https://ajaonline.org/book-review/3485/ Tue, 13 Aug 2024 04:06:36 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.1 https://ajaonline.org/book-review/3485/#comment-61 Tue, 13 Oct 2020 11:50:59 +0000 https://www.ajaonline.org/book_review/3485/#comment-61 Paul Wood’s book ‘Western Art and the Wider World’
Wood says exactly the opposite of what you attribute to him regarding the primitivism of the people and artefacts of Benin. He states that ‘The bronze sculptures in particular were without precedent and threw the racist stereotype of Africa as a place devoid of culture populated by almost sub-human savages into disarray.They demonstrated high levels of technological and craft skill in the difficult technique of lost wax metal casting and implied the prior existence of a hitherto unsuspected civilization of considerable social complexity’. He goes on to say, with reference to the influences of the Benin Bronzes on works by Kirchner and Pechstein, that ‘In both cases the forms were significantly changed in order to bring the relatively rounded modeling of the bronze plaques into conformity with the more distorted, and hence authentically “primitive” forms encountered in directly carved wooden masks and “idols’, i.e. that the Bronzes were not primitive enough.

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