Modernist Art in Ethiopia

Elizabeth W. Giorgis

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780821446539
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

If modernism initially came to Africa through colonial contact, what does Ethiopia's inimitable historical condition—its independence save for five years under Italian occupation—mean for its own modernist tradition? In Modernist Art in Ethiopia —the first book-length study of the topic—Elizabeth W. Giorgis recognizes that her home country's supposed singularity, particularly as it pertains to its history from 1900 to the present, cannot be conceived outside the broader colonial legacy. She uses the evolution of modernist art in Ethiopia to open up the intellectual, cultural, and political histories of it in a pan-African context.

Giorgis explores the varied precedents of the country's political and intellectual history to understand the ways in which the import and range of visual narratives were mediated across different moments, and to reveal the conditions that account for the extraordinary dynamism of the visual arts in Ethiopia. In locating its arguments at the intersection of visual culture and literary and performance studies, Modernist Art in Ethiopia details how innovations in visual art intersected with shifts in philosophical and ideological narratives of modernity. The result is profoundly innovative work—a bold intellectual, cultural, and political history of Ethiopia, with art as its centerpiece.

Chapter 1

EARLY TO MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY MODERNISM (1900–1957) AND THE FORMATION OF THE FINE ART SCHOOL

ITALY’S COLONIAL interest was put to rest at the Battle of Adwa. One of the major challenges to colonial domination, Adwa disrupted the broader colonial imaginary. “Adwa,” said Andreas Eshete, “represent[ed] the rare, perhaps unique success of a poor, black country in defeating the imperialist ambitions of a European power.”¹ A substantial engagement with Ethiopia by Europeans became necessary, since the victory revealed what could be called the reversal of classical colonial history. Ethiopia became a curious object of colonial knowledge and attained special importance. Many foreigners eagerly arrived in Ethiopia after the victory at Adwa; some were curious travelers, but the vast majority came as engineers and technicians to build roads, the railway, and the shipping line. As Richard Pankhurst noted, Adwa was “an anachronism in the era of the Scramble for Africa.”²

As artists and intellectuals dealt with the sensibilities of triumph that Adwa brought forth, modernism came into the core. Clearly, the social and cultural history after the victory at Adwa showed a marked and significant shift from preceding periods, and after Adwa, the encounter with modernity anticipated novel optimisms. Artistic production radically shifted from previous practices of church art, and beyond that, new ideas and imaginations also affected different areas of artistic subjectivity and inquiry. Yet the ways in which artists took on the challenge to transform the legacies of religious art and, more importantly, their abilities to negotiate modernism in different forms are theorized in ways that categorize the art without recourse to the specific history and culture that circumscribes it. It is not the purpose of my book—nor is it even possible—to cover the wide and rich artistic range of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church that has evolved through centuries. Yet it is crucial to reposition modernism’s causalities and origins, in which the Orthodox Church played a central part, to make the extraction of early twentieth-century artists’ works real in modernism’s history.

One of the most defining and profound features of early twentieth-century modernism is the history of ideas that exchanged and deployed the values and ideals of modernity. If formalist analysis is also imperative in this, I argue it is in the critical consensus and interplay of visual and intellectual thought that we espouse a broader perspective of modernism’s genesis and its evolution in the 1940s and 1950s. Whereas visual modernism began with artists such as Belachew Yimer, the intellectual quest for the meaning of modernity broadly began with the writers of Berhanena Selam at the turn of the twentieth century. The early intellectuals’ obsession with the “modern,” or what historian Shimelis Bonsa reported as “their ambivalence and fear to the terror of modernity and their desire to stay true to the vernacular,”³ without doubt provides a better understanding of the affective consequences of the modern in the social thread and imaginary. In many respects, then, I also find it crucial to offer a new perspective about the notion of the public and its discursive site, from where, I argue, ideas about the modern also emerged. To understand why the utopian scheme of the “modern” was correspondingly mediated in popular discourse and imagery is, therefore, both pertinent and necessary.

It is from these perspectives that I invoke a dialogic relationship between the sociocultural complexity of the early twentieth century and artistic modernism, beginning in 1900 and continuing until the establishment of the Fine Art School in 1957. The period was born, so to speak, into a panaroma of multiple, competing sites of politics, culture, and aesthetics. What is essential is a critical rereading of how the wider changes were negotiated, produced, and contested. Therefore, I am introducing a new approach to understand the specific reasoning behind the central philosophical position of the time and its aesthetic implications.

