Читать книгу The Art of Life in South Africa - Daniel Magaziner - Страница 14

Chapter 3

ART

JOHN WATT GROSSERT—Jack, to those who knew him—was born in Tweedie, Natal, in 1913. He trained in fine arts at the University of Natal, studying with O. J. P. Oxley. After graduation, he qualified as an art teacher, one of only two in African schools in the mid-1930s. He moved quickly into native education administration, serving first as a regional inspector and eventually, after the advent of apartheid, as the organizer of arts and crafts for the entire Natal Province. (He assumed the same position on a national level after 1955.) The organizer was a relatively recently defined position; Grossert traveled the length and the breadth of the province—he spoke of traversing tens of thousands of kilometers per year—visiting with principals and instructors, attending school shows, and overseeing the implementation of the arts and crafts program in government-supported schools.¹ He was also an impassioned public intellectual. He published frequently on matters ranging from the development of the Bantu Education syllabus to the need to establish a collection of African craft in his home province. He lectured both at home and abroad; he gave talks on African art on Radio Bantu; and beginning in the early 1950s, he spoke frequently about the specialist art teachers’ training course that he opened at the Indaleni Mission, outside Richmond in the Midlands.

The specialist art teachers’ course was Grossert’s brainchild. The program embodied the aspirations and promise of his wide-ranging reading about the role of art and education to promote what he repeatedly described as “harmonious relationships” among people. For Grossert, art education was not only about economic stability and the need to preserve cultural traditions from the overwhelming power of industrial modernity—although those were issues about which he cared deeply. Art was also “educative in the profoundest sense of the word”—it trained people to think, to create, to be, and to be better members of a community.² Art was foundational and essential, and after 1955, the apartheid government’s support for his program ensured that South Africa would remain on the cutting edge of progressive pedagogical practice.

Grossert was undoubtedly a primitivist; he was among the many white South Africans who worried about the loss of black South Africa’s cultural traditions and who fretted about whether the institutional training of African artists risked seeding a dangerous cultural schizophrenia. Yet Grossert’s faith in art education emerged simultaneously from a deeply held critique of white, Western, industrial modernity. He was not concerned that some vague “Africanness” was being lost to urbanization and social change; rather, like John Ruskin and others associated with the nineteenth-century arts and crafts movement, he was concerned that essential human values such as harmony and balance were at stake in the struggle to retain crafts on the curriculum.³

In addition to his duties as organizer and founder of the art-training course, Grossert published two books during the 1950s, which collected his ideas about art education’s role in society. The first, Art and Crafts for Africans (1953), was intended to serve as a handbook for teachers in African schools. Generously detailed and illustrated with Grossert’s remarkable reproductions of student work, Art and Crafts for Africans was largely instructional, with chapters on weaving, basketry, and so on. He coedited the second book, The Art of Africa, with Walter Battiss and two anthropologists, G. H. Franz and H. P. Junod. Ostensibly a study of the artistic traditions of the entire continent, from Egypt through West Africa and points south, The Art of Africa was a profound political, discursive, and ideological statement about the role of art in world society in general and in South Africa in particular. It set out a bold agenda for black South African art, which, as Grossert repeatedly assured audiences in the 1950s and 1960s, would make the entire country a more accomplished and more harmonious place.

As with Art and Crafts for Africans before it, The Art of Africa was intended for African school students as part of the expanded Bantu Education syllabus. Its goal was to guide Africans to the useful precedents of African attainment, to “re-awaken” the “joyful attitude” that Grossert claimed had prompted artistic invention in the past. To accomplish this, Grossert played two discursive tricks on his readers. First, he embraced the idea of a racialized Africa to smooth over the dramatically different material cultures of the continent. Although he acknowledged the obvious differences between southern Africa and West Africa, he nonetheless claimed that a “common cultural heritage” linked black people across the continent. This heritage, he continued, was apparent especially in material culture, where “simplicity” and directness of “universal forms” predominated. His second trick was to collapse the category of craft into that of art, thereby eliding the frequent assertion that black South Africans had no visual arts traditions to preserve and promote.⁴

Each chapter in the book was lavishly illustrated with Grossert’s careful reproductions of masks, headrests, statues, drums, pots, baskets, and so forth (save Battiss’s chapter on “bushmen” art, which included the author’s own drawings). Grossert’s illustrations served to link the different material cultures of West Africa and southern Africa. The book opened with a chapter on “The Arts and Crafts of Negro Africa.” There, Grossert drew from examples held in the Natal Museum and other collections to demonstrate the extent to which West Africa statuary, masks, and other material objects had become an accepted part of the global art world by the 1950s. But in a book called The Art of Africa, it was notable that the next five chapters focused exclusively on southern Africa, an area much less celebrated for its artistic achievements. Indeed, although in the 1930s and 1940s numerous observers called for the preservation of African craft, as we have seen, they did so largely in terms of preserving culture, not “art” per se. In their text, Grossert and his coeditors were granting craft—the making of useful objects—the same degree of aesthetic accomplishment as that usually reserved for the so-called fine arts. Grossert devoted as much loving care and seriousness to sketching a seemingly simple Zulu imbenge—a pot cover woven from ilala, a long, pliable palm frond—as he did to sketching a life-sized bronze head from Ife.⁵ Between the same covers, rendered by the same hand, the argument was apparent: both the celebrated bronze and the quotidian imbenge were esteemed markers of aesthetic attainment. Both were formally accomplished works of art.

Grossert and his coeditors defined art expansively to embrace the variety of objects reproduced in the text. “Art is most simply and most usually defined as an attempt to create pleasing forms,” they explained.⁶ The urge to create a pleasing form was a fundamental trait shared by all: “[Man] must create beauty for himself. That is how the art of man is born. True man is not really happy until he has ever with him that which pleases his eye, his ear, his taste, his touch, his emotions.” This was a compelling definition of art, which collated decades’ worth of aesthetic theory that thinkers across the globe had developed in response to what they perceived as a crisis in the arts in an era of capitalist expansion and technological change. The collapsing of high and low art into the all-encompassing category of art did important ideological work within the museum—but not only there. To assert that for man truly to be man, he had to work in pursuit of beauty was a profound political statement about the role of art and creativity in modern society. And here, both Grossert’s colleagues and his forerunners claimed that African art had a particularly vital role to play.

