these two African modernists undoubtedly figured largely in
the modernist histories that defined our short century, their influence in the
countries from which they hailed is a matter of speculation and revision. How
deeply their practices shaped the teachings of local art academies in Africa,
the imaginations of a youthful generation of artists at the heart of modern-
ist nation building, or the habits of potential collectors is extremely difficult
to measure. As neither spent significant time in their postcolonial nations, a
study of their artistry requires a rereading of the contours of African modern-
isms, pushing critics and scholars to take account of diasporic practices and
the international movements of the postwar moment.
Notes
Funds for this research were generously provided by the Jackman Humanities Re-
search Institute, University of Toronto. I also would like to thank Sepadi Moruthane at
the Iziko National Gallery in Cape Town and Barbara Lindop at the Sekoto Foundation
for their generosity, and Diane and Chuck Frankel for their support.
1. The definitive text on Ernest Mancoba’s life in South Africa remains that of art
historian Elza Miles, Lifeline out of Africa: The Art of Ernest Mancoba (Cape Town:
Human and Rousseau, 1994).
2. During the 1940s, Sekoto took lessons in oil painting from Judith Gluckman and
found support and friendship with Brother Roger Castle (CR), a teacher at St. Peter’s
School, who made connections for him in the gallery world. Judith Gluckman had
studied with Ossip Zadkine, within the Académie de la Grande Chaumière during her
time in Paris before the war.
3. Barbara Lindop, Gerard Sekoto, ed. Mona de Beer (Johannesburg: Dictum, 1988).

4. Noel Chabani Manganyi, Gerard Sekoto:” I Am an African” (Johannesburg: Wits
University Press, 2004); Gerard Sekoto, “A South African Artist,” Présence Africaine
5, nos. 14/15 (1957): 281–98; Gerard Sekoto, “La responsabilité et la solidarité dans la
culture africaine,” Présence Africaine 27 (1959): 263, translated as “Responsibility and
Solidarity in African Culture” in Manganyi, Gerard Sekoto, n.p.; Gerard Sekoto, “Au-
tobiography,” Présence Africaine, no. 69 (1969): 188–94; Gerard Sekoto, “The Present
Situation of a Non-White Artist in South Africa,” Présence Africaine 80 (1971): 134–36;
Barbara Grace, “Touring Africans,” Time, August 8, 1949, 29.
5. Despite writing from an academic post, in Gerard Sekoto, friend N. Chabani
Manganyi elects not to footnote his sources, many of whom could provide key archival
evidence of the linkages of intellectuals within lively expatriate communities. Man-
ganyi argues, “Biography is crossing the boundary between fiction and non-fiction.
. . . I have deliberately avoided using a style that burdens the narrative with references
and matters that have little to do with the unfolding story. One has to accept that
the majority of readers are not researchers. Their primary concern is the unfolding
drama of the life that is being put before them.” Manganyi, Gerard Sekoto, n.p. With
this choice, however, he obscures the broader sociopolitical framework of Sekoto’s
cosmopolitanism.
6. Song for Sekoto: 1913–2013 (Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg, April 25–June 2,
2013); Joe Dolby, Gerard Sekoto: From the Paris Studio, exhibition catalog (Cape
Town: Iziko South African National Gallery, 2005); Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties —
Retrospective Exhibition, exhibition catalog (Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1989).
7. Manganyi, Gerard Sekoto, 72.
8. Irit Rogoff, “Luggage,” in Terra Infirma: Geography’s Other Cultures (New York:
Routledge, 2000): 37.
9. Rogoff, “Luggage,” 38.
10. Sekoto had a robust musical practice in the clubs and bars of postwar Paris, com-
posing, singing, and playing piano and guitar. In 1950, he landed a job at the nightclub
L’échelle de Jacob, on rue Jacob in St. Germain, and performed to support himself and
his painting career. Three of his original songs were published in 1956 in Les Éditions
Musicales but the rest remained unknown until his estate was repatriated in 2002. His
musical talents ensured a breadth to his social circles — taking in expatriates, tourists,
and locals.
11. Valerie Cassel, “Convergence: Image and Dialogue — Conversations with Alex-
ander ‘Skunder’ Boghossian,” Third Text 7, no. 23 (1993): 23.
12. Christine Eyene begins to rectify this situation in regard to South Africa in her
chapter on exiles in Europe, “Yearning for Art: South African Exile, Aesthetics and
Cultural Legacy,” in Visual Century: South African Art in Context, 1907–2007, vol. 2,
1945–1976, ed. Lize van Robbroeck (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2011), 96–119.
13. Transmodernity is a term coined by Enrique Dussel to refer to a kind of “re-

bellious modernity” in sites “outside” the purview of enlightenment Europe. Enrique
Dussel, “World-System and ‘Trans’-Modernity,” Nepantla: Views from the South 3, no. 2
(2002): 221.
14. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Writings
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 173.
15. Said writes, “Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting,
one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an
awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that — to borrow a phrase from
music — is contrapuntal.” Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 186.
16. Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present
(London: Verso, 2002); Kobena Mercer, introduction to Discrepant Abstraction: Anno-
tating Art’s Histories: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts, ed. Kobena Mercer
(Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2006), 6–29; Susan Stanford Friedman, “Periodizing
Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Stud-
ies,” Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 3 (2006): 425–43; Partha Mitter, “ Interventions —
Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” Art
Bulletin 90, no. 4 (2008): 531–48.
17. His works have featured prominently, for instance, in the South African Consti-
tutional Court Trust. See “Artworks,” Constitutional Court Trust, accessed January 5,
2016, http://www.concourttrust.org.za/content/page/artworks. Other accounts of Se-
koto’s place within South African modernism include Richard Powell, Black Art: A
Cultural History (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002); John Peffer, Art and the End
of Apartheid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 1–10.
18. Pius Adesamni, “Redefining Paris: Trans-Modernity and Francophone African
Migritude Fiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 51, no. 4 (2005): 965. For Parisianism, see
Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape (Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1998). The term “migritude” brings together migration and
Negritude — combining experiences of mobility with radical black practices that seek
new forms of subjectivity. Jacques Chevrier, “Afrique(s)-sur-Seine: Autour de la Notion
de ‘Migritude,’ ” Notre Librairie 155/156 (2004): 13–17.
19. For discussion of the term “decolonial,” see Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker
Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2011). See also “Decolonial Aesthetics (I),” Transnational Decolonial
Institute, accessed January 5, 2016, https://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress
.com/decolonial-aesthetics/.
20. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1985).
21. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French
Culture (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1995); Debra Kelly, “Loss and Recuperation, Or-
der and Subversion: Post-war Painting in France, 1945–51,” French Cultural Studies 8,

no. 22 (1997): 53–66; Jill Carrick, Nouveau Réalisme, 1960s France, and the Neo-avant-
garde: Topographies of Chance and Return (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010).
22. Achille Mbembe, “Frantz Fanon’s Oeuvres: A Metaphoric Thought,” Nka: Journal
of Contemporary African Art 32 (2013): 8–16; Achille Mbembe, “La république dés
oeuvrée: La France à l’ère post-coloniale,” Le Débat 5, no. 137 (2005): 159–75; Hannah
Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–
1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 8. See also the multiyear research
project Post-war: Between the Atlantic and the Pacific, 1945–1965, organized by Okwui
Enwezor at Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2014; Cold World Cultures, University of Texas at
Austin, September 30–October 3, 2010; Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken, eds., Africa
in Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2013); and multiple articles, such as Laura M. Smalligan,
“The Erasure of Ernest Mancoba: Africa and Europe at the Crossroads,” Third Text 24,
no. 2 (2010): 263–76.
23. Irit Rogoff, “Hit and Run — Museums and Cultural Difference,” Art Journal 61,
no. 3 (2002): 69.
24. Christine Eyene and Paul Gilroy, “Nouvelle topographie d’un Atlantique noir:
Entretien avec Paul Gilroy,” Africultures 72 (2008): 82–87.
25. Tony Ballantyne, “Race and the Webs of Empire: Aryanism from India to the
Pacific,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 2, no. 3 (2001): 3.
26. Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2001), 15.
27. Nestor Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
28. Sekoto, “Autobiography,” 191.
29. “Interview with Jimi Matthews,” African Impact (October 1982), as quoted in
Manganyi, Gerard Sekoto, 55.
30. Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 1982), 3.
31. Asake Bomani, Paris Connections: African American Artists in Paris (San Fran-
cisco: qed Press, 1992).
32. Jennifer Anne Boittin, “In Black and White: Gender, Race Relations, and the
Nardal Sisters in Interwar Paris,” French Colonial History 6, no. 1 (2005): 120–35; Car-
ole Sweeney, “Resisting the Primitive: The Nardal Sisters, La Revue du Monde Noir
and La Dépêche Africaine,” Nottingham French Studies 43, no. 2 (2004): 45. Madeleine
Rousseau was a museologist and collector, who, with Chiekh Anta Diop, published
special issue of Le Musée Vivant (1948) on African cultures entitled “1848 Abolition de
l’esclavage — 1948 Évidence de la culture nègre.” See Danielle Maurice, “Le musée vi-
vant et le centenaire de l’abolition de l’esclavage: Pour une reconnaissance des cultures
africaines,” Conserveries mémorielles, June 1, 2007, http://cm.revues.org/127. Skunder

Boghossian also mentions Rousseau’s influence in his Third Text interview, calling
her Madeleine Rousseux. See Skunder in Cassel, “Convergence,” 55. A number of
artists have listed their apprenticeships within Zadkine’s studios: Iba Ndiaye, African
American Harold Cousins, Japanese American Shinkichi Tanjiri, and numerous Latin
American artists. See Elizabeth Harney, “Prismatic Scatterings: Global Modernists in
Post-War Europe” (forthcoming).
33. Arlene Farge, quoted in Brent Hayes Edwards, “A Taste of the Archive,” Callaloo
35, no. 4 (2012): 946.
34. Tyler Edward Stovall and Georges Van Den Abbeele, ed., French Civilization and
Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race, After Empire: The Francophone World
and Postcolonial France (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003).
35. See Gordon Parks, To Smile in Autumn: A Memoir (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2009); James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press,
1955); Es’kia Mphahlele, Afrika My Music: An Autobiography, 1957–1983 (Johannesburg:
Ravan Press, 1984), 31–79.
37. Cassel, “Convergence,” 54.
38. Alioune Diop, “Opening Remarks, First Congress of Negro Artists and Writers,
Paris, 1956,” Présence Africaine nos. 8–10 (1957): 9–19. For an illuminating firsthand
account of this conference, see James Baldwin, “Letter from Paris-Princes and Power,”
in Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 52–60.
39. Sekoto, “A South African Artist,” 287.
40. Christine Eyene, “Sekoto and Négritude: The Ante-room of French Culture,”
Third Text 24, no. 4 (2010): 432.
41. Elizabeth Harney, In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in
Senegal, 1960–1994 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Souleymane Bachir
Diagne, African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude (London:
Seagull Books, 2012).
42. “Peintre sud-Africain qui reside à Paris, Gerard Sekoto est venu renouveler ses
sources d’inspiration à Dakar,” Dakar-Matin, April 20, 1966.
43. Christine Eyene and Barbara Lindop, Exiles: Drawings by Gerard Sekoto (Johan-
nesburg: Afronova Gallery, 2008).
44. “Return to sources” is a favored phrase Senghor used in his writing on reclama-
tions of pan-African aesthetics and motifs. See Léopold Sédar Senghor, Négritude et
civilisation de l’universel (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1977).
45. Lesley Spiro, Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties (Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art
Gallery, 1989). In the Johannesburg Weekly Mail, March 4, 1988, Ivor Powell writes of
these later works, reflecting, “the tragedy of the artist cut off from his subject matter,”
as quoted in Barbara Lindop, “Gerard Sekoto: A Perspective on His Work,” Staffrider 7,
no. 1 (1988): 11.

46. Gerard Sekoto, as quoted in Lindop, “Gerard Sekoto,” 23.
48. A close look at the details of the artist’s own writings makes clear that the move
to Paris was far from disastrous for his career. He details his early and broad success in
the first years of his European settlement, exhibiting a number of works at the French
Overseas Colonial House, Académie Populaire, Ambassade du Sénégal, and at local
galleries Else-Clausen, Saint-Placide, Jean Castel, Colin, and Marthe Nochy, in addi-
tion to traveling shows throughout Europe. But for writings about the effect of exile
on his creativity, see Gerard Sekoto, “Alone in a Paris Ward: The Father of Black Art,”
Johannesburg Weekly Mail, March 3, 1988.
49. Jennifer Anne Boittin, introduction in Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds
of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2010), xiv–xv.
50. Skunder Boghossian as quoted in Cassel, “Convergence,” 57.
51. Tritobia Benjamin argued that Boghossian was the first African artist to exhibit
at the Paris Biennale, in 1965, and the Salon de Comparison in 1966. Although a body
of literature focuses on Boghossian’s life, no definitive book on his work exists to situate
it within the overlapping black Atlantic modern spheres to which he contributed so
greatly. See Tritobia Benjamin, “Skunder Boghossian: A Magnificent Difference,” Afri-
can Arts 5, no. 4 (summer 1972): 22–25.
52. Gebre Kristos Desta, a masterful painter and poet, trained in Cologne. Solomon
Deressa, known as an important poet, art critic, and social activist, and Tesfaye Gebre
Medhin, a playwright, both trained in Paris and America.
53. During a royal visit to Jerusalem in 1924, Emperor Selassie encountered a march-
ing band made up of orphans from the Armenian genocide. He gave asylum to these
young men and their musical director, Kevork Nalbandian. Considered by many to be
the father of Ethiopian music, Nalbandian composed the national anthem and directed
the imperial jazz band that played on all official state occasions. Though always a small
minority in Ethiopia, Armenians dominated many of the professions, particularly ar-
chitecture, pharmacy, and medicine. See Ani Aslanian, “In the Company of Emperors:
The Story of Ethiopian Armenians,” Armenite, October 6, 2014, http://thearmenite
.com/2014/10/company-emperors-story-ethiopian-armenians/.
54. Ethiopia was never colonized but was occupied by the Italians from 1934 to 1941.
55. Achamyeleh Debela, “Alexander (Skunder) Boghossian: A Jewel of a Painter of
the 21st Century,” Blen Magazine (2005), accessed November 5, 2014, http://www.blen
grafix.com/blenmagazine/skunder_jewel.htm. See also Solomon Deressa, “Letter from
Addis Ababa,” African Arts 2, no. 2 (winter 1969): 42–62.
56. Solomon Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” Ethiopian Bir 3, no. 1 (January/February
1997): 19.
57. He left for an invited lecturer position at the Atlanta Center for Black Art in 1969.
58. Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” 23. For an interesting overview of the intellectual

scene in Addis during this fruitful period, the 1960s, including reference to operating
galleries, important journals, and sites of exchange, see Shiferaw Bekele, “A Modernis-
ing State and the Emergence of Modernist Arts in Ethiopia (1930s to 1970s) with Spe-
cial Reference to Gebre Kristos Desta (1932–1981) and Skunder Boghossian,” Journal of
Ethiopian Studies 37, no. 2 (December 2004): 11–44; and Bawru Zewde, The Quest for
Socialist Utopia: The Ethiopian Student Movement, 1960–1974 (Oxford: James Currey,
2014).
59. “Skunder Boghossian ‘Afro-Metaphysics on Canvas,’ ” Menen, May 1966, 25–26,
as quoted in Bekele, “A Modernising State,” 31.
60. Chika Okeke-Agulu, “Natural Synthesis,” this volume.
61. W. Jackson Rushing III, “Being Modern, Becoming Native,” and Karen Duffek,
“An Intersection,” both in this volume.
62. Michael Richardson, ed., Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean,
trans. Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski (New York: Verso, 1996).
63. Benjamin, “Skunder Boghossian,” 22–25.
64. Benjamin, “Skunder Boghossian,” 23.
66. Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” 21.
67. Bekele, “A Modernising State,” 32.
68. “Skunder Boghossian ‘Afro-Metaphysics on Canvas,’ ” as cited in Bekele, “A
Modernising State,” 32.
69. Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
70. Simon Gikandi, “Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference,” Modernism/
Modernity 10, no. 3 (2003): 455–80.
73. Deressa, “Skunder in Context,” 21–22.
74. Simpson was a founding member of the Spiral Group — a collective of African
American painters, including Romare Bearden, Emma Amos, and Hale Woodruff,
who gathered to discuss civil rights and aesthetics, and who worked broadly in the vein
of modernist abstraction.
75. The state of Boghossian scholarship is such that chronologies are still unsettled,
connections between the artist and others a matter of speculation. Deressa claims that
Skunder returned to Ethiopia in 1966 and stayed for six years. Sidney Kasfir places him
in Addis Ababa from 1965 to 1969, migrating to the States in the “early 1970s.” Skunder
remembers leaving for a post in Atlanta in 1969. There is dispute as to whether the
young painter ever met Lam (Deressa claims he did, in Rome in 1959) or Max Ernst.
Any and all of these encounters were clearly possible in the cosmopolitan circles in
which he mixed.
76. Cassel, “Convergence,” 67.

77. Elizabeth Harney, Ethiopian Passages: Dialogues in the Diaspora (Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Press, 2003).
79. Dayo Olopade, “The Meaning of Modernism in Two Transitions: What a Hom-
onym Can Teach Us,” Transition 106, no. 1 (2011): 45–61; David Crary, “Two Black Art-
ists Earn Kudos at Last,” Globe and Mail (Canada), November 20, 1989, 10.
80. “The Sadness of Sekoto — That of Art in Isolation,” review of Gerard Sekoto ex-
hibition at the Cassirer Fine Art Gallery in Rosebank, Johannesburg, in Johannesburg
Weekly Mail, March 4, 1988. See also notes on Gerard Sekoto in Revisions: Expanding
the Narrative of South African Art, November 5, 2014, 21–22, http://www.revisions
.co.za/.
82. An exception to this rule is surely Leon Wainwright’s Timed Out: Art and the
Transnational Caribbean (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).
84. Keith Moxey, “Is Modernity Multiple?,” in Visual Time: The Image in History
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 15–16.