THE RISE OF EARLY MODERNISM IN CONTEXT (1900–1957)

The founding of Addis Ababa as Ethiopia’s capital in 1881, the issuing of the country’s first national currency in 1894, and the releasing of postage stamps in the same year all affirmed Menelik II’s modern nation-building schemes even before the Battle of Adwa. Perhaps the most important technological project of this period was the execution of the Addis Ababa–Djibouti Railway, which was begun in 1894 under the auspices of Alfred Ilg, Menelik II’s Swiss technical adviser, and Ilg’s partner, French trader Charles Chefneux. The railway project ran into several political, financial, and technical difficulties and was not fully operational until 1915. But even before the railway’s completion, the port of Djibouti had become a route for trade from ports of the Indian Ocean such as Aden, Jeddah, and Bombay. Manufactured goods were shipped to the city, including paint and paintbrushes for artists. Alfred Ilg, who arrived in Ethiopia in 1879, would also become Menelik II’s personal photographer and is credited with introducing photography in Ethiopia. The advent of photography influenced the art of painting as well when portraits began to be painted from photographic images.

Menelik II had also expanded his territory to the south through aggressive military expeditions, as he simultaneously promoted modern institutions and infrastructure. The last years of his reign saw a string of modern nation-building projects. The Bank of Abyssinia, an affiliate of the British-owned National Bank of Egypt and the first bank in the country, was established in 1905, staffed by British personnel. The first modern school, Menelik II School, was opened in 1908, and Aemero, the first Amharic newspaper, and a state printing press were founded in 1911. The historical conditions of the early twentieth century were subsequently crucial to the rise of Ethiopian modernism.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, religious paintings had also shifted from traditional conventions. But it was not until the beginning and the middle of the twentieth century that a marked development in artistic practice emerged in which artworks were partially, if not entirely, divorced from the traditions of Orthodox Church paintings. The victory at Adwa was consequently of great importance in Ethiopian modernism’s history. After Adwa, a renewed sense of pride and consciousness had positioned individual subjectivity, and the artist as subject sought to voice the ideals of gallantry and glory.

Paintings of multiscene images, heroic battle scenes, and historical legends were primarily sold to the foreign market. As Richard Pankhurst noted: “The early years of the 20th century, which witnessed increasing numbers of visitors, many of them diplomats, also saw a corresponding increase in the supply of paintings on the market.”⁴ For instance, Pankhurst referred to the German diplomat Friederich Rosen, who arrived in Ethiopia in 1905 and obtained a painting depicting the Battle of Adwa. Pankhurst also stated that a market for local consumption had developed in the early part of the twentieth century and that one of the venues where artists sold their work were the tej bets (drinking houses). Notable artists of this time were Belachew Yimer, Tasso Habtewold, Yohannes Tessema, and Behailu Gebremaryam. I focus on Belachew’s work, although the works of Tasso, Yohannes, and Behailu are equally intriguing. Similar to religious paintings, these works generally renounced the European perspective and the illusion of volume and depth. The figures they depicted were arranged on flat surfaces and typically shown in static poses, with unnatural head and body proportions.

This body of work demarcated a newfound consciousness in aesthetic practice. Artistic practice grew, paradoxically, with a European colonial imaginary that enthusiastically embraced this genre of artworks, not necessarily out of regard for their quality but as objects of curiosity. For instance, Friederich Rosen referred to the Battle of Adwa painting that he acquired in this way: “Despite its crude execution it has a certain cultural historical interest.”⁵ These works lacked the familiar features of European formalist renditions, but their classification should closely attend to material details, unique symbols and images in the composition, and the relationship to their own localities. There can be little doubt that these renditions were credible expressions of modern desires and of self-representational subjectivities. Artists had agency in their appeal to autonomy—in shaping their own executions, desires, and performativity. This autonomy embraced the tradition and values of the Orthodox Church, not as irreconcilably opposite but as part and parcel of modern subjectivity. The beginning of early Ethiopian modernism was a call for a new resonance of nationalism, and as such, nationalism as a cultural paradigm empowered the artist as subject to surmise a new imagination that was expressed in new forms. Nevertheless, these works were regarded as ahistorical and reckoned as inferior derivatives of a long-gone European medieval past. It is impossible to unite two different historicizing processes that are divergent and that are each considered irredeemably discordant. These two histories—that of European modernism and that of its Other—have always intersected, and it is this traverse that is interesting to understand. Consequently, formalist analysis cannot compare the formal elements of early twentieth-century art to European formal elements from its own period, although deciphering the formal properties of these types of works is essential because such description would preserve the authenticity of the works.

