Zimbabwean stone sculpture: The invention of a Shona tradition

"This thesis details how Zimbabwean stone sculpture has been creatively conceived in terms of a ""tribal"" renaissance by the first director of the National Gallery in Harare, Zimbabwe, Frank McEwen. Despite the complexity belying the movement's history, McEwen initiated the Shona sculpture discourse through drawing upon theories about artistic revivals developed by French art historian Henri Focillon as well as the pedagogical techniques of the nineteenth century symbolist painter Gustave Moreau. In doing so, McEwen presented the works created during his tenure (1957-1973) as the reemergence of an ancient Shona tradition. He heralded Shona sculpture as a cultural revival that would stimulate a return to the spiritual in modern European art which he construed as hopelessly trivialized. Through a critical analysis of his writings, the dissertation reveals the complexity subsumed in the construction of a tradition rooted in essentialist conceptualizations of ethnicity and history and heavily inflected by early modernist and symbolist ideas of art as sacred."

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Anthropology, Cultural

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2011

Author dc:creator

• Zilberg, Jonathan Leslie

Contributors dc:contributor

• Gottlieb, Alma J.

• Anthropology, Cultural
• History, African
• Art History

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 1996 Zilberg, Jonathan Leslie

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

9780591089479
AAI9702727
(UMI)AAI9702727

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/23660