In The Art of Africa, drawings of kraals and huts brought the architecture of everyday African life (or at least “traditional life”) into the category of art. Grossert contributed a meticulous rendering of a village to Franz’s chapter on Basotho artistic practices. His drawing is a remarkable piece of art in its own right—the village detail shows a half dozen perfectly round huts set within a series of interlocking straight and rounded walls. Take away the detail (thatched roofs, a fence of vertical branches) and you have simple, geometric shapes—circles, squares, rectangles, ovals—that are well balanced and logically related to each other. “Now let us look at the Mosotho village,” Franz wrote in the accompanying text, “the first thing that strikes us is that it fits so beautifully into the landscape.”⁷ The village was obviously an artifact, or something made, but as drawn by Grossert and explicated by Franz, it was so natural as to fit perfectly into the landscape. In their huts and walls, Basotho villagers had perfected the work that the land’s creator had begun. Franz had a word for this: harmony. “In all things [people] seek for harmony . . . the sense of beauty is satisfied when man is able to appreciate a unity or harmony of formal relations among his sense-perceptions. His own creation must be in harmony with himself and with the life around him.”⁸

Figure 3.2 A Basotho Village, drawn by Jack Grossert, from Walter Battiss, G. H. Franz, Jack Grossert, and H. P. Junod, The Art of Africa (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Shuter and Shooter, 1958)

Here, Franz was writing about an imagined Mosotho, in language reminiscent of the earliest twentieth-century reception of African and other so-called primitive art in the salons of Europe and America. Artists, theorists, and critics had hailed African art not only for the simplicity of its form and the essential accomplishment of its design but also for the social values they read into the objects—harmony, unity, beauty—in other words, traits that many moderns found lacking in their own day-to-day lives. Since the 1910s and especially in the 1920s, African art had been levied as a critique against the excesses of industrial society. So conscripted, African art was profoundly political. By describing the art of everyday life in southern Africa in a similar way, Jack Grossert asserted that black South African art would change society, if only it could be cultivated in the next generation of Africans. Grossert published this text in the late 1950s, just as this generation was being drawn into the confines of Bantu Education schools, where African students encountered the arts and crafts requirements that the previous decades had bequeathed to them. Grossert did his best to reassure them that art deserved to be on the syllabus, for art and only art could guarantee unity, perfection, balance, and harmony under apartheid.

ART AGAINST MODERNITY

When the NEF set up shop in South Africa in the winter of 1934, it brought a wealth of knowledge about new pedagogical movements, psychological innovation, and ethnography’s confidence about the way societies functioned. As we have seen, it also brought speakers who bemoaned the passage of the world’s once-varied visual cultures in the face of industrial manufacture. Grossert echoed these concerns, writing that however accomplished it might be, local artistic production could not compete with “the mass produced utensils and furniture from modern European controlled factories.”⁹ Factories made useful goods but not art. As Walter Benjamin famously argued, mechanical reproduction threatened fundamentally to alter the production and experience of art. Benjamin was particularly concerned about photography’s capacity to displace painting; if anything, the threat that manufacturing posed to African craft–cum-art was even more profound.¹⁰ The year 1934 stood on the precipice of a global crisis in the arts, a Dutch educationist, J. J. Van Der Leeuw, had told the delegates gathered in Cape Town. Machines were displacing traditional human activities, and it fell to the pedagogues to figure out how best to preserve that innate creative spark—what he called “spontaneous self-activity”—that made humans unique.¹¹

Given the prevailing undercurrent of concern, it was perhaps not surprising that the best-attended talks of the two-month NEF conference were given by Arthur Lismer, a Canadian art education expert who was working as the education director of the Toronto Art Gallery. In Toronto, Lismer’s primary job was to use the Gallery to motivate the masses of Torontonians to create. “Art has been placed in a water-tight compartment, separate and sacred to the initiated few,” he claimed. Art did not necessarily rot within museums, but neither did it live. As he wrote elsewhere, “dead and stately halls hung with . . . priceless masterpieces of other days feel the need of something more than sightseers and occasional visitors.” Sequestered and set apart from everyday life, art lacked oxygen. The problem was not with the objects, Lismer explained, but with people’s failure to appreciate the vital role that objects played. “The Art Gallery is more . . . than sticks, metal girders and concrete,” he asserted, “it is a living manifestation of the expression that life is not all depression and material possessions, that there are still things in life that we need to see more and more, still new experiences in adventuring into new lands and into the heart of people everyone, through an understanding of their arts.” Art was under threat, but Lismer insisted it remained “the most universal voice to-day,” something in which all communities needed to share.¹²

Figure 3.3 Children’s Art Centre Class at the Art Gallery of Toronto, July 1937, unknown photographer, with the permission of the Art Gallery of Ontario

Lismer was especially keen that children be exposed to art and encouraged to produce it. He brought an exhibition of children’s art to South Africa. “We are slowly emerging into a wider consciousness of the true function of Art,” he counseled his audience. “We are beginning to claim the privileges and opportunities that the participation in the experience of Art offers to all.” Art was not a matter of specialized training or wealth or privilege. Rather, art was about the “growth and sustenance of people”—adults and children alike—“in daily life.”¹³ The social work of art worked best when begun early. Thus, Lismer insisted, the role of art and art education in industrial society ought to be a matter of widespread concern.

