Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 9, 1995 TAG: 9507070010
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GRAHAM HEATHCOTE ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
DATELINE: LONDON LENGTH: Medium
``The bulk of the loans are inevitably from Europe and America as that's where the great collections are. The circumstances in which many of the works left Africa is not known,'' Piers Rodgers, the academy secretary, says.
``Africa: The Art of a Continent,'' opens Oct. 4 and continues through Jan. 21 at the 227-year-old Royal Academy in London's Piccadilly. Its only other showing will be at New York's Guggenheim Museum, opening in June 1996.
The 750 works will span 1.6 million years and cover the whole of Africa, something never previously attempted, the organizers say.
It will start with the earliest known human artifact, a handmade stone tool from Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, and go on through rock paintings 29,000 years old from the Apollo 11 cave in Namibia and down to recent times.
Rodgers said many of the works came out of Africa with the beginnings of Western trade with the continent and in the missionary and colonial period, and are undocumented.
He acknowledged that the question of art works being outside their country of origin is a contentious one but stressed signs of increasing sensitivity in recent years: museums deciding against buying works without a provenance and attempts to regulate the trade in antiquities.
``Our first concern is to put on the best show we possibly could. We went all over the world for them, as well as in Africa,'' Rodgers said. ``The questions about how these works left Africa and if it is right to show them have been foremost in our minds all the time.
``Part of the answer lies in the colonial period so for us it is history. A private institution like the Royal Academy devoted to art is not really in a position to right the wrongs of history. If that can be done at all it is a matter for governments,'' the secretary said.
``We try to take a balanced view. We never knowingly show stolen property but we cannot refuse to show great works of art. They cannot be kept in the cellar forever.''
Rodgers said he regretted that Britain has not ratified a UNESCO convention of 1970 against illicit traffic in art.
He said pillaging of art works in Africa and thefts from African museums is still going on, as well as the looting and destruction of African archaeological sites.
Tom Phillips, a British artist and Royal Academician who has traveled widely in Africa, said the exhibition will show the primacy of Africa in the history of art.
``African art has been labeled by us for years as primitive but the truth is that it was too sophisticated for us to understand,'' said Phillips, the curator of the exhibition.
``The exhibition will show that Africans can make anything, and often did before anyone else.''
The exhibits will include stone and wood carvings, statues, reliefs, basketry, totems, snuff bottles, textiles, bronzes, gold ornaments and other jewelry, pottery figures, mosaics, manuscripts, Arabic calligraphy, portable goods of nomads and Mameluke art from Cairo.
The exhibition has been conceived as a journey around Africa and divides the continent into seven geographical areas: Egypt and Nubia; Ethiopia, Sudan and the eastern coast, including the island of Madagascar; southern Africa; the Congo and central Africa; coastal west Africa, the sub-Saharan region and north Africa.
Petrine Archer-Straw, a lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, said the exhibition catalog which she is coordinating will contain essays by 120 scholars in archaeology, ethnography, anthropology and art history and will be the most comprehensive survey of the subject yet published.
The exhibition is the centerpiece of ``africa95,'' a British season devoted to all the arts of Africa, starting Aug. 12 and lasting until the end of this year.
by CNB