’Art & Soul
A world of dreams and spirits
There is not only beauty but also great raw power in the masks made by the Dan artists of Africa
B.N.Goswamy

The Dan, I now know, is an ethno-linguistic group of tribal people inhabiting the mountainous part of the IvoryCoast and neighbouring areas of Liberia in western Africa. But when, some 40 years ago, I landed in Zurich, and at its famed Museum Rietberg, I had no idea of who the Dan were. I had in fact never even heard of them. But there, among the splendid publications that the museum supports, was a relatively slim volume on Dan artists that caught my attention on account of the riveting image of an African mask that it featured on its cover. The book, which carried the name of Eberhard Fischer — then Director of the Museum, who became a dear friend and colleague, and with whom I have worked together with great pleasure over the years — was, however, all in German, a language to which I had only modest access. But I could see that it spoke of four individuals, all sculptors: Tame, Si, Son, and Tompieme. This struck a chord within me, for the approach seemed to go against the commonly held but uninformed belief that ‘tribal art is tribal art’: anonymous, unassigned, collective, with its makers having no individual identities. I say a sympathetic chord because — totally removed from those climes — I had been working for some years on Pahari painters, trying to pierce the chaste cloak of anonymity behind which they had remained hidden, digging out not only names but also establishing the styles of individuals, or at least of the families to which they belonged.

Mme. Delea. According to the carver Tame, “the most beautiful woman in Diaple”

It had not been easy for me, for the painters were long gone, having done their work some two hundred or more years ago, and one had found oneself casting about in the wide open world of speculation, aided, of course, by close stylistic analysis. These Dan artists, in contrast, were contemporaries, living individuals whom Eberhard had known, interviewed, seen at work, in fact had even lived with. All the same the approach was similar: to enter the mind of the artists, their beliefs and their worldview, and see what made their work what it was.

I go back to all this because the early, 1963 work of Eberhard Fischer, which had been published as a monograph in a Basel-based journal, has, just recently, come out in an English version under the broad title: Dan Artists. This makes things easier of access and one can get the full measure of what that path-breaking early work contained. But that apart, there is additional material in it: more photographs, and an extended epilogue. The result? There are three journeys that one can, and needs to, track in the book: that which the master artists take within themselves, reaching out to the layers of memories, impressions, images seen or unseen; that which the Dan take as a people, imagining and reconstructing their racial past, inhabiting the world of spirits; and that which Eberhard, then short of 20 years in age, inspired and encouraged by his father, Hans Himmelheber, the distinguished art ethnologist, took in the simple but also highly sophisticated world of the Dan who lived in the little village of Nyor Diaple inhabited by no more than 50 households.

Dean mask carved by Son. Museum Rietberg, Zurich

Waekemia ceremonial spoon. By the carver Son

There is great profit in tracking each of the three journeys, for one learns a lot, truly a great lot. One can hear, for instance,Tame, one of the gifted four whom Eberhard worked with, speak. There is detailed information about his methods: how he cuts and carves and colours of course, but also how thoughts about the masks he carved form in his head. Consider this, for instance, his account of ‘a magic remedy for carving’. "When one is one of many carvers, and one wants to be famous among them, then one gets a remedy from the forest. One goes after it", he says. "One takes a little plaster from the wall and fills in into a particular leaf. All of it is then pounded in a small mortar. From it one forms small balls, which one rolls in one’s hands to sausages. The ends are pointed. Before beginning to carve one rubs one’s hands with it. Now the remedy, which is in the hands, shows one all the various forms that have ever been made. They pop up in my head like something coming to the surface of the water. Then I imagine the ‘zo’ who will wear the mask and how he is likely to perform with it, and then I know how I have to carve the mask."

As for the Dan people, if one tracks them, art involves "masks that are based on dreamlike apparitions. Forest spirits want to manifest themselves, to become visible, to appear not in human form, not as animal or plant, but as they are envisioned". Accordingly, there are no general representations of certain existing objects or beings, but "rather of what is invisible to the people and is seeking to become visible". One of the carvers put it differently, but well. "The first mask being came to a man in a dream, and said: make me, wear me, that will frighten the enemies." There is not only beauty — as seen through the eyes of the Dan beholder — in the masks but also power, great raw power.

And as for Eberhard, who landed in Nyor Diaple essentially for documenting on film what his father and his colleagues had observed and analysed before him, a new world opened up as he lived in the village and worked with the carvers. He knew that in many ways his life had taken a different turn. For him, "no more Gothic language learning, no more seminars on the interpretation of the poetry of Goethe and Holderlin" that he might have been heading for as a student at the Tubingen university. Instead it was this raw, almost untouched, world of Africa, inhabited not by ‘craftsmen’ but by ‘artists’ who lived and created a world very different from that he was born in. These were artists ‘forged by a different cultural pattern" And this he found both ‘intriguing’ and ‘stupendously fascinating’. Among these artists he found a different energy, a different understanding of life, as it were. It was as if their art had washed away in some manner the dust of classical art. And in the process of that washing away, friendships were formed, warmth was shared, lessons were learnt.

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