Mary Stainbank, Modernism and the ‘Spirit of Africa’
The intention in this paper is to investigate, through specific examples of
sculptures by the Durban born Mary Agnes Stainbank (1899-1996), the
relationship between an indigenous South African iconography, and a Europeanbased
modernist formal idiom. Stainbank identified her intentions as depicting
the ‘spirit of Africa’. It will be argued that a post-colonial approach is essential to
the construction of cultural difference, which forms the basis of what Stainbank
identified as the African ‘spirit’, as opposed to a primitivist approach, which
describes the efforts of early 20th century European painters and sculptors to
subvert those established aesthetic canons and conventions they considered
restrictive and outdated. It is also significant (and ironic) to note that, in the
absence of a South African modernist idiom at the beginning of the 20th century,
the artist had to acquire such a formal ‘language’ in Britain, in order to represent
what was for her, truly African.