The American educationist and philosopher John Dewey was in the audience in Johannesburg in 1934. Dewey had recently begun to write on these very same issues, reflecting on his time as education director at suburban Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation. Like Lismer, Dewey’s patron, Albert Barnes, was well known for critiquing staid, tired galleries for treating works of art like religious icons. Barnes insisted that art’s value was its insight into the human condition, which meant that works of art needed to be shared, considered, and experienced, not cut off from view. What was needed was “necessary insight,” to understand the work of art, as he put it, and it was that insight that the foundation sought to generate.¹⁴

As Barnes’s educational director, John Dewey had begun to reflect on and develop this “necessary insight” about art and society. His studies brought art, insight, and society together. Art, he explained, reflected human insight and initiative, and it produced human insight and initiative, without which the progress of human societies was impossible. The problem, Dewey wrote in Art as Experience (1934), was not that mechanization undermined the unique value of the work of art but that it made artificial the natural relationship between human minds and the objects of their imagination. “Objects that were in the past valued and significant because of their place in the life of the community now function in isolation from the conditions of their origin,” Dewey explained. Museums exacerbated this by telling tales of individual genius and extolling the mystic values of fine art, with the result that works of art were too frequently “set apart from common experience [to] serve as insignia of taste and certificates of special culture,” not as sources of insight, available and inspirational to all.¹⁵

Dewey’s analysis suggested that concepts such as “art for art’s sake” obscured the fact that all aesthetic objects were historical practices, hardwired into the functioning of the human organism within its environment. Art was how people worked within and through their physical world, and works of art revealed and reflected humans’ understanding of their context. To be educated in art was thus to learn how better to be within both nature and society.¹⁶ Here in particular, the American’s ideas dovetailed neatly with the gathering South African consensus that crafts ought to be treated as valued and valuable works of art. Like Jack Grossert, Dewey critiqued the art industry for failing to recognize how, in the artisanal past, “domestic utensils, furnishings of tent and house, rugs, mats, jars, pots, bows, spears, were wrought with such delighted care.” The work of art was everywhere where people made things and lived among them, and “such things were enhancements of the processes of everyday life.”¹⁷

What made objects aesthetic was not their inherent beauty or technical accomplishment but the ways in which their creators had lived in and through them.¹⁸ Life, Dewey explained, is ongoing, flowing like a river toward death, but that is not how we experience it; rather, we narrate our lives, carve discernable experiences out of the medium of experience, and tell stories “so rounded out that [their] close is a consummation and not a cessation,” even as our bodies continue downstream.¹⁹ To create an object is to narrate time: creation has a beginning and an end; it is a discrete and therefore knowable, discernable experience. This matters, Dewey argued in the early 1930s, because without such experiences, people cannot come to grasp their selves amid the onrushing of time. Art objects are concrete manifestations of the human reflection on (and therefore knowledge of) experience; objects are consciousness, embodied. The work of art is thus work of the self.

But why did this embodied, objective humanity matter in Dewey’s own context? To what would such selves amount? Dewey’s ideas about art and education were not uncontested. Indeed, in his writing he invoked other theorists, among them Franz Cižek, an Austrian educationist who was well known for proposing that schools ought to cultivate their pupils’ “free expression.” Cižek saw art differently than did Dewey. As the Austrian understood it, art was a means by which individuals developed their own selves, period. To interfere in students’ expression was to risk damaging their psyches and their best selves. According to Cižek, individual attainment and expression were the sine qua non of art education. Dewey disagreed, suggesting instead that art education served society’s ultimate purpose: integration of the individual within his or her environment, as a better functioning member of the community.²⁰ In the context of the Great Depression in particular, partisans of the Deweyesque perspective felt that, as the education historian Arthur Efland put it, “[though] the psychological adjustment of the child was . . . important, the survival of society itself was also a priority.”²¹ Art education did not need to stop with expressive selves; it needed to go further to promote an expressive society. To borrow from Grossert and Junod, art education was about the harmony in social relations that would result.

There were many reasons why life in industrial society lacked harmony. Not surprisingly, scholars interested in art and education posited that the fact that moderns lacked the opportunity to resolve conflicts through self-expression was paramount among these. Both Grossert and Dewey agreed that harmony’s opposite—discord or dissonance—was also an experience, a potential narrative within the flow of life. Expression was how people responded to discord’s recurring presence. Words, paint, and wood (to cite but a sample) were the means by which harmony and unity were reestablished in the individual, and thus, through individual efforts, harmony restored to the social body. Everyone needed this; what made artists exceptional was the intensity with which they embraced discord as a necessary antecedent to harmony. As Dewey understood it, artists were people who sought out life’s rough, irregular moments, rather than striving for smooth tranquility: “Demand for variety is the manifestation of that fact that being alive we seek to live, until we are cowed by fear or dulled by routine. The need of life pushes out into the unknown.”²² A person became a self by grasping the experiences that made up the drama of life; selves became a society when they were able to share in the tension and release that marked the work of art. This same concern about social cohesion was what motivated the ethnographers to call for the preservation of so-called Bantu culture. But for Dewey, Lismer, and Grossert, this was bigger than Bantu society. It was a modern problem, demanding an institutionalized, societal response.