ANITRA NETTLETON
13 CONDITIONS OF ENGAGEMENT
Mobility, Modernism, and Modernity

in the Art of Sydney Kumalo and Jackson Hlungwani
To understand its various vectors, we need to provincialize modernism,

that is, to spatialize it as a series of local modernisms rather than one big
universal modernism. If there is no one lineage of modernism or, for that
matter, of contemporary art, then to fully grasp its qualities of historical
reflection requires a heterotemporal understanding.
O K W U I E N W E Z O R | “Questionnaire on the Contemporary”
Two South African artists, Sydney Kumalo and Jackson Hlungwani, both
black, both descendants of rural dwellers, engaged with the twentieth-century
art world of South Africa in very different ways. Although their lives were
coeval, their artistic careers barely overlapped. In exploring their careers and
work, I peel back some of the assumptions made about modernity and mod-
ernisms in relation to the urban and rural as they are mapped on a local, a
national, and a global terrain. In doing this I explore modernity as a phenom-
enon or a condition of art production, as distinct from the unique historical
“moment” of a singular European modernism. What follows in this chapter,
then, is perhaps best described as a response to Arjun Appadurai’s identifica-
tion of the need to study “cosmopolitan cultural forms of the contemporary
world without logically or chronologically presupposing either the authority
of the Western experience or the models derived from that experience.” He
argues that we should be studying these cultural forms in the contexts of “the
transnational flows in which they thrive.” 1
To investigate the differing experiences of the modern, modernism, and
variant expressions of modernity within twentieth-century South Africa, I
have taken Kumalo and Hlungwani as case studies because, while they were
of the same generation and thus contemporaries in a wide sense, they engaged
with modernity at very different times and under startlingly different con-
ditions. They were both members of indigenous African communities, and
both traveled overseas.2 Their engagement with the transnational flows that
Appadurai sees as the bedrock of globalization were also qualitatively dis-
tinct, to the point that it could be argued that Kumalo was a modernist by
intention, whereas Hlungwani was a modernist by recognition.3 I argue that
such variable conditions of engagement are crucial to a wider understanding
of multiple modernities, and to an unseating of the modern, and its corollary
modernism, as exclusively Western phenomena.
One of the discourses used in dividing contemporary African artists from
those of both the African past and the Western contemporary is that of the
“authentic,” especially as it qualifies the “African.” Authenticity is deeply em-
bedded in notions of origins and beginnings, of belonging and “truth.” As a
discourse, it is fundamentally a product of European high modernism, but it is
simultaneously at odds with discourses of modernity. Authenticity is also in-
imical to admission of movement, travel, diaspora, and hybridity, all of which
are central to a discussion of multiple modernisms and modernities. It is, sig-
nificantly, the discourse that various commentators and critics used to write
both Sydney Kumalo and Jackson Hlungwani into the history of twentieth-
century South African art.4
I explore the representation of indigenous modernists as I draw my compar-
ison, but note that, while biographies of artists are generally invoked to estab-
lish the “authenticity” of their work, in African arts, biographies are instead
used to establish the authenticity of the African artist, rather than of his or
her work. This deployment of “authenticity” in the canon of historical African
arts has been thoroughly debunked.5 I demonstrate that Kumalo’s and Hlung-
wani’s biographies confound categories of the authentic and the modern.
Jackson Hlungwani was born in 1923 at Kanaana (Limpopo Province), in
a deeply rural community, and he received only elementary Western-style
education: he could read and write. He had a rural youth’s induction into
manhood, herding goats and learning wood carving from his father and
grandfather. He briefly worked as a farm laborer in Mpumalanga, followed
by industrial jobs in Springfield and Turffontein in Johannesburg. After he
lost his left index finger in an industrial accident in 1944, he returned to his
336 A nitra N ettleton

F I G U R E 1 3 . 1 Jackson Hlungwani, Altar for Christ, 1970–84. Wood, stone,
metal, dimensions variable. Christ and Gabriel (center left); Cain and Jonah’s Fish
(right). Installation shot, Wits Art Museum, 2015. Photograph courtesy of Wits Art
Museum. Standard Bank Collection of African Art, Wits Art Museum.
rural home, where he married and spent the rest of his life. When Hlungwani
started carving sculptures is uncertain, but he engaged in sustained carving
only from the late 1970s onward.6 He attended a silk-screening workshop,
Tiakeni, at Elim in the “homeland” of Gazankulu in the late 1970s but had
little contact with the urban art world prior to 1984–85, when Ricky Burnett
included his work in the Tributaries exhibition.7 From 1985 to 1989 Hlungwani
was lionized by the art world at home and abroad, traveling to the Edinburgh
Festival in 1992 and to Gallery Watari-Um, in Tokyo, Japan, in 1994 with his
Altar for Christ (figure 13.1).8 During these experiences, he, as an “authentic”
African artist, seems to have been on display with his artworks, rather than
being engaged in a purposive exchange with other artists. After 1996, he was
increasingly abandoned by the high-art world, partly because he used assis-
tants to produce works in multiples.9
Kumalo’s and Hlungwani’s paths crossed for the first time at the Tributaries
exhibition. Intending to reflect the contemporary state of South African art,
C onditions of E ngagement 337

Burnett, in an innovative curatorial move, took the “contemporary” to mean
“of the moment” and thus as inclusive of artists (largely black) who had never
before exhibited their works.10 This opened up the contemporary to works
beyond commonly exhibited variants of the late international modernism,
among which Kumalo’s work had been admitted as representative of urban
black art. Burnett’s show linked this art, largely made by urban artists, to an-
other art, imagined as authentic, rural, and traditional. Unlike Kumalo, repre-
sentative of the urban category, with a reputation in the art market for twenty
years before Tributaries, Hlungwani, almost unknown outside his own rural
community, was among artists of the second category.11
Sydney Kumalo
Sydney Kumalo was born in 1934 to isiZulu-speaking residents of Soweto. His
links to rural areas were limited to visiting a traditionalist family of royal lin-
eage, and he was very aware of Zulu history.12 Kumalo received secondary ed-
ucation at Madibane High School, Soweto, but had no formal art education. In
an interview in Drum Magazine, he recalled being impressed by paintings he
saw in white people’s houses, which he visited with his house-painter father.13
He also related that his teachers encouraged him to join the art classes at the
Polly Street Art Centre in 1958. Here he received instruction from two white
South African artists, Cecil Skotnes and Edoardo Villa, who became a lifelong
friends and collaborators. They had both received formalist, modernist art
training, Skotnes at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and
Villa at Scuolo d’Arte Andrea Fantone in Bergamo, Italy.14 Kumalo’s training
in formalist traditions of composition, balance, harmony, and the qualities of
texture, line, and shade did not match the technical and theoretical grounding
that Villa and Skotnes had received, but was nevertheless very different from
Hlungwani’s apprenticeship to his father and grandfather as a woodcarver.
Kumalo’s work was thus developed and articulated within a discourse that
Hlungwani could not have encountered.
Working in many mediums, in a studio and with professionals in the
foundry, Kumalo participated in the established art world. His education
included study of both reproductions and original modernist works, which
his mentors showed to him.15 If an education based on knowledge of art
history was central to the formation of a consciously modernist artist, then
Kumalo clearly qualified, while Hlungwani worked in isolation in the deeply
rural homelands of apartheid South Africa, where no such opportunities were

available. Yet the two artists were separately, and at different times, incorpo-
rated under the same arts discourses of South Africa.
The sculptors Sydney Kumalo and Ezrom Legae were among the best
known to emerge from Polly Street, one of the few places in apartheid South
Africa of the 1950s where black artists could go for lessons. Other Polly Street
artists, including Durant Sihlali, Louis Maqhubela, and Ephraim Ngatane,
were primarily painters, although Sihlali also made some sculptures. The fame
attained by the sculptors betrays an assumption in the earliest critical recep-
tion of these artists’ works; contemporary black artists needed to confirm the
understanding of African art as almost exclusively stylized sculpture.16 This
bias was confirmed in Sihlali’s reminiscences about the teaching at Polly Street
and in gallery owner Egon Guenther’s stated expectations of art produced by
African artists.17 That this idea was tied to Africa as the site of the “authentic,”
the “primitive” and the “origin” is also visible in art critics’ writing around
these artists’ works at the time.18 Some came perilously close to portraying
Kumalo as a “primitive” African.19 As a result Kumalo’s modernity was some-
times cast in doubt, subordinated to his supposed “recall” of a primitive past.
Even Polly Street instructors were implicated: Susanna Jansen van Rensburg
cites Skotnes’s initial attempt to retain something “tribal” in the works of black
urban artists attending the workshops, and his admission that they were not in
touch with the “tribal” at all.20 Kumalo’s collaborations with white members of
the Amadlozi group, initiated by Egon Guenther in 1962 and revived by Linda
Givon of Goodman Galleries in 1984, suggest that he saw past the racial nature
of that definition of Africanness.
Kumalo’s integration into the world of high art in South Africa happened
when he resigned from teaching in 1964 to pursue a career full time as an
artist. One of the first black South Africans to succeed as a professional, he
traveled abroad, to Britain, Europe, and the United States, despite the restric-
tions imposed by the apartheid regime on black people’s mobility.21 He became
a regular on both national and international fine arts circuits, in biennials and
competitions.22 As a black South African, a isiZulu-speaking native of Soweto,
his African identity was never in doubt.
Separating Kumalo’s work from his crudely Africanized biography, I argue,
shows that his work followed an internationally available formalist abstrac-
tion most clearly related to the works of Henry Moore and Marino Marini.
Kumalo never forsook the figurative, always invoking the universal rather
than the particular. So, Reclining Figure: Ndebele Woman (1980s) is, by its title,
evocative of ethnic specificity, but the form is abstracted and thus universal.23

F I G U R E 1 3 . 2
Photograph of Sydney
Kumalo in his studio,
ca. 1969–1970. Courtesy
the Goodman Gallery,
Johannesburg.
Miles and others suggest that both Skotnes and Guenther provided African art
sources similar to those used by European modernists, to familiarize Kumalo
and others at Polly Street with historical forms.24 They were shown modernist
works in the form of journal and book illustrations. Guenther showed works
by some European modernists where he saw synergies with works by black
(and white) artists in his stable, and he suggested that Kumalo’s favorite among
the European modernists whose works he studied was Ernst Barlach.25 Guen-
ther was insistent that the African quality he saw in Kumalo’s work was rooted
in an African ethos, environment, and ambience, rather than in what Miles
claims to was a “neo-African idiom,” shared by Kumalo, Ben Arnold, and Ez-
rom Legae.26 While Guenther also claimed that Kumalo never copied African
forms directly, Jansen van Rensburg identified several African motifs and
their sources in Skotnes’s sketches for the ceiling paintings at St. Peter Claver
in Kroonstad, which were reinterpreted by Kumalo in the final paintings.27
In his sculpture, Kumalo rarely resorted to direct quotation, even though he
drew on general stylistic principles gleaned from historical African sculptural
forms, some pieces of which he owned himself, as is evident in photographs of
the artist in his study (figure 13.2).

FIGURE 13.3 Sydney Kumalo, Killed Horse, 1962. Bronze, 14.2 × 25 × 9.9 in.
(36 × 64 × 25 cm). Wits Art Museum.
Works like Killed Horse (figure 13.3) and Seated Woman employ simplicity of
form and the qualities of material surface in evocative ways. Elizabeth Rankin
and Elza Miles have discussed the political meanings of Killed Horse, showing
that Kumalo’s subject matter was not polemic-free.28 Its visual impact results
not only from the horse’s supine position, but also from the pitted surface and
green bronze patina, showing Kumalo’s manipulation of the expressive poten-
tials of the materials. This is not just a killed horse, but one whose death has
been ignored. Its political connotations derive from Kumalo’s encounters with
such corpses in the townships, where horses were used for transport until the
1960s. Its Africanness is situated in this biographical association more than
in its formal configuration. By contrast, in the small Seated Woman (plate 11),
the surface texture is smooth, flowing from the head and elongated neck to
the angular knees and feet. Here, the emotion suggested by the figure’s raised
arms and hands clutching the head, which could index the grieving wives
and mothers of those lost in the growing struggle against apartheid, is less
clearly reflected in the material. Political readings of this work are in some
ways anachronistic, because although the sculpture was executed in the year

of the Sharpeville massacre (1961) and undoubtedly related to it, associations
sparked by other memories are also possible. The abstracted treatment of the
subject gives it an apparent universality and places it squarely within a mod-
ernist frame.
Most of the academic interest in Kumalo’s work has centered on works like
these, produced in the 1960s while he was working at Polly Street Art Centre
with Skotnes and exhibiting at the Egon Guenther Gallery. Very little real cog-
nizance remains of the directions his art took after Guenther closed his gallery
and Kumalo joined the Goodman Gallery, partly because of a perception that
the quality of his work declined. Guenther attempted to maintain quality con-
trol over the work of artists in his stable and required that they destroy works
that he considered not up to standard.29 Thus, while the similarities between
Kumalo’s and Legae’s works in the late 1960s and early 1970s have been ex-
plained through Kumalo’s instruction of Legae, they were also a consequence
of Guenther’s interventions. These also resulted from the vision Guenther had
of what the works should look like. Kumalo, Legae, and Arnold worked and
had critique sessions together at Guenther’s house, with emphasis on how
they reflected Africanness in particular forms.30 This is explicitly visible in the
clarity of formal construction and angular masklike facial features of Kumalo’s
Seated Figure (figure 13.4). The use of a single foot, evocative of Lega, Lulua,
or Songye figures, enhances its African identity, with a possible side glance at
Alberto Giacometti.
That Kumalo came to his abstracted figurative forms thirty years after Moore
and Marini place him, in the Euro-American master narrative, in a position
of latecomer, an out-of-date modernist brushed aside by the metropolitan art
world as irrelevant, because apparently not part of the avant-garde. The formal
abstraction pursued by Moore and Marini appears to have been couched in
universalist terms, based in subjects that did not invoke any form of social
critique, something that made them innocuous, even if not appreciated, in
conservative contexts.31 If, following Renato Poggioli, the avant-garde is both
political and aesthetic because it unseats entrenched aesthetic norms and
challenges the political status quo, then Kumalo’s works are not avant-garde
because, at first sight, they do neither.32 James Elkins’s suggestion that finding
“values in these works that are recognizably European or North American”
will not decide the relevance of the works of “local” modernisms, for a larger
history could be reversed by searching for the factors that differentiate them
from the North American or European modernism.33 This would yield a dif-
ferent assessment of their relevance, one concerned not with the avant-garde

FIGURE 13.4 Sydney Kumalo,
Seated Figure, ca. 1967–68.
Bronze, 24 × 12 × 14 in.
(60 × 30 × 35 cm). Private
collection, Johannesburg.
bias of the master narrative of global art history, but with their contribution to
trajectories of art’s modernisms.
Thus, in South Africa in the 1960s, Kumalo’s work formed part of a local
avant-garde, which, in its direct engagement with things modernist and Afri-
can, was also quite heavily political. Contesting the conservatism of Afrikaner
nationalism, this avant-garde challenged apartheid’s construction of African
cultures and peoples as inferior. Yet, while Kumalo’s works made a claim for
modernity, his strongly developed formalist abstraction was interpreted by
writers in the 1960s and early 1970s as evidence of his primitiveness, rather
than of his sophisticated primitivist modernism. It is almost as though, even
among those white writers and art historians who knew him well, he could not,
by virtue of his being black (and African), be considered a modernist.34 This
prejudice has been discussed elsewhere, but it is central to how Indigenous
modernism is positioned.35 In South Africa the black artists’ praxis was con-
strued as primitive, not primitivist, not as self-primitivizing and definitively
not as part of mainstream modernism. These black artists saw themselves as
modernists, drawing on African traditions, as were their white counterparts

who drew on African sources. But their separation, as followers of an existing
“own” (rather than an “othered” African) tradition, was enforced as racially
rather than historically defined, and thus as ethnically determined, by legis-
lated apartheid in South Africa. In effect, while modernist artists who were
white could claim a form of African modernity with some degree of auton-
omy, black artists were simply cast into a mold of Africanness through which
their autonomy was denied.
Guenther considered neither these black artists as traditionally African, nor
their work to be African art, but rather saw them as modern/contemporary
artists from Africa.36 Whether black artists also thought this about their work
seems likely but difficult to prove. While Kumalo’s personal style developed
and changed over time, his artistic self-identity remained firmly situated: an
African making African modernism. Yet, because the construction of an Af-
rican identity nearly always refers to the past in the form of specific cultural
practices, languages, and beliefs, the possibility of an African being a modern-
ist becomes oxymoronic when viewed from an outside perspective. Further,
Kumalo’s “pioneer” status in South Africa is itself indicative of the modernist
teleologies at play in writing art’s histories: it points to a tradition that the
artist apparently leaves behind.
After the closure of Guenther’s galleries in 1970, the paths of “his” artists
separated, but all continued to claim African identity. Legae and Kumalo,
however, exhibited together with Villa and Skotnes in reconstituted Amad-
lozi group shows organized by Linda Givon of Goodman Galleries more than
ten years after Guenther closed his gallery.37 Kumalo’s later works focused on
thematics of Africa, on themes identifiable as African by their cultural content
and difference, more than his generic subjects of the early 1960s. The themes
were historical, often mythological, as in the many Mythological Rider(s),
made over several years, drawing on African sculptural forms and his own
cultural traditions. The Praise Singer, executed on commission for the Cape of
Good Hope Centre, and produced in a smaller bronze edition, follows a West-
ern convention of heroic male figures with toga-like robes and firm stance,
but Africanized by its title. Such works are modern, modernist, and monu-
mental, elevating African tradition, but they lack the overt political content or
reference to suffering and struggle necessary to Kumalo’s resurrection in the
postapartheid context.38 Kumalo’s legacy has been ignored compared to that
of other black artists–contemporaries of Kumalo — such as Dumile Feni, Peter
Clark, George Pemba, and Gerard Sekoto, all of whom have received large-
scale, nationally traveled celebratory exhibitions. These nationally recognized

artists, concerned with the social and political evils of apartheid, espoused a
naturalistic or narrative style and content, easily regarded as modern and po-
litical, but unconcerned with abstraction or Africanness. Kumalo’s work was
generically African, and in his later career, he positioned himself within Af-
rocentric modernity, spending time in the 1980s at Emory University among
African American peers involved in reconstruing black histories and philoso-
phies.39 At this time Kumalo worked on a series of drawings, inspired by Afri-
can American performance and literary sources, that explored a slightly more
naturalistic style.40
Inherent in the predication of European modernism on the principle of a
universal understanding of form is a claim that it could be taken up anywhere
and at any time: that it could travel, but in traveling would implicate temporal
and cultural as well as physical distances. Kumalo received a form of mod-
ernism via mentors whose position as settlers, and claims to Africanness, is
testament to the kinds of “flows” that Appadurai argues constitute the move-
ments of cultural material across boundaries.41 Kumalo’s travels, especially his
time in the United States, opened political and artistic ethnoscapes that were
not available to him in the apartheid state. Being able to mix freely with other
artists, visit museums and galleries in urban centers, and in various countries,
was a privilege not open to blacks under apartheid. Kumalo’s residence in the
city, his disjuncture from any of the stereotypical and nostalgic constructions
of Africa as tribal and rural, which upheld the apartheid system of separate
development, constituted a kind of personal deterritorialization for him as an
isiZulu speaker. Such deterritorialization enabled Kumalo to claim citizenship
in a wider art world, one of Appadurai’s “scapes.” In view of this, modernism’s
precepts of universality would have been enabling, but, as I have shown, in
need of adaptation to an African modernity. Kumalo died in 1988 at the age of
fifty-three, and his memorial exhibition at Goodman Gallery included sculp-
ture as well as a number of two-dimensional works, made over the course of
his career. Yet the drawings hardly ever appear in the record of his work. In
this way, his Africanness is preserved as purely sculptural, and his work is, in
the minds of some collectors and connoisseurs, still “primitive” and outside
history rather than modernist.
Jackson Hlungwani
Jackson Hlungwani, born in 1923, was more than ten years older than Kumalo
and lived much longer, dying in 2010. He left an oeuvre executed largely in the

last thirty years of his life. His direct engagement with work in modern urban
Africa was short but significant in understanding his identity as a modern
subject. His rural (but still modern) lifestyle, and his knowledge of, and re-
spect for, his ancestral heritage, was read as a “primitive” or “tribal” habitus,
one that would have answered Skotnes’s expectations of the tribal in ways that
Kumalo’s urban life could not.
Hlungwani started sculpting consistently only in 1978, without any engage-
ment with the art world, and almost exclusively for his own religious shrine.
His church, an individual offshoot of the apostolic Zion Christian Church of
South Africa, served a local community: he was its chief preacher, healer, and
seer. His independent interpretations of the Bible and his Christian teach-
ing were inflected with inversions of power challenging the ideological and
political supremacy of white people.42 Working with local wood, fallen tree
trunks washed up on riverbanks, he sculpted ensembles for the altars at New
Jerusalem at Mbokhoto, in Limpopo Province, for sites around the shrine, as
well as figures and bowls for sale to visiting (mostly white) patrons in search
of the African “primitive.” Hlungwani used the shrine carvings to explain his
theology to congregants, and he claimed that his theological discourse would
be spread among more people through the sale of sculptures.43 As a result,
much of his work was documented in relation to its religious aspects: only
Burnett engaged with the formal and sculptural aspects of the works as art.44
The literature implicitly acknowledges of Hlungwani’s Indigenous and in-
nate Africanness, made explicit in his ties to a Tsonga ethnic identity. Yet
Hlungwani’s Africanness is not traditional or premodern but a result of trans-
national flows of the type identified by Appadurai.45 He had experienced the
establishment of imagined “homelands” within the South African context, in
which black Africans belonged and were separated according to ethnolinguis-
tic categories, being designated as only temporary inhabitants of the urban
spaces. He worked both in the cosmopolitan space of the city and in the rural
homeland, following his inherited traditions as well as embracing the trans
national in the form of Christianity.
The works that Hlungwani produced for his Christian shrine at Mbokhoto
drew on established African traditions insofar as they were wood carvings.46
Attempts to tie Hlungwani’s style to Tsonga carving traditions have not been
particularly convincing because Hlungwani’s “style” appears to be random.47
Some works display an intense attention to detail, while others involve mere
suggestions carved into the wood.48 Very few of these forms can be related to
Tsonga carvings of the past and certainly cannot have been learned from a

preceptor or from formal training. Hlungwani arguably worked without rigid
adherence to the external codes that, according to Appadurai, constitute “tra-
ditions.” 49 Hlungwani embarked on making works, both for his church and for
sale, as an individual modern subject in a process of indigenizing his work’s
Christian and modernist elements.50
His exhibition history started with Tributaries in 1985 and peaked in a solo
show at Bree Street Gallery (a short-lived venture newly opened by Ricky Bur-
nett and Mary Slack) in Newtown, Johannesburg, in 1989.51 There is no prec-
edent for the forms, scale, or use of sculptures on shrines in his local habitus;
he was also not acquainted with other historical African shrines.52 He was,
however, familiar with forms of Christian art found in conventional church
buildings. Among his earliest works are two crucifixes, and he possessed
color lithographic prints of religious subjects, including of John the Baptist.53
These popular religious prints are based on baroque typologies and could be
acquired even in small towns, part of an entirely modern world impinging on
rural Africa before the turn of the twentieth century. Yet Hlungwani’s work
never emulated their naturalism: his style was expressionistic, and in it the
modernist precept “truth to material” appeared, fully formed, at the beginning
of his carving career in 1978. The Christ from Altar for Christ (see figure 13.1)
is a good example, with minimal but purposive interventions in the original
appearance of the tree trunk from which the figure appears. Even the more
detailed working of the figure of Cain from the same altar is attuned to the
original shape of the branch.
Hlungwani’s work has been explained through an invocation of the seer, of
a shaman producing visions, rather than of a professional sculptor presenting
considered and calculated images.54 Many of Hlungwani’s works invoke the
idea of function, a reminder that the Western category of “primitive” art in-
cludes functional objects. Hlungwani produced, for example, many “bowls,”
but they might merely act as vessels metaphorically, and they vary from
intricately carved to minimalist forms.55 This production of metaphorically
functional objects as art can be paralleled to modernist transformations of
functional objects into carriers of aesthetic and connotative “meanings.”
Once Hlungwani’s art entered the high-art world, the discourse shifted
from the anthropology of religion and the shaman to his realization of ideas or
beliefs in sculpture, including relationships between form and content, truth
to materials, context, installation, and chance, all central themes in histories
of avant-garde modernism.56 So, for example, God’s Antenna and Cain’s Aero-
plane (figure 13.5) invoke aspects of the modern world and modern technol-

