The image of a figure in deep contemplation has resonated across cultures and throughout history. From Auguste Rodin's "The Thinker" to ancient Neolithic figurines, the pose evokes a sense of profound thought and introspection. In African art, this theme is also present, with various sculptures depicting figures in similar poses, each carrying its own unique cultural and historical significance.
The Thinker by Auguste Rodin, a universally recognized symbol of deep thought.
Blackamoor Figures: A Complex History
One example of African figures in decorative art is the "blackamoor." This term refers to a type of figure, typically found in European decorative art from the Early Modern period, depicting a man of sub-Saharan African descent, usually in clothing that suggests high status. Common examples of items and objects decorated in the blackamoor style include sculpture, jewellery, and furniture.
Typically, the sculpted figures carried something, such as candles or a tray. In jewelry, blackamoor figures usually appear in antique Venetian earrings, bracelets, cuff links, and brooches (Moretto Veneziano). Blackamoor figures are typically male, sometimes depicted with a head covering such as a turban. Sculptures are typically carved from ebony, or painted black to contrast with the bright colors of the embellishments.
In decorative sculpture, the full body is depicted, either to hold trays as a servant figure, or bronze sconces to hold candles or light fixtures. They may be incorporated into small stands, tables, or andirons, and are often portrayed in pairs. Often, blackamoor figures are depicted in acrobatic positions that would be physically impossible to hold for any extended length of time.
Read also: Experience Fad's Fine African Cuisine
The Dunham Massey Hall sundial depicts a blackamoor carrying the sundial above his head. From the period of the Atlantic slave trade, it has also been categorised as a 'kneeling slave'. The statue was set up as one monument to honour the 1st Earl of Warrington by his son, the second Earl in c. 1735.
It's important to note that in modern times, the blackamoor is often considered to have racist connotations, due its association with colonialism and slavery. Art historian Adrienne L. Childs notes this association in her work.
The term "blackamoor" is ultimately derived from the name of the Moors, a historic people in the western Mediterranean.
A blackamoor figure holding a shell-shaped dish.
Despite the controversy, blackamoor figures have been collected by various individuals throughout history. Vogue editor Diana Vreeland had a famous collection of blackamoor figurines and blackamoor jewelry and famously said: “Have I ever showed you my little blackamoor heads from Cartier with their enameled turbans? I'm told it's not in good taste to wear blackamoors anymore, but I think I'll revive them." Civil rights activist and pop star Anita Pointer of the Pointer Sisters has some blackamoor pieces in her extensive collection of black memorabilia that she started in the 1970s.
Read also: The Story Behind Cachapas
In heraldry, a blackamoor may be a charge in the blazon, or description of a coat of arms. The reasons for the inclusion of a blackamoor head vary.
Fred Wilson, an African-American sculptor, displayed an installation at the 2003 Venice Biennale that incorporated blackamoors. Wilson placed wooden blackamoors carrying acetylene torches and fire extinguishers. Wilson noted that such figures are so common in Venice, few people notice them. He said, "They are in hotels everywhere in Venice ... which is great, because all of a sudden you see them everywhere.
Alberto Giacometti's Engagement with African Art
Alberto Giacometti continually engaged with African artists’ creations from his early career through his later model-based work of the 1940s through 1960s, which is the time frame in focus for the featured exhibition Alberto Giacometti: Toward the Ultimate Figure. He didn’t seek to understand their aesthetic perspectives or their works’ meaning. Instead, what compelled him was a personal interpretation of African arts as reality-revealing archetypes:
The earliest sculptures he created in Paris drew from African artworks that he viewed in ethnographic museums or in personal collections. These displays were the direct result of European colonial conquest and exploration across Africa. Brought to Europe by the thousands since the 1870s in violent, bureaucratic, or even mundane ways, African artworks and weapons were often displayed to shore up racist conceptions of savagery or primitiveness. First influenced by colonial geography, Western definitions of “art” further refined the “African art canon” to favor wooden sculptures or masks from Western and Central Africa.
The impact of this narrow “African art canon” is seen in 1927’s Spoon Woman and The Couple, as is Giacometti’s tendency to select elements and interpretations of African artworks. Scholars have linked Spoon Woman’s scoop-like form to an oversized ceremonial ladle that Dan communities in Côte d’Ivoire once honored a generous woman with during festivals.
Read also: Techniques of African Jewellery
Unlike his artistic peers in Paris, such as Pablo Picasso, Giacometti focused his collecting efforts on books rather than artworks: many of these are linked to his drawing and sculpture practices.
