The Oshogbo Group

Between 1962 and 1966, after Nigeria gained Independence from Britain, a group of artists emerged in the Yoruba town of Oshogbo in southwestern Nigeria. They participated in art workshops conducted by expatriates, particularly Susanne Wenger, Ulli Beier and Georgina Beier. The artists combined traditional subject matter and stories with Western artistic media and techniques. Many had been involved in dance, theater and music as members of Duro Ladipo’s theatre company and remained creatively linked. Their works were characterized as trans-genre and retained the performative momentum of Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork). The artists, among them Jacob Afolabi, Rufus Ogundele, Jimoh Buraimoh, Adebisi Fabunmi, Taiwo Olanyi (Twins Seven-Seven), Muraina Oyelami, Adebisi Akanji, Buraimoh Gbadamosi and Nike Okundaye, gained international fame and patronage, continuing with their work even after the Beiers left Nigeria. The Beiers continued to support Oshogbo artists in Sydney, Australia and Bayreuth, Germany while Susanne Wenger involved them in the artistic recreation of the Osun grove in Oshogbo itself. In the early 1960s, three expatriate artists, the art critic Ulli Beier (1922–2011), and visual artists Georgina Betts (later Beier, b. 1936 ) and Susanne Wenger (Beier’s first wife, 1915–2009) settled around Oshogbo, setting an art movement in motion. At the same time playwright Duro Ladipo (1931–1978) arrived with his theatre group. In March 1962, Ladipo opened up his home as a cultural center housing the Oshogbo chapter of Mbari Mbayo (an outgrowth of an arts organization originating at the University of Ibadan) in his "Popular Bar."

Maria Martins (1894–1973)

Maria Martins was a Brazilian sculptor and writer, a founding member of the Fundação do Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, and a co-founder and exhibitor for the BienalInternacional de São Paulo. She was born in Campanha, Minas Gerais, Brazil in 1894. She made a name for herself in the international art world of the 1940s as "the sculptor of the tropics" and "the great sculptor of Surrealism," though she was largely overlooked between the 1950s and early 2000s. The wife of a diplomat, in the art world she preferred simply to be known as "Maria." She was influenced by Jacques Lipchitz, who encouraged exploration of her Brazilian identity in her work, and by Surrealism. A member of the expatriate artists’ community in New York, she was championed on the international stage by André Breton and held a long affair with Marcel Duchamp. Maria’s sculpture, based on natural forms and reflecting deep introspection, became increasingly abstract over the course of her career. On returning to Brazil from the United States in 1949, Brazilian critics rejected her work for its non-traditional and eroticized manner and themes. Nonetheless Martin used her international connections in the art world to promote modern art in Brazil until her death.

Dadaism

Dada began in Zurich, Switzerland, in the midst of World War I. Several expatriate artists converged in the city to escape the brutal and seemingly nonsensical destruction of the war. They responded in turn with nonsense, creating an anarchic and subversive anti-aesthetic that would have profound effects on the history of the avant-garde. Indeed, nearly every major Western art movement since the 1920s, as well as culture jammers of all kinds, can claim some connection to the Zurich Dadaists. They initially met at the Cabaret Voltaire—named after the French Enlightenment philosopher—that was opened by theater director Hugo Ball and his partner, the performer, Emmy Hennings, on February 5, 1916. Until the summer of that year, the international group met nightly in a charged Dionysian atmosphere where an audience of fellow expats and dissidents experienced a provocative mix of sound and simultaneous poetry in different languages, Cubist dances with African masks, as well as readings from Expressionist and Futurist texts, Voltaire, and from the artists’ own manifestos. Works by Hans Arp and Otto van Rees hung on the walls. The Dadaists violently rejected the values of Western art and culture, which they believed had contributed to the outbreak of war in the first place. They were especially against the ideas of beauty, mimesis, the myth of originality, the truth of reason, and the transparency of communication.

NEW LIGHT ON THE LABYRINTH FRESCO FROM THE PALACE AT KNOSSOS

Considered here is the ‘Labyrinth Fresco’ (or ‘Maze Fresco’), fragments of which were found by Sir Arthur Evans in the Minoan palace at Knossos. Interestingly, the pattern was rendered through engraving, with the exclusively red colour used applied within the grooves. Oddly, this design is very similar to one shown as a patterned floor in a recently excavated wall painting discovered by the Austrian excavator Manfred Bietak, at Tell el Dab'a, in the Nile Delta area of Egypt, where it depicts an arena used for bull leaping. The present article therefore raises the question of whether the ‘Labyrinth Fresco’ from Knossos was actually decoration on a patterned plaster floor rather than a wall, and could have acted as the model for the one depicted in the Tell el Dab'a painting. One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that the Tell el Dab'a painters were Greek expatriate artists – a matter that prompts questions about actual international contacts between the Aegean and Egypt in the mid-second millennium bc The paintings in Egypt clearly imply travelling Aegean artists, though further and more formal contacts probably also existed between the two countries.

MESMERISTS AND OTHER MEDDLERS: SOCIAL DARWINISM, DEGENERATION, AND EUGENICS IN TRILBY

About two-thirds of the way through George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894), a novel that entranced the reading public with its descriptions of Bohemian Paris and mesmerism, there is a seventeen-page digression on The Origin of Species. This rumination is sparked by the fact that Little Billee is “reading Mr. Darwin's immortal book for the third time” while he contemplates proposing to the parson's daughter, Alice (180; pt. 5). Ultimately, he cannot bring himself to do so because Alice believes, among other Bible stories, that “[t]he world was made in six days. It is just six thousand years old,” a view debunked in The Origin by Darwin's depiction of the gradual evolution of species over vast periods of time (174; pt. 5). While the controversy elicited in the second half of the nineteenth century by Darwin's theory of natural selection continues today, the question remains: what is this debate doing in a novel about expatriate artists and the woman they love? I read this seeming digression from the sentimental and sensational plot of the novel as a cue to the importance of Darwinian ideas to reading Trilby. In this article, I trace Du Maurier's engagement in Trilby and in his cartoons with various permutations of Social Darwinism, notably degeneration (especially its relationship to class), society's moral and cultural evolution, and eugenics. I argue that the novelist negotiates between Darwin and his interpreters as he resists collectivism, or state intervention in questions of social welfare, in favor of individual liberty in matters of sexual selection.