Writing a few years later, the Dewey disciple and English art theorist Herbert Edward Read (not to be confused with Tladi’s South African patron) expanded on this in a particularly eloquent and damning way. Like Dewey, Read argued that art was a fundamental human practice, once available to all, that had been obscured by industrial modernity and the isolation of “artist” as a social category. Lacking an awareness of the true work of art, contemporary society fetishized only the individual artist, the genius, at the cost of the mass repression of “instinctive life . . . [a] repression [which was] responsible for [man’s] mental illness—his psychoses and neuroses.”²³ Writing in the early 1930s, Dewey had envisioned a world that would grant expanded opportunities for self-expression. Read wrote as World War I raged, and he was more pessimistic. Like Dewey, he bemoaned the separation between the “high” arts of the museum and the “low” arts of the struggling artisan, suggesting that the division rendered creativity the property of an exclusive few, not a widely dispersed practice. The suppression of “spontaneous creative ability” had led to the “disintegration of the [human] personality” in the centuries since the Renaissance, resulting in the chaos and disintegration that were amply evident in his time.²⁴ In a telling passage, he put it this way:

It is the first day of June 1942. The laburnum trees cast their golden rain against a hedge of vivid beech trees. Everything is fresh and sweet in the cool early sunshine. I have just heard that during the weekend the biggest air-raid in history has taken place. Over the city of Cologne . . . our airforce on Sunday morning dropped [11,000] bombs. I listen half-consciously to the sounds that reach me here—the twittering of birds and the voices of children playing in the garden—and try to realize the meaning of these distant events.²⁵

Read believed, as Dewey did, that human beings needed to to face, embrace, and resolve tensions by creating, and thus make life more expressive, more transparent, and more harmonious. Art was the necessary outlet, without which humans lived a denuded life, out of sync with the rhythms of the natural world and their own human community. Or so the horrors Read’s own time revealed.

Read’s critique was the latest in a long series of writings expressing similar sentiments. As John Ruskin and the arts and crafts movement demonstrated, when industrialization took hold in the nineteenth century a variety of Western utopian thinkers had looked backward to the West’s eroding artisanal traditions for guidance. In the interwar twentieth century, many looked instead to the supposedly harmonious African societies—and these, too, now appeared to be in danger.²⁶

Proponents of the work of art in society shared primitivists’ fascination with the supposedly simple forms and geometric shapes of African sculpture. But theirs were not only formal concerns; to Barnes, Lismer, Dewey, and others, so-called primitive society stood out as a model for what had been lost along with the true meaning of art. The objects stood in for the forgotten ways of experience and creativity. “There is much in the life of the savage that is sodden,” Dewey explained, but also much for the civilized man to learn: “When the savage is most alive, he is most observant of the world around him and most taut with energy. As he watches what stirs around him, he, too, is stirred.”²⁷ Dewey imagined primitive man “taut” with tension, not the master of the world but in constant, ever-evolving dialogue with his environment. “Primitives’” lack of mastery meant that their society was constantly forced to adapt, to create, and thus to humanize the world. In Dewey’s day and in his community, this was no longer the case. Instead, the “environment is, . . . exhausted, worn out, esthetically speaking.”²⁸ He called for “civilized” people to get back to the fundamental creative negotiation that was the quest for balance and harmony.²⁹

Dewey’s work at the Barnes Foundation brought him into contact both with Barnes’s notable collection of African statuary and with his dealer, the Parisian Paul Guillaume. Along with Thomas Munro—a former student of Dewey’s at Teachers’ College—Guillaume selected exemplary pieces to be shipped to Philadelphia and displayed at the foundation. The two also collaborated on the publication of Primitive Negro Sculpture (1926), one of the books which Lippy Lipschitz would later introduce to Ernest Mancoba and which observers credited with inspiring the young sculptor’s turn to a more recognizably “African” style.³⁰

Guillaume and Munro applied Barnes’s ideas about “plastic form” to the analysis and appreciation of African art, while frequently straying beyond art objects to rehearse the theory of the work of art in society. African art suggested that a “durable intellectual culture” had once existed in Africa, although it was no longer in evidence. They imagined an Africa prior to colonialism and slavery, home to “the art-producing negro [who] was a negro un-touched by foreign influences.”³¹ The art-producing African’s way of life was visible not in the Africans of Guillaume and Munro’s present but through the “plastic form” of the statue, “recapturing a part, and the central part, of the experience of all who have come to vital grips with the statue: that of the sculptor himself [and] the first observer” in that long-distant past.³² The statue embodied the experience of its creator, as Dewey would put it; it was a piece of historical evidence, which in turn helped to produce the society that encountered and supported its production. Elsewhere, Guillaume described what he saw in the best of African art—“all-inclusive unity and harmony . . . every part is related to every other, and there are no loose ends, no discordant notes or irrelevant details . . . one exists for the moment in a single small harmonious world from which frustration and incompleteness have been removed.”³³ To come into contact with an African sculpture and to consider its plastic form was to come into contact with an untouched, pure society, harmonious, unified, expressive. “Born along by the rhythm of the life about him, and by the momentum of the past, going a little farther by his individual power, the primitive artist creates a new form, the crystallized expression of his race and of his own personality.”³⁴ The subtext was readily apparent: everything African society had been, which had resulted in their delightful objects, modern society was not. Modern society was discordant, off balance, and violent. Art was the privilege of the few, the fetish of the individual, whereas the African artist had “sought no individual fame.”³⁵ The (imagined) work of art in the African past answered the critique that Dewey, Barnes, Lismer, and Read levied against their own time.

This is not to say that theorists about the work of art wanted to replicate African societies; rather, from objects of African social creation they culled lessons about creativity and the position of the artist, to be applied to modern life. But where did that leave African societies—and African artists? Guillaume and Munro could not control how their ideas—and ideas like theirs—were received. Mancoba responded in his own way. In Grossert’s careful sketches of Asante fertility dolls, Sahelian masks, and Zulu rugs, in Franz’s assertions about Basotho society, and in Grossert’s lovingly wrought village scene, we might see another response—the radical conviction that Guillaume and Munro were wrong and that harmony was still possible in Africa.³⁶

It is worth noting that there was a precedent here for using the text in this way. One of Africa’s paramount aesthetic theorists was the poet and politician Leopold Senghor, who, according to Souleymane Bachir Diagne, encountered Primitive Negro Sculpture while a student in Paris in the 1930s.³⁷ Over the next three decades, Senghor adapted the text’s conviction about African artistic accomplishments to his own political program for the continent’s engagement with modernity. In the 1950s and 1960s, Senghor frequently returned to Primitive Negro Sculpture’s claim that African creative objects represented an Africanity avant la lettre—something so African that they even predated the need to claim Africanness, whether as a deracinated captive or as an anticolonial revolutionary. Senghor closely followed existentialist and phenomenologist debates about the nature of African identity and rebutted them with the art object, “an Africanity as real as the material objects it has produced, which are, before all else, its works of art.”³⁸ Like Grossert, Senghor believed that works of African invention rehearsed great African achievements still to come.

