Zimbabwean stone sculpture: The invention of a Shona tradition

Abstract

"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."

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