When Nicholas Mukomberanwa wants to size up a newly quarried stone for sculpture, he hauls it and his tools to a shady hilltop on his farm near Ruwa, Zimbabwe. There, huge, yellow boulders form a natural amphitheater, and, says the artist, ”I feel strength.” He ponders a massive, unformed hunk of dark green serpentine, and adds, ”It is very quiet and peaceful there. You only hear birds and the whistling of nature. The stone can actually tell you what lies inside. I only have to take away what has been hiding it.”
Mukomberanwa, 48, and a dozen other deans of Shona sculpture have been talking to stones for more than 30 years now, in the process creating what some observers have called the finest body of contemporary art in Africa.
”I`ve seen some Shona sculpture, when it was exhibited here twice at Art Expo,” says Isobel Neal, whose Chicago gallery is at 200 W. Superior. ”It`s classic, beautifully crafted, universal in its appeal, because it addresses universal issues.”
The Shona sculptors` strength has been a talent for drawing on traditional beliefs to create striking works, unfettered by any artistic school or ancient tribal pattern. Typically, they will circle a stone for hours or days, then fall upon it with hammer and chisel and quickly complete a piece, leaving the final smoothing, sanding and waxing to assistants.
Through a combination of timely advice and historical accident, Zimbabwe broke the pattern of the rest of Africa of channeling artists into mass production of curios.
The leading artists of Shona sculpture, which is named for Zimbabwe`s majority tribe, have cracked the international fine arts market; prices have gone up astronomically in the last decade, with some large pieces now selling for as much as $10,000. The most successful sculptors have bought big farms outside the Zimbabwean capital, Harare.
Now the question is whether the guiding principles of Shona sculpture can survive growing international recognition-and the pressure of an expanding foreign market.
”Come after two years, there will be nothing,” laments John Takawira, 50, the most famous of the first-generation artists, whose birds, animals and human faces emerge from rough-hewn rock.
Takawira, who says he conceives his pieces in dreams that conjure up the lost sculpture of his Shona ancestors, warns, ”There are a lot more people involved now, but the work is going to be nothing.”
Not necessarily, insist some gallery owners-and a younger generation of sculptors.
”There is a danger,” says Roy Guthrie, who directs one of the largest of a half-dozen galleries in Zimbabwe that specialize in Shona sculpture.
”There is commercialization creeping in. One has to be discriminating. What is required is a major, powerful retrospective exhibition in the great museums of the United States and Europe.”
Another long-time dealer is more blunt.
”Every unemployed man in Zimbabwe is punching a rock,” says Olivia Burdett-Coutts, director of the Vukutu Gallery in Harare. ”There is a lot of junk being shown.”
It was a British gallery director, Frank McEwen, who set Shona sculpture on its course-and first warned of the pitfalls of success.
McEwen arrived in what then was the federation of Rhodesia in 1956 to set up a National Gallery. Schooled in Paris, he was schooled in the teaching techniques developed by Gustave Moreau, acknowledged by the leading French impressionists as a key to drawing out an artist`s individuality.
In the colonial capital, then called Salisbury, McEwen first supplied paints and canvas to museum staff. But he found that most gravitated toward working local stone-first soapstone, and later serpentine, a much harder stone that occurs locally in a wide range of hues from green to reddish brown to black.
Dramatic rock outcroppings-often decorated with aboriginal paintings-distinguish the landscape in Zimbabwe, set on a high plateau the size of Montana in southern Africa.
Soon McEwen had a dedicated group of apprentices, enough to support a colony in the remote highlands on the country`s eastern border, where there is an abundant supply of serpentine.
Typically, local spirit mediums helped select the site, named Vukutu, or
”place of peace.” The Shona, like most African tribes, believe in the constant presence and importance of the spirits of their ancestors; tribal elders and spirit mediums keep believers in touch with the spirits. Success in life-and successful sculpture-requires such communication.
The Vukutu colony produced an astonishing variety of sculpture styles. In all, the aim has been to depict the spirits of things, rather than the things themselves-water, fire, plants, animals, ancestors. Under McEwen`s guidance, this led to a trend toward abstraction.
Unlike the artists of West Africa, the Shona sculptors had no known tradition to draw on, and there was no role in religious ritual for their works. The only evidence of any previous stone-carving tradition is mysterious stone ruins at Great Zimbabwe, built about 1500, which included giant soapstone birds that were adopted as the national symbol at independence in 1980.
In colonial times, schoolchildren were taught that Great Zimbabwe had been built by explorers, perhaps Phoenicians. But the Shona sculptors now claim to have rediscovered a lost indigenous art form.
”They (the Vukutu colony artists) are perfectly attuned to render art from the vast potential of creativity, and from the energy and upsurge of awakening Africa,” McEwen wrote in the late 1960s, as the sculptors he had encouraged began to reach an international audience, through shows in New York, London and Paris.
McEwen cautioned: ”Elements of spoilation abound-airport art factories, over-production, demoralization from success, the clutches of unsympathetic dealers and possible danger of some form of state control, such as that which spoiled Eskimo art.”
Just as the Vukutu artists were achieving their first successes, another colony began to flourish. This one was founded by Tom Blomefeld, a white tobacco farmer who turned his hired hands to working the serpentine found on the property, Tangenenge, situated in a chrome-rich geological formation called the Great Dyke. Sculpture was an alternative to unemployment when economic sanctions against Rhodesia began to hit home.
”I was a tobacco grader,” recalled Henry Munyaradzi, 67, who bought a farm outside Harare four years ago. ”I was looking for work, and I just came across people carving. I asked if I could stay with them, and Tom Blomefeld said, `You are welcome.` I started the next day.
”The picture of the piece comes from the picture in the stone,” said Munyaradzi, who sat barefoot on the lawn outside his farm house in a dusty pair of overalls. As he chiseled at an abstract bust, the rock gave off the clear ring typical of serpentine and emblematic of the Zimbabwe sculpture colonies. A fire smouldered nearby, warming another piece so that it would absorb a coat of wax.
Tangenenge was forced to disband in 1978 after Blomefeld sold the farm because of an escalating guerrilla war. But after independence, it reopened on a corner of the old property, and now the colony is home to several dozen sculptors.
Many more now work in the suburbs of Harare or in far-flung tribal homelands, encouraged by the success of the first generation of sculptors.
”When they saw you could make a living out of it, they started carving seriously,” says Michael Masedza, 24, who works under a shade tree behind a Harare hotel. ”Most of the pioneer artists aren`t educated. To be a sculptor, there`s no need to go to an art school, if you have inborn talent.”
But he complains that the artist now is becoming expendable. Gallery owners pay little for works by little-known sculptors, then mark up prices by a factor of five or six, he says, adding, ”We`re the cheapest part of the process.”
Still, young artists like Brighton Sango, 30, have been able to break free of the pack. Sango`s pieces are starkly angular, and he says he often is accused of imitating the cubists.
”I`ve never even visited the whole of Zimbabwe, let alone overseas,” he says in his defense.
His pieces may be contemporary, but the philosophy behind them is that of his elders. The angular pieces have titles like ”Meditation” and ”Spiritual Protection.”
”I sort of X-ray the stone, and I can see a figure in it,” he says.
”The idea is there if the spirit is there. If the spirit is there, you go very quickly.”