ogy, in the use of industrial detritus in the former, as well as in their titles.
Cain’s Aeroplane closely resembles Hlungwani’s bowls but is more like a canoe
than a flying machine, with the forms coaxed out of the matrix. This is very
different from, but no less modernist than, the calculated qualities of material
engagement in Kumalo’s work. Not surprisingly, therefore, Hlungwani’s praxis
is treated as though it were a manifestation, not of a modernism that results
from being in touch with the primitive, but of the primal response itself. His
primitiveness, thus presented as different from Kumalo’s, nevertheless raises
the question of whether it/he was “genuinely primitive” and thus “authentic,”
as opposed to a revivalist/ primitivist/modernist as argued in Kumalo’s case.57
Examples of Hlungwani’s sculptures made between 1984 and 1989 are held
in many major South African and some European and American museum
collections and are still regarded as important. Produced largely for outside
patrons and increasingly for the art exhibition circuit, they are recognized
as contemporary works by an individual artist, something that would cause
some difficulty in the last part of his life. These works carried not only the
trace of the artist’s hand, but also both visible patina in the wear on the wood
and an invisible patina of having a place in a world for which his audience was
demonstrably nostalgic. Appadurai argues that this quality of patina and the
nostalgia that it evokes are indices of a way of life that the owner cannot have,
and that this nostalgia affected the reading of Hlungwani’s work.58 Thus, while
Jameson argues that modernism is inevitably, in global terms, a temporal cat-
egory, he nevertheless offers an understanding of modernity as a “frozen alle-
gory” in which there is a “palpable contradiction between the absolute claim
for novelty and the inevitable repetition and inevitable return.” 59 A temporal
category is thus upset by its own implicitly cyclical nature and by its confusion
with the contemporary and the new.
Some such confusion was evident in the removal of Hlungwani’s shrine
pieces from a sacred space in the bush to the hallowed halls of urban art mu-
seums as part of the pieces’ modernization, of the process of domiciling them
within the modern habitus of the art world. It set a standard for recognition of
works as original Hlungwanis and started him on a course of production for
the market. Despite the view that Hlungwani carved only religious subjects
or with a religious message, many of the works that he sold, such as Lion (fig-
ure 13.6), had limited or very obscure reference to religious themes.60 These
works point to a fundamental difference from Kumalo’s praxis as a modernist.
Kumalo’s animal images capture an essence; for example, the slouch of Leop-
ard indicates a self-conscious modernism, trying to capture the essence of

F I G U R E 1 3 . 5 Jackson Hlungwani, Cain’s Aeroplane, detail from Altar
for Christ, 1978–84. Wood. Photograph by A. Nettleton. Standard Bank

Collection of African Art, Wits Art Museum.
F I G U R E 1 3 . 6 Jackson Hlungwani, Lion, pre-1989. Wood and metal. Standard
Bank Collection of African Art, Wits Art Museum.
the African animal.61 Hlungwani, on the other hand, viewed and made his
creatures as part of a single creation that was simply African in that he was
African. Perhaps the difference lies in that Kumalo, the urban dweller, had to
retrieve a mythology, while Hlungwani lived and made mythology in a place
that was a “homeland.” The attempt to be visibly African was a self-conscious
dimension of Kumalo’s use of African mythology and subjects, taken from
a position of deterritorialization. Hlungwani, however, never seems to have
suffered that degree of alienation from his rural habitus.
Hlungwani, in a masterstroke of freeing his mind from colonial shackles,
invented his own church, his own iconography, and established a theological
world in sculptures without concern about his own modernity. Perhaps he was
never asked the question, but in none of the interviews with him did Hlung-
wani make claims to being a modern artist. His work, however, could never
have become part of the artistic canon without the modernist frameworks,
which traveled globally, allowing the removal of objects from contexts of use
to the space of the aesthetic. Kumalo, on the other hand, was a modernist from
the time he first started making work, even when he made work for churches,
because he understood and developed his identity within the context of an
African modernity expressly discussed by his mentors.

The ways in which Kumalo and Hlungwani engaged with modernity can
be encapsulated in relation to how they traveled. Kumalo traveled broadly,
but within a circuit of galleries, artists, and exhibitions. He was constituted as
a contemporary subject whose understanding of modernism and production
of art forms was situated within a discourse in which he was a participant.
Hlungwani, on the other hand, traveled from rural homelands to the city and
back. Settled in the rural context for some forty years before his engagement
with the art world, he was taken up by its denizens as a seer and a shaman, at
the receiving end of their nostalgia. Burnett, with whom he traveled to Edin-
burgh, recalls Hlungwani’s amazement at and eager absorption of the new and
complex world into which he was flung.62 Yet little of this is visible in his work
after his return to Kanaana in the mid-1990s. Kumalo and Hlungwani could
thus be seen as inhabiting one of the polythetic spaces of overlap that charac-
terize the flows of culture outlined by Appadurai.63 They both had one foot in
some version of the African, and the other in the world of modernisms — in
effect, theirs were both indigenized African modernisms, but approached
from different positions.
Notes
Epigraph: Okwui Enwezor, “Questionnaire on the Contemporary: Enwezor,” October
Magazine 130 (2009): 36.
1. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 49.
2. Indigenous is a disputed term in South African identity politics. The people who
were in Southern Africa first were the Khoi-San speakers; they were followed by Bantu
speakers from farther north, around the beginning of the common era. These migrant
Bantu speakers were however, Indigenous to Africa as a continent.
3. Appadurai, Modernity at Large.
4. A short, critically coherent account of Kumalo’s work, by Elizabeth Rankin, es-
capes many of the flaws that I attribute to the writing on Kumalo later in this chapter.
See Images of Metal: Post-War Sculptures and Assemblages in South Africa (Johannes-
burg: Wits University Press, 1994). While this lays much of the groundwork, it does not
specifically engage with issues raised by modernism as a style or as a mode of art pro-
duction. Ivor Powell’s short essay on Kumalo also broaches the issue but does not follow
it through. See Ivor Powell, “Sydney Kumalo,” in Revisions: Expanding the Narrative of
South African Art, edited by Hayden Proud (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press,
2006), 144. Elza Miles’s history of Polly Street deals with the narrative of Kumalo’s early
career. Miles, Polly Street: The Story of an Art Centre (Johannesburg: Ampersand Foun-
dation, 2004). There is no equivalent body of literature on Hlungwani.

5. See Shelly Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Prog-
ress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, “African
Art and Authenticity: A Text without a Shadow,” African Arts 25, no. 2 (1992): 41–53;
Christopher Steiner, African Art in Transit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994).
6. See Ricky Burnett, “Sparks of Recognition,” in Jekiseni Hlungwani Sangani: An
Exhibition, ed. Ricky Burnett, exhibition catalog (Johannesburg: Communications
Dept., bmw South Africa, 1989), 4–7; and Jane Duncan, “Factors Affecting the Positive
Reception of Artworks: A Case Study of Selected Artists Sculptures from Venda and
Gazankulu since 1985” (master’s thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannes-
burg, 1994).
7. Ricky Burnett, Tributaries: A View of Contemporary South African Art, exhibition
catalog (Johannesburg: Communications Dept., bmw South Africa, 1984).
8. Ivor Powell, “Gazankulu’s Wounded Shaman Sculpts His Strange Temples,” Johan-
nesburg Weekly Mail, November 3 to 9, 1989, sec. Arts, 22; Marilyn Martin, “Jackson
Hlungwani — The Prophet of Mbokota,” sa Arts Calendar 12, no. 3 (1989): 9; Elza Miles,
“Hlungwani se Goddelike Speelding,” Die Beeld, November 17, 1989, 30; Miles, “Met
Eerbied vir ’n Oeuvre,” Die Beeld, November 20, 1989, 29.
9. Nielen van Kraayenberg of Gallery 181, interview by the author, September 2010,
Johannesburg, Kya Sands. Van Kraayenberg had particular expectations of what these
works would look like and clearly regarded Jackson Hlungwani and his workshop pri-
marily as producers of work that appealed to corporate buyers. See Anitra Nettleton,
“Home Is Where the Art Is: Negotiating the Urban Art Market — Six Rural Artists from
the Northern Province, South Africa,” African Arts 33, no. 4 (2000): 26–39, 93; and Ani-
tra Nettleton, “Jackson Hlungwani’s Altars: An African Christian Theology in Wood
and Stone,” Material Religion 5, no. 1 (2009): 50–69.
10. Ricky Burnett, interview by the author, Johannesburg, September 29, 2009.
11. Kumalo’s and Hlungwani’s works were on the same exhibition only once more —
after Kumalo’s death in 1988. See Steven Sack, The Neglected Tradition: Towards a New
History of South African Art, 1930–1988 (Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1989).
12. These views were recorded in note form after a conversation I had with Mzilikaze
Khumalo (noted academic linguist and composer) and Sydney Kumalo at Jean Kenne-
dy’s house in Johannesburg in July 1973.
13. This is repeated by Miles, Polly Street; Rankin, Images of Metal; and Susanna
Jansen van Rensburg, “Sydney Kumalo en Ander Bantoekunstenaars van Transvaal”
(master’s thesis, University of Pretoria, 1970).
14. Frieda Harmsen, “Artist Resolute,” in Cecil Skotnes, ed. Frieda Harmsen (Johan-
nesburg: South African Breweries, 1996), 11–63; Nessa Leibhammer, A Tribute to Maria
Stein Lessing and Leopold Spiegel: L’Afrique (Johannesburg: David Krut, 2009).
15. Egon Guenther, interview by the author, April 23, 2012.

16. Interviews and visits to the collections of Cecil Skotnes (1971) and Egon Guen-
ther (1972, 2009–2014). Both emphasized the importance of the sculptural legacy of
African artists.
17. Sihlali cited by David Koloane, “The Polly Street Art Scene,” in African Art in
Southern Africa: From Tradition to Township, edited by Anitra C. Nettleton and Wil-
liam D. Hammond-Tooke (Johannesburg: ad Donker, 1989), 211–19; Guenther inter-
view, April 23, 2012. Guenther was an immigrant from post–World War II Germany.
A jeweler by profession, he founded an important art gallery in Johannesburg and
promoted a particular late-modernist aesthetic among the artists he showed. He was
known particularly for his promotion of black modernist artists from Polly Street.
18. For example see Jenni Basson, “Sydney Kumalo, Beeldwese van Afrika uit,” Die
Brandwag, January 21, 1977, 88–91; Jenni Basson, “Sydney Kumalo,” Bantu 24 (1977):
114; Elize Jacobs, “Sydney Kumalo,” Artlook (December 1973): 8–15; Jansen van Rens-
burg, “Sydney Kumalo.”
19. Eda Marcus, “S. Kumalo, Zoeloe Beeldhouer,” South African Panorama 6, no. 1
(January 1961): 38–39; Marilyn Martin, “Kumalo vang gees van Afrika,” Die Transvaler,
October 29, 1982, 8; Naomi Nowosenetz, “Spirit of Tribal Art in Kumalo,” Pretoria News,
November 4, 1976; Lola Watter, “Kumalo,” in Our Art III, ed. Georges Duby and Heine
Toerien (Pretoria: Foundation for Education, Science and Technology, n.d.), 67–73.
20. Jansen van Rensburg, “Sydney Kumalo.” Miles, Polly Street, citing Anthony Krell,
“Urban African Art in South Africa” (master’s thesis, University of Cape Town, 1972),
raises this issue only at the end of her discussion of Skotnes’s time at Polly Street. That it
was probably central to many of the decisions he made about pedagogy is not acknowl-
edged. This is also discussed in Elizabeth Rankin, “Teaching and Learning: Skotnes at
Polly Street,” in Harmsen, Cecil Skotnes, 65–81.
21. This history is complex. Under apartheid, some black South Africans were given
passports if they were useful to the regime — allowing Kumalo to go overseas, for ex-
ample, enabled the South African government to claim that apartheid was not so bad.
He was not as politically engaged as others like Ernest Mancoba, Dumile Feni, or Mir-
iam Makeba, who went into exile.
22. Many of Kumalo’s works are archived in the Goodman Gallery, but the best
source is the fuba archive at the Johannesburg Art Gallery Library. Thanks to Jo
Berger, the librarian, for her ongoing support in maintaining and facilitating access to
these archives.
23. Illustrated in Esmé Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa: An Illustrated Bi-
ographical Dictionary and Historical Survey of Painters, Sculptors and Graphic Artists
since 1875 (Cape Town: Balkema, 1983), 404.
24. Miles, Polly Street; Jansen van Rensburg, “Sydney Kumalo”; Rankin, “Teaching
and Learning”; Watter, “Kumalo.”
25. Guenther interviews, April 23, 2012; Berman, Art and Artists. Guenther (inter-

views by the author, September 16, 19, and 23, 2009) explained how he chose modern-
ists to show to these artists.
26. Guenther interviews 2009; Miles, Polly Street, 126.
27. Guenther interview by the author, April 20, 2012.
28. Rankin, Images of Metal; Miles, Polly Street. See also, for example, Watter, Syd-
ney Kumalo; and Edward J. de Jager, Contemporary African Art in South Africa (Cape
Town: Struik, 1973).
29. Rankin, “Teaching and Learning”; Guenther interviews 2009.
30. Guenther interviews by the author, November 15, 2010, and July 17, 2014.
31. A Henry Moore work was offered to the University of the Witwatersrand in the
late 1960s as a memorial for the fallen of two world wars. The offer was rejected because
the university did not think the public would understand the work.
32. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Lon-
don: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981).
33. James Elkins, “Writing about Modernist Painting outside Western Europe and
North America,” in Compression vs. Expression: Containing and Explaining the World’s
Art, ed. John Onians (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 195.
34. For example, Jansen van Rensburg, “Sydney Kumalo”; Watter, Sydney Kumalo.
35. See Lize van Robbroeck, “Race and Art in Apartheid South Africa,” in Visual
Century: South African Art in Context, 1907–2007, vol. 2, 1945–1976, ed. Lize van Rob-
broeck (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2011), 79–95; Anitra Nettleton, “Primi-
tivism in South African Art,” in van Robbroeck, Visual Century, 2:121–63.
36. Guenther interviews 2009, 2010, 2014. The modern black artists did not qualify
as African artists in the same way as the makers of “traditional” pieces of African art
that he had in his collection, sold at Sotheby’s in 2000.
37. Guiseppe Cattaneo and Cecily Sash, two of the original Amadlozi exhibitors, did
not participate. Ezrom Legae was added to this new Amadlozi, which thus included
largely sculptural or carved forms, and some drawings. (Thanks to Neil Dundas for
access to the Goodman Gallery archive in September 2009).
38. Many others have had posthumous retrospective exhibitions that toured South
Africa. See Anitra Nettleton, “Writing Artists into History: Dumile Feni and the
South African Canon,” African Arts 44, no. 4 (2011): 8–25, for a discussion of the Feni
exhibition.
39. Neil Dundas, Goodman Galleries, personal communication, Johannesburg,
October 21, 2009.
40. I have found photographs of these works in the Goodman Gallery archives but
have not been able to trace, as yet, their actual whereabouts.
41. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 45–46.
42. These interpretations were extensively recorded by Marcelle Manley, “Jackson
Hlungwani: A Contemporary Prophet” (Unpublished manuscript, University of South

Africa, Dept. of Religious Studies, 1991); Jameson Maluleke, “Jackson Hlungwani,” un-
published manuscript, 1991, University of the Witwatersrand Art Museum Archive,
Johannesburg.
43. Maluleke, “Jackson Hlungwani.”
44. Burnett, “An Introduction to the Sculpture,” in Burnett, Jekiseni Hlungwani San-
gani, 31–37.
45. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 49.
46. See Anitra Nettleton, “The Professional, Authentic Artist,” in Authentic Wood-
carver, ed. Vuyani Biya and Mark Waller (Polokwane, ZA: Timbila, 2012), 7–22, for a
discussion of Hlungwani’s status as a professional artist as opposed to a shaman.
47. Karel Nel, “Shangaan: In Search of a Genealogy,” in Dunga Manzi / Stirring Wa-
ters: Tsonga and Shangaan Art from Southern Africa, ed. Nessa Leibhammer (Johan-
nesburg: Wits University Press, 2007), 149–67.
48. For example, his thrones are made up of several found pieces of wood, con-
structed into seats, with carved elements visible only in some details. See Anitra Nettle-
ton, “Homeland Artists and the Contemporary Artworld: The Politics of Authenticity,”
Double Desire: Transculturation and Indigenous Contemporary Art, ed. Ian McLean
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014), 264–86.
50. For a discussion of the subjectivities of contemporary African artists, see Chika
Okeke-Agulu, “Modern African Art,” in The Short Century: Independence and Liber-
ation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, ed. Okwui Enwezor, 29–36 (Munich: Prestel
Verlag, 2001).
51. Burnett, Tributaries.
52. Discussed in Anitra Nettleton, “In Search of a Tsonga Style: Figurative and
Abstract Woodcarving,” in Leibhammer, Dunga Manzi, 123–37; Nettleton, “Jackson
Hlungwani’s Altars.”
53. See Rayda Becker, “Visions and the Viewer,” in Burnett, Jekiseni Hlungwani San-
gani, 20–23; Ricky Burnett, interview by the author, September 29, 2009; Peter Rich,
“The New Jerusalem,” in Burnett, Jekiseni Hlungwani Sangani, 27–30.
54. For a discussion of these, see Nettleton, “Professional, Authentic Artist.”
55. See Nettleton, “Homeland Artists.”
56. See, for example, Herbert Read, The Origins of Form in Art (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1965).
57. By Miles, Polly Street, for example.
59. Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present
(London: Verso, 2002), 125.
60. This view is strongly maintained by his family, and his daughter expressed it in a
speech at the Hlungwani seminar in Polokwane on March 9, 2012.

61. A signed cast of this sculpture was sold recently on auction at Bonhams in Lon-
don (http://www.bonhams.com/auctions/18788/lot/93/). I have not traced a cast in
a public collection thus far. There are several posthumous casts on the market, with
significant differences between some of those and the originals.
62. Burnett interview, 2010.