Figure 3.4 Mask (Senegalese), artist unknown, Mask, Senegal, District Leo, drawn by Jack Grossert, 1956, with the permission of the CC

It is unclear whether Senghor read Dewey, but it seems possible that both he and the American generated much of their philosophy in dialogue with Guillaume and Munro’s account of African artistry. Senghor and Dewey both cited rhythm as the element that united the traditional and the new. For Dewey, rhythm was seen in art’s accumulating narratives, each “having its particular rhythmic movement; each with its own unrepeated quality throughout.”³⁹ Every statue was different, but each reflected a unique experience and effort to overcome discord with harmony. Guillaume and Munro’s anonymous artists worked like all “great original artists [who] take a tradition into themselves. They have not shunned it, but digested it.” Dewey was a theorist; Senghor was also a politician, and he drew a powerful political lesson from the art object. He rejected Guillaume and Munro’s contention that African art was dead and claimed instead that the rhythm of the individual statues revealed that African art by definition always moved, always progressed—as would African societies, grounded in tradition but open to the future. His négritude was a “principle of movement,” an experience of openness. He called for Africans, artists and otherwise, to claim this rhythmic approach to life as their African identity: “an open question to be ceaselessly explored.”⁴⁰

Senghor developed his aesthetic theories while also pursuing national self-determination and Senegal’s intellectual and artistic development.⁴¹ Unlike Dewey, Barnes, Guillaume, and Munro, he had authority outside the narrow world of art (no matter how much the four of them might regret the art world’s narrowness). Jack Grossert also had a certain degree of political authority. Like Senghor, he believed in the aesthetic accomplishments of the African created object. As The Art of Africa so eloquently expressed, he, too, rejected the notion that African artistry was lost with the political and other practices that had been battered by European occupation. Grossert’s sketchbook revealed this. In pencil and crayon, he captured the Natal Museum’s collection of West African sculpture and, sometimes on consecutive pages, a learner’s pot, beaded bracelet, or grass broom.⁴² In African schools across the Union throughout the 1940s and 1950s, he witnessed what he described as an unbroken lineage of African creativity. Using what authority he had, Grossert worked to develop an education system based on the self-expressive work of art and the grounded openness that made art African.

Figure 3.5 Broom handles by Natal schoolchildren, drawn by Jack Grossert, 1950s, with the permission of the CC

EDUCATION THROUGH ART

In his writings and speeches, Grossert frequently acknowledged his debt to the “revolution of art” and the aesthetic theory of the 1920s and 1930s.⁴³ He returned again and again to concepts familiar from Dewey, Herbert Read, Arthur Lismer, Guillaume, Munro, and others. But there were many concepts that were South Africa’s alone and represented his attempt to thread the various needles of his brief—as a proponent of the beautiful and an apartheid bureaucrat; as an African art aficionado, in a country without celebrated indigenous artistic traditions; as a modernist teacher who believed that self-expression led to social harmony and that Africans as Africans best expressed themselves in certain ways. He began to solve these issues by introducing the concept of taste.

Grossert wanted to argue that black South Africans had inherited the continent’s artistic traditions, yet, as we have seen, his own bureaucracy could report only scattered findings of African artistry. Eiselen had argued that European manufactures were responsible for the decline of African artisanship, and Grossert agreed that the flood of industrial goods threatened to usurp the African society’s creative outlet.⁴⁴ But he added a new element—the concept of inherent, racialized taste—that allowed him to suggest that something intangible had survived the African craftsperson’s encounter with industrial modernity. He bemoaned the “devastation which had been wrought in Bantu taste by the flooding of Native stores with shoddy European trash to take the place of traditional crafts of great beauty and sincerity.”⁴⁵ In response to this discussion, he proposed a pedagogical solution. Writing of basketwork, Grossert despaired how “under white guidance these naturally formed objects arising out of the simple use of materials, have been distorted into pretty, useless objects that are completely subversive of character and traditional taste.”⁴⁶ Note how easily Grossert slipped into Deweyesque language in describing this situation. African production had been “natural,” not artificial. It was what the people did and what, we might presume, rendered their society harmonious and tranquil. But Europeans had ruined that, and in Grossert’s own time both art and society were flirting with a tragic loss.⁴⁷

By focusing on taste, Grossert criticized the ways in which Africans were taught, and he proposed a bureaucratic intervention.⁴⁸ Yes, government surveys had revealed a lack of craftwork, but Grossert circumvented such findings by insisting that Africans’ inherent taste still survived. He drew his audience’s attention to how well Africans dressed. “In choosing clothes, one notices that most Africans . . . have an infallible taste for what is best,” he observed on one occasion. “Cannot this gift be extended to crafts in general?”⁴⁹ Dress was a tempting subject; it was less overdetermined than the production of aesthetic items, and yet it reflected artistry as Dewey would have understood it—conscious selection and awareness, the human need to organize material to tell a story. Dress was taste unsullied, an aesthetic practice that transcended time. He credited all Bantu and especially the Zulu, with whom he was most familiar, for “their taste in dress, both when they dress in a traditional manner and when [they] adopt European styles.”⁵⁰ The last clause was critical: Grossert had no problem with Africans dressing in European styles. The clothes were not what made the African; it was the Africans’ tasteful manner of dressing that defined Africanity. As Africans, taste came naturally from within, as they engaged their present.

