Another case of going to look for one thing and being surprised by something else on the shelf… What caught my eye was the inscription on the front cover identifying this album of children’s art as the creations of African schoolboys: most of this kind of material in Cotsen comes from Western Europe or North America.
The inside of the front wrapper is filled with a note in block letters explaining that primary school students between the ages of nine and thirteen cut linoleum blocks or made watercolor drawings from their imaginations. The group was a mix of boys who had lived for two or more generations in the city of Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harari, the capital of Zimbabwe) and the bush, living with relatives in order to take advantage of the educational opportunities. Laid in the album is a card: all the names of the boys who contributed to the album are written in pencil on the back.
Here are some examples of the artwork in the album. The first linocut is unsigned and seems to be a fanciful design based on plants. The second has two boys in the foreground and floating overhead two boys riding bicycles down a road. “Tongai 1950” appears in the line of triangles along the bottom. “Tongai” is a boy’s name in Shona, a language spoken in Zimbabwe.
According to the author of the note, the girl pupils at Chirodzo School were excluded from art instruction: they took domestic arts where they learned to make puddings and sweets. the boys would have rather traded places with them instead of participating in the school’s world-famous art program under the direction of the Canon Edward Paterson (1895-1974).
These watercolors suggest otherwise. Kenneth Kudenga boldly signed his name on a colorful landscape with animals. The caption written for the second watercolor explains: “They love setting themselves problems–here the problem of showing a beast drinking from the front.” The next one according to the caption shows “the terrors of the bush–crocodile, snakes, lion, leopard appear often in the work of city children, afraid of the bush.”
A Scot who emigrated with his family to South Africa in 1901. After military service in Namibia and East Africa, he accepted a scholarship to study at London’s School of Arts and Crafts, then returned to South Africa to train for the Anglican priesthood. After ordination in 1928, he served in several Transvaal congregations, where his artistic interests surfaced in the launching of projects to teach pupils skills like bas relief carving or painting murals in churches.
Paterson enjoyed the reputation as the leading art educator in Africa. Between 1939 and 1953, he taught at Cyrene School, where he developed an unusual curriculum for art education. Under his tuition, his students so distinguished themselves that their work was displayed in a series of travelling exhibitions between 1949 and 1953 in South Africa, England, and America. White Rhodesians began buying the young men’s artwork, which helped to underwrite the cost of classes at Cyrene. When he moved to the Chirodzo School in Salisbury, his students’ work continued to attract international attention. Grace McCann Morley, the forward-thinking director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, organized an exhibition of 900 pieces of African student art which was view there in 1958. The archive remained at SFMoA, where a curator recently highlighted it in a video presentation.
This recognition may have encouraged Paterson to think that the director Frank McEwen of the new National Gallery in Salisbury established 1957 would welcome him and his students. When opportunities did not materialize, the two men quarrelled openly with change in the situation. Eventually McEwen’s work on Zimbabwean art overshadowed that of Paterson, whose influence has been questioned by scholars more recently. His own limitations as an artist, it has been argued, may have prevented students to move beyond copying his style and to develop more comprehensive technical skills. His harshest critics claim most of his students ended up in the tourist trade and few established vibrant artistic practices.
No one disputes, however, that some of Zimbabwe’s first artists got their start in Paterson’s classes. It would be interesting to see how many of the boys whose work appears in this album continued to make art after they left Chirodzo School.
