Attitude to benin art

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How Victorian attitudes suppressed Benin Art

The 19^th Century Victorian Britain was marked by an overwhelming sense of superiority that the Victorians felt over the inhabitants of other countries and colonies. Venturing outside their own country, they imagined that the other countries and people were innately inferior, and that their interaction had to be that of redemption or civilisation. In their ingrained arrogance and sense of entitlement, the Victorians remained ignorant about other cultures, languages and art, choosing to refer to them as backward and barbaric. This paper explores how the racial attitudes of the Victorian era, fuelled by the scientific discoveries of the time, helped to not only create a perception of inferiority of Benin art and those from other colonised territories, but also reinforce the perception that art existed in an unequal continuum with those from Britain occupying the most venerable spot. The denigration of Benin art and art from the colonies in the 19^th century was a consequence of misleading notions about the racial inferiority of the colonised people.

Validating the misconceptions on the hierarchical strata of races by scientific reasoning was one factor that determined the scorn thrown on Benin art and art from the colonies. In the second half of the 19^th century, the ideas of Charles Darwin and his evolution theory had taken over the discourse on many aspects of society, and it brought forth the concept of racial superiority based on the descent of people. When Herbert Spencer talked about “survival of the fittest”, his ideology had a ring of extreme competition, and it was the prevailing view that only the strongest survive. Social Darwinism had been born. Even art had to be put to this test, and the Victorian society had little room for the promotion and high regard of Benin art, emblems of the colonial enterprise. Francis Galton was already making a name for himself, attributing genius almost entirely to genetics and laying ground for eugenics. It was his belief that breeding the clever with the clever would ultimately improve human intelligence. Mole (2017) agrees that the so-called primitive cultures together with their art forms sadly had no place in what was considered an advanced human civilisation (p.11). Paramount to improving the art then would be the systematic suppression of art forms from the less cultured and primitive people, and their ultimate conversion to a more enlightened Victorian world-view. Such pervasive ideas on the nature of human society pushed colonial art to the periphery regardless of the merit of such pieces.

The denigrating attitude of the Empire towards the colonies informed the shelving of Benin Art in favour of Victorian art forms. As Gerstenblith, (2010) asserts, it is during the Victorian era that the ideals of the Empire were shaped in Britain, complete with its belief in the invincibility and infallibility that the Empire embodied (p. 499). To validate their colonial claims among the Oriental, African or the Indigenous Australian people, the Empire had to lay an elaborate plan and campaign to denigrate, belittle and dehumanise the people in the colonies. Their cultures and civilisations were scorned upon, and art, the likes of which Benin art were part of, were claimed to be merely ornamental. In the view of the Empire, various races were not equal in the sight of God. The Victorian Englishman was the epitome of civilisation, and down in the ladder of human importance was the Aboriginal man and the African native. They were incapable of higher reason, leave alone producing art. The African man was depicted as in the extreme savagery, characterised by human sacrifices and devilish worship. Their art was not art at all; they were idols. Through such beliefs, the Empire laid ground for a moral justification and the necessity for political interventions and rule. The only recourse for the savage people was a conversion to Christianity. It is little wonder then that the missionary was one of the most celebrated people in the Victorian age. It was assumed that the missionary had the difficult task of making the heathens see the light. One of the first tasks for them was to ensure that idol worship and other forms of prayer considered devilish were abandoned. The sculptures and ornaments that had a central role in the culture and rituals of the native population were less useful now. Imperialism had begun taking its toll on Benin Art and those from other colonies.

The plunder of Benin in 1897 by the British for the Benin Art forms showed little regard for the centrality of the art forms to Benin people in particular, and the collective culture of the colonised people in general. In 1897, the British made an expedition of the then Benin Empire, seizing Benin Bronzes and handing them to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The plunder of Benin City by the winning forces and the seizure of Benin artefacts as war booty was an insensitive consequence of the expedition, and it did nothing to dignify the functional significance of the pieces to the people of Benin. Plankensteiner (2007) affirms that the artefacts served more than an ornamental purpose. They were also divine (p. 80). The ruler of the Benin Empire was the divine head. The Bronze carvings were displayed sometimes for spiritual purposes. After the plunder, many of these art forms were sold to cover the expedition cost. In this way, many of them found their way in museums around the world. According to Brodie (2018), this act of plunder and seizing of colonial art forms and stripping them from the people whose cultures were enriched by them was not a kind legacy of the Victorian period.

The condescending manner in which the plundered Benin art material was treated did not work for the popularisation of such art in the 19^th Century. Initially, these art materials were simply collected as anthropological objects of fascination. Greenberg (2017) suggests that their tag as being anthropological was informed by the roles that they supposedly played in the Benin Empire (p. 341).There was little regard for such as art forms in the Victorian world. Considered as objects of curiosity, Benin Art and art from other colonised lands did not stand a chance in the Victorian Age. The already racist tendencies and the prevailing beliefs on the inferiority of the people who produced them made sure that Benin art had little room for success as pure art forms. The increased urbanisation in Britain meant that many people moved away from the traditional forms of life, a reality that some in the Victorian age used to look down upon products of the colonised world, including the art products. Increased communication, made possible by the invention of the phonograph, the photograph and motion picture made the production of cheap works of art possible. When such innovations made it easier to link the Empire to the so-called primitive colonised cultures, the notions of inferiority and disregard for these cultures was even more retrenched. Only until the emergence of a new class of artists seeking to move away from the restrictions of the Victorian era was there a change in perception for Benin art to the famous art that it became thereafter.

The classical influences on art appreciation in Victorian Britain gave little room for the art from colonised lands to flourish in the Victorian age. The Classical model was the dominant cultural model in the Victorian era, and the imparting of Athenian, Spartan or Corinthian values was the ultimate aim of education. Even in sculpture where Benin art could thrive, the ideal forms were considered Classical embodied by people like Apollo Belvedere. By basing academic art education almost entirely on the classical ideals of beauty and enforcing a rigid program based on the strict following of these ideals, the art forms from Benin stood little chance. There were constant references by artists to the Classics, and almost no mention of the art that could have emanated from the people in the colonised territories. This was made worse by the strict censorship and sanitisation of what was considered derogatory in the classical era. The Christian values of this period demanded that only certain kind of content was acceptable to the public. Works that were perceived to lack moral and intellectual seriousness were not given room to thrive. This is the kind of calamity that greeted art from colonised lands, considered heathens and lacking the values for a moral, Christian life. They were to be observed for the sake of curiosity, not as models of high art.

As already discussed, the scientific discoveries in the 19^th Century Victorian Britain and the perceptions of race were hugely influential in the perception of Benin art and the art from other colonised lands. The beliefs about the hierarchy of races, the denigration of colonial cultures, the plunder and treatment of these looted artefacts and the adoration of classical culture over other cultures in the Victorian age all made it hard for Benin art to exert any noticeable influence in 19^th Century Britain.

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