Portraiture in Africa

Abstract

A portrait depicts a specific person, and the idea of portraiture springs from a common impulse to remember and be remembered, whether the reasons are personal or political, ritual or social. The nature of portrayal differs from culture to culture, however, subject to concepts of individualism, the prevailing aesthetic, and a host of social or ritual beliefs particular to a given time period, people, or place.' Western culture emphasizes individual identity, Western art features representation, and the portrait canon stresses physiognomic likeness-notably, the communication of personality through facial features and expression. We do not know what John Harvard looked like, yet a quite realistic sculpted image bearing his name surveys Harvard Yard. In contrast, African culture emphasizes social identity, the African aesthetic is a generalizing one, and the portrait image is individuated by name and context. Thus such widely disparate visual configurations as Kurumba antelope headdresses (Roy 1987) and dressed houses (Fig. 4) work as portraits in Africa alongside representational (Fig. 3) and stylized (Fig. 10) human images.2 Recognition of the portrait genre in Africa stems from the same interaction of situations and events that has expanded the range of African images now generally considered appropriate to study under the rubric art-notably developments in Western art since the late 1800s, field study in Africa by Euroamerican scholars, and the increasing participation of scholars from Africa in the academic disciplines concerned with material culture (Borgatti 1976a). The modern period in Western art is rich in examples of portraiture that convey personal identity without resorting to literal physical description-making them more like African portraits and making it easier for us to recognize comparable images in Africa. For example, reliance upon literary reference and indirection creates a conceptual and cross-cultural bond between such works as Charles Demuth's I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (Fig. 7), a symbolic portrait of William Carlos Williams that refers to his poetry (Aiken 1987), and Fon applique portraits (Fig. 8) that draw upon the imagery of a proverb to sug2. COMMEMORATIVE MASK (OLIMI NIKEKE) REPRESENTING ZIBIRI ATEKPE'S FATHER, ATEKPE. CARVED BY JAMES JOHN, 1978. OKPELLA, NORTHERN EDO, NIGERIA. ZIBIRI ATEKPE'S COMPOUND, OGIRIGA VILLAGE, 1979. PHOTO: JEAN M. BORGATTI.