Figure 3.6 Design in blue and purple, by Gcinisiwe Gumede, displayed at the Eshowe Craft Show, drawn by Jack Grossert, 1950s, with the permission of the CC

The question, then, was how to promote aesthetic progress without destroying African taste. Grossert’s goal was always to return the lost vitality to African craft, in which he saw shining examples of the work of art. For inspiration, he turned to education theorists such as Lismer and Read, whose own work in wildly different settings confirmed that the art teacher’s greatest challenge was not to teach too much and risk stifling students’ creativity. He looked closer to home as well, especially to Canon Edward Patterson’s Cyrene Mission in Southern Rhodesia.⁵¹ (See map 1.1, and note 22 in chap. 2, above.) Patterson, a graduate of the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London (and an instructor at Grace Dieu in the 1920s), founded a school for African children near Bulawayo in the 1940s, in which art played a central role. In 1949, Grossert journeyed to Cyrene, accompanied by Ann Harrison, another young British art school graduate (of the Slade School), who had recently arrived in South Africa seeking to teach art. Theirs was a pilgrimage to a great center of African creativity. Grossert’s companion recounted her impressions of Cyrene in her diary: “These walls glow with colour and are totally unexpected in this khaki coloured, sundried setting. Every foot of the walls outside and inside have been painted by the pupils with murals rich with African vegetation and Biblical happenings set in a Rhodesian countryside. The impact of these murals, their creative vision, design and colour, is breathtaking.”⁵²

At Cyrene, Patterson’s pedagogy was simple. He trusted in his students’ innate taste and eschewed sharing other people’s work with them, both that of European and of their predecessors at the mission. Indeed, after the walls were completely covered in authentic expression, he had them whitewashed and then started over. For Patterson, art was most decidedly not a matter of the finished work but was instead about the regular work of self-expressive creating.

Grossert and Harrison returned to Natal excited, for at Cyrene they had seen the progress they envisioned in African art. First, they would revitalize craftwork; then, trusting in taste and the unceasing stream of African creativity, their students and South African society would rediscover that rooted openness for which Senghor called. They left Southern Rhodesia “convinced that we were fully justified in introducing” art in Natal, Grossert remembered, “since many of the students there showed a . . . standard of aesthetic sensibility” comparable to what they had seen at Cyrene. In South Africa too, taste had survived conquest, and from students’ “beautiful grass mats and bowls and carved wooden artifacts” would come new harmonies.⁵³ Patterson was a bit of an eccentric, isolated in the Matopos Hills far from the centers of aesthetic theory, but he had arrived at a critical point. He trusted in his students’ capability and good taste, and he practiced a gentle pedagogy designed to cultivate both. John Dewey had arrived at a similar place, writing in the late 1920s about the ideal relationship between teacher and student. “Nobody else can see for [the student],” Dewey suggested, “and he can’t see just by being told,” yet teachers were still essential, “for the right kind of telling may guide his seeing and thus help him see what he needs to see.”⁵⁴ Teaching—and especially art teaching—was itself an art, requiring acute sensitivity and finesse. Returning from the Matopos Hills to the Natal Midlands, Grossert and Harrison talked about how they would begin to train Africans to teach with such skill.

Looking back over the history of art education in the Bantu Education schools, Grossert credited two people for laying the program’s foundation. The first was Charles Loram, who was famous in South Africa and whose influence was obvious. The second was Arthur Lismer, the Canadian art educator who had first visited the country to attend the NEF in 1934.⁵⁵ Grossert credited Lismer for laying the practical, institutional groundwork for the South African art program, while noting that he was also a critical theorist. In 1934 Lismer had explained to his audiences at the NEF that the work of art in the schools was twofold: the development of personality and, as children matured, the social dividend of empathy. Each child who was granted an opportunity to experience and produce beauty was an investment in a better, more humane community. “Art education is the encouragement of a whole people towards the appreciation of beauty,” Lismer reflected. To some extent, art education was about the identification and “encouragement of individual talent,” but it could only “prepare the soil” for genius “by developing the natural instincts of [all] human beings towards the lovelier things in life. [Art] provides room for self-expression and opportunities for the lighting by each of his own little lamp.” In referring to “the lighting by each of his own little lamp,” he was asserting that each person, regardless of creed or color, was capable of self-expression and aesthetic appreciation. This was Lismer’s credo. Truly artful teachers and sensitive education systems were those that offered a light of inspiration equal to the task.⁵⁶

Figure 3.7 Beaded objects, unknown artists, drawn by Jack Grossert, 1950s, with the permission of the CC

Lismer’s talks generated an intense interest among the NEF delegates. E. G. Malherbe, the conference organizer, had met Lismer in Toronto in 1933 and raised funds for his trip to South Arica. Malherbe assumed that Lismer’s lectures on such an esoteric subject—child art?—would struggle to draw a crowd, however, so he assigned Lismer’s first lecture to a room that held less than one hundred. Lismer proved so popular that his second talk was moved to the University of Witwatersrand’s Great Hall, one of Johannesburg’s largest venues. After the conference’s end, Lismer was invited to stay on in South Africa and even to assume the directorship of the Johannesburg Art Gallery.⁵⁷ He declined the latter offer but did return to the country in 1937 to embark on a grand tour to assess the potential for art education in the Union’s native schools. He visited elite schools such as Adams College, where students reported that “Mr. Lismer . . . spent several hours instructing training college students on the elements of Art. To Mr. Lismer, Art is not simply a subject, it is the expression of life itself.”⁵⁸ He visited government primary schools as well. Everywhere he went, Lismer reflected on the teachers’ responsibility to help their students’ creative efforts in search of harmony.

Given the prevailing primitivist mood, it was perhaps not surprising that Lismer claimed in 1937 that “traditional Bantu crafts” were the best means of achieving this.⁵⁹ Schools were foreign impositions on African society, he explained, and without a link to Bantu culture, Lismer suggested that “serious damage will be done to the minds of the Bantu pupils.”⁶⁰ Craftwork would be a bulwark against the African student’s rootless wandering through the modern world. At the NEF, the South African politician D. D. T. Jabavu had claimed African children “[came] to school armed with a strong bias for handwork.”⁶¹ Lismer agreed and suggested that Africans’ unconscious, innate, natural aptitude for craftwork would be the foundation of an artful society in South African.