ERIN HANEY
14 THE MODERNIST LENS
OF LUTTERODT STUDIOS
Two Gold Coast gentlemen array themselves in front of the camera, elegant
and comporting with a serene intimacy. Modulated light contours the young
men’s faces and angles of repose. Behind them, expansive trompe l’oeil win-
dows and the airy dimensions of an interior scene suggest the fine residences
of Elmina, Cape Coast, and Accra. This inscribed carte de visite, a portrait by
the Lutterodt Brothers and Cousin of Accra, circa 1880, indicates the medium’s
felicitous mobility: its subjects iteratively regarded, kept in albums, dispatched
by post. Willie L. Pine of McCarthy Hill, Cape Coast, sent two cartes (figure
14.1) as message tokens to a distant friend — tracing new and future circuits
of photographs throughout the West Coast of Africa (wca) and the Atlantic
world.1
Despite long awareness of the global flows of photographic objects and ideas,
self-fashioning for the camera in the nineteenth century has been dismissed as
mimicry of European models — substandard and lacking in “authenticity” —
rather than the product of deliberate creative decisions by west African sitters
and photographers.2 Of these subjects, one observer noted, “These are poses
late 19th century Victorian sitters would have assumed in Europe or North
America, whereas the proper etiquette for self-presentation in that region of
West Africa (as we know from sculpture as well as from other photographs)
would have required both men to frontally face the camera, rest their hands on
their knees or in their laps, and sit erect and still.” 3
This kind of statement echoes others concerned with posing in particular
ways as an affectation, regularly noted of Seydou Keïta’s subjects, who recline
or pose on a motorcycle, for example. It suggests a particular unfamiliarity to
FIGURE 14.1 Carte de visite, two unidentified men, Ghana, before 1886. Lutterodt
Brothers and Cousin, Accra, Gold Coast. Private collection.
imply that non-European people were obliged to sit or pose like sculptural
objects, or to dress in a way somehow indicative of an essential geographic or
cultural location.4 In a photo studio, any sitter had the prerogative to affect his
or her appearance, and a portrait was thus a collaboration with the photogra-
pher and the shadow of all other portraits seen or enacted.
Personal dress and public display were essential projections enacted in elite
coastal West Africa, and imported clothing was among the most visible signs
of belonging to a larger elite coastal society.5 Such self-fashioning signaled
cosmopolitan savoir faire and personal and familial financial attainment.6
Photography utterly transformed the coastal coordinates of the visible: reach-
ing west African audiences who appreciated and equally indulged in such
lavish investment in their personal appearances. Their exchange within these
networks illuminates a larger constellation of ideas throughout the wca and
358 E rin H aney

beyond, signaling independence, educational preferences, abiding material
wealth, marriages and business partnerships, and a measure of advocacy and
authority in the conflicting and changing spheres of indigenous and colonial
power.7 Such portraits became the self-conscious creation of a visible record of
lives and social standing, and their complex subjectivities constituted a larger,
visual west African modernity.
This photo from the latter part of the nineteenth century is evidence that the
visual representation of African modernity has a much deeper history than is
usually recognized. We must look to the early history of photography in Africa
to understand the particularly mobile nature of the modern and the agencies
of these visual forms. An overzealous attention, largely market driven, on the
work of one or two Malian photographers from the independence era has had
the unintended consequence that important precursors in West Africa, the
true pioneers of photography and its modernities, have been largely ignored.
In this chapter I consider the Lutterodts’ studios and photography on the
wca in the mid to late nineteenth century. The Lutterodts were an Accra
family, whose generations of photographers operated pop-up and permanent
studios along the coast from the 1870s to the 1940s. As creative entrepreneurs,
this family created a performative visual zone, extending studio practices
and flows of photographs rhizomatically to the coast’s cities. In doing so,
they linked cosmopolitan centers and bridged cultural, linguistic, political,
and colonial contexts. A border-crossing logic inheres in their photographic
subjects — not occupied with marking origins, city, or state belonging, but
rather creating images wherein land, space, and people illuminate the mea-
sure of public biography and records of personal and political achievement.
The Lutterodts established entirely new positions as artists and entrepreneurs,
sparking a diverse and booming transborder market for photography on the
wca from the 1870s.
Itinerant Agents of Modernity

West Africa’s coastal cosmopolitanisms began much earlier than the advent
of the camera. In Accra and other Gold Coast towns, a new indigenous elite
began to emerge in the early nineteenth century, merchants who were inde-
pendent, educated, and traded in new commodities following the Atlantic
slave trade’s decline. These elite communities had ties to Creole (Krio) so-
cieties in cities from Europe to Freetown to Fernando Po, as well as strong
family ties to indigenous communities in the Gold Coast.8 Finally, these elite
M odernist L ens of L utterodt S tudios 359

forged alliances with the long-standing Euro-African communities that had
grown around the Gold Coast’s Danish, Dutch, and English trading forts
from the eighteenth century. For example, in Accra’s Osu, the town around
the Danish fort Christiansborg, a sizeable and self-conscious community of
mulatofoi (Ga: mulatto), descended from Danish soldiers and Ga women,
was long established and encouraged by the Danish trading administration.
Children were schooled at the Danish fort, and some were employed in its
trade and government. Of these Accra and other Gold Coast Euro-African
communities, some were Christian, others secular or tied to indigenous royal
and military lineages, and many were educated in Europe.
Into this milieu George Lutterodt arrived in Accra, coming from Germany
with a Danish relative in 1805. George would become a merchant and trader
who married, had many children, and owned a plantation north of the city.
George’s son Wilhelm attended the Danish school at Osu, later tying into a no-
table Euro-African lineage with his marriage to Mary Cleland. Wilhelm and
Mary built their house, Lutterodt Hall, in 1854 on Lutterodt Street in Dutch
Accra (Ussher Town) after the British bombing of Osu. George’s grandsons,
William, George, and Gerhardt, referred to in contemporary English sources
as “educated natives” and “Danish mulattoes,” were the founding brothers of
the photographic dynasty.
The Lutterodts’ business models and network of family ties, status, and
wealth across class lines and origins along the coast was no small feature of
their company’s lasting success. From 1876, they created what would become
the most enduring business model for photographers in the region: combining
itinerant pop-up studios that advertised from town to town in advance and on
arrival with permanent studio operations in Freetown, Accra, and Fernando
Po, and extending their traveling photography as far south as Angola.
From their earliest advertisements, it became clear that they occasionally
worked together and other times traveled itinerantly, working under their own
names or studio names. Gerhardt operated along the coast from the 1870s, cir-
culating in Freetown, Cape Coast, and Accra; his brother William joined the
circuit but moved separately, perhaps ensuring periodic access to customers
while early patronage was still expanding. All family members benefited from
the capital provided by their affluent family, but cameras, supplies, studio back-
drops, and furniture were periodically imported, and they advertised these
events as a way of drawing new patronage. Several studios became well estab-
lished in Accra during this decade, with family apprentices and commissions
360 E rin H aney

abroad, including work for colonial and academic explorers, despite tightening
access to credit during the economic downturn of the 1890s, which strength-
ened European commercial interests at the expense of west African businesses.
The Lutterodts traveled on steamers, which carried scores of educated workers
and laborers from the Gold Coast along the Gulf of Guinea — the migration
of labor rising with the demand for empire building particularly in Nigeria,
Cameroon, Gabon, the Congo, and Angola. During their perambulations,
they trained others who sought instruction in the trade of photography. Their
tutelage also squarely drew from family, and historical accounts indicate that
any young man in the family might be sent to Fernando Po for training with
Gerhardt, where he had established a farm in his later years.
The nature of this family practice had several benefits. One, it expanded
public knowledge of their practice, their family name, and photography more
generally; two, it created a secondary market in images — where a commis-
sioned portrait would be reprinted and shown as an example to convey the
styles and appearances of people from far away; and three, it built up anticipa-
tion in places where permanent studios had not yet been established. As with
their contemporaries Fred Grant of Cape Coast and J. P. Decker who worked
in Freetown and Accra in the 1870s, the Lutterodts and other photographers
in West Africa saw the benefit in keeping their studio practices mobile and
offering views and portraits from far away places. Yet more than those of their
colleagues, the Lutterodts’ temporary studios and their thorough itinerancy
underscore the advantages offered by these patterns of mobility.9 Their par-
ticularly wide coverage from Freetown to Fernando Po suggests that despite
the cumbersome equipment and glass plate negatives, the Lutterodts more
than any other west African studio were the most successful in carrying these
ideas, as well as those “secondary images,” long distances. They incorporated
examples of their oeuvre as they went and created new portraits with clientele
in the next town on the circuit. Their portraits, such as that of Chief Ayevie
with his court musicians, Little Popo, on the Slave Coast (Republic of Benin),
were commissioned, then reprinted to sell, or given to other interested view-
ers (figure 14.2). It is likely that once several images were printed and sold on
studio card mounts or singly, very few of the negatives survived such lengthy
journeys intact; the emulsion would often be scraped off so that the plates
could be reused.10 The Lutterodts were among the first to forge an entirely new
social role as artists and entrepreneurs across the wca. In tracing their efforts,
in spite of their now scattered and mostly lost oeuvre of work in the region, we

F I G U R E 1 4 . 2 [Gerhardt Lutterodt?], Slave Coast: Chief Ayevie of Little Popo
with His People, ca. 1880. Albumen print. From Conrad Bullnheimer Album.
Courtesy the Walther Collection, New York and Neu-Ulm, Germany.
can still arrive at a more nuanced and polycentric remapping of photography

and modernity along the coast.11
Biographies Will Stay with Us

Elite Gold Coast sensibilities were shared and recognizable in other parts of
the wca.12 Many families had blood ties to Europe and sent children to school
in England. Overseas travel was an increasing priority for education, business,
and the new growing internationalist political class.13 The display cultures of
Gold Coast modernity were not limited to imports from Europe, but were
also embedded in earlier notions of mercantile success and business acumen
rooted in preexisting Atlantic circulations. Before British imperialism’s en-
croachment and systemic economic advantages over Gold Coast merchants
became significant, mercantilisms as evidence of intellectual prowess, busi-
ness acumen, and ambition drove forms of economic development that ran
through local societies for centuries.14
362 E rin H aney

Gold Coast families who had accrued resources through the eighteenth-
century Atlantic slave trade kept much of this wealth and deep investment
through the decline of the human trade in the 1830s. Later, two economic
surges revivified Gold Coast wealth: the palm oil boom of the 1850s, and
growth in the market for rubber, timber, gold, and cocoa in the 1880s; both
buoyed merchant incomes in coastal towns.15 During this later time, growing
numbers of Gold Coast businessmen, educated in Europe, began creating
entirely new demonstrations of their success. They commissioned new archi-
tectural projects, personal homes in Elmina, Cape Coast, and Accra, designed
and styled by Brazilian architects and builders.16 These ostentatious buildings
were both business dwellings and family house compounds, and they became
new focal points of accomplishment and prestige in the urban landscape (plate
13). Likewise, merchant families used disposable income in commissioning
photographs, from intimate portable images like the cartes de visite to grand
large-scaled formal portraits to decorate the central meeting rooms in these
new houses. Thus, the public rooms of these houses and the displays of family
portraits inside were integrated elements of this modern display culture, com-
mingling the visual in public and private, mobile and geographically rooted
creative forms.
In the same way, imported clothing was an important signifier of success,
though it was never an either/or choice, but a deliberate personal selection
made based on contexts of public and private vision. Rather than indicating
some instrumental switch of cultural allegiance, wearing imported clothing
was but one of many visible signs of wealth, and more important, individual
style (figure 14.3). The ladies and gentlemen gathered at a pop-up merry-go-
round could afford these sartorial choices — men in suits, a soldier, and per-
haps the photographer himself on the right, frame a cluster of women and
children seated in the center. On this minimally observed imported holiday,
the photographers were drawn to the many wealthy citizens partaking in the
city’s diversions — teas, fairs, rides, and horseraces.
By the 1880s, the visible display of luxury items and consumerism was
becoming a matter of considered local debate, as Gold Coast contestation of
European political and cultural influence grew in response to British colonial
consolidation. Those who adorned themselves with tailored clothes at times
came under criticism from various levels — from scorn heaped on people who
were accorded a misplaced high status, to a broader accusation of the unthink-
ing assimilation of English ideas and blind love of foreign imports.17 There

FIGURE 14.3 [Gerhardt Lutterodt?], Gold Coast, Merry-Go-Round, Accra,
Christmas 1887, ca. 1887. Albumen print. From Conrad Bullnheimer Album.
Courtesy the Walther Collection, New York and Neu-Ulm, Germany.
were also those who decried these as trappings of a pervasive and ostentatious
materialism.18 Not surprisingly, the cities, with their density of grand houses
and increasing parades of luxurious bodies and imported clothing, were also
the sites of heated debate on the meanings and effects of such ostentation.
As was the case in other trading entrepôts, the relatively ready flow of cash
underpinned the commercial apparatus and mobility of photography. In
much of the wca, this wealth came in part from the deep pockets that slavery,
and later, rural exploitation of people from the interior provided. For the Lut-
terodts and their cohort, mercantile imperative and entrepreneurialism drove
their itinerant studios. Even competition among the family members seems to
have spurred on their enduring and widespread expansion (see plate 12).
Photographers like the Lutterodts illuminated aspects of this showy spend-
ing in Accra and other coastal cities. They were poised to create images that
would capture personal and familial achievement at important events like
marriages, or even small public events like a festival for Christmas, the peri-
odic debut of young women eligible for marriage, or another holiday gather-
ing in town. Yet circulation of those images later on could be a random and
364 E rin H aney

F I G U R E 1 4 . 4 [Gerhardt Lutterodt?], Almeida Brothers,
Little Popo, Republic of Benin, ca. 1880. Photograph. From

Conrad Bullnheimer Album. Courtesy the Walther Collec-
tion, New York and Neu-Ulm, Germany.
somewhat felicitous affair, guided by what the photographers had just photo-
graphed, and what new audiences were offered at the next stop. For example,
a portrait of the Almeida brothers of Little Popo, Republic of Benin, suggests
how readily the appearance of the photographer was the impetus for taking a
fine portrait (figure 14.4). Adorned in frock coats, the brothers of this Afro-
Brazilian community might have sent this portrait to family members down
the coast (to Ouidah or Porto-Novo), or given them as gifts to visitors, as was
likely the case with this image, which ended up in a private German album.19
As the Lutterodts traveled farther afield, their sitters grew to use photog-
raphy as part of a more thorough-going initiative, one that helped create a
permanent and visible record tied to a much broader concern with personal
biography, family, and public memory.
Certainly in southern Ghana, photographic portraiture became a potent
form of biography and selective record of personal achievement. It drew from

imperatives informed by the prerogatives of the elite citizenry, but also for
any person, regardless of status or birth, who was full of ambition. Like other
kinds of semipublic display, portraits would be displayed and used over time
to evoke individual glory: a portrait might be a visual metonym for a political
success; a triumph measured in land, goods, or a house; or even travel for
work and adventure portrayed as lionized engagements with the world be-
yond one’s home.
One of many key actors in the exchanges of intellectual and creative capital
along the wca and the Atlantic during this era was Tackie Tawia. During his
long reign as a king in Accra, Tackie ruled over important political shifts and
advocated for the avant-garde transfer of ideas and skills between cities. He
commanded a renowned military force and had fought in several Gold Coast
wars; his successes were also attributed to his position in the spiritual domains
of Ga supernatural belief. Through his four decades’ reign, King Tackie stood
resolutely as an oppositional force against British colonial encroachments on
his political control in the city.20
Tackie’s role as an agent of intercultural negotiation was one part of his her-
oism. The export and appropriation of ideas and the expansion of technolo-
gies during this era of solidifying colonial rule are hallmarks of his biography.
The Lutterodt studios photographed this king, to whom they were related,
fairly often.21 Tackie’s death in 1902 was a momentous event in the political and
supernatural life of colonial Accra. The funeral had caused uproar in the city,
with ten thousand mourners coming from Accra and its environs to mourn,
wearing the color of blood, and firing muskets and guns in tribute. On the an-
niversary of his death, mourners held a month-long Great Lamentation (Ga:
yalafemo) in Accra and created a new custom of parading to his mausoleum,
on the outskirts of town, every year thereafter. Frederick Lutterodt’s studio
photographed mourners on the commemorative anniversary. This portrait of
his close mourners, carefully marked 1903, was printed plentifully enough that
copies were given and bought by Accra’s community, including a member of
the city’s Basel Mission (figure 14.5). Taken in the courtyard of a family house,
men of all ages and a few boys are assembled in front of an expansive painted
backdrop. They wear dark-colored mourning cloth, simple and free of pat-
terns. Many wear cloths as armbands as well, and their elaborate head ties
signify that these are particularly senior members of the family, to distinguish
them from mourners of the larger bereaved family and community. Three
men pose with their hands on faces and one finger pointing to the eye: this
seemingly casual move is a charged gesture meaning “Have you seen?,” which
366 E rin H aney

F I G U R E 1 4 . 5 Frederick Lutterodt, The People of the Deceased King Tackie in
Accra (with their temples bound as a sign of mourning), Gold Coast, 1903. Albumen
print. FRC Lutterodt Studio, Accra, Ghana, Gold Coast. Permission of Basel
Mission Archive, qw-30.007.0008.
references the importance of this event and tells all spectators that this mo-
ment is being deliberately and consciously made or noted. The gesture alerts
the present audience, and the photographer, and all future viewers, about the
gravity of the occasion, social and photographed.
Portraits and photography around the biographical events of important
people are deeply imbricated in the local and the cosmopolitan regional senses
of the political world. Portraiture was inevitably an ongoing visual negotiation
between photographers or artists and their subjects and patrons over their
interpretations of local histories and traditions. This is how there came to be
such considerable photographic attention to portraits of the deceased, their
funerals, their chief mourners, of women dressed and adorned for the various
stages of mourning, and of graves. This photographic attention expanded in
the late nineteenth century and became widespread along the coast, creating
new visualities of family, private and public observation and performance.
Not only does this photograph of Tackie’s mourners inscribe and underline lo-

cal determination to perform, to remember and iterate Tackie’s political legacy
and triumphs, it marks the emergence of an entirely new kind of monument
to Tackie’s importance in colonial Accra’s political and spiritual spheres. It is
one of many performative and intermedial images, which extends modern
personal and political biography into the future.
Photography and the Colony

The Lutterodts’ seven decades of studio practice effectively bookend the rise
and decline of British colonialism in West Africa. Yet neither British inter-
vention nor other European imperialist projects much undermined the abil-
ity of these entrepreneurs to traverse borders for their own ends. Rather, the
long-standing trade networks and the thorough mercantilism of the region
supported their expansion into the rapidly changing terrain of the wca and
beyond. The Lutterodt family was secure in Accra as its business hub and
ancestral home, and the itinerancy of the brothers, sons, and nephews was
not only tenable but successful because of the management of other income
streams. As Érika Nimis and others have pointed out, colonial rule in coastal
entrepôt cities was quite distinct from those in the west African interior. It was
far easier than in other regions for those in English protectorates and colonies
to travel and trade on their own behalf; in contrast, French photographers
dominated in Saint-Louis, Senegal, and later Dakar for decades before the first
African-owned studios would appear.22 Photographic subjects and patronage
reflected these different orders, where oppressive labor extraction was the
norm, as in the aof (French West Africa). The freedom of independent Ac-
cra families to move, and the means to do it, was a symptom of the relative
wealth of Gold Coast families, and the entrepreneurial spirit and wherewithal
to travel for work along the coast was a long-standing and highly regarded
tradition with deep roots in the elite classes along the wca.
In some ways, Gerhardt Lutterodt best exemplifies the benefits of itinerancy
as a strategy against the shoring up of colonial consolidation. Of the family’s
three founding photographers, Gerhardt’s movements along the Bight of Bi-
afra to Fernando Po and along the southwest coast down to Angola suggest
that he was probably the most well traveled of the studio photographers. In
this capacity, Gerhardt trained generations of family members, as well as other
photographers in the region. A. Accolatse of Lome, Togo, was taught by Ger-
hardt, and Lutterodt family records indicate that many of the young sons in
the Accra family were sent at some point to Fernando Po to apprentice with
368 E rin H aney

F I G U R E 1 4 . 6 Unknown photographer, Two Men Standing in a Field Cleared for
Cocoa Plantation, Bioko, Equatorial Guinea [Probably Gerhardt Lutterodt and his
employee on Lutterodt’s farm, Fernando Po], ca. 1900. Albumen print. From the
Basel Mission Album, Accra, Ghana, eepa 1997-011-0148. Courtesy Eliot Elisofon
Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution.
him.23 Many of the Lutterodt men around the turn of the century joined the
ongoing waves of migration from the Gold Coast to other parts of the coast to
seek their fortunes. Members of the family advertised their services as agents
to bring new skilled labor to new cities in Nigeria, Gabon, other parts of the
Bights, as well as the Congo.24
Upon retiring, Gerhardt bought land on the island of Fernando Po to start
a cocoa farm, riding the wave of new opportunities in changing access to
land ownership and new introductions to the agricultural economy. In family
accounts, it was Gerhardt, rather than the noted nationalist Tetteh Quashie,
who introduced the all-important crop of cocoa to the Gold Coast from Fer-
nando Po. The few landscape photographs of this area in the late nineteenth
century survey the dramatically changing environs. They frame the growing
numbers of vessels at the port and the build-up of infrastructure, such as men
stringing telegraph wires and road building. Among these are a series of Ger-

hardt with multiple laborers who have recently cleared a forested area (figure
14.6); other photographs of this field show newly planted cocoa trees. There
is a very personal sense in the way these images were formulated in relation
to land, ownership, new forms of agricultural experimentation, and personal
accomplishment. These are both modest and proud gestures — connecting the
accomplishment of land ownership and its transformation to cash crop with
the Lutterodt family’s successful migrations back and forth from Accra. Also
imbricated is the depicting of different statuses — the changing authority of
people as landowners and paid laborers against a new backdrop — here set up
in a British-held area where African entrepreneurs tried their hands in new
ventures and captured those successes in images.25
The range of commissions offered by Gerhardt’s strategic positioning at
Fernando Po underlines the photography of the time as indifferent to genres.
They traded on the breadth of their experience, which anchored their exper-
tise. As the most experienced, skillful, and mobile of wca photographers,
their commissions held portraiture, landscape photography, and colonial
and commercial assignments. Gerhardt photographed many of the islands
off that coast for the Portuguese explorer and naturalist Francisco Newton
in the 1890s, at a time when Spanish and Portuguese protectorates were par-
ticularly prime for land grabs by the other, stronger colonial powers in the
region. Unfortunately, many of the images from these expeditions were lost in
a fire in Spanish archives. Frederick Lutterodt, part of the second generation
of Lutterodts, was directly commissioned for various colonial expeditions,
including by the British and the Germans. His Accra Studio, established 1904,
touted his experience abroad, such as in Cameroon from 1909 to 1913, and
with the British governor through northern Ghana and Togoland in 1919–20;
Frederick’s formative years in the 1890s, it was widely noted, were spent in
Cameroon, French Gabon, Fernando Po, San Tome, and Principe.26
Overburdened
Alex Lutterodt, a descendant who worked in the family business until the Sec-
ond World War, observed that by far, most of the studio clients were women,
continuously coming in to capture fleeting pleasures — a new ensemble made
of spectacular cloth, a birthday, a return to good health, the reception of good
news.27 Taken on the spur of the moment, the demand for updated portraits —
combined with holidays, births, funerals — meant that the flow of beautiful
women was such that it overwhelmed the young photographer, who was too
370 E rin H aney

inclined to give away his services in the presence of such stunning patrons. He
left the business to ensure that it would survive the hazard of his own financial
and aesthetic recklessness. The flood of beauty coming into the studio was just
too great to bear.
In Lutterodts’ pop-up migrations along the coast, they blazed along the cor-
ridor of the wca, extended the views of west African and European traders,
women and men, missionaries, “returnees” from the Americas and the UK,
sailors, laborers, clerks, and cocoa pioneers from up and down the coast, the
free born, slaves, and the newly freed.28 They were agents of modernity, and
framed this standard as practice in photographing the cosmopolitan, mercan-
tile, and outward-looking citizens and subjects. As objects and as process, their
photographic events were local, creative, iterative, and participatory. As pho-
tographers, each negotiation of making a photograph was an essential trans-
formation of ideas about location, the creating of tradition, and the constant
updating that photography enabled and demanded. The Lutterodts made por-
traits that now could be interpreted as ethnographic moments, caught as if in
amber, wherein lovely women’s portraits seem flattened by labels in personal
albums because we are missing their stories (figure 14.7). Terms like “Krobo”
or “Yoruba,” “native” or “educated” cue a longed-for sense of authenticity and
atemporality but were, I think, a kind of shorthand to mark the naming and
flow of people passing through the cities of the wca, occurring in those mo-
ments in the late nineteenth century, and that were anything but timeless.
Aporias
Because Lutterodt studios were so widely arrayed, and very little was published
in postcards or in commercial albums in other locations, much of this image
legacy is now lost, or rests in private family collections. Even the descendants
of the Lutterodt family have seen great losses of these archives after the close
of operations. The early heyday of their work from the late 1870s to the 1890s,
a particularly momentous era, was before the development of technology to
transfer photographic images into prints for books or newspapers. Only from
the 1890s is it possible to trace their work in travel publications. Still, much
more has been lost over time, decaying in private family collections. For these
reasons, relatively little is known of their oeuvre. The Lutterodts’ photographic
practice amounts to an unprecedented west African dynasty, which tirelessly
expanded the circulation of the medium, even to the detriment of the longevity
of their communal archive. They formalized the enactment of the photograph

