24 August 2008
Nairobi — AFRICA IS FAMOUS FOR ITS traditional masks, its stunning life-size sculptures and its colourful textiles.
Creators of most of such early works of art have passed on but their creations are scattered in museums and private collections around the world.
It was these uniquely African works that mesmerised the so called "modern" artists who emerged in the early years of the 20th century. At that time, European artists were confronted and threatened by a new invention -- the camera -- a devise they feared would render not only their profession but also their portraits and landscapes obsolete.
It was also at that same time that, by a strange coincidence, works of art from Africa began pouring into Europe. The works were largely abstract in concept as opposed to the realism of the European art.
For the Europeans, they brought a new way of thinking, a new way of conceptualising art. It was from these works -- for which the African artists drew their inspiration from within rather than from without -- that the early "modern" European artists found a new source of inspiration.
There were many "schools" of modern European art which sprang up as a result of this cultural cross-fusion. These were cubism and Dadaism, among others, but almost all of them borrowed heavily from the African masters, and yet they were regarded as revolutionary in the early 20th century.
Many of the early modern artists such as Picasso and Matisse had huge collections of African sculptures, masks and textiles. In fact, Matisse's appliquéd art was based largely on the hand-woven Bakuba raffia textiles from the Congo, one of the most stunning of all African art forms, which is now being considered for world heritage status by Unesco. Matisse's huge collection of Bakuba cloth was first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in l938.
Today, art critics, teachers and curators are at a loss about the diminishing contemporary pieces coming out of Africa, despite the rich historical and anthropological background of African art.
Joseph Murumbi, perhaps Africa's most famous collector of objet d'art African, was fascinated by the movement of African art from the continent to the modern art ateliers of Paris and other art centres of Europe.
Consequently, many of the sculptures and other art forms he collected from Africa are those that noticeably influenced the so-called modern artists. There are a number of sculptures that reflect this connection at the Murumbi Gallery at the Kenya National Archives.
It was during his time in exile in London in the l950s that Murumbi first started his famous collection of African art. Murumbi founded the African Heritage with his wife Sheila and Alan Donovan in 1972. He sought out talented African artists and sculptors.
Most of the artists were highly skilled professionals trained mostly at Uganda's Makerere University which had the best art curriculum at the time.
Nevertheless, he also delighted in finding talent from unknown and unlikely sources.
Among those whom Murumbi took delight in were contemporary artists whose works echo those of old African masters that grace the world's museums today. One of the most notable is Prof Magdalene Anyango Odundo.
Prof Odundo's clay vessels transcend the confinements of pottery, craft and function.
A Kenyan based in the UK, her clay works are highly regarded works of art that speak evocatively of past ceramic traditions and heritage. Odundo's ceramic vessels go back in time to the age old pottery traditions of Africa, and reflect the artist's thorough knowledge of the world's ceramic history. Prof Odundo, acclaimed as one of the world's leading ceramicists, is probably Kenya's most famous living artist.
SHE HAILS FROM WESTERN Kenya, renowned for its pottery tradition, but has also travelled extensively in Nigeria and other parts of the world to study the various ways women produce pottery using centuries-old traditional hand-building and firing.
She completed a master's degree in ceramics in London and teaches ceramics at the University College for Creative Arts, previously known as the Surrey Institute of Art and Design.
After numerous exhibitions around the world, including a successful pioneer exhibition at the original African Heritage Gallery on Kenyatta Avenue during the UN Decade of Women's Conference in Nairobi in 1985, her magnificent vessels are now highly sought after by collectors, museums and galleries around the world. In recent years, her pots have fetched record prices at auctions, one going for over £50,000.
One of her pots graces the entrance of the British Museum in London. Another is on loan from the Murumbi Trust to the Murumbi Gallery at the Kenya National Archives, and inhabits a place of honour at the foyer of the gallery.
Born in 1944, Elkana Ongesa comes from a long line of traditional stone carvers in Kisii, in southwestern Kenya. However, Ongesa was the first in his family to combine his innate skills with the broadening influence of training in Fine Arts at Makerere University and the University of Nairobi, where he completed his postgraduate thesis on stone carving in East Africa.
Ongesa also attended the McGill University in Canada in 1985, where he got a Masters in Education in Teaching of Art. Two of his pieces grace the United Nations headquarters in New York and the Unesco headquarters in Paris.
ALTHOUGH FRANCIS NNAG-genda is one of the very few Ugandan artists that Makerere University does not claim as its own, he is identified with the school where he served as chairman of the Fine Arts Department.
Nnaggenda can only be described as an experimental artist. Born in 1936, Nnaggenda left Uganda in the 1960s to work as a musician as well as a sculptor's assistant in Germany before finishing his five-year academic course in only three years.
Oddly enough, it was during his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich that he encountered the legendary art of West Africa that had already inspired many of the modern artists earlier in the century.
He returned to Uganda and began work immediately at a small house outside Kampala, exhibiting at the small Nommo Gallery, a non-profit institution promoting contemporary art.
In 1968, he moved to Kenya where he taught art at the then University College of Nairobi. It was there that he met Murumbi, who became one of his most ardent admirers. In fact, Murumbi made Nnaggenda's sculptures the subject of his address when he opened the African Heritage in 1973.
One of Africa's most prolific artists, John Odoch'ameny taught many of East Africa's leading sculptors while sculptor- in-residence at the African Heritage in the 1980s. His black molten metal works are familiar to many sculpture enthusiasts in East Africa.
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