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Article

Modern African art encompasses the diverse range of artistic expressions by Africans resulting from their encounter with modernity at the onset of the continent’s colonization during the late 19th century through to the decades of political emancipation in the 1960s. It is at once a product of and a response to the erroneous claim by colonialism’s European apologists, which was that African peoples, burdened by a primitive mentality, could not run their own affairs and lacked the intellectual sophistication necessary for the production and appreciation of high art. Thus the general absence of systematic modes of realistic representation in the sculpture of African peoples was usually cited as proof of African mental and cultural inferiority, despite the fact that European modernist artists looked to African sculpture as a source of inspiration for their own formal experimentation.

An important task the first generation of modern African artists set for themselves in the early decades of the 20th century, therefore, was to travel to Europe to study at art academies in order to dispel any doubts about their artistic competence. Familiarity with the academic tradition also provided the pioneer African modernists with the impetus to advocate for academic art instruction in opposition to the rudimentary arts and crafts training offered in the newly established colonial government schools. Moreover, this turn to rigorous realism at the moment it was being discarded by the European avant-garde in favour of symbolic colour and stylized and abstract forms, must be understood as the logical step for artists whose ancestors for the most part had mastered non-realistic modes on the basis of which the European avant-garde developed their own modernist styles. Realism, for the African modernists, constituted a true break from tradition, and thus an artistic equivalent to the aspiration for progressive modernity championed by the social and political élite....

Article

Marianne Barrucand

[‛Alawī; Filālī]

Islamic dynasty and rulers of Morocco since 1631. Like their predecessors the Sa‛dis, the ‛Alawis are sharīfs (descendants of the Prophet Muhammad), and both dynasties are sometimes classed together as the ‘Sharifs of Morocco’. From a base in the Tafilalt region of south-east Morocco, the ‛Alawi family was able to overcome the centrifugal forces exerted by the Berber tribes who had destroyed the Sa‛di state in the first half of the 17th century. To restore political authority and territorial integrity, Mawlay Isma‛il (reg 1672–1727) added a new black slave corps to the traditional tribal army. Although royal power was weak during the 19th century and the early 20th, when the French and Spanish established protectorates, the ‛Alawis’ power was fully restored after independence from the French in 1956.

‛Alawi building activities (see Islamic art, §II, 7(v)) were concentrated in the four cities that have served as their capitals: Fez and Marrakesh at various times from ...

Article

Gavin Stamp

(b Cobham, Kent, June 9, 1862; d Cobham, Feb 4, 1946).

English architect and writer, also active in South Africa and India. He was articled to a cousin, Arthur Baker, a former assistant of George Gilbert Scott I, in 1879 and attended classes at the Architectural Association and Royal Academy Schools before joining the office of George & Peto in London (1882), where he first met and befriended Edwin Lutyens. Baker set up in independent practice in 1890 but moved to South Africa in 1892 to join his brother Lionel Baker. In Cape Town he met Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, who directed his attention to the traditional European Cape Dutch architecture of the province and asked him to rebuild his house Groote Schuur (1893, 1897), now the official residence of South Africa’s prime ministers. Applying the ideas of the English Arts and Crafts movement to local conditions, Baker produced a series of houses, both in the Cape Province and the Transvaal, which were instrumental in the revival of Cape Dutch architecture. In ...

Article

Kirk Ambrose

(b Moscow, May 7, 1903; d Paris, Jan 25, 1988).

Lithuanian art historian, scholar of folklore and Egyptology, and diplomat of Russian birth. Son of the celebrated Lithuanian Symbolist poet of the same name, Jurgis Baltrušaitis II studied under Henri(-Joseph) Focillon at the Sorbonne and earned the PhD in 1931. The concerns of his mentor are evident in La stylistique ornementale dans la sculpture romane (1931), which reprises and extends arguments for the ‘law of the frame’ in Romanesque sculpture. Accordingly, the shapes of architectural members, such as capitals and tympana, determined the articulation of sculptural forms. This theory could account for the genesis of a wide array of monumental carvings, from foliate capitals to narrative reliefs, but ultimately it had a rather limited impact on the field of Romanesque sculptural studies. In a scathing critique, Schapiro argued that Baltrušaitis’s book—and by implication Focillon’s methods—robbed Romanesque sculptors of agency and neglected the religious and expressive meanings of this art form....