F I G U R E 1 4 . 7 Unknown photographer, Accra-Mulattin, ca. 1880.
Photograph of unidentified woman, Accra, Ghana. Unattributed Gold

Coast studio. From Conrad Bullnheimer Album. Courtesy the Walther
Collection, New York and Neu-Ulm, Germany.
itself within performative scenes of public display and political life in West
Africa, and marked the triumphant and ephemeral contexts of self-fashioning
and display in the distance from home.
The Lutterodts’ photographs and histories utterly upend the notion that the
camera’s introduction in the nineteenth century was a hegemonic tool used
primarily for the colony. The Lutterodts were agents of the modern, working
in cosmopolitan milieux and anchored in wca social, political, and creative
worlds. To iterate their histories as merely reactions to colonial photographic
fictions reflects an ignorance of the depth and complexity of local and trans-
national west African artistry. Their work fundamentally centered the camera
in West Africa, far earlier than has been supposed by Okwui Enwezor, André
Magnin, and others who have assumed the medium was superfluous or even
reactionary until the independence era. The artistry of unintended conse-
quences is all the more valuable, and the Lutterodts’ photographs reinscribe
the substances of African modernity from those utterly mobile early days.
Notes
1. West Coast of Africa (wca) was a regional term employed by many photogra-
phers in the nineteenth century. Writing from other points on the wca are Patricia
Hickling, “Bonnevide: Photographie des Colonies — Early Studio Photography in
Senegal,” Visual Anthropology 27, no. 4 (2014): 339–61. doi:10.1080/08949468.2014.91
7252; Xavier Ricou on Saint-Louis, Senegal, Sénégalmétis, last updated June 10, 2013,
http://senegalmetis.com/Senegalmetis/PHOTOGRAPHES_1.html; Vera Viditz-Ward,
“Photography in Sierra Leone 1850–1918,” Africa 57, no. 4 (1987): 510–18; Julie Crooks,
“Alphonso Lisk-Carew: Early Photography in Sierra Leone” (PhD diss., University of
London, 2014); Jürg Schneider, “Exploring the Atlantic Visualscape: A History of Pho-
tography in West and Central Africa, 1840–1890” (PhD diss., University of Basel, 2011).
2. Stephen Sprague, “Yoruba Photography: How the Yoruba See Themselves,” Afri-
can Arts 12, no. 1 (1978): 52–59; Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of
Indian Photographs (London: Reaktion, 1997); Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Mo-
dernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1997); Christraud Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb, eds., Delivering Views:
Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1998); Erin Haney, Photography and Africa (London: Reaktion, 2010).
3. Christraud Geary, “Roots and Routes of African Photographic Practices: From
Modern to Vernacular Photography in West and Central Africa (1850–1980),” in Com-
panion to Modern African Art, ed. Gitti Salami and Monica Blackmun Visona (Hobo-
ken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 81.
4. Jean Allman, ed., Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 2004); Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and
Revolution, vol. 2, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997).
5. Simon Gikandi, “The Embarrassment of Victorianism: Colonial Subjects and the
Lure of Englishness,” in Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth
Century, ed. John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000), 157–85.
6. Richard Rathbone, “West Africa: Modernity and Modernization,” in African
Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debate, ed. Jan-Georg Deutsch, Peter
Probst, and Heike Schmidt (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), 18–30; Kristin Mann, Slavery
and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2007); Michael Echeruo, Victorian Lagos: Aspect of Nineteenth Century Lagos
Life (London: Macmillan, 1977); Michel R. Doortmont, “Producing a Received View of
Gold Coast Elite Society? C. F. Hutchison’s Pen Pictures of Modern Africans and African
Celebrities,” History in Africa 33 (2006): 473–93, doi:10.1353/hia.2006.0010.
7. Changing identities through travel, education, intermarriage, and the diverse
cosmopolitan communities on the Gold Coast littoral are discussed in John Parker,
Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra (Oxford: James Currey,
2000), 33–45; and in Paul Jenkins, ed., The Recovery of the West African Past (Basel:
Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 1998).
8. Creole (Krio) refers to Anglophone communities in myriad settler towns; Euro-
African refers to communities in Ghana of European and African parentage, known
in nineteenth-century usage as “mulatto,” or in Ga (the language of Ghana), mulatofoi.
Indigeneity is so varied and contingent on the wca that it must be considered precisely
in local contexts as well as in internationalist terms. There is considerable fluidity be-
tween groups of so-called traditional or natural rulers and cosmopolitan Gold Coast
elite. Larry W. Yarak, “A West African Cosmopolis: Elmina (Ghana) in the Nineteenth
Century,” Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, February 12–15,
2003, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, History Cooperative, http://www.history
cooperative.org/proceedings/seascapes/yarak.html; Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry, “ ‘Dis
respect and Contempt for Our Natural Rulers’: The African Intelligentsia and the Ef-
fects of British Indirect Rule on Indigenous Rulers in the Gold Coast, c. 1912–1920,”
International Journal of Regional and Local History 2, no. 1 (2006): 43–65.
9. See discussions of the ebb and flow of different centers, Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Biran Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Centers of photographic practice
along the coast were constantly in flux: Gambian photographer Francis Joaque moved
to Cameroon from Fernando Po in 1865; see Jürg Schneider, “Portrait Photography: A
Visual Currency in the Atlantic Visualscape,” in Portraiture and Photography in Africa,
ed. John Peffer and Elisabeth Lynn Cameron (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
374 E rin H aney

2013), 35–65. J. P. Decker from Cape Coast worked itinerantly from 1867; Haney, Pho-
tography and Africa, ch. 1; Hickling, Bonnevide, passim.
10. A. P. K. Lutterodt, interviews by the author, Accra, November 23, 2001, and May
3, 2002. The images shown in this chapter were found in of a series of albums held by
the Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm, Germany, exhibited in Distance and Desire: Encoun-
ters with the African Archive.
11. Additionally, Ann Shumard, A Durable Memento: Portraits by Augustus Wash-
ington, African-American Daguerreotypist (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution,
1999); Erin Haney, “Film, Charcoal, Time: Contemporaneities in Gold Coast Photo-
graphs,” History of Photography 34 (2010): 119–33; Jürg Schneider and Erin Haney, eds.,
“Early Photographies in West Africa,” special issue, Visual Anthropology 27 (2014);
Crooks, “Alphonso Lisk-Carew.”
12. Parker, Making the Town; Roger Gocking, Facing Two Ways: Ghana’s Coastal
Communities under Colonial Rule (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999);
Yarak, “West African Cosmopolis.”
13. Doortmont, “Producing a Received View.”
14. J. F. A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder, A History of West Africa, vol. 1 (London:
Longman, 1985).
15. Raymond E. Dummett, “African Merchants of the Gold Coast, 1860–1905 —
Dynamics of Indigenous Entrepreneurship,” Comparative Studies in Society and His-
tory 25, no. 4 (1983): 661–93, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500010665.
16. Two-story buildings of brick and stone contained grand living spaces, ware-
houses and outbuildings, courtyards, rooms for servants, and buildings for doing
business all within one family compound. See Doortmont, “Producing a Received
View”; Alcione M. Amos, “Afro-Brazilians in Togo: The Case of the Olympio Family,
1882–1945,” Cahier d’Études Africaines 162 (2001): 293–314.
17. “Indians, Chinamen and Maoris rejoice in their native names, and are proud of
their countries and their own institutions, but we groan under the weight of foreign
names and habits, hence all our misery and woe. . . . The home-loving English mind
cannot think with out associating us with slavery and savagism. . . . And let us ever
bear in mind, that to be thoroughly convinced that ‘Civilization does not necessarily
mean The Aping of European Manners and Customs.’ ” Kwamina Tawiah, “No Pseudo-
Englishmen,” Gold Coast Express, November 19, 1888. Another noted that the British
borrowed from Greek and Roman civilization, but they themselves accused the Afri-
can of being “too readily imitative.” Janus, “The Inventive Faculties of the European
and the African Races,” Gold Coast Aborigines, February 26, 1898.
18. A Citizen, Cape Coast, Gold Coast Aborigines, April 23, 1898.
19. The Afro-Brazilian family d’Almeida included former slaves, free born, and
slave traders in Agoué, Ouidah, and Little Popo, Dahomey (now Republic of Benin);
Silke Strickrodt, “ ‘Afro-Brazilians’ of the Western Slave Coast in the 19th Century,” in

Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slav-
ery, edited by Jose C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy (Amherst, MA: Prometheus, 2004),
212–44; Adam Jones and Peter Sebald, An African Family Archive: The Lawsons of Little
Popo/Aneho (Togo), 1841–1938 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Robin Law,
Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port,’ 1727–1892 (Athens: Ohio
20. Shortly after Tackie came to the throne in 1862, the British consolidated their
holdings along the coast and banished two of the three Accra kings, Tackie of Kinka
and Kojo Ababio of Jamestown. Both returned to Accra in 1869, prompting the British
to change their policy toward Accra’s leaders. By 1875 Tackie led the Ga-Adangme peo-
ple in battle in the southeastern part of the Gold Coast and cemented his reputation for
bravery as a military leader.
21. Tackie referred to his Lutterodt “uncle.” King Tackie interview by Col. White, Oc-
tober 12, 1887, adm 11/1/1086, National Archives of Ghana, Accra. See Parker, Making
the Town, 77.
22. Érika Nimis, Photographes d’Afrique de l’Ouest: L’expérience Yoruba (Paris: Kar-
thala, 2005); Érika Nimis, “Yoruba Studio Photographers in Francophone West Africa,”
in Portraiture and Photography in Africa, ed. John Peffer and Elisabeth Lynn Cameron
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 102–40; Hickling, Bonnevide.
23. Philippe David, “Photographer-Publishers in Togo,” in Anthology of African and
Indian Ocean Photography, ed. Pascal Martin Saint Leon, N’Goné Fall, and Jean Loup
Pivin (Paris: Revue Noire, 1999) 42–46; A. P. K Lutterodt, interviews by the author,
Accra, November 23, 2001; April 3, 2002; and May 3, 2002.
24. Advertisement by the Royal Photographic Gallery’s G. A. G. Lutterodt, Gold
Coast Chronicle, October 21, 1899.
25. Erin Haney, “Going to Sea: Photographic Publics of the Free and Newly Freed,”
Visual Anthropology 27, no. 4 (2014): 362–78.
26. Allister Macmillan, The Red Book of West Africa: Historical and Descriptive,
Commercial and Industrial Facts, Figures and Resources (London: F. Cass, 1968), 211.
27. A. P. K. Lutterodt, interviews by the author, Accra, November 23, 2001; April 3,
2002; May 3, 2002; and February 16, 2005.
28. These migrations and the statuses of free and unfree people in Haney, “Going
to Sea.”
376 E rin H aney

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CONTRIBUTORS
B I L L A N T H E S is a professor in the Art Field Group at Pitzer College. He is
author of Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960 (2006) and

Edgar Heap of Birds (2015), both published by Duke University Press. He has
received fellowships and awards from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research
Center, the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University, the
Rockefeller Foundation/Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heri-
tage, and the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Pro-
gram. He lives in Pomona, California.
PETER BRUNT is senior lecturer in art history at Victoria University of Wel-

lington, where he teaches the visual arts of the Pacific with a research emphasis
on the postcolonial era. He received his doctorate from Cornell University and
is coeditor of Art in Oceania: A New History (2012), winner of the 2013 Author’s
Club Art Book Prize (UK), and Tatau: Photographs by Mark Adams: Samoan
Tattoo, New Zealand Art, Global Culture (2010). His publications have appeared
in Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture, the Eighteenth Century: Theory
and Interpretation, Art New Zealand, and the Journal of Pacific History. He is
currently cocurating (with Nicholas Thomas and Adrian Locke) the exhibition
Oceania for the Royal Academy of Arts, London, due to open in 2018.
KAREN D U F F E K is the curator of Contemporary Visual Arts and Pacific
Northwest at the ubc Museum of Anthropology. Her research focus lies both
in the history of Northwest Coast Indigenous collections and in the relation-
ship of contemporary art to cultural and institutional practices. Among her
exhibitions and publications are Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Terri-
tories (with Tania Willard, 2016), Projections: The Painted Art of Henry Speck,
Udzi’stalis (with Marcia Crosby, 2012), Border Zones: New Art across Cultures
(2010), Robert Davidson: The Abstract Edge (2004), and The Transforming Im-
age: Painted Arts of Northwest Coast First Nations (with Bill McLennan, 2000).
ERIN HANEY is a research associate with Visual Identities in Art and Design
at the University of Johannesburg; she holds a doctorate in the history of art
from soas, University of London. She recently curated Sailors and Daughters:
Early Photography and the Indian Ocean for the National Museum of African
Art, Smithsonian Institution (indian-ocean.africa.si.edu). She partners and
teaches in several arts collaborations in the United States, the UK, and west
Africa, including Resolution (www.resolutionphoto.org), and has published
widely on photography, media, and arts institutions on the African continent
and the diaspora. Erin co-curated the inaugural exhibition of Kenyan photog-
rapher Priya Ramrakha, A Pan-African Perspective, 1950–1968, in South Africa
in 2017; and is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Priya Ramrakha (2018).
ELIZABETH HARNEY is an art historian and curator in the Department of

Art, University of Toronto, where she teaches modern and contemporary Af-
rican and diasporic arts. She is the author of In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics,
and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995 (2004) and Ethiopian Passages: Con-
temporary Art from the Diaspora (2003), and coeditor of Inscribing Meaning:
Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art (2007). Harney has published in
Art Journal, African Arts, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, the Art
Bulletin, New Literary History, Third Text, South Atlantic Quarterly, and the Ox-
ford Art Journal. She was the first curator of contemporary arts at the National
Museum of African Art, Smithsonian (1999–2003). As a Commonwealth
Scholar, Harney received her doctorate from the University of London. She has
two books in progress, “The Retromodern: Africa in the Time of the Contem-
porary” and “Prismatic Scatterings: Global Modernists in Post-War Europe.”
HEATHER IGLOLIORTE (Inuk, Nunatsiavut) is an associate professor in the

Department of Art History at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec,
where she holds a Concordia University Research Chair in Indigenous Art
History and Community Engagement. Heather has published extensively on
Inuit and other Indigenous arts in academic journals such as PUBLIC, Art
Link, TOPIA, Art Journal, and RACAR and in texts such as Negotiations in
a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada (ed. Lynda Jessup, 2014), Man-
ifestations: New Native Art Criticism (2011), and Curating Difficult Knowl-
edge (2011). She recently cocurated the world’s first circumpolar night festival,
iNuit blanche (2016); curated the reinstallation of the permanent collection of
Inuit art at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, Ilippunga (2016);
and launched the nationally touring exhibition SakKijajuk: Art and Craft from
410 C ontributors
Nunatsiavut (2016–19). Igloliorte is also the Guest Curator for the Winnipeg
Art Gallery’s Inuit Art Centre, opening 2020.
SANDRA KLOPPER is a former deputy-vice chancellor at the University of

Cape Town in South Africa. She has written extensively on the art of tradi-
tional communities in southern Africa; on the expressive culture of other
marginalized groups, including the urban homeless; on various aspects of
South African youth culture; and on the art of several contemporary South
African artists. Klopper is the author, most recently, of Irma Stern: Are You
Still Alive? Stern’s Life and Art Seen through Her Letters to Richard and Fred
Feldman, 1934–1966 (2017). Her research interests include the proliferation of
alternative modernisms that emerge through the interface between rural and
urban communities in present-day KwaZulu-Natal.
I A N M c L E A N is Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History at the Uni-
versity of Melbourne and research professor of contemporary art at the Uni-

versity of Wollongong. He has published extensively on Australian art and
particularly Aboriginal art within a contemporary context. His books include
Indigenous Archives: The Making and Unmaking of Aboriginal Art (with Dar-
ren Jorgensen, 2014), Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art
(2016), Double Desire: Transculturation and Indigenous Contemporary Art
(2014), How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art (2009), White
Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art (1998), and The Art of Gordon
Bennett (with a chapter by Gordon Bennett, 1996).
ANITRA NETTLETON was director of the Centre for the Creative Arts of
Africa and academic head of Wits Art Museum at the University of the Witwa-
tersrand from 2012 to 2015. Having earned the first PhD in African art studies
in South Africa, she subsequently published on Indigenous arts of southern
Africa in books, journals, and edited volumes. Her essays consider the works of
both historical and contemporary African artists. In association with Wits Art
Museum, she has curated and cocurated exhibitions and was responsible for a
section of UCLA Fowler Museum’s fiftieth anniversary show. She has presented
papers at numerous international conferences in the United States, Europe, and
Japan. She is author of the book African Dream Machines: Style and Meaning
in African Headrests (2007). Her current concern with modernity in its wider
aspects is reflected in her concurrent work on modern traditions and traditions
of modernism in South African art. She is now professor emeritus at Wits.
C ontributors 411
CHIKA is professor of African and African diaspora art
O K E K E -A G U L U
history at Princeton University. His books include Contemporary African Art

Since 1980 (2009), Who Knows Tomorrow (2010), Ezumeezu: Essays on Ni-
gerian Art and Architecture, a Festschrift in Honour of Demas Nwoko (2012),
Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria
(2015), and Obiora Udechukwu: Line, Image, Text (2016). His curatorial proj-
ects include the Nigerian Pavilion at the First Johannesburg Biennale, 1995;
Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London,
1995); The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa,
1945–1994 (Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 2001); The 5th Gwangju Biennale
(2004); Who Knows Tomorrow (Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2010); and Life Ob-
jects: Art and the Lifecycle in Africa (Princeton University Art Museum, 2010).
Okeke-Agulu is coeditor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, a col-
umnist for Huffington Post, and a blogger at Ofodunka.
RUTH B. PHILLIPS is a Canada Research Professor and Professor of Art His-

tory at Carleton University, Ottawa. Since completing doctoral research on
Mende women’s masquerades from Sierra Leone, her research has focused on
the Indigenous arts of North America and critical museology. Her books in-
clude Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (2011),
Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the North-
east, 1700–1900 (1998), and Native North American Art (2014). She has served
as director of the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology
and president of ciha, the International Committee on the History of Art. She
is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
W. JACKSON RUSHING was educated at the University of Texas at

