Heart Of Darkness, Gleam of Gold

African tribal art falls into many loose categories -- the Islamic style in which figurative representation is prohibited, the broad groupings of central, west and southern Africa, and so on.

But beneath this, I see only two basic divisions, which can be illustrated by comparing the art of West Africa with that of Angola and the Congo.

The West African nations like Benin, modern-day Nigeria, Ivory Coast, etc were in contact with Portuguese and other Europeans from the Renaissance onward. There were wealthy kingdoms in West Africa even then, which deeply impressed the first whites to reach them.

The legacy of the great kingdoms of Ife and Benin is a style of art that is close to the Hellenistic ideal -- and for that reason, remains today very accessible to Western tastes. The same techniques of stone carving, bronze casting and terracotta modelling had evolved in West Africa as in ancient Greece and Rome.

More than that, art of the Ife period shared an aesthetic with Hellenistic art -- a striving for plasticity, realism, humanism. It produced objects made to please the eye and the hand, art made for a rich court where wealthy clients used it to enhance their lives and adorn their persons.

Art of the Congo is very different. In the Hellenistic sense, it is scarcely art at all. These are emanations of the spirit world, not the material world. These objects are not made to please the eye, but to penetrate, illuminate and influence the space where ancestors, gods and demons dwell. They speak of the uncertainty of life and of its sudden, terrible endings.

Where the art of Ife is imbued with human dignity, art of the Congo is shot with yearning and tragedy. There is immense variety in the tribal groupings that follow the River Congo to what Conrad called The Heart Of Darkness -- but nowhere do we find the serene plasticity of those Ife faces.

It has taken the West a long time to realize that this second kind of art is far closer to our modern spirit than the first. When the first Congo art reached Europe in the late 19th and early 20th Century, it struck a chord with great artists like Picasso and Modigliani who were already looking for new ways to interpret a world where uncertainty and terror would reign in the place of enlightenment.

Those artists, indeed, predigested African art for us, helping us to understand it, to the extent that we are now able to "recognize" the features that they found so exciting.

A good collection of African art should contain pieces from both sides.

So when you next look at African art, you might ask yourself whether it is materialistic or spiritual. Does it speak to your eyes or to your soul? Does it reflect the uncertainty and anxiety in your own life, or does it offer an ideal world where all is serene? How long do you think you will be happy with what it says to you?