Article

Bazaar  

Mohammad Gharipour

Bazaar, which is rooted in Middle Persian wāzār and Armenian vačaṟ, has acquired three different meanings: the market as a whole, a market day, and the marketplace. The bazaar as a place is an assemblage of workshops and stores where various goods and services are offered.

Primitive forms of shops and trade centres existed in early civilizations in the Near East, such as Sialk, Tepe in Kashan, Çatal Hüyük, Jerico, and Susa. After the 4th millennium BC, the population grew and villages gradually joined together to shape new cities, resulting in trade even with the remote areas as well as the acceleration of the population in towns. The advancement of trade and accumulation of wealth necessitated the creation of trade centres. Trade, and consequently marketplaces, worked as the main driving force in connecting separate civilizations, while fostering a division of labour, the diffusion of technological innovations, methods of intercultural communication, political and economic management, and techniques of farming and industrial production....

Article

Martha Schwendener

[Ben Youseph Nathan, Esther Zeghdda]

(b London, Nov 21, 1869; d Brooklyn, NY, Nov 27, 1933).

American photographer. Born Esther Zeghdda Ben Youseph Nathan to a German mother and an Algerian father, she immigrated to the United States in 1895. She worked as a milliner in New York before opening a photographic portrait studio in 1897. Her ‘gallery of illustrious Americans’ featured actresses, politicians, and fashionable socialites, including President Theodore Roosevelt, author Edith Wharton, artist William Merritt Chase, and actress Julia Marlowe. Ben-Yusuf also created Pictorialist-inspired artwork like The Odor of Pomegranates (1899; see fig.), an allegory informed by the myth of Persephone and the idea of the pomegranate as a tantalizing but odourless fruit. Ben-Yusuf was included in an exhibition organized by the Linked Ring, Brotherhood of the in London in 1896 and continued to exhibit in the group’s annual exhibitions until 1902. Her photographs were exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1898 and at the Camera Club of New York in ...

Article

Betsy Cogger Rezelman

(b Cahirconlish, Co. Limerick, Aug 28, 1847; d Penzance, Cornwall, June 22, 1926).

Irish painter and writer. He attempted various professions, including diamond-mining and journalism in South Africa (1872–7), before becoming an artist. At the Koninklijke Academie, Antwerp (1878–80), under Charles Verlat, in Paris (1881–4) as a student of Carolus-Duran and in Venice (1885) Garstin became friends with future Newlyn school painters. Saint’s House and Field, Tangier (1885; Plymouth, City Mus. & A.G.), a small oil panel painted en plein air, exemplifies both the medium and the suggestive approach he preferred throughout his career. In 1886 he married and settled in Newlyn and then Penzance (1890). Financial pressures forced him to produce portraits and such large anecdotal genre scenes as Her Signal (exh. RA 1892; Truro, Co. Mus. & A.G.) for which his talents for simplified forms and surface design were less well suited. Though he exhibited widely, he received little recognition. Garstin supplemented his income by writing, lecturing, teaching and, from ...

Article

Elizabeth Meredith Dowling

(b Johannesburg, Sept 7, 1938).

American architect, teacher, historian, and writer of South African birth. Greenberg’s quiet, gentlemanly demeanor reflected the time-honored traditional and classical architecture he created over four decades. His stylistic choices are rooted in research and aesthetics. His fascination with 18th- and 19th-century American architecture is related to its genesis in the American Revolution and the commitment of those architects to expressing American democratic ideals in architectural form.

Greenberg graduated from King Edward VII School, a private preparatory school in Johannesburg, in 1955. He received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in 1961. Unlike American architecture schools of the period, his training was classically based and included drawing the historic models of Classical and Gothic architecture from memory. During his apprenticeship, he worked with Jørn Utzon in Hellebæk, Denmark, in 1962 during the design phase of the Sydney Opera House. In 1963, he continued his apprenticeship working with both ...