III
Austin. He is Eugene B. Adkins Presidential Professor of Art History and

Mary Lou Milner Carver Chair in Native American Art at the University of
Oklahoma. His research has been supported by the American Council of
Learned Societies, the Howard Foundation at Brown University, the Gug-
genheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and an
ou Arts and Humanities Faculty Fellowship. His major publications include
Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde (1995), Native American
Art in the Twentieth Century (1999), and Allan Houser: An American Master
(2004). He was curator, editor, and principal author of Modern Spirit: The Art
of George Morrison (2013), a traveling retrospective exhibition organized by
the Minnesota Museum of American Art and Arts Midwest. His most recent
412 C ontributors
exhibition and catalog is Generations in Modern Pueblo Painting: The Art of
Tonita Peña and Joe Herrera (Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, 2018).
DAMIAN SKINNER is a Pākehā New Zealand art historian and curator. He

was a Newton International Fellow at the Museum of Archaeology and An-
thropology, University of Cambridge, in 2012–13. He received his PhD in art
history from Victoria University of Wellington in 2006 for a thesis exploring
the dynamic relationship between customary and modern Māori art in the
twentieth century. This was later published as The Carver and the Artist: Māori
Art in the Twentieth Century (2008). He has published a number of books
about Māori art, including Ihenga: The Evolution of Māori Art in the Twentieth
Century (2007) and The Passing World, The Passage of Life: John Hovell and the
Art of Kōwhaiwhai (2010). He is a contributor to the book Art in Oceania: A
New History (2012). His most recent book is The Māori Meeting House: Intro-
ducing the Whare Whakairo (2015).
NICHOLAS THOMAS has written extensively on art, empire, and Pacific his-
tory. He has curated exhibitions in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, many
in collaboration with contemporary artists. His books include Possessions:
Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (1999); with Peter Brunt and other colleagues,
he coauthored Art in Oceania: A New History (2012), which was awarded the
Authors’ Society’s Art Book Prize. Since 2006 he has been director of the Mu-
seum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and
a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
NORMAN VORANO is a Queen’s National Scholar and associate professor

of Indigenous Art and Visual Culture in the Department of Art History and
Art Conservation at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, and curator at the
Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s. His research and publishing focus
on historical, modern, and contemporary Indigenous arts of North America
and museum studies. He was a cocurator and author of Inuit Prints, Japanese
Inspiration: Early Printmaking in the Canadian Arctic (2011) and curator of
the traveling exhibition Picturing Arctic Modernity: North Baffin Drawing,
1964 (2017–19). From 2005 to 2014, he was the curator of Contemporary Inuit
Art at the Canadian Museum of History He received his PhD from the Uni-
versity of Rochester’s Program in Visual and Cultural Studies.
C ontributors 413
INDEX
Page numbers followed by f indicate African American modernists, 324–25

