visual arts in an artistically uninformed nigerian society

10
For, theirs was total distortion or abstraction,
reorganization, representation, interpretation,
symbolization and intellectual conceptualization of their
subjects. That is, while the European artist’s philosophy of
creation promoted art that was photographic in appearance,
the African ideology of art was antagonistic to any art
production that was naturalistic or photographic. While the
European artist merely represented or reproduced what he
saw, externalization of subject, the African artist
interpreted what he felt, internalization, the inward essence,
of his subject.
The European artist focused on physical body, but
the African artist focused on the spirituality enclosed by the
body. Europe concentrated on physical beauty, Africa was
pre-occupied with moral beauty or character. The African
ideology of art is strongly reflected in the byword of the
Yoruba, that physical beauty without moral beauty or good
character is not beauty but vanity. One can now understand
why the African, therefore the Nigerian, traditional artist
made their art images disobey all the rules of the European
art; without formal proportion, symmetry, semblance and
morphological detail. The traditional African artists were
“creators" of art, bringing into physical reality what had not
been; while the European artists were “makers” of art,
producing, repeating and imitating what was already there.
These, among others, were what the colonial administration
in Nigeria did not understand before their indictment of
Africa and proclamation of European artistic superiority.
However, as the colonial administrators were
contriving chimerical reasons to demean, with atmost racial
disrespect, the unique and natural creativity of the African,
Christianity instantly became a surrogate in this apparent