Article

Bolaji V. Campbell

(b Efon-Alaye, c. 1860; d 1938).

Nigerian wood-carver. Little is known of his training except that he moved to Ise to work at the court of the king, where he served as court messenger. He carved for the king of Ise as well as for other regional rulers and wealthy Yoruba families. At one point he had up to 15 apprentices in his studio. He worked within the conventions of Yoruba carving, creating standard forms: multi-tiered house-posts (see fig.), doors, divination bowls and boxes. Yet his treatment was innovative: some of his relief carvings were so deep that figures appear nearly fully round. As can be seen in the door from the palace at Ikere-Ekiti (1906; London, BM), he gave complex and active poses to these elongated, angular figures and applied enamel paint to his pieces earlier than most other carvers. His door panels are sometimes narrative, recording historical events and personages such as British colonial officers. He was known in particular for the attention given to the surface of his works, where hair and jewellery are clearly shown. Two doors included in the ...

Article

C. J. M. Walker

(b Melbourne, Jan 2, 1870; d Cape Town, Nov 20, 1948).

South African architect. His parents were English, and he was educated in London and worked for a builder, S. J. Jerrard, from 1885 to 1887; he then studied architecture at the University of London (1887–90). In 1889 he was articled to Roger Smith & Gale, London, and he subsequently worked for them, for William Emerson and for Ernest George & Yates before leaving for South Africa early in 1896. He settled in the Cape, working for J. Parker, Sydney Stent and then for Herbert Baker in Cape Town, all in 1896. He became a junior partner in the firm of Baker & Masey (c. 1899), and from 1902 to 1905 he ran the office in Bloemfontein while he supervised work on the new government offices for the Orange River Colony. In 1906 he became a senior partner and, on Francis Masey’s departure in 1910, a principal in the new partnership of ...

Article

C. J. M. Walker

(Edward)

(b London, Nov 18, 1861; d Salisbury, Rhodesia [now Harare, Zimbabwe], Sept 3, 1912).

English architect active in South Africa and Rhodesia. He was apprenticed to his father, the architect Philip Masey, in London for two years before entering the office of Alfred Waterhouse (1878). In 1887 he became a student in the Royal Academy Schools, London, and he won several prizes that enabled him to visit France (1889) and Italy (1891). In 1896 he went to Cape Town on a three-year contract with the Public Works Department, but soon after his arrival he met Herbert Baker, broke his contract and entered practice with him; the partnership of Baker & Masey was formed in 1899. Their first success was winning the competition for the City Club (1896–7), Cape Town, built to a classical design with Baroque gables and domes. Masey’s studies in Italy were a major influence on the use of the Italianate style frequently adopted by the practice, particularly before Baker’s visit to see Classical sites in Europe in ...

Article

Sebastian Wormell

(b St Louis, Senegal, 1867; d Paris, May 8, 1953).

French art and architectural historian. His main interest was in Byzantine art of the medieval period, and he was one of the first Western European scholars to take a serious interest in the art of the Palaiologan period (1261–1453). Most of his original research was based on field work undertaken between 1890 and 1914 in Trebizond, Greece and Serbia. This resulted in the publication (1916) of two major works, one relating medieval paintings in Greece to liturgical sources and the other an attempt to develop a classification of regional schools and chronology in Byzantine architecture. Although some of the methodology is now outdated, these pioneering works are still of value, as are his study of the monastery of Dafni and his albums of illustrative material on the Byzantine monuments at Mystras and Mt Athos. Another major contribution to Byzantine studies was the large photographic library he assembled at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. His interests led him to the art and architecture of other regions influenced by Constantinople, especially in the Balkans and the Slavic countries. His study of medieval Serbian churches is still fundamental, and he edited an important collection of papers on the impact of Byzantine art on the Slavs. Millet’s work in this field was of particular interest to art historians in the countries of south-eastern Europe who were seeking the roots of their national artistic traditions....

Article

Kevin Mulhearn

(Mbouombou)

(b Foumban, c. 1870; d Yaoundé, June 1933).