figures. African modernisms in Paris. See Paris,
postwar African modernisms in
Abbe, Mary, 277 AfriCOBRA movement, 324
Abedin, Zainul, 252 agency, 56, 82–84, 245
Abelam artists, 163–65 agwọlagwọ (Nigerian coil motif), 248
Aboriginal art, Australian. See Austra- Akeeaktashuk, 80, 81f
lian Indigenous and Western Arrernte Akis, Timothy, 166–69, 173, 182; Man
art i hait namil long tupela ston (Man
Abstract Composition (Morrison), hiding between two stones), 169f;
264–66 Untitled, 168f
abstract expressionism: first- and Alaskan Native Arts and Crafts (anac)
second-generation, 268; Indian Space catalogs, 75, 87n31
Painters and, 262; Morrison and, 262, Albrecht, F. W., 200
264, 268–69, 270; New York school, allochronism, 7
268, 270, 277, 280n39 Alloway, Lawrence, 264–66
abstraction, formalist, 339–40, 342–43 Almeida Brothers, Little Popo, Republic of
abstract surrealism, 263–64 Benin (Lutterodt), 365, 365f
Académie La Grande Chaumière, 311, 318 Altar for Christ (Hlungwani), 337, 337f,
Accra-Mulattin (Lutterodt), 372f 347
Achebe, Chinua, 166 altermodern, 2
action painting, 270 “alternatively modern” approach, 113
Acutt, Lynn, 33, 40, 54 Altjira (Dreamtime or Dreaming),
Adam and Eve (Nwoko), 249 198–206
Advancing American Painting exhibition Amadlozi group, 339, 354n37
(1946), 96 Amidilak (Amidlak), 80, 81f
aesthetic primitivism, 251–53, Amos, Emma, 333n74
255nn29–30 Amulda Gorge (Pareroultja), 193
Africa, Oceania, and the Americas Ana Mmuo (Okeke), 246, 247
(aoa) grouping, 3, 13 Anderson, Benedict, 236
Andrew, Brook, 165, 184n3 and indigenization of Australian cul-
Ango, 182 ture, 188; pastoral modernism, 190–91,
Aniakor, Chike, 247 195–96, 202–3; Spencer and Gillen’s
Anima (Duff), 156f study of Arrernte and prototypical
Antagonist, The (Morrison), 269 primitivism, 193; temporal rupture of
Anthes, Bill, 275 modernity, neotraditionalism, and,
Aotearoa. See Māori art 195–96, 205–6; tjurunga concept, 189,
Appadurai, Arjun, 20, 335–36, 345, 346, 199–205. See also Namatjira, Albert
348, 351 Australian Museum, Sydney, 174, 185n16
Araeen, Rasheed, 279n21 authenticity: “African,” 336, 339; decolo-
Arlidge, Clive, 144 nizing societies and, 18; Inuit art and,
Arnold, Ben, 340, 342 65, 79, 88n45; Lutterodt photography
Arp, Jean, 273 and, 357–58, 371; primitivism as
Arrernte. See Australian Indigenous and generator of, 5; “traditional Indian
Western Arrernte art painting” and, 95
Art Gallery of South Australia, 179–81, autoethnography, 91, 106n2
190 automatism, 263, 266, 270, 273
artifact vs. art, 138, 149, 158. See also craft Autumn Exhibition, Auckland Society
vs. art of Arts, 155
Arts of the Raven exhibition (Vancouver avant-garde: aesthetic primitivism and,
Art Gallery), 110–12, 115, 121, 131, 251–52; Kumalo and, 342–43; local,
137n72 342–43; Okeke and, 245; in Paris, 311;
Art Students League (asl), New York Sekoto and New York avant-garde, 327
City, 261–62 avant-garde abstraction, 262
Ashevak, Kenojuak, 211
Ashoona, Pitseolak, 211 Baij, Ramkimkar, 252
assimilation: Australia and, 192; Inuit Baldwin, James, 311
and, 211, 224; Native Americans and, Ballantyne, Tony, 309
94, 95–96; Northwest Coast art and, Bantu Agricultural Show, 53–56, 55f
115 Barclay, Philip, 155
attitudes, modernist, 10 Barkan, Elazar, 14
Auckland City Art Gallery, 155, 156f Barlach, Ernst, 340
Augustine, Magdalena, 103, Plate 2 “Basket Makers of the Coachella Valley”
Australian Indigenous and Western (Steffa), 99–100
Arrernte art: Aboriginality and mod- basketry, 93, 98–106, 102f, Plate 2
ernism, 187–95; Altjira (Dreamtime Battarbee, Rex, 187, 188, 189, 191–92, 202;
or Dreaming), 198–206; Edwin Pare Central Australian Landscape, Plate 5
roultja, 192–93; Hans Heysen, 190–91, Beadle, Paul, 155
193–94, 203; Hermannsburg Mission, Bearden, Romare, 333n74
cosmology, and Arrernte modernism, Beier, Georgina, 166–70, 174, 179, 182–83,
188–89, 195–206; middlebrow taste 184n9
416 INDEX
Beier, Ulli, 165–70, 174, 180f, 182–83, Busa, Peter, 262
184n9, 185n16 Bush, Ronald, 14
Belting, Hans, 1–2, 327
Belvo, Hazel, 259 Cadena, Marisol de la, 16
Benjamin, Tritobia, 320, 323, 332n51 Cain’s Aeroplane (Hlungwani), 347–48,
bighouse (gukwdzi), 126, 127f, 131–32 349f
biomorphism, 264, 266 “Canada: Contemporary Eskimo Stone
Biting the Doctor’s Arm (Kauage), 176, Carvings” (Saarinen), 209, 210f
177f, 181 Canadian Eskimo Art exhibition and
Black and White Patterned Forms (Mor- catalog, 79, 82, 227–28
rison), 266–67, 266f Canadian Handicrafts Guild, 62, 65,
Blue Eagle, Acee, 92 68–71, 85n7
Blue Geese on Snow (Mungitok), 228, Canclini, Nestor, 309
229f Canterbury Museum, Christchurch,
Boghossian, Alexander “Skunder,” 307f; New Zealand, 147–50
about, 306, 318; in America, 324–25; Cape Dorset. See Inuit printmaking in
Ju ju’s Wedding, 321f; Klee and, 318–19, Cape Dorset
323–24; Lam and, 322–23; in London, Caribou, Walter, 276
Paris, and Ethiopia, 317–20; Night Carlson, Helen, 269
Flight of Dread and Delight, 321–22, Carpenter, Edmund, 88n45
322f; Sekoto, commonalities with, Carpenter, George, 69
325–26; Spring Scrolls, 320f; surrealism Carr, Emily, 17, 67
and, 319–22; Time Cycle III, 322, Carter, Paul, 201
Plate 10 Cassatt, Mary, 51
Booth, John, 151 Castle, Brother Roger, 327n2
Bose, Nandalal, 252 Cattaneo, Guiseppe, 354n37
Botha, Louis, 42, 44 Central Australian Landscape (Battar-
Bourgeois, Louise: The Winged Figure, bee), Plate 5
267–68 Central Mt. Wedge (Namatjira), 191f
Bourriaud, Nicolas, 2 Césaire, Aimé, 319
Brancusi, Constantin, 249, 267 Cetshwayo, King, 33, 40–42, 44, 58n17
Braques, Georges, 151 Cézanne, Paul, 195
Breton, André, 319, 322 Champion, George, 35
British Columbia Totem Pole Preserva- Chatterjee, Partha, 236
tion Committee, 119 Chocknajki, Stanlislaus, 318
Brown, Diane, 123–24 Clark, Ed, 310
Buddensieg, Andrea, 1–2 Clark, Peter, 344
Buka War (Kauage), 176, 177f Clemente Orozco, José, 242
Burn, Ian, 190–91, 194–95 Clifford, James, 14, 16–17, 20–21
Burnett, Ricky, 346–47, 351 Cockerel with Its Head Cut (Michou
Burrus, D. L., 75 touchkine), 282–83, 283f
INDEX 417
Cold War cultural nationalism, Cana- Crumbo, Woody, 92
dian, 225–30 cubism, 264, 272, 279n26
Colenso, Harriet, 42, 43 Cumulated Landscape (Morrison), 272,
Collier, Oscar, 262 Plate 6
Collin: Untitled (Landscape with Two Cyprian Bhekuzulu, King, 53, 54f
Snakes and a House), 201f Czechoslovakia, 227–29
Collins, Henry, 216
colonial narratives and legacies: Dadi, Iftikhar, 252
“Anglicized colonial subjects,” 236; Dali, Salvador, 279n23
Gold Coast photography and British Damas, Léon, 319
colonialism, 368–70; Northwest Coast Dancing Couple (Owambe) (Nwoko), 250
art and, 114–15, 132; Qwabe’s refusal Dansey, Harry, 141
to reproduce, 42; Western Arrernte Davidson, Robert, 110, 121, 123f, 137n72
(Australia) and, 197–98. See also Day, Archibald, 227
decolonization Day, Melvin, 151
comparative framework, 9–10 Decker, J. P., 361
Confluences of Tradition and Change/ decolonization: African modernism
24 American Indian Artists exhibition, in postwar Paris and, 308–9, 311,
274 312, 326–27; globalization and, 4;
Contemporary American Indian Paint- Inuit artistic agency and, 82–84;
ing Exhibition, 96, 97 Kauage and, 172–73, 176; mapping,
contemporary art and modernity, rela- remapping, and, 9; Michoutouchkine
tionship between, 1–2 and Pilioko in Polynesia and, 286, 287,
Contemporary Māori Painting and Sculp- 289, 299; nationalist narratives and,
ture exhibit, Festival of Māori Arts, 18–19; Nigeria and, 235–43, 319; Papua
Hamilton, New Zealand, 140f New Guinea and, 165, 176; politics of
Contemporary Painting in New Zealand inclusion and, 132; Senegal and, 314
(Commonwealth Institute, London), DeHuff, Elizabeth, 94
147–48 DeHuff, John, 94
Cook, James, 176 de Kooning, Willem, 264, 268, 269
Cousins, Harold, 310–11 Delaney, Beauford, 311
craft vs. art: Inuit, 64–65, 78–84; Native Delisle, Jean, 229–30
American modernism and, 93, 98, DeMott, Helen, 262
104; Zulu art and, 40. See also artifact de Patta, Margaret, 118
vs. art Deressa, Solomon, 320, 323, 326, 332n52,
Cranmer, Doug, 121, 125, 137n72 333n75
Crosby, Marcia, 112, 119, 123, 126, 131 Desta, Gebre Kristos, 318, 332n52
Cross, John, 118 Devonshire, Duke and Duchess of, 48,
Crucifixion (Okeke), 247–48 50, 59n37
Crucifixion of a Cockerel (Pilioko), Diefenbaker, John, 225, 226
283–84, 284f, 300 Dingane, King, 35
418 INDEX
Dinuzulu, King, 33, 41–44, 48, 54, 56 106n2; Inuit art and, 70–71; Knauft’s
Diop, Alioune, 312 “alternatively modern” and, 113; Mela-
Donaldson, Jeff, 324 nesian modernism and, 181–82; Native
Doyle, Laura, 4 American art and, 91, 95; Northwest
Drapeau, Jean, 123f Coast art and ethnographic context,
Dream of Calamity (Morrison), 264 120, 128; Papua New Guinea, com-
Dreamtime or Dreaming (Altjira), missioned ethnographic images from,
198–206 163–65
Dube, John, 59n22, 59n39 Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, Grand
Duff, Alison: Anima, 156f Central Art Galleries, 93–94
Duff, Wilson, 119, 137n72 expressionism, 263, 279n26, 324. See also
Dunn, Dorothy, 92, 95, 103 abstract expressionism
Durack, Mary, 192 Eyene, Christine, 313, 316
Durban Agricultural Show, 45–46
Dussel, Enrique, 328n13 Fabian, Johannes, 7, 56
Fanon, Frantz, 18, 242–44
Eastern Europe, Inuit print shows in, Feldman, Hannah, 309
225–30 Fellowship for Native American Fine
Eaton’s Salute to Indian Culture (Vancou- Art, 276
ver), 110–12, 111f, 130 Feni, Dumile, 344, 353n21
Edenshaw, Charles (Da.a xiigang), 118–19 Festival of Māori Arts, Hamilton, New
Egonwa, Osa, 240 Zealand, 140f, 141
Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, 276 Fienup-Riordan, Anne, 216
Elizabeth II, 178, 178f Fineberg, Earl, 269
Elkins, James, 342 First Nations, Canada. See Inuit art and
el Salahi, Ibrahim, 166 handicrafts, promotion of; Inuit print-
Enuani Dancers (Nwoko), 250 making in Cape Dorset; Northwest
Enwezor, Okwui, 309, 373 Coast art
Ernst, Max, 279n23, 321, 333n75 Fischer, Adelheid, 260
Errington, Shelly, 14 Flejšar, Josef, 228, 229; Uméní
Eskimo Affairs Committee, 226–27 Kānādských Eskymáků, 228, 229f
“Eskimo” art. See Inuit art and Ford, Robert, 227
handicrafts, promotion of; Inuit Forge, Anthony, 163–65
printmaking in Cape Dorset Foster, Hal, 14
Eskimo Bulletins (Houston), 79–80 Foucault, Michel, 197
“Eskimo Graphic Art” (Houston), frottage, 220, 263, 272, 273
212–13 Fry, Amelia R., 60n40
Eskimo Prints (Houston), 212–13 Fry, Roger, 11
Eskimo Whale Hunt (Qiatsuk), 220–22, Futunian Dancers (Pilioko), 291, 291f
223f Fynney, Eric, 53
ethnography: autoethnography, 91, Fynney, Oswald, 45
INDEX 419
Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, 176–78, Graham, Fred, 144, 151
178f, 183 Grant, Fred, 361
Garbara, Esther, 8 Greenberg, Clement, 188, 193
Gauguin, Paul, 192, 195 Gregory, Chris, 183
Gentry, Herbert, 310 Grey, Black and White Lines (Morrison),
Geometric Vertical Forms (Morrison), 270, 271f
267 Group of Seven, 67, 82
George, Deinde, 241 Growth Forms (Wilson), 156f
Geschiere, Peter, 15 Gruzinski, Serge, 231
Giacometti, Alberto, 249, 342 Guenther, Egon, 339–40, 342, 344,
Gibson, Ann, 262, 268 353n17
Gibson, R. A., 75 Guilbaut, Serge, 308
Gigibori magazine, 167, 184n9
Gikandi, Simon, 11 Habib, Rowley, 152
Gillen, Frank, 193, 198 Haefliger, Paul, 192
Gilroy, Paul, 309 Haida: about, 132n1; Bill Reid, 110, 113–14,
Givon, Linda, 339, 344 117–24; totem poles, 118, 119–21, 122f,
Gladstone, Charles, 118 123f. See also Northwest Coast art
Gladstone, Sophie, 117–18 Hall, Vic, 187
Glass, Aaron, 119–20 Hallett, George, 316
Glissant, Edouard, 8 Halliday, William, 126
Global Indigenous Modernisms: Primitiv- Hapgood, Norman, 52
ism, Artists, Mentors colloquium, xv Harris, Bob (X - i’x-a’niyus), 125
Gluckman, Judith, 327n2 Harris, ‘Wadzidi (Lucy), 135n48
God’s Antenna (Hlungwani), 347–48 Hartigan, Grace, 269
Goetz, Henri, 318, 321 Hass, Robert, 260
Gold Coast. See Lutterodt family Havemeyer, Luisine, 50–52, 60n40
photography studios, West Coast Hawthorn, Audrey, 123f, 128
of Africa Hawthorn, Harry, 119
Gold Coast, Merry-Go-Round, Accra, Head of a Girl (Okeke), 247, 248
Christmas 1887 (Lutterodt), 364f Helicopter (Kauage), 171
Gold Coast: Fort in Elmina (Lutterodt), Hemple, Heidi, 96
Plate 13 Henderson, Carol, 141
Goldie, Charles, 144 Herbert, Harold, 192
Goldwater, Robert, 13, 255n29, 267 Hermannsburg Mission, Australia,
Goody, Jack, 183 188–89, 195–98, 202
Gordon, Allan M., 274, 275 Hernanda, 91, 101, 102
Gorky, Arshile, 263, 264 Hessel, Ingo, 72, 75
Gottlieb, Adolph, 96, 262, 264, 272 heterochronologies, 326–27
Goubet, Pierre, 318 Heysen, Hans, 190–91, 193–94, 203; The
Graburn, Nelson, 69, 88n39, 193, 224 Land of the Oratunga, 190
420 INDEX
Hiratsuka, Un’ichi, 216–18; Katsura Independence Celebration 4 (Kauage),
Rikyu Amano Hashidate (Stone 172–73, 173f
lantern), 217–18, 219f India, 236, 253n4
Hitler, Adolf, 187 Indian Craze, The (Hutchinson), 98
Hlungwani, Jackson, 335, 336–37, 345–51; Indian Space Painters, 262
Altar for Christ, 337, 337f, 347; Cain’s indigeneity as construct, 5, 15–17
Aeroplane, 347–48, 349f; God’s Ingersoll, Fern S., 60n40
Antenna, 347–48; Leopard, 348–50; “In Search of Contemporary Eskimo
Lion, 348, 350f Art” (Houston), 78–79
Holm, Bill, 121, 131, 137n72 Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies,
Hossack, Rebecca, 176, 183 170
Hotere, Ralph, 143, 150 Inuit art and handicrafts, promotion
Houser, Allan, 259 of: agency in age of colonization and
Houston, James, 68f; Eskimo Bulletins, decolonization, 82–84; Alaskan Native
79–80; “Eskimo Graphic Art,” 212–13; Arts and Crafts (anac) catalogs, 75;
Eskimo Prints, 212–13; “In Search of art industries before modernism,
Contemporary Eskimo Art,” 78–79; 64–66; community traits in stone
introduction to Sanajaksat: Eskimo carvings, 88n44; cribbage boards, 71,
Handicrafts pamphlet, 62, 70, 87n33; 72f, 86n25; fur trade and, 66; growth
Inuit handicraft and art promotion of stone sculpture after Sanajaksat,
by, 66–83; Inuit printmaking and, 77–78; Inuktitut syllabic writing
211–16, 225–27. See also Inuit art and system, 86n23; “master” sculptors,
handicrafts, promotion of; Sanajaksat: 80–82; modernist primitivist art
Eskimo Handicrafts pamphlet market, shift to, 77–84; precursors
Howe, Oscar, 93, 95–98, 105–6; Umine and creation of Sanajaksat, 67–75;
Wacipi: War and Peace Dance, 97; reactions to Sanajaksat content
Woman Buffalo Dreamer, 96–97, and productions, 75–76; reception
Plate 1 of Sanajaksat in the North, 66–67;
Hrdlička, Aleš, 216 Sanajaksat pamphlet (overview),
Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc), 62, 65, 62–63, 63f; “Suggestions for Eskimo
67, 76, 224, 226 Handicrafts” (Canadian Handicrafts
Hunt, Sarah, 131–32 Guild), 69; totem poles, Inuit-made,
Hutchinson, Elizabeth, 98 71–75, 73f, 74f
Huyssen, Andreas, 7, 9, 230 Inuit printmaking in Cape Dorset:
background, 211; Canadian Cold
Ife terra-cotta, 249 War cultural nationalism and
Igbo Folk Tales (Okeke), 247 Eastern European shows of, 225–30;
Ihimaera, Witi, 153 comparison of Japanese and Inuit
Impressions of Haiti exhibition, 215 prints, 217–20, 219f, 221f; cultural
Independence Celebration 1 (Kauage), reproduction and, 224; financial
172 impact of, 224–25;
INDEX 421
Inuit printmaking in Cape Dorset (cont.) Flies to Scotland for the Opening
Houston memo, Haitian graphic arts, of New Museum of Modern Art in
and, 214–15; Houston’s account of Glasgow, 178f; Magic Fish, 170f; Man
origins of, 212–13; Houston’s studies draiwim tripela member bilong hilans
in Japan, 215–16; “Japanese Print (Man driving three members [of
Revival” (Time magazine), 213–14; parliament] from the Highlands),
modernism as intercultural attractor 172–73; Missis Kwin, 186n19; Okuk’s
and, 230–31; Saarinen’s Vogue article Son at Moresby Airport, 174–75, 175f;
and, 209, 210f, 222–24 Pasindia trak (Passenger truck), 171f;
Inukpuk, Johnny, 80–81 sexual politics and, 172; signature and
Ipeelee, Osuitok, 80–81, 212 inscriptions of, 178
Irniq, Piita, 84n1 Keïta, Seydou, 357
Kempe, Herman, 196, 198
Jameson, Frederic, 348 Killed Horse (Kumalo), 341, 341f
Jansen van Rensburg, Susanna, 339, 340 Kīngitanga, King, 144
Japanese printmaking, 213–20, 219f, 221f Kingwatsiak, Iyola, 212
Jewsiewicki, Bogumil, 56 Kirchner, Ernst, 218
Johnny POV, 80–81 Klee, Paul, 318–19, 323–24
Johnson, Michael, 137n72 Kleinert, Sylvia, 193–94
Jones, Philip, 194 Kline, Franz, 270
Jonson, Raymond, 94 Knauft, Bruce M., 113
Joplin, Janis, 260 Kohatu (Muru), Plate 4
Ju ju’s Wedding (Boghossian), 321f Kovave magazine, 167, 184n9
Junod, Henri, 52 Kuanimbandu, 164f
Kubler, George, xvi, 7–8
Kabotie, Fred, 94, 95; Two Bird Dancers Kumalo, Sydney, 335, 337–45, 340f,
with Costumed Audience, 92f 348–51; Killed Horse, 341, 341f; Myth-
kaMangcengeza, Mtomboti, 35, 47 ological Rider(s), 344; Praise Singer,
Kandinsky, Wassily, 239 344; Reclining Figure: Ndebele Woman,
Kasfir, Sidney, 333n75 339–40; Seated Figure, 342, 343f;
Katsura Rikyu Amano Hashidate (Stone Seated Woman, 341–42, Plate 11
lantern) (Hiratsuka), 217–18, 219f Kunene, Mazisi, 43
Kauage, Mathias, 180f; on Art Gallery Kwakwa-ka-’wakw: Henry Speck, 110, 114,
of South Australia, Adelaide, 179–81; 124–31; potlatch tradition and prohi-
Biting the Doctor’s Arm, 176, 177f, 181; bition, 115, 125, 126; Tlawit’sis tribe of,
Buka War, 176, 177f; commentary 124, 126, 128, 132n1, 136n54. See also
and “stories” of, 174–76, 179–81; Northwest Coast art
death of, 179; Georgina Beier and, Kwakwala Arts and Crafts Organization,
167–70; Helicopter, 171; Independence 126
Celebration 1, 172; Independence KwaZulu-Natal. See Zulu art and figura-
Celebration 4, 172–73, 173f; Kauage tive relief panels
422 INDEX
Lalonde, Christine, 78 Portrait of Albert Lutterodt and
Lam, Wifredo, 322–23, 333n75 His Wife, Accra, Ghana, Plate 12;
Land of the Oratunga, The (Heysen), 190 portraiture as biography, 365–68;
Lasisi, David: The Whore, 172 self-fashioning, concerns about,
Lattier, Christian, 310 357–59; Slave Coast: Chief Ayevie of
Laurent, Louis St., 226 Little Popo with His People, 362f; Two
Leach, Edmund, 183 Men Standing in a Field Cleared for
ledger art, Plains, 106n1 Cocoa Plantation, Bioko, Equatorial
Legae, Ezrom, 339, 340, 342, 344, 354n37 Guinea, 369f
Lemke, Sieglinde, 252
Leopard (Hlungwani), 348–50 Macaulay, Herbert, 253n2, 253n7
Léro, Etienne, 319 Magic Fish (Kauage), 170f
Leuthold, Steven, 15–16 Magnin, André, 373
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 117, 198 Māhinarangi meeting house, Ngāru-
Liddle, Nancy, 276 awāhia, 144–45, 152. See also Māori
Lindauer, Gottfried, 144 Festival of the Arts, Māhinarangi
Lindsay, Ian, 64 Makeba, Miriam, 353n21
Lion (Hlungwani), 348, 350f Makenna, Louis, 304
Lismer, Arthur, 67 Malangatana, 166
Loatjira, 200 Manangananga cave, 200–202
locational approach, 4 Man Carried to the Moon (Mungitok),
Lord, Douglas, 76 220, 221f
Lugard, Lord, 252, 255n34 Mancoba, Ernest, 304, 353n21
Lugg, H. C., 48, 50, 59n37 Mandani, Mahmood, 15
Lutterodt family photography studios, Mane-Wheoki, Jonathan, xvi, 141, 147
West Coast of Africa (wca): Manganyi, Noel Chanbanyi, 316
Accra-Mulattin, 372f; as agents of Man i hait namil long tupela ston (Man
modernity, 371, 373; Almeida Brothers, hiding between two stones) (Akis),
Little Popo, Republic of Benin, 365, 169f
365f; archives, loss of, 371; British Mannheim, Grete, 58n10
colonialism, mobility, and, 368–70; Māori art: art/artefact distinction and,
Carte de visite, Ghana, 358f; display 138, 149, 158; contemporary New
cultures of Gold Coast modernity, Zealand art and Selwyn Muru,
362–65; as family business, 360–63; 155–58; exhibition history and the
Gold Coast, Merry-Go-Round, Accra, negotiation of value, 138–42; Festival
Christmas 1887, 364f; Gold Coast: Fort of Māori Arts, Hamilton (1966),
in Elmina, Plate 13; history of coastal 140f, 141; Māori Artists and Writers
cosmopolitanism, 359–60; “overbur- Society meeting, Te Kaha marae
dened” by flow of beautiful women, (1973), 152–55, 153f; Māori Festival
370–71; The People of the Deceased of the Arts, Māhinarangi (1963),
King Tackie in Accra, 366–68, 367f; 139–41, 139f, 144–47, 146f, 152;
INDEX 423
Māori art (cont.) Mexico, 231
“modern” art vs., 157–58; New Zealand Michener, James, 214
Māori Culture and the Contempo- Michoutouchkine, Nicolaï, 292f, 298f;
rary Scene, Canterbury Museum, about, 282–83; Cockerel with Its
Christchurch (1966), 147–50; Te Hau’s Head Cut, 282–83, 283f; collection
exhibition at Adult Education Center, and planned museum, 290–91, 294,
Auckland (1958), 142–44; “Tovey 302n18; Esnaar studio-home, 291, 299;
generation,” 141; The Work of Māori in Futuna, 290–91; island modernism
Artists exhibition, nag (1969), 150–52 and, 288–90; travels, exhibitions, and
Māori Artists and Writers Society, collection in Pacific Islands, 291–96;
152–55, 153f world travels and exhibitions, 285–87,
Māori Festival of the Arts, Māhinarangi, 296–99
139–41, 139f, 144–47, 146f, 152 middlebrow taste, 188
mapping tropes, 9–10 Mignolo, Walter, 20
Maqhubela, Louis, 339 Miles, Elza, 340–41
Marini, Marino, 339, 342 Miller, Daniel, 220
Martijn, Charles, 69, 82 Miller, John, 153f
Mary-Rousselière, Guy, 69 Miró, Joan, 263–64
Mason, Ngahiraka, 142 Missis Kwin (Kauage), 186n19
Massey, Vincent, 227 Mitchell, Joan, 268, 269
Massey Report, 227 Mitchell, Marybelle, 83
Masson, André, 263, 264, 322 Mitchell, Timothy, 7
Mataira, Katerina, 143 mobility: apartheid and, 339; as
Matchitt, Paratene, 144, 145, 151, 154f construct, 5, 19–21; horizontal, 309;
Matisse, Henri, 195, 266 Lutterodt photo studio and, 361, 364,
Matta, Roberto, 267, 323 368–70; “migritude,” 329n18; Pilioko
Matulu, Tshibumba Kanda, 172–73 and, 287; Sekoto and, 306. See also
Maurer, Evan M., 273 spatiality
Mayer, Gyula, 127–28, 129, 130f modernism: definitions of, 5–6, 230;
Mbembe, Achille, 309 diversity of Indigenous practices
McCarthy, Conal, 147, 149, 151, 152 as challenge for, 116; as intercul-
McKeand, David, 65, 85n9 tural attractor, 230–31; Knauft’s
McLaughlin, Anne, 154 “alternatively modern” approach,
McLean, Ian, 254n14 113; middlebrow taste and, 188; mod-
McLeod, Ellen Easton, 65 ernist attitudes and mapping, 9–10;
Medhin, Tesfaye Gebre, 332n52 “modern” works vs. “modernist”
Melanesian modernism. See Papua New art, 106; rupture and, 114–16, 121–23;
Guinea (PNG) art and Melanesian as temporal category, 348. See also
modernism specific cases
Memories of Sharpeville (Sekoto), 315, 317f modernist primitivist art. See
Mercer, Kobena, 10, 20 primitivism
424 INDEX
modernity: African, 236, 343–44, Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morri-
350–51; African agency, marginality, son exhibition, 277
and, 56; African modernists and, Modigliani, Amedeo, 322
250–51; Africanness and, 336, 344; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 224, 225
the altermodern, 2; alternative Moon Mask Dancers (Speck), Plate 3
modernities, 308; avant-garde and, Moore, Henry, 80, 228–29, 339, 342,
251–52; Boghossian and, 319, 324; as 354n31
condition of art production, 335; the Morrison, Ann K., 85n16
contemporary, relationship with, Morrison, George: 9 Black Squares, 11
1–2; definitions of, 5, 6–7; display Brown Squares, 273; Abstract Compo-
cultures of Gold Coast modernity, sition, 264–66; abstract expressionism
362–65; encounter, exchange, and, 4; and, 262, 264, 268–69, 270; action
as “frozen allegory,” 348; geopolitics painting and, 270; The Antagonist,
of knowledge and, 20; heterochro- 269; automatism and, 263, 266, 270,
nologies and, 326–27; as historical 273; background, 259–61; biomor-
condition, 23; historiography of, 20; phism and, 264, 266; Black and
Hlungwani and, 336, 350–51; home/ White Patterned Forms, 266–67, 266f;
away binaries and, 287; India and, Boghossian compared to, 319; Brown
253n4; infiltration into daily lives, and Black Textured Squares, 273;
197–98; Inuit art and printmaking critical reception of, 268–70; cubism
and, 210–11, 213–25; Kumalo and, 336, and, 264, 272; Cumulated Landscape,
339, 343, 345; Māori artists and, 140; 272, Plate 6; death of, 259; Dream
modernist primitivism turned into of Calamity, 264; emplacement and
indigenous modernity, 83; Namatjira Chippewaness of, 275; exhibitions and
and, 187, 192; nationalism and, 22, accolades, 269–70, 275–76; Fulbright
236; Northwest Coast artists and, Fellowship, Paris, 266; Geometric
113–16, 118, 127, 130–31; Onabolu and, Vertical Forms, 267; Grey, Black and
239–41; Pacific Islands and, 287, 289, White Lines, 270, 271f; Howe com-
295–96, 299; Papua New Guinea pared to, 97; as Native modernist, 277;
artists and, 165, 172, 180; revolution New York, 267, 268; primitivism and,
and, 198; Sekoto and, 306, 308–12, 261–63, 267; Red Totem series, 273–74;
326; silencing of non-West histories, Starfish, 264; surrealism and, 263–67,
2; spatial turn and, 20; temporal 270, 273; Surrealist Landscape, 270;
inscriptions of modernist geogra- Three Figures, 263; Turning the Feather
phies, 7–8; temporal rupture and, Around (memoir), 264; Untitled
195, 205; transcultural Indigenous (1945), 265f; Untitled (1995), 274,
strategy, 195; transmodernity, 307, Plate 7; Whalebone, 264
328n13; West Africa photography Motherwell, Robert, 268, 269
and, 359–62, 371, 373; Western Moxey, Keith, 326–27
Arrernte (Australia), 195–206 Mpande, King, 47
modernization, defined, 5 Mphahlele, Es’kia, 311, 316
INDEX 425
Mt. Hermannsburg with Finke River mentors, patrons, and promoters, 92,
(Namatjira), 189f 94; Howe’s letter to Philbrook (1958),
Mt. Sonder from Ormiston (Pareroultja), 97, 105–6; Howe’s shift to modernism,
193 95–98; Hutchinson’s The Indian Craze,
Muller, Hendrik P. N., 52 98; informed by women’s traditions,
Multiple Modernisms: Transcultural 108n17; introduction of pictorial arts,
Exchanges in Twentieth-Century 91–92; “modern” works vs. “mod-
Global Art symposium, xv–xvi, xvii ernist” art and, 106; Plains ledger art,
Munakata, Shikō, 214, 216–18; The Sand 106n1; Steffa’s basket collection and
Nest, 220, 221f narrative, 98–106, 102f; “studio style”
Mungitok, Kellypalik: Blue Geese on (traditional Indian painting), 92,
Snow, 228, 229f; Man Carried to the 95–97. See also Morrison, George
Moon, 220, 221f “Natives Who Are Artists in Woodcarv-
Murray, Kenneth C., 240–41, 252–53, ing” (Reyher), 45
255n34 “Natural Synthesis” (Okeke), 243–46
Muru, Selwyn, 144, 150–51, 155–57, 158f; Ndebele, Nimrod, 304
Kohatu, 150, Plate 4 Ndiaye, Iba, 310
Mythological Rider(s) (Kumalo), 344 Neel, Ellen, 137n72
Negritude movement and discourse,
Nalbandian, Kevork, 332n53 242–44, 313–14
Namatjira, Albert: Aboriginality, Negro Artists and Writers congresses,
modernism, and, 187–95; Arrernte 312–13, 313f
modernism, Christianity, and, 195, Nelson, Robert, 9
198, 202–5; background of, 188–89; “neo-African idiom,” 340
Burn and Stephen essay on, 194–95; New Design Gallery, Vancouver, 128–30,
celebrity of, 187, 189; Central Mt. 130f
Wedge, 191f; first exhibition, 187–88; Newman, Barnett, 262
Mt. Hermannsburg with Finke River, Newton, Norman, 124
189f; pastoral modernism and, 190–91, New York (Morrison), 267, 268
195–96, 202–3; Whispering Hills, 204f. New York school, 268, 270, 277, 280n39.
See also Australian Indigenous and See also abstract expressionism
Western Arrernte art New Zealand. See Māori art
National Art Gallery (nag), Wellington, New Zealand Māori Culture and the
New Zealand, 150–52 Contemporary Scene, Canterbury
nationalism: Cold War Canadian Museum, Christchurch, 147–50
cultural nationalism, 225–30; decolo- Ngata, Āpirana, 139–40, 145–46
nizing societies and, 18–19; modernity Ngatane, Ephraim, 339
and, 22, 236; Nigeria and, 236, 242–45 Nigeria, Arts Society in: aesthetic
Native American modernism vs. primitivism and, 251–53; background,
“traditional Indian painting”: dis- 235; Fanon and Okeke on Negritude,
appearance narrative and, 101; early 242–44; nationalism, decolonization,
426 INDEX
and the artistic avant-garde, 236–41; Oja Suite (Okeke), 246–47
Okeke’s theory of natural synthesis, okala isinwaọji (Nigerian kola nut
240–46; Onabolu’s portraiture and, motif), 248
236–41; postcolonial modernism Okamura, Kichiemon, 216–17
and primitivism in works of Okeke O’Keeffe, Georgia, 17, 94
and Nwoko, 246–53 Okeke, Uche, 240–48, 319; Ana Mmuo,
Night Flight of Dread and Delight (Bog- 246, 247; Crucifixion, 247–48;
hossian), 321–22, 322f “Growth of an Idea” speech, 242;
Nimis, Érika, 368 Head of a Girl, 247, 248; Igbo Folk
Nin, Buck, 147–48 Tales, 247; “Natural Synthesis,”
9 Black Squares, 11 Brown Squares (Mor- 243–46; Negritude and, 242–44; Oja
rison), 273 Suite, 246–47; Owls, From the Forest,
Nok terra-cotta, 248–50 247, 248; Primeval Forest, 247–48;
Nongoma district, KwaZulu-Natal, radio interview, 241–42
37–40 Okuk, Iambakey, 174–75
Northwest Coast art: Arts of the Raven Okuk’s Son at Moresby Airport (Kauage),
exhibition (Vancouver Art Gallery), 174–75, 175f
110–12, 115, 121, 131, 137n72; Eaton’s Onabolu, Aina, 236–41, 252, 253n7; Sisi
Salute to Indian Culture, 110–12, 111f, Nurse, 238f
130; Haida (Bill Reid), 110, 113–14, Onians, John, 3
117–24; Kwakwa-ka-’wakw (Henry Onobrakpeya, Bruce, 241
Speck), 110, 114, 124–31; politics of Oomayoualook, Isa, 74f
inclusion and, 132; potlatch and Orientalism, 216, 324
prohibition, 115; “renaissance” of, Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, 184n10
113; rupture, colonialism, and forced Our Land/Our Selves: American Indian
detachment, 114–16, 121–23. See also Contemporary Artists exhibition, 276
totem poles and sculptures Owl (Qiatsuk), 217–18, 219f
Northwest Territories Council, 65–66 Owls, From the Forest (Okeke), 247, 248
nostalgia, primitivist, 79, 101
Nwoko, Demas, 241, 246, 248–50; Paalen, Wolfgang, 127
Adam and Eve, 249; Dancing Couple Painters and Sculptors of Promise exhibi-
(Owambe), 250; Enuani Dancers, 250; tion, Auckland Society of Arts, 155
Philosopher, 249; Soldier (Soja), 250, pan-Africanism, 312–17, 324. See also
251f; Titled Woman, 249, 249f Paris, postwar African modernisms in
Papua New Guinea (PNG) art and
Oceania. See Michoutouchkine, Nicolaï; Melanesian modernism: commis-
Papua New Guinea (PNG) art and sioned ethnographic images as
Melanesian modernism; Pilioko, Aloï precursors, 163–65; difficult climate
Odjig, Daphne, xvi for art, 178–79; Highlands aesthetic
Ogbechie, Sylvester, 240 of self-decoration, 181–83; migrant
O’Hanlon, Michael, 181, 183 workers and, 171–72;
INDEX 427
Papua New Guinea (PNG) art and Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, 277n3
Melanesian modernism (cont.) Pieces of Paradise exhibition, Australian
modernity and modernism, 179–82; Museum, Sydney, 185n16
Port Moresby cultural conjuncture Pilioko, Aloï, 292f, 298f; about, 283–84,
and the Beiers, 165–74; Timothy Akis, 287–88; Baume exhibition, Papeete,
166–69, 168f, 169f. See also Kauage, 296–97, 297f; Crucifixion of a
Mathias Cockerel, 283–84, 284f, 300; Esnaar
Pareroultja, Edwin, 192–93; Amulda studio-home, 291, 299–300; in
Gorge, 193; Mt. Sonder from Ormiston, Futuna, 290–91; Futunian Dancers,
193 291, 291f; island modernism and,
Paris, postwar African modernisms in: 288–90; Self-Portrait with Bracelets,
communality and, 325–26; heteroch- 300, Plate 9; Tattooed Women of
ronologies and archipelagoes, 326–27; Bellona, Solomon Isles, 297, Plate 8;
pan-Africanism, transmodernity, travels and exhibitions in Pacific
and, 312–17; postwar Paris milieu, Islands, 291–96; world travels and
310–12; surrealism and politics of exhibitions, 296–99
postwar blackness, 317–25. See also Pine, Willie L., 357
Boghossian, Alexander “Skunder”; Poggioli, Renato, 342
Sekoto, Gerard Poland, 228–30
Paris, school of, 279n26 Pollock, Jackson, 259, 260, 262, 326
Parks, Gordon, 311 Polynesia. See Michoutouchkine, Nico-
Pasindia trak (Passenger truck) laï; Pilioko, Aloï
(Kauage), 171f Pootoogook, Egyvudluk, 212
pastoral modernism, 190–91, 195–96, Pootoogook, Kananginak, 211, 212, 220
202–3 Portrait of Albert Lutterodt and His Wife,
Pechstein, Max, 52 Accra, Ghana (Lutterodt), Plate 12
Peck, James, 86n23 portraiture as response to racism, 237–41
Pemba, George, 344 postcoloniality and Nigeria. See Nigeria,
People of the Deceased King Tackie in Arts Society in
Accra, The (Lutterodt), 366–68, 367f postcolonial theory, 193
Pere, Baden, 147–48 Potgieter, Jan (Upotolozi), 41–42, 44
Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, 96, 97 potlatch, 115, 125, 126
Phillips, R. A. J., 76 Potter, Karen, 78
Phillips, Ruth B., 83, 255n29 Pousette-Dart, Richard, 262, 268
Philosopher (Nwoko), 249 Powell, Ivor, 331n45
photography, pictorialist, 237, 253n6 Praise Singer (Kumalo), 344
photography on the Gold Coast. See Pratt, Mary Louise, 17, 79, 107n2
Lutterodt family photography studios, Pratt, Scott, 275
West Coast of Africa Preston, Margaret, 17
Picasso, Pablo, 17, 151, 157, 195, 239, 259, Price, Sally, 11, 14
312–13 Primeval Forest (Okeke), 247–48
428 INDEX
primitive art, modernist. See specific Reid, John, 155
cases Renaud, Eugene, 43
primitivism: aesthetic, 251–53, Renkaraka, Titus, 200
255nn29–30; Africanness and, 339; Reyher, Rebecca Hourwich, 39, 44–47,
aoa grouping and, 3, 13; as construct, 50–53, 54f, 56–57, 60n40, 60nn44–45
5, 10–11; deconstruction of, 14; Robinson, Margaret, 253n6
“Eskimo,” romantic notions of, 77; Rogoff, Irit, 20, 306
Hlungwani and, 346; Kumalo and Rosenblum, Robert, 264
primitiveness vs., 343; Morrison Rothko, Mark, 262, 269, 274–75
and, 261–63, 267; Nigerian art and, Rotorua School of Māori Arts and
246–53; as prehistory of the future, Crafts, 138, 141, 145
14; Prins’s “primitivist perplex,” 222; Rousseau, Madeleine, 311, 318, 330n32
Rubin on, 250–51; Santiniketan, 253; Rubin, William, 250–51
Steffa on Native American basketry Ryan, Terrence, 225
and, 99–100; Vogue and, 222; Western
Arrernte (Australia) and, 193 Saarinen, Aline B., 209, 210f, 222–24
Prins, Harald, 222 Sack, Steven, 45
printmaking, Inuit. See Inuit printmak- Said, Edward, 20, 307, 329n15
ing in Cape Dorset Samuelson, Robert C. (Lubhembhedu),
Pudlat, Pudlo, 211 58n17
Sanajaksat: Eskimo Handicrafts pam-
Qiatsuk, Lukta, 212; Eskimo Whale Hunt, phlet (Canadian Handicrafts Guild):
220–22, 223f; Owl, 217–18, 219f growth of stone sculpture, 77–78;
Qwabe, Amos, 46–47, 50–51 Houston’s introduction to, 62, 70,
Qwabe, Zizwezenyanga, 46f, 55f; art 87n33; overview, 62–63, 63f; precur-
of invention and, 47–50; at Bantu sors and creation of, 67–75; reactions
Agricultural Show, 53–56; name of, to content and productions, 75–76;
39, 58n14; as oral historian, 40–44; as reception in the North, 66–67
pioneering producer, 36–40; Reyher’s Sand Nest, The (Munakata), 220, 221f
influence on career of, 44–47 Santa Fe Indian School, 92, 94, 95–96
Sash, Cecily, 354n37
Rainbow Serpent, 201–2 Saul, Terry, 96
Rankin, Elizabeth, 341 Scheub, Harold, 42–44
Rauschenberg, Robert, 260 Schlosser, Katesa, 53, 54
Recent New Zealand Sculpture exhibit, Schoon, Theo, 144
Auckland City Art Gallery, 156f Schreiner, W. P., 43
Reclining Figure: Ndebele Woman Schwarz, Wilhelm, 196
(Kumalo), 339–40 Scow, William, 128
Red Totem series (Morrison), 273–74 scrimshaw, 65
Reid, Bill, 110, 113–14, 117–24, 122f, 123f, Sea Monster (Speck), 129f
129–31, 137n72, 319 Seated Figure (Kumalo), 342, 343f
INDEX 429
Seated Woman (Kumalo), 341–42, soapstone carvings, Inuit, 64, 77–78,
Plate 11 88n39
Sekoto, Gerard, 307f; about, 304–6; Soldier (Soja) (Nwoko), 250, 251f
Boghossian, commonalities with, Solomon, King (Zulu), 44, 47, 53
325–26; as jazz musician, 310, 328n10; sōsaku hanga (“creative print”) move-
Memories of Sharpeville, 315, 317f; ment, 213–14, 216, 218, 220, 230
in Paris and Senegal, 312–17; poster South Africa, 304, 351n2, 353n21. See
for the Second Conference of Negro also Hlungwani, Jackson; Kumalo,
Writers and Artists, 313, 313f; postwar Sydney; Zulu art and figurative relief
Paris milieu and, 310–12; Senegalese panels
Women, 315f; Street Scene, 305f; tem- South Pacific. See Michoutouchkine,
poral relationship to modernism, Nicolaï; Papua New Guinea (PNG)
326–27; Untitled (1969), 316f art and Melanesian modernism;
Selassie, Emperor Haile, 317, 332n53 Pilioko, Aloï
Self-Portrait with Bracelets (Pilioko), 300, Soyinka, Wole, 166
Plate 9 spatiality, 7–8. See also mobility
Senegalese Women (Sekoto), 315f Specht, Jim, 185n16
Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 314 Speck, Henry (Udzi’stalis), 110, 114,
Serizawa, Keisuke, 216 124–31, 130f, 137n72; Moon Mask
Sewid, James, 126 Dancers, Plate 3; Sea Monster, 129f
Sewid-Smith, Daisy, 115 Speck, John (Tlakwagila’game), 135n48
Shadbolt, Doris, 112 Spencer, Baldwin, 193, 202
Shahn, Ben, 96 Spiral Group, 333n74
Sheath, Stephen, 153f Spring Scrolls (Boghossian), 320f
Sherman, John K., 269–70 Standing in Northern Lights retrospec-
Sibaya, Christina, 53 tive, 275–76
Sihlali, Durant, 339 Starfish (Morrison), 264
Simpson, Merton, 324, 333n74 Starn, Orin, 16
Sisi Nurse (Onabolu), 238f Steffa, Emil Paulicek, 91, 93, 98–106
Sissons, Jeffrey, 140 Stephen, Ann, 194–95
Skaha, King, 34 Stern, Irma, 52, 60n45, 252
Skotnes, Cecil, 338–40, 342, 344, 346 Strathern, Marilyn, 171, 181, 182–83
Slack, Mary, 347 Street Scene (Sekoto), 305f
Slave Coast: Chief Ayevie of Little Popo Strehlow, Carl, 200
with His People (Lutterodt), 362f Strub, Henry, 82
Smith, Bernard, 191 “Suggestions for Eskimo Handicrafts”
Smith, Don Lelooska, 137n72 (Canadian Handicrafts Guild), 69
Smith, Jaune Quick-to-See, 276 sumi-zuri (black ink) painting, 217–18
Smith, Terry, 6, 7 surrealism: abstract, 263–64; black
Snelleman, Johannes F., 52 modernists and, 319; Boghossian and,
Snodgrass, Jeanne, 97 319–22; Morrison and, 263–67, 270,
430 INDEX
273; primitive art and, 261; veristic Committee, 119; Haida, 118, 119–21,
and ethnographic, 263, 279n23 122f, 123f; Inuit-made, 71–75, 73f, 74f;
Surrealist Landscape (Morrison), 270 Red Totem series (Morrison), 273–74
Sywollie (Sarollie), 80–81 Tots (Kuanimbandu), 164f
Tovey, Gordon, 141
Tackie Tawia, King, 366–68, 376n20 to-vig-nil (“gift basket”), 103, Plate 2
Taiapa, John, 149 Townsend-Gault, Charlotte, 116, 124
Taiapa, Pine, 141 translation processes, 198–99
“Tales of a Desert Indian” (Steffa), 91, transmodernity, 307, 328n13
99, 101 Tributaries: A View of Contemporary
Tall, Papa Ibra, 310 South African Art exhibition, 337–38
Tattooed Women of Bellona, Solomon Tūrangawaewae marae, Ngāruawāhia,
Isles (Pilioko), 297, Plate 8 144–47
Teakles, John McLaurin, 227 Turnbull, David, 9
Te Hau, Matiu, 142–44 Turner, Evan, 225
Te Kaha marae, 152–55, 153f Tuwhare, Hone, 152
Tekle, Aferwerk, 318 Two Bird Dancers with Costumed Audi-
temporality: heterochronology, 327; ence (Kabotie), 92f
modernism as temporal category, Two Men Standing in a Field Cleared for
348; modernist geographies and, Cocoa Plantation, Bioko, Equatorial
7–8; modernity’s rupture of, 195–96, Guinea (Lutterodt), 369f
205; Sekoto’s temporal relationship
to modernism, 326–27; translation ukiyo-e print tradition, 214, 218
processes and, 198–99 uli (Igbo body drawing and mural paint-
third space, 116 ing), 246–48
Three Figures (Morrison), 263 Uméní Kānādských Eskymáků (Flejšar),
Tiberio, Wilson, 310, 314 228, 229f
Tiffany, Louis, 51 Umine Wacipi: War and Peace Dance
Time Cycle III (Boghossian), 322, Plate 10 (Howe), 97
Titled Woman (Nwoko), 249, 249f University of British Columbia Museum
Tjalkabota, 196–97, 202–5 of Anthropology, 122f, 123f, 128
Tjita, 197 Untitled (ca. 1970) (Akis), 168f
tjurunga concept (Australia), 189, Untitled (1945) (Morrison), 265f
199–205 Untitled (1995) (Morrison), 274, Plate 7
Tlawit’sis tribe, 124, 126, 128, 132n1, Untitled (1969) (Sekoto), 316f
136n54. See also Northwest Coast art Untitled (Landscape with Two Snakes
To Market, Haitian Peasants (Wilson), and a House) (Collin), 201f
215, 215f
Tomory, Peter, 147–48 Vancouver Art Gallery (vag), 110–12, 131
totem poles and sculptures: British van der Walt, Sarel, 60n39
Columbia Totem Pole Preservation Van Gogh, Vincent, 157, 195
INDEX 431
vanguardism, 319 Wilson, Clifford, 71
van Kraayenberg, Nielen, 352n9 Wilson, Ellis: To Market, Haitian Peas-
Villa, Edoardo, 338, 344 ants, 215, 215f
Vincent, Mac, 157 Wilson, Selwyn, 143
Vincent, Rosemary, 157 Winged Figure, The (Bourgeois), 267–68
Vogue magazine, 209, 210f, 222–24 Winiata, Maharaia, 143
Winkiel, Laura, 4
Wainwright, Leon, 8 Winnipeg Art Gallery, 73, 75, 86n27
Waititi, John, 144 Wirepa, Ivan, 153f
Walters, Muru, 142, 143 Wolf, Eric, 310
Watanabe, Sadao, 216 Woman Buffalo Dreamer (Howe), 96–97,
Watson, Scott, 115 Plate 1
Webb, Electra Havemeyer, 51–52, 60n44 Woodruff, Hale, 333n74
West, Dick (W. Richard, Sr.), 92, 96, 97 Work of Māori Artists exhibition
West, W. Richard, Jr., 262, 276 (National Art Gallery, Wellington,
West Coast of Africa (wca) elites. See New Zealand), 150–52
Lutterodt family photography studios, Wright, James, 85n9
West Coast of Africa
Western Arrernte art. See Australian Yanagi, Soetsu, 216
Indigenous and Western Arrernte art
Western Desert school of painting, 205 Zadkine, Ossip, 311, 327n2
Westra, Ans, 144, 145, 147 Zamecznik, Stanislaw, 228–29
Whalebone (Morrison), 264 Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe, 252
whare whakairo (meeting house), Zulu, Abenizo, 45–47
139–40, 146 Zulu art and figurative relief panels:
Wheeler, Steve, 262 art of invention and, 47–50;
Whispering Hills (Namatjira), 204f background and history, 34–40;
White, Mark Andrew, 96–97 Bantu Agricultural Show and, 53–56;
Whiting, Cliff, 151–52, 153–54 “craft” vs. art and, 40; Eurocentric
Whitney Museum of American Art, 269 narratives and, 56; fascia boards,
Whore, The (Lasisi), 172 53–54; mat racks, Qwabe as pioneer-
Widmer, Kingsley, 255n29 ing producer of, 36–40, 37f; Qwabe
Wight, Darlene Coward, 75 as oral historian, 40–44; Reyher’s
Wilk, Richard, 222 influence, 44–47; Reyher’s passion
Wilson, Arnold, 142, 143, 144, 145, 151; for art and, 50–53. See also Qwabe,
Growth Forms, 156f Zizwezenyanga
432 INDEX
P L A T E 1 Oscar Howe, Woman Buffalo Dreamer, n.d. Tempera on paper,
17.5 × 15.5 in. (44 × 39 cm). Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of
Oklahoma, Norman. Gift of Gertrude Phillips, 1978. Courtesy of the
Oscar Howe Estate.
PLATE 2 Magdalena Augustine, Large Basket, ca. 1914. Juncus, deer
grass, and sumac, diameter: 11 in. (28 cm). Pomona College Museum
of Art, Claremont, California. Gift of Mr. Emil P. Steffa, P1276.
PLATE 3 Henry Speck, Moon Mask Dancers, 1962. Gouache on

