Magazines - Tribal Art Winter 2007

By Lorenz Homberger, curator in the Department of African Art at the Museum Rietberg in Zurich.

Two exhibitions were held in the winter of 2008 at the Museum Rietberg in Zurich. One of them, Cameroon - Art of the Kings exhibited masterpieces from the Grassfields region, while the other, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the Art of Cameroon, emphasized the influence of this art on a member of the avant-garde group Die Brucke. Both events serve as a pretext for Lorenz Homberger to deliver, in his article, the characteristics of the art of Cameroon.

Exceprts:
The region of Cameroon generally known as "the Grassfields" stretches from the expansive rainforests in the south and west parts of the country to the upper reaches of the Mbam River on the Nigerian border. The Grassfields are a highland, rising approximately 1,000 to 3,000 meters above sea level, and belong to the savanna belt that runs from the Atlantic coast across the continent to the Indian Ocean. The border between forest and Grassfields not only marks two geographically and climatically distinct areas but also separates two entirely different cultures. The forests are mostly inhabited by small population groups who have––if at all––only small chiefdoms that are considered by academics as relatively egalitarian and acephalic societies. The Grassfields, on the other hand, is a land of monarchies.
Visitors to the Grassfields will still see the royal palaces and major festivals, especially those relating to the death of a king or a member of the nobility. They continue to convey an impression of the scale and splendor of the ancient African kingdoms of the region that were praised so enthusiastically in the reports of early European explorers. And from this region dervies the artifacts that have come to be known as "Grassfields art" in Europe and America: animal and human masks, carved stools, palace pillars, richly decorated tobacco pipes and drinking horns, and elaborate items of jewelry and clothing.
Most of these are part of what is considered court art, but this represents only the summit of official artistic activity. Outside the palaces, objects of everyday use––stools, bowls, musical instruments, etc.––were almost everywhere. These are distinguished less by their adornment than by their elegant simplicity.

Until the 1970s, art historians and ethnologists tried to connect certain African artistic styles with certain African ethnic groups, working from the assumption that each group had developed its own immutable style. Attempts to follow this methodology with Grassfields art were doomed to fail from the start. In this region, trade had played an important role long before the kingdoms were founded several hundred years ago. Through this well-established conduit, as well as the tradition of gift exchange between allied kings, regional styles were "exported." Ambitious kings also frequently tried to improve their court workshops with the help of artists from other areas, further adding to the complexity of the artistic situation in the Grassfields. It became evident to scholars that here style and ethnic origin are not identical, and analysis of the reasons why contributed to ethnologists and art historians revising their premises for other parts of Africa. Notions of closed borders and immutable conditions, which had long held sway in ethnology, especially in its French and Anglo-Saxon forms, were replaced by the dynamism and awareness of multiple connections that today form the core of research on African art.