Cameroonian ruler, patron of the arts, and artistic innovator. King Ibrahim Mbouombou Njoya was the 17th ruler of the Kingdom of Bamum in the Grassfields region of Cameroon, which dated back to the 14th century. King Njoya came to power at a young age following the death of his father King Nsagnu in battle. Nominally ruling from c. 1887 until his death, his power was limited before the mid-1890s and after 1924, when the kingdom was abolished by the French. He died in exile, banished from the kingdom to the colonial capital Yaoundé in 1931.

King Njoya’s reign coincided with an era of growing European colonial involvement in the region, first by Germany and later by Great Britain and France, and he undertook complex relations with colonial powers, striving to safeguard his kingdom and preserve his influence. With this political aim at the forefront, he initiated a variety of ambitious and forward-thinking cultural projects, which drew on and creatively combined a wide range of local and global forms. He was remarkable for his ability to assimilate new ideas and refashion them for use by his court and kingdom....

Article

Fani-Maria Tsigakou

(b Alexandria, May 10, 1878; d Athens, July 1967).

Greek painter of Egyptian birth. He studied in Vienna under the German painter Karl Dieffenbach (b 1851) and first exhibited at the Boehms Künstlerhaus in 1899. His first exhibition in Athens was in 1900. From 1903–7 he lived on the island of Poros where he painted the frescoes for the church of St Nicholas. In 1908 he decorated the church of St George in Cairo. From 1909 to 1911 he lived in Paris, where he participated in the Salon d’Automne. In 1910 he received an award for his painting The Hillside, and in 1911 he won first prize at an exhibition of religious art for his painting of the Annunciation. He returned to Greece in 1912, living in Corfu for five years, before finally settling in Athens in 1917. In 1918 he was commissioned to decorate the church of St Alexander at Paleo Phaliro. In 1920, after a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Záppeion, Athens, he received the art and literature award of the Academy of Athens. In ...

Article

Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom

[Arab. taṣwīr, fūtūgrāfiyā ; Ottoman Turk. taṣwīr ; Mod. Turk. fotoğrafçilik ; Pers. ‛akkāsī, fūtūghirāfī

Term used to describe the technique of producing an image by the action of light on a chemically prepared material. Although used privately in France and England as early as 1833, the process was announced publicly only in 1839.

In January 1839 François Arago (1786–1853), a member of the Académie des Sciences, suggested that among the advantages the new medium presented was that the millions of hieroglyphs covering the monuments of Thebes, Memphis and Karnak could be copied by a single man rather than by scores of draftsmen, and in 1846 the English photographer and scientist William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–77) published a pamphlet with three prints of hieroglyphics for distribution among ar-chaeologists and Orientalists.

The Ottoman press reported the discovery of photography as early October 1839, and European colonial involvement in the Islamic lands of North Africa and West Asia ensured that photography was immediately brought there: for example, in ...

Article

Colette E. Bidon

(b Algiers, March 23, 1861; d Marlotte, Seine-et-Marne, March 1932).

French painter and designer. He began his career painting the Algerian scenes of his youth, rendering Orientalist subjects—such as markets and musicians—with a distinctive, unaffected precision. In 1888 he went to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Auguste Herst (b 1825) and Fernand Cormon. He exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts from 1890.

The discovery of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, and a visit to Italy in 1894, led Point to model his work on the artists of the Florentine Renaissance. The inspiration of Botticelli and Leonardo can be seen in such works as the Eternal Chimera (c. 1895; London, Piccadilly Gal.). Under the dominating influence of Gustave Moreau, his work was also aligned with Symbolism. He became a disciple of Rosicrucianism and a friend of Sâr Peladan, fastidiously rejecting the modern industrial world and what he considered the excessive realism of Zola or Courbet. He painted magicians, endowed with a pure and ancient beauty, or figures of Greek mythology (e.g. ...

Article

Pamela H. Simpson

(b Bozanquit, Ont., Sept 27, 1860; d Palo Alto, CA, Sept 4, 1950).