While he often spoke or wrote about trips to the Louvre and the Trocadéro Ethnographic Museum to see Egyptian or sub-Saharan African art, books had fueled Giacometti’s appetite for copy-sketching since childhood: Through his book collection, Giacometti became acquainted with artworks made in places he never visited. He based many of his sketches of African artworks on photographic illustrations from art, anthropology, ethnography, and Surrealist publications.
Giacometti’s unusual way of rendering the human body as flattened, colorless, and elongated reflects how he viewed African artists’ rendering of the body as depicted and transformed through the lenses of European photographers. Studying photographs of African arts prompted him to make visual translations that affected his sculptural practice and possibly encouraged his near-obsessive focus on the human form and head.
Echoing anthropometric-style photographs of African individuals and sculptures, many of his later drawings and sculptures (especially those called “Man” or “Woman”) depicted unclothed, hairless bodies or heads in frontal or side views. When drawing, Giacometti preserved photography’s transformation of three-dimensional African sculptures into two dimensions and from color to black and white. He then reversed it when sculpting; like a visual version of the “telephone” game, he altered African artists’ works through this process and imposed his own way of seeing. Doubling and reflecting the underlying colonial and anthropological contexts of the photographs he used as source material, his artworks held their own meaning, yet could never be completely true to the original.
O Pensador: The Thinker of Angola
“O Pensador” (The Thinker) is a statue of Tchokwe (also known as Chokwe) origin. It is a symbol of Angolan national culture. The figure represents an elderly person that could be a man or woman. Designed in symmetric profile, the face is slightly bent down. The sculpture expresses an intentional subjectivism as, in Angola, the elderly represent wisdom because they experience long years and knowledge of the secrets of life.
The Chokwe people are an ethnic group primarily in Angola, southern Africa, and parts of Congo and Zambia. The Government of Angola offered the sculpture O Pensador as a gift to the United Nations.
The National Museum of Anthropology (Museu Nacional de Antropologia), which is located in the Barrio dos Coqueiros of Luanda, is one of the most important in the capital of Angola; it is certainly the oldest, being founded in 1976, just a little less than one year after Angola’s proclamation of independence.
The most famous of the sculptures exhibited at the Anthropological Museum of Luanda is, beyond any doubt, the 16 cm high statuette, known as ‘The Thinker’, depicting a man with elbows posed on his knees and hands placed on his head, although some scholars think that the sculpture represents an elderly woman.
The hands that hold the back of the skull tightly with a dynamic gesture, symbolize the tight hermeticism of thought, by actually synthesizing the popular idea of the wisdom of the old man among this ethnicity. Cokwe elders are, in fact, considered thinkers and philosophers par excellence, given their habit of meditation and their constant search for etiological, cosmological and cosmogonic elements.
O Pensador statue at the National Museum of Anthropology in Luanda, Angola.
It is said that the living copy of this statuette was a very old soba (village chief) who lived in a village called Chitato. He used to complain: “Trees drop their seeds into the ground and so when the die they can be born again, while man is a seed that when placed under the ground does not sprout anymore. All my friends are dead, I’m about to leave and I won’t be able to enjoy the sunlight any more.
According to the legend, God finally decided to give an answer to this tormenting dilemma. The next day the house was built and in front of the great crowd, God made the sun and the moon enter the house and commanded that a dish with food for each person of the village should be put inside the house. Then God made a man and a dog enter the house and they were given their respective dishes with food. Finally, the small entrance of the house was completely walled up.
The morning after, the people of the village gathered in front of the walled up house, and God ordered that the entrance that had been closed the previous day be reopened and so all the people, to their astonishment, could verify that the sun and the moon, despite the fact that there were no doors or windows, were not inside the house anymore and that the sun was triumphantly coming up over the horizon.
The story reflects the deep philosophical and spiritual traditions embedded within the culture represented by "O Pensador."
Other Examples of Thinking Figures
While Rodin's "The Thinker" is perhaps the most famous example of a contemplative figure in art, it is not alone. Other examples include:
- The "Karditsa Thinker": A Neolithic clay figurine found in the area of Karditsa in Thessaly, Greece, dating back to around 3900 BCE.
- The "Thinker of Cernavodă": A terracotta sculpture from the Late Neolithic era in Romania.
- Michelangelo's Tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici: Features a sculpture of the Duke portrayed as a thinker.
These examples, along with the African "Thinking Man" statues, demonstrate the enduring human fascination with contemplation and the diverse ways in which it has been expressed through art.