Lismer’s critical innovation was his insistence that crafts were only the beginning. On the surface, his call for crafts in schools was reminiscent of the insistence of anthropologists, artists, and others that crafts stay on the syllabus, but he sharply criticized those who failed to understand the real reason why this was so. In the face of derision, he proclaimed that all people were artists, whether they painted landscapes or made pots. “The people slapped their thighs and laughed when he told them their pots were art,” his biography recounts.⁶² Lismer’s audience did not understand that he did not necessarily mean the pots deserved to be in a museum. Crafts were not valuable in themselves, however accomplished and visually pleasing they might be. Rather, they were tools. In schools, African pupils would be given a medium familiar from their regular, nonacademic life. Clay, grass, wood, beads--Lismer believed that such things were abundant and familiar in the communities from which students came to attend school. This was the raw material with which the “richness” of their African background—taste, aesthetic sensibility—could be cultivated in the schools, not to make prettier baskets but “to cultivate the uniqueness of their individuality.” This was where teachers came in. According to Lismer’s vision, teachers would circulate throughout the classroom, encouraging students to make their thinking explicit, to continue probing their material, and to reflect on why they molded the clay this way and not that or why they emphasized this color and not another. As Lismer explained, the goal of craftwork was to discover “the potentiality of the Bantu pupils and help them to discover themselves.” It was not necessarily about developing talent; it was about ensuring that South African students were able to contribute to art’s work in human society.⁶³

Lismer submitted a report to the Natal provincial government before returning to Canada in the winter of 1937. His argument was threefold: craft was the tool that unlocked art, art was the expression and consciousness of the individual student, and the Natal Education Department ought to recognize this by training teachers to guide, rather than dictate to, students. He further recommended that the department name an art organizer to ensure that the program was able to walk the line between craft for culture’s sake and art for society’s sake.⁶⁴ Over the next few years, Natal began to implement Lismer’s recommendations. South African art education moved forward, carried by the odd combination of primitivism and progressive ideas about the work of art.

Jack Grossert absorbed these theories during his stint as a provincial art teacher. Over time, he had other “teachers,” among them Viktor Lowenfeld, a German Jewish refugee who had developed a theory of art education during years teaching at Virginia’s Hampton Institute and Pennsylvania State University after World War I. Like Lismer, Lowenfeld urged instructors to begin with society’s youngest members. He suggested that art was how children communicated; without art, they—and thus, society—were stifled and unhealthy. “Whenever we hear children say ‘I can’t draw that,’ we can be sure that some kind of interference has occurred in their lives,” Lowenfeld noted. It was the teacher’s task to cultivate children’s natural urge to communicate. To ensure that expression remains free and unencumbered, he wrote in 1947, “never prefer one child’s creative work over that of another! Never give the work of one child as an example to another! Never let a child copy anything!” Copying ruined originality; ranking and comparison undermined confidence; to insist on what the teacher thought was the correct representation of reality destroyed creativity. “How ridiculous to overpower these little children’s souls!” Lowenfeld exclaimed. Scribbles were a first stage of their mental growth and communication, which, if cultivated, would result in a more humane and successful society made up of confident, expressive people. Let the children scribble! he urged.⁶⁵

Or work clay or grass. Lowenfeld’s scheme for art teaching reinforced Grossert’s conviction that Europeans had been the wrong kind of teachers. Convinced of their own righteousness, they had ridiculed and mocked the conventions of African artistry. They had even denied that the good, tasteful objects that Africans created were worthy of being called art. They had overwhelmed the souls of their charges—primarily the adults but also, through the alienating experiences of the schools, the children as well. To Grossert’s mind, it was a happy accident that the authorities had retained a space on the syllabus for creative work, and he intended to exploit it. He applauded the advent of Bantu Education. Even if the National Party and its ideologues did not necessarily grasp how essential art was to human development, their policies had kept the door open for the work of art in South Africa.⁶⁶

THE INVENTION OF SOUTH AFRICAN ART

Grossert trusted that the schools would provide the space to experiment and to build, at least as far as the visual arts were concerned. Aesthetic activity was already on the syllabus. Tradition called it craft, but like Dewey and like Grossert’s coeditors on The Art of Africa, he believed that crafts differed from art in name only. Grass and paint were nothing more than “different media for the expression of the same aesthetic activity.”⁶⁷ The only difference was that African children were more familiar with the former than the latter. The real work of art would follow. “Art and crafts as school subjects are taught because they provide basic educational experiences for the development of imagination and constructive thought processes,” Grossert explained. “For educational value it is of less concern . . . what materials are used, provided they are within the range which pupils can fashion and shape, than the ideas which can be developed from them.”⁶⁸ Craftwork was focused, self-conscious labor. In effect, it tricked students, administrators, and parents into thinking that the children were just modeling clay animals or weaving mats, when in fact they were developing their own selves. By giving students a space to make things, teachers seeded “creativity and originality.” From those seeds would flower adults able to “face the world with a confident ability to use all its challenges as creative opportunities.” Bantu Education would create artists, not in the sense that art was listed in the school curriculum but in the fervent, hopeful faith that art was, in reality, “a way of life.”⁶⁹

As Grossert began to plan and publicize the nascent Bantu Education art program and especially its teacher-training initiative, it was clear that he had learned from Lowenfeld and Lismer. “It is a bad method for the teacher to sit at the table while the children stand waiting heir turn to show her their work,” he counseled. “Hours of time are wasted this way.” Instead, he believed that teachers ought to circulate around the classroom, offering encouragement and support but not talking “too much during a lesson”: “After the pupils have been questioned, give them time to get started, before interrupting their train of thought. When about ten minutes have passed, go around the class noticing each pupil’s individuality.”⁷⁰ He, too, recognized that only the right kind of teaching could produce the right kind of art; simple pedagogical decisions could promote expression. As art produced real, thoughtful life, life would produce better art. Crafts were seeds and not “tribal” curios, which Grossert ridiculed as the “sentimental repository of pseudo art [and the] sluggish backwater from which no refreshing drink can be obtained.” Bureaucrats and businesspeople who wanted to market and sell traditional crafts were charlatans and their business “anathema to all those who have a genuine interest in the education of the Bantu.”⁷¹ It was “facetious” to expect to sell student work, as so many had intended; African schools were schools, not industrial centers.⁷² And schools were about adapting tradition to the demands and possibilities of the future, in both senses of the “work” of art.