American sculptor. Raised in Colorado when it was still a frontier state, Proctor’s identification with the West was a key element of his work. Initially known as an animalier sculptor, he later did a number of figural monuments. In 1885 he went east to study at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design and in 1893 to Paris where he worked with Denys Puech and (Jean-)Antoine Injalbert. He interrupted his studies a year later to return to New York to model horses for Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s General Logan (1897; Chicago, Grant Park) and the Sherman Monument (1892–1903; New York, Grand Army Plaza), but in 1896 with a traveling fellowship returned to Paris. He settled in New York in 1900, but frequently visited the West and in 1914 moved to Idaho, then Oregon, and in 1918 to California. Known for his western themes, Proctor was a well-respected and much-admired sculptor who resisted modernism and worked in the Beaux-Arts style for his entire career....

Article

C. J. M. Walker

(b Plymouth, July 1856; d Cape Town, Oct 1922).

South African architect of English birth. He trained in England, moving to South Africa in 1877. After working in the Cape for several years he moved to Johannesburg (1887), reputedly the first trained architect to practice in the town. In partnership with R. L. McCowat (c. 1885–1925) he designed the second Rand Club (1893; destr. 1903) and the first Johannesburg General Hospital (1889). Both buildings were semi-classical, High Victorian structures with pediments over every aperture. They were characteristic of the nature of many early buildings in Johannesburg and elsewhere in South Africa, becoming a vernacular easily resorted to by architects of no particular distinction but providing the backdrop against which the work of more talented architects was evident. Reid was among the first architects in South Africa to develop branch practices. In 1897 Reid returned to Cape Town, leaving his brother Walter Reid (...

Article

John Baines

(b Berlin, Oct 29, 1868; d Hessisch-Lichtenau, April 6, 1957).

German Egyptologist and writer. He studied Egyptology at Berlin University and began work in the Ägyptisches Museum, Berlin, before completing his doctorate in 1892. He remained in the museum all his working life, travelling principally for fieldwork in Egypt, which included seasons at Abu Ghurab, Abusir and Philae.

Schäfer was an outstanding historian and analyst of Egyptian art and made a vital contribution to the general theory of art. He published studies of individual works and made Egyptian art accessible to the public, as well as collaborating with Walter Andrae (1875–1956) on the standard history of Ancient Near Eastern art, Die Kunst des alten Orients. More important is his work on representation, on which he wrote many articles and smaller works, synthesizing his results in Von ägyptischer Kunst. The first two editions are concerned with two-dimensional representation, the third and fourth with two and three dimensions and with the general character of Egyptian art. The two-dimensional studies are the most important. Schäfer showed in detail how a non-perspectival system operates, and he examined Egyptian art primarily from the viewpoint of the ancient Egyptians themselves. He proposed two universal representational strategies, which he termed ‘pre-Greek’ (non-perspectival) and ‘Greek’ (incorporating foreshortening). His explanation of the character of ‘pre-Greek’ representation as based on mental images is not ultimately satisfactory, and there is still no convincing solution to this question, but his analysis of and insight into the problems remain fundamental....

Article

Melanie Hillebrand

(b London, June 5, 1856; d Durban, June 23, 1928).

South African architect of English birth. He studied at the University of London and was articled to W. W. Gwyther in London, then to J. McVicar Anderson and to Robert Hesketh. In 1881 he established his own practice in London. He moved to the colony of Natal c. 1886 and set up practice in Durban and Pietermaritzburg in partnership first with Percy Barr (d 1894), then with Arthur Fyfe until c. 1899, and finally with J. Wallace Paton (1874–1948) from c. 1899 until his death. Street-Wilson was a prolific architect and designed many houses, shops and office buildings, but his reputation was based on public commissions. The Pietermaritzburg Town Hall (1893; destr. 1898) was his first major work: a modest, two-storey ‘Free Renaissance design’ using the characteristic salmon-pink brick of the area. Invited to design a new structure after its destruction by fire, he created a florid three-storey version using imported plaster mouldings and cast iron. Other successful designs in this style include Scott’s Theatre (...