paper, 14 × 16.8 in. (35.6 × 42.9 cm). University of British Columbia
Museum of Anthropology, A8003. Museum of Anthropology
purchase from Muse Antiques and Art Galleries, Vancouver.
Photograph by Derek Tan.
PLATE 4 Selwyn Muru, Kohatu, 1965. Oil on hardboard,
31 × 47 in. (79.5 × 120.3 cm). Museum of New Zealand Te Papa
Tongarewa, 1965-0020-1.
PLATE 5 Rex Battarbee, Central Australian Landscape [Mt. Her-

mannsburg], 1938, watercolor on paper, 12 × 14.6 in. (31.2 × 37.1 cm).
Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle. Photograph by Newcastle Art
Gallery. Courtesy Gayle Quarmby.
PLATE 6 George Morrison, Cumulated Landscape, 1976. Wood, 48 × 120 × 3 in.
(121.2 × 304.8 × 7.6 cm). Collection of the Minnesota Museum of American Art.
Gift of Honeywell.
PLATE 7 George Morrison, Untitled, 1995. Colored pencil on paper, 17 × 15 in.
(43 × 38 cm). Collection of Hazel Belvo.
PLATE 8 Aloï Pilioko, Tattooed Women of Bellona, Solomon Isles, 1966.
Wool tapestry and oil paint on jute (copra sacking), 27 × 87.4 in.
(68.5 × 222 cm). Private collection. Courtesy of Aloï Pilioko.
PLATE 9 Aloï Pilioko,

Self-Portrait with Bracelets,
1974. Wool tapestry on jute,
42 × 24 in. (106 × 61 cm).
Private collection.
Courtesy of Aloï Pilioko.
PLATE 10 Skunder Boghossian, Time Cycle III, 1981. Embossed bark and
sand with collage on board, 48 × 47 × 2.7 in. (121.9 × 121.6 × 7 cm). Courtesy
of Bill Karg and the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida,
Gainesville. Museum purchase with funds provided by the Caroline Julier
and James G. Richardson Acquisition Fund, and the Charles P. and
Caroline Ireland Foundation. Photograph by Randy Batista.
P L A T E 1 1 Sydney Kumalo, Seated Woman, 1960–61.
Bronze, 37.4 × 5.6 × 6 in. (95 × 14.3 × 15.4 cm). Wits

Art Museum.
P L A T E 1 2 Unknown
photographer, Portrait of
Albert Lutterodt and His
Wife, Accra, Ghana, ca. 1885.
Carte de visite. Inscribed
“With Mrs. Lutterodt to
Mrs. M. Schweizer.” Albert
Lutterodt Photograph, Gold
Coast Colony. Permission
of Basel Mission Archive,
qq-30.145.0001.
P L A T E 1 3 Unknown photographer, Gold Coast: Fort in Elmina, ca. 1880.
Albumen print. Elmina fort with houses in foreground, Elmina, Ghana.

From Conrad Bullnheimer Album. Courtesy the Walther Collection, New
York and Neu-Ulm, Germany.

Mapping Modernisms - Art, Indige - Elizabeth Harney

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General editors: Ruth B. Phillips

and Nicholas Thomas

Duke University Press | Durham and London | 2018

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support

Frontispiece: Lukta Qiatsuk, Owl, 1959. Stone-cut print,

General Editors’ Foreword | Ruth B. Phillips and Nicholas Thomas xiii

Preface | Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips xv

INTRODUCTION Inside Modernity: Indigeneity, Coloniality,

PART I MODERN VALUES

ONE Reinventing Zulu Tradition: The Modernism of Zizwezenyanga

TWO “Hooked Forever on Primitive Peoples”: James Houston

THREE Making Pictures on Baskets: Modern Indian Painting

FOUR An Intersection: Bill Reid, Henry Speck, and the Mapping

FIVE Modernism on Display: Negotiating Value in Exhibitions

PART II MODERN IDENTITIES

SIX “Artist of PNG”: Mathias Kauage and Melanesian Modernism |

EIGHT Cape Dorset Cosmopolitans: Making “Local” Prints in Global

NINE Natural Synthesis: Art, Theory, and the Politics of Decolonization

PART III MODERN MOBILITIES

TEN Being Modern, Becoming Native: George Morrison’s Surrealist

TWELVE Constellations and Coordinates: Repositioning Postwar Paris

THIRTEEN Conditions of Engagement: Mobility, Modernism,

FOURTEEN The Modernist Lens of Lutterodt Studios | Erin Haney 357

1. Oscar Howe, Woman Buffalo Dreamer

1.1. Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, pair of large vertical pokerwork panels 34

GENERAL EDITORS’ FOREWORD

xiv GENERAL EDITORS’ FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION INSIDE MODERNITY

Indigeneity, Coloniality, Modernisms

This book addresses the silence surrounding indigeneity in established narra-

2 E lizabeth H arney and R uth B . P hillips

4 E lizabeth H arney and R uth B . P hillips

Modernity, Modernization, Modernism

6 E lizabeth H arney and R uth B . P hillips

8 E lizabeth H arney and R uth B . P hillips

(Re)mapping “Modernist Attitudes”

Modern Values: Artistic Hierarchies and Modernist Primitivisms

10 E lizabeth H arney and R uth B . P hillips

12 E lizabeth H arney and R uth B . P hillips

14 E lizabeth H arney and R uth B . P hillips

Modern Identities: Indigeneity Historicized

16 E lizabeth H arney and R uth B . P hillips

18 E lizabeth H arney and R uth B . P hillips

Modern Mobilities: The Networked Maps of Modernists

20 E lizabeth H arney and R uth B . P hillips

22 E lizabeth H arney and R uth B . P hillips

24 E lizabeth H arney and R uth B . P hillips

26 E lizabeth H arney and R uth B . P hillips

28 E lizabeth H arney and R uth B . P hillips

1 REINVENTING ZULU TRADITION

The Modernism of Zizwezenyanga Qwabe’s

34 S andra K lopper

FIGURE 1.3 Zizwezenyanga Qwabe, detail of King Cetshwayo from one of

from Portuguese traders at Delagoa Bay in present-­day Mozambique.2 Some

R einventing Z ulu T radition 35

36 S andra K lopper

R einventing Z ulu T radition 37

pair of vertical pokerwork panels, Qwabe, detail of Dinuzulu’s incarcer-

Qwabe, detail of bride holding small

R einventing Z ulu T radition 39

from Portuguese traders at Delagoa Bay in present-day Mozambique.2 Some

or cutting right through it, he achieved colour-differentiation and a certain

iglu, and skinning and butchering animals; on page twenty-five, he illustrated

of a totem pole — depicting large-faced stylized animals stacked one above the

Eskimos are becoming well-known for their cleverness in carving.