On many of these paintings, the artists’ names are inscribed at the bottom center of the canvases. Here, I should stress that church paintings were rarely signed: since creating such a painting was considered an act of piety, describing in pigment and line the narratives of the Gospel, it was considered inappropriate to individualize the faith with a signature. But the paintings of this new genre almost always have names inscribed, although dates are usually missing. Discussing this trend, Lanfranco Ricci’s Pittura Etiopica tradizionale (1996), a catalog that illustrated the collection of the Istituto Italo-Africano, stated,

In a number of the paintings the artist is actually indicated through his signature on the canvass, a decidedly European innovation which had been so totally absorbed as in some cases to cause the artist to give only his initials, and in the Roman alphabet . . . on occasion indicative of the pervading influence from Europe . . . the artist first signs in Latin, and the Roman alphabet, and then in Ge’ez.⁶

Indeed, issues of early modernism can only be understood through the history that has framed Ethiopian church art. Rarely using the bodies of knowledge written in the Ethiopic script Ge’ez and embedded in the philosophies of the church by erudite Ethiopian church scholars, authorities such as Stanislaw Chojnacki (1915–2010) wrote widely on church art but barely understood its intrinsic meaning . They engaged in a reductionist Orientalist scholarship that diminished not only the interpretive metatexts of church art but also the manifestation of the art in modern practices. There is an immediate need to investigate the scholarship of church art because the initial articulation of modernism is firmly wedded to this same imaginary. Central to this stance, moreover, is an added concern for contemporary scholars’ complete reliance on existing scholarship, which draws its knowledge piecemeal from secondary sources. And the scholarship predominantly uses these sources to endorse the Orientalist invention of early practices of modern art. It is in this regard that I intend to provoke future research by citing limited examples to briefly reveal the ambiguities that have framed the scholarship of the art. But let me also clarify that when I introduce these examples, I am only pointing to larger, varied, and urgent queries that should be thoroughly interrogated. All of this calls for further substantive research that locates knowledge outside its hegemonic center, real or imagined.

A FEW INSIGHTS INTO THE ORIENTALIST INVENTION OF ETHIOPIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH ART

The scholarship that has framed the art historical studies of church art has largely been organized by European travelers, chroniclers, and a few academics. But it was explored more expansively by Chojnacki, a Pole who traveled to Ethiopia as a librarian in the early 1960s. His scholarship is the primary text, an introductory account. It is important to note his tremendous contribution to the scholarship of church art; his meticulous recording of archival resources; his comprehensive formalist analysis; his collection of rare religious imagery that today embellishes the antiquities gallery of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies; and, most importantly, the volumes of documents that he wrote. These are all scholarly archives for further research pursuant to investigations of the genealogies of church art.

Chojnacki’s work is primarily object-centered and largely engaged in an exhaustive investigation of iconographic themes. His foundational narrative is generally based on secondary sources from native informants and travelers’ documents. He lived in the country for over forty years, but he did not speak the working language, Amharic, and neither did he understand Ge’ez, the liturgical script. In fact, many who have written on Ethiopian church art do not speak or understand Ge’ez or Amharic. These include European academics such as Oto Jager, Eva Balicka-Witakwoska, Dorothea McEwan, and Elizabeth Biasio, as well as individuals who simply became interested in Ethiopia and its art. Among the latter groups are Paul and Martha Henze and Ian Campbell, who are not trained art historians but whose writings on Ethiopian church art are widely read by both local and outside scholars. Perhaps because they do not understand the language, their research is completely directed to the physical and material analysis of the art rather than to its comprehensive meaning, that is, the theological, historical, cultural, and political context of the art.

The Amharic language is full of puns, wit, and layered meanings. “Wax and Gold” is the most dominant form of poetic expression in this language, with the apparent figurative meaning being called the “Wax” and the hidden and significant meaning called the “Gold.” Essence and appearance are therefore fundamental. The Wax and Gold is prevalent in Amharic and is also ubiquitous in the Ge’ez script. It is also intrinsic to the images of church art. Its ontology is implied in the paintings but is often absent in the scholarly works about the art.

Chojnacki’s primary work, Major Themes in Ethiopian Paintings (1983), particularly focused on proving the exclusive kinship of Ethiopian church art with European or Byzantine art; it did not highlight the configuration of the objects’ underlying meanings or the different treatises, upheavals, and polemics surrounding the theology of Orthodox Christianity that were frequently depicted in the paintings. What is also troubling is Chojnacki’s presumptions that Ethiopian painters always needed European inspiration to innovate and that the political, economic, and cultural climate of the country had little or no bearing on artistic production. Consequently, Chojnacki’s dominant claim throughout Major Themes was that Ethiopian artists always copied from a prototype and often from models imported from Europe—a declaration that suggested artists were oblivious to the political and cultural conditions of their lived experiences and to the integrity of their own skills and talents. For example, Chojnacki wrote:

The religious and other attitudes of the Ethiopian painter remain always the same and his technique alters very little. It is true, nevertheless, that the forms and their stylistical expression hav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Early to Mid-twentieth-century Modernism (1900–1957) and the Formation of the Fine Art School
• 2. Intellectual Thought of the 1960s: The Prime of Ethiopian Modernism
• 3. The Modernists of the 1960s: Gebre Kristos Desta and Skunder Boghossian and Their Students
• 4. Enat Hager Weym Mot (Revolutionary Motherland or Death): Art during the Derg, 1974–91
• 5. Contemporary Ethiopian Art: 1995–2015
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index