Instead of feeding the curio market, Grossert imagined that the South African art education program would begin with crafts and eventually incubate what he hoped would become “a school of indigenous art” in the country.⁷³ “African pupils could produce “high artistic” expression in painting . . . on a level equal to that of any other race,” he assured a group of African teachers after his experiments had gone on for a few years.⁷⁴ Later, he reflected on several urban schools where “picture-making” had supplanted craftwork. He had not yet had an opportunity to staff those schools with trained art teachers; they were “staffed” only with materials and the conviction that students ought to be “left free to express themselves.”⁷⁵ But he noted that these schools were enjoying tremendous success. This move into graphic arts confirmed his conviction that all children could carve, model, paint, and create.⁷⁶

For this vision of art education to succeed, South Africa needed more specialist art teachers, trained with the insights of Dewey, Read, Lismer, and Lowenfeld in mind. Advertisements for a specialist art teachers’ program began to appear soon after Harrison and Grossert returned from Cyrene in 1949. “There is an Art class at . . . Indaleni,” the Native Teachers’ Journal informed its readers that year. Teachers who were “interested in Drawing, Painting, Modeling, Design, etc.” were encouraged to apply.⁷⁷ By the early 1950s, Native Teachers’ Journal began to feature covers designed by Indaleni art students, in addition to Grossert’s ever-present drawings of school craft. A Richmond-born Indaleni student named Selbourne Mvusi drew one of the first covers; it showed an ancestor, wearing an inkatha (a coiled grass headdress) looking on approvingly as a schoolboy in short pants worked a lathe—tradition, updated, manifest in the creative exertions of the twentieth-century school student.⁷⁸

By the mid-1950s, Mvusi had left the Indaleni Mission and was both teaching art in Durban and developing his own reputation as an artist. In Mvusi’s own progress, Grossert saw confirmation that art education in South Africa was going to work—that Bantu Education could cultivate humane expression in mid-twentieth-century modernity.⁷⁹ When thinking about successful artists such as Mvusi, the father of national art education in apartheid South Africa fantasized about a future in which the regular work of art in South African society would result in a special class of artists, “prophets . . . creative geniuses” who “transcended the physical world and gained visions of an ideal order.”⁸⁰ He acknowledged that South Africa was far from ideal—the people were poor, and art was still poorly understood. But he was optimistic that from children’s scribbles and molding of clay would emerge masters who could help to harmonize society. Or so he hoped, as he put his faith in his art school.

. . .

Figure 3.8 Cover by Selbourne Mvusi, Native Teachers’ Journal 33, no. 3 (April 1953): 212

Of course, the reality was that in South Africa, art education existed only because its primitivist and racialist aspects were popular with the ideological pretensions of the white minority. Even if people were motivated with progressive ideas about the creative potential of the child, reality demanded that art education in apartheid South Africa began where South African society was—that is, with primary school students and the crafts black children were made to do there, simply because they were black. Grossert traveled tens of thousands of miles through apartheid South Africa, visiting craft shows and witnessing the development of Bantu Education. He knew that his was not the only vision and that there were others, more authoritative than he, with their own agendas for the schools. Still, he believed in human perfectibility, through the work of art. On occasion, he even went so far as to declare that the poverty and want that stalked Africans’ school were actually advantages, in that they would promote more of the initiative and critical thinking that was the raw material of art.⁸¹

Grossert left Bantu Education in the mid-1960s to found the Fine Arts Department at the University of Durban–Westville, the apartheid era tertiary institution for South Africans of Asian ancestry. It was a homecoming of sorts for him, as his Oxley-supervised master’s thesis had been on Hindu architecture in Natal—touching on another community’s story about the unfolding of tradition. At the end of the turbulent 1970s, Grossert left South Africa for Ireland. He returned to Natal in 1988 and gave an interview about the Bantu Education art program that he had once so enthusiastically promoted. In his account, he reflected especially on a visit he had had in 1982 from one of Mvusi’s classmates, Eric Ngcobo, an accomplished artist and theorist in his own right. Ngcobo had succeeded Mvusi as an art teacher at Loram High School in Durban; he eventually became the organizer of arts and crafts in the KwaZulu Bantustan. Like Grossert, Ngcobo had been a true believer in the work of art. The former had even sponsored Ngcobo’s overseas trip to attend an international conference of art educators during the mid-1970s, at which Ngcobo had extolled the virtues of the South African art education system.⁸² And yet, Grossert told his interviewers, during Ngcobo’s visit to the United Kingdom in the early 1980s, he had toured a number of schools to assess what resources students had available there—and the discrepancy between British and Zulu schools had “overwhelmed” him. Ngcobo’s reaction forced Grossert to acknowledge that South Africa’s material limitations and politics had conspired to undermine even the best-intentioned theories. That confession was only part of Grossert’s burgeoning crisis of faith; he was more troubled still by the fact that when he returned to South Africa in the late 1980s, he heard many collectors and others extol his art program for sustaining the curio trade in South Africa. To someone whose younger self had so vilified that sordid business, those words must have stung with painful venom.⁸³