Ethiopian Narrative Painting

In order to understand how artistic images are produced and interpreted in Ethiopia, it is essential to remember that the Orthodox Church stresses the view that religious icons are not images subject to veneration in themselves but rather a means to direct the devotion of the faithful toward the sacred persons they represent. This is the theologians’ explicit justification for the fact that icons are bi-dimensional painted portraits and that pictorial techniques to create illusions of perspective and volume are almost never used. In Christian Ethiopia, tri-dimensional (“realist”) images are never venerated and, contrary to bi-dimensional crosses of which there is a great profusion of styles, one never finds any (sculptured) crucifixes in orthodox churches. Ethiopian Christian art thus strongly differs from both what we usually identify as African art and Semitic influenced art. It is a figurative art painted on cotton canvas or parchment that is reminiscent of Byzantine and Coptic iconography, and that transforms into icons certain themes and styles of sacred Catholic painting.

Unlike religious icons, Western style modern paintings produced by Ethiopian artists, such as that shown in the two or three art galleries of Addis Ababa, are extremely marginal objects, practically unrecognised by the overwhelming majority of the population, both rural and urban. Saddled between these two unconnected universes – that of the veneration of religious icons and that of the fruition of lay Western-style “artistic” paintings – there is a hybrid genre, though: a genre born and bred under the stylistic and structural conditionings of traditional religious painting, but which developed and survived thanks to the fact that, for over a century now, Western expatriates and tourists have been interested in buying them. This art is generally seen as a “folk” and “naïf” that continually repeats the same historical themes in a very conventional way. Never the less, it shows an aesthetic potential that is rarely equalled by the so-called Ethiopian “modern art”. Moreover, it is a particularly attractive type of painting for people who, like me, grew up reading comic strips and so recognize it as “storytelling”, which doesn’t demand that the observer-reader perceives it as “art”.

It was in Addis Ababa, in the beginning of 1999, that the present exhibition on Ethiopian Art started to take shape. It was there, when informally discussing art, representation and power in Ethiopia, that I decided to think about collecting the folk paintings that narrate one of the best known and cherished stories in Ethiopia: the legend of the meeting of king Solomon of Israel and queen Makeda, also known as the queen of Sheba. Both in its literary form (either oral or written) and in sequential paintings, the Makeda-Solomon story has been used, since immemorial times, to convey ideas of national identity. More than any other, this story explains how centralized political power in Ethiopia was influenced by the introduction of Judaism and Christianity in the country. The legend of the birth of Menelik, the first king of the Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia, is actually a local development of the Ancient Testament’s episode of the visit of the queen of the South to Solomon, when he was building the Temple in Jerusalem. According to the versions that circulate in Ethiopia, the red skinned Makeda slept with king Solomon and conceived Menelik, who was born somewhere half way between Israel and Ethiopia. Menelik, who grew up to be king in the same genealogical line as Jesus Christ, not only symbolizes an idea of national Ethiopian exclusivity as the “chosen people” (he carries the Ark of the Covenant to his mother’s kingdom, after visiting Jerusalem), but also the importance of the miscegenation between African and Semitic populations, as a racial criterion that identifies the nationalities that dominated the Abyssinian high plateaux, as opