Torday preparing to make a phonograph recording of Songye musicians. Liustrations to this article, this is from the catalogue by John Mack, Keeper of the Museum of Mankind. Torday left a large photographic archive part of which is now in the hands of the Museum of Mankind and part in the RAI's photo-collection (see Roslyn Poignant, ed., Observers of Man, exhibition catalogue, 1980).

Two imposing works of African art have been standing in London's National Gallery: in terms of quality (as they confidently challenge their surrounding nephews, the paintings of Picasso and Braque) they do not look like intruders.[1] Looking at them it is astonishing to reflect that the capital city has never staged a comprehensive exhibition of the art of Africa. This will only be remedied in all probability in 1995 when the Royal Academy in its main rooms intends to mount a full-scale show. In scope and power it will come as a surprise for there is no permanent display to give it context nor any institution (like New York's Center for African Art or the Foundation Dapper in Paris) to provide an energetic succession of specialist or polemical displays. New Yorkers, for example, will see this summer an exhibition of twentieth century. African art presented with all the apparatus of publication, symposium and seminar; extra relevance and added meaning will have been given to it by a preceding series of inventive shows organised by Susan Vogel. Such an event arriving out of the blue in London would merely seem quirky.

The Museum of Mankind cannot provide such a context or such a dialogue: its brief is too large, its budget too low and its staff too small. We can only hope that its selection of `highlights' might be extended when the department moves back to Bloomsbury. At the moment what is described as `An Introduction to the Collection' is a bit of a tease, like a brilliant overture after which the curtain fails to rise. The stimulated visitor stumbles out into what often seems a cavern of closed rooms and his whetted interest in this or that culture is unlikely to be matched by the temporary presentations on offer.

There have been fine shows at Burlington Gardens, yet the necessarily ponderous rate of exposure suggests that double the normal lifespan would be needed to witness a well ordered view of the Museum's holdings of African art alone.

One recent strategy seemed to point in a promising direction. In 1985 the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi was invited to select a room's worth of treasures and the result was a strange, informative and often whimsical exhibition.[2] If this welcome idea were developed into a series (analogous to the more predictable Artist's Eye selections at the National Gallery) we would have the beginnings of an argument in aesthetics as well as random glimpses of the huge reserve collection which only the dauntless see.

Yet every now and then all criticism evaporates in the face of an exemplary presentation such as Emil Torday and the Art of the Congo. Untrammelled by the ersatz huts and undistracted by the music and birdsong that for some time have been the fashionable accessories to dimly arrayed ethnic artefacts, the visitor proceeds through an elegantly appointed space and sees well-lit African art show with new dignity. The original background is conveyed through photographs taken by Torday and his colleague Hilton Simpson and by the paintings of Norman Hardy.[3]

The title does not equivocate but boldly uses the word `art'. In the case of the Kuba this is supremely justified for their sophisticated decorative schemes are all-pervasive, informing their entire output from the most regal ancestor figure down to the humble enema. In European cultures assorted distinctions are made between fine and applied arts. These `class' divisions are often suspect for the obvious reason that the failures of high art are lifeless compared with the successes of applied art. Fortunately, with the artefacts of the Kuba, a virtually seamless visual language allows no such categories.

Wood figure (ndop) commemorating MishaaPelyeeng aNce as indicated by the drum associated with his reign carved on the plinth. Kuba-Bushoong, height 55.5 cm., collected at Nsheng.

Torday, a Hungarian, was in his twenties when he first went to Africa in 1900. He soon discovered himself to be in a place more congenial to him than Europe and among people more sympathetic to him than Europeans. His first rather vague employment for the notorious King Leopold came to an end in 1904. It was then that he made his initial approach to the British Museum, presenting them with `some trifle curiosities' from his stay in Luba country. These were courteously accepted with no intimation that they were to be the first of over three thousand objects that would enrich the national collection.
On his return to Africa this preliminary link with the British Museum somehow legitimized (most importantly perhaps in his own mind) his penchant for collecting specimens and data. Under the tutelage of T.A. Joyce, the museum's specialist (in what amounted to a private correspondence course), Torday used his unique field experiences to become one of the most outstanding ethnologists and anthropologists of that pioneering time.[4]

His human involvement and sympathy with the Congolese is well described in John Mack's fine and searching catalogue essay. This is one of the most pleasurable reads in the genre that has come my way; Mack dodges no issue and brings in a wide range of reference while showing that scholarly probity is not incompatible with either humour or humanism. His affection for Torday's maverick spirit is everywhere apparent in what is essentially the prelude to a catalogue raisonné in preparation. It is exactly poised so that the specialist is not left undernourished and the uninitiated not overtaxed. I would suggest that this short book (less than 100 amply illustrated pages in length) might serve any student as an introduction to African cultural studies.

Torday said he had `not chosen objects for their beauty but for the interest they may have for the anthropologist...' Neither catalogue nor exhibition makes clear quite what he meant. One might ask what he saw (and could have negotiated the purchase of) that was more `beautiful' than what he actually brought back? How, in any case, could `beauty' be an invalidating factor in the anthropological interest of an object? Perhaps this statement (though prominently quoted at the beginning of the exhibition) was, since it was made in 1905 at the outset of Torday's career, overtaken by Torday's own developing taste. There is certainly no doubting his aesthetic excitement in what he called `the Kuba collection', of which he said that he would blow his brains out were it to get lost on the way. `The Kuba', he affirmed, `[are] undoubtedly the greatest arstists of Black Africa', a statement as aesthetically based as it is partisan. By 1908 he is positively crowing about certain acquisitions such as the ancient drum he talks of as `a marvel'.

Rafia textile with cut-pile embroidery. The colours are black and yellow. Kuba-Shoowa. Width 49 cm.

Fragment of an old drum. Kuba-Bushoong, height 99 cm., collected at Nsheng.

Wood cupamong the oldest objects still extant a the time of its collection. Kuba-Ngongo, height 12.5 cm., collected at Miumba.

The putative stars of the show are the large wooden commemorative statues of kings. The three that we see look to be comfortably attributable to the same artist, though Torday took them to be contemporary portraits (which would date the earliest of them to the seventeenth century). This does not, of course, mean that his informants were lying; it was merely how they thought of them. They are now generally and convincingly thought to date from the end of the eighteenth century. They are justifiably famous, yet to my eyes they have always looked somewhat stilted (as, after all, is often the case with royal portraits in the European tradition). None of them have the eloquence of the finest Luba (Hemba) figures or the compressed energy of the Fang reliquary statues. I was certainly more excited by the magnificent wooden cup, which is probably of comparable antiquity, and Torday's `marvel', the old drum, with its powerful repeat carving of knots and disc-like masks.

The art form in which the Kuba have no rivals is that of woven, embroidered and cut-pile textiles. These latter have long been known to Europeans since the first explorers who described them as `Kuba velvets', a technical misnomer which somehow pays tribute to their refinement of texture. Those who spent luckless hours doing `Raffia Work' at school will be chastened at the sight of them. With the simple starting point of line and lozenge an amazingly sophisticated vocabulary was built up in a tradition we know to have lasted for well over four hundred years. The rhythms, inflections, variations and syncopated arrangements of this small repertoire make these cloths the visual equivalent of the intricate cross patterning of the best African drumming. In a recent book Georges Meurant has attempted to analyse these variants in pages of line drawings that recall someone going quietly mad in a telephone booth.

One form of textile is, however, rather stingily shown. The great ceremonial dance-skirts (ntshak) which, when unwound, can be the length of a sizeable gallery are represented only by a single example; this itself, being folded, offers only a glimpse of the characteristic design of appliqued patches. When fully displayed these free and playful shapes (which intriguingly anticipate the work of Paul Klee) can be read, as panel succeeds panel of abstract narrative (with the occasional figurative allusion), like a Platonic prototype of the cartoon strip. That they were apparently worn only by high ranking women suggests that such improvisatory designs were highly regarded. In the formalized world of Kuba design they seem like an anomaly, a wild cadenza in a classical concerto. One would like to know how the Kuba themselves make the aesthetic comparison. It is also intriguing to remember that at the time of Torday's expedition there was no European aesthetic criterion by which the high quality of their `drawing' might have been admired.

The British Museum was quick to respond to the acquisition of Torday's Kuba material and, immediately upon its arrival in 1909, displayed a selection of the treasure in a special case. One need look no further than the Vorticists to see the clear influence of Kuba motifs on English art and design of the period. There is a tendency to believe that the impact of African art on that of the industrialized world involved only a few individuals at a particular moment in Paris (Picasso, Derain, et al). Mack deftly quotes a letter from Derain to Vlaminck describing his excitement at the African art he had seen in 1906 at the British Museum. Epstein by that time was already in London and beginning to sift through the ethnographic collections. Information on the visual vocabulary of `primitive' societies had been available to the enquiring practitioner for centuries. Perhaps the first major artist to respond with frank and unqualified enthusiasm to the art of an exotic civilization was Albrecht Dürer, who, in 1521, examined artefacts from the New World with unpatronizing amazement.[5] By the mid nineteenth century it did not seem eccentric for Owen Jones to begin the most widely consulted handbook of decorative design with three full colour plates of `Art of the Savage Tribes'.[6]

Admittedly, to see that the researches of Cézanne pointed to conclusions already reached by African artists and to unite them in a single work was, on Picasso's part, an inspired experiment in artistic fusion, but it was people like Torday and his rival Frobenius (of whose more exploitative field methods he so strongly disapproved) who were the midwives to this and the other more quiet revolutions.

Torday had not deceived his many Congolese friends (including King Kot aPe whom he described as `more of a gentleman in one toe than the whole American mission') when he assured them that their work would be honoured in the `great treasure house' of the world's artistry. In contrast to may other early ethnographers, his dealings were scrupulously fair: he often mentions the high prices at which he purchased objects whilst wryly observing that the artefacts that he got for nothing were the most expensive of all by virtue of the heavy obligations that went with them.

Each visitor will have a favourite object in the current display, whether it be the much reproduced Wongo ceremonial adze (in the form of one-footed figure with the blade as its tongue), or the tiny but huge-volumed headrest figure from the northern Mbala, or the Kuba cloths that seem plain between their ornate fringes yet on closer examination prove to be busy with self-colour design. I was particularly drawn to one of the fine group of stools on show whose witty construction is full of paradox. Made, as are the vast majority of African objects, out of a single piece of wood, it reflects the log-like shape of its origins yet is carved away like an apple eaten to its core. Of the initial outside shape only the most delicate struts remain which at first glance look as if they support the whole structure; a feat of carving as well as an imaginative jeu d'espirit. It is, however, the sustained creativity and craftsmanship of the Kuba art that forms the bulk of this impressive exhibition which will haunt the mind of everyone that sees it.

It was from that same Congo immortalized by Conrad in 1902 as the Heart of Darkness that these objects of bright intricacy came so shortly after. Their first showing began, in Britain at least, the long process of according to African art the equality of respect that Torday showed its makers. His work is here at last fulfilled. The evidence demonstrates what he instinctively knew, that the idol was an ikon all the time.

[1] They form part of the Berggruen Collection. It seems, however, that they will not be retained when the collection is merged with that of the National Gallery as a whole.
[2]Lost Magic Kingdoms. Museum of Mankind, 1985. An illustrated catalogue was published with an introduction by Malcolm McLeod.
[3]Hardy did not quite live up to his name as an expedition member and, apparently to nobody's particular regret, departed early. His watercolours, however, worked up from his own field sketches or from photographs supplied by Torday, are evocative and sensitively painted.
[4]Malinowski, at Torday's death in 1931, described him as `one of the world's foremost anthropologists ... [whose] ability to reach the personal element in Africans and to gain their affection as well as his sure grasp of theoretical problems placed him among the makers of modern ethnology'.
[5]Dürer was in Brussels when the first consignment of Cortes' treasure arrived from `the new Golden Land'. He wrote, `I have never seen in all my days that which so rejoiced my heart as these things. For I saw among them amazing artistic objects and I marvelled over the subtle ingenuity of the men in these distant lands'.
[6]Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, 1856. This huge book of lithographic plates in colour, which was reproduced in smaller format soon after, became influential to the point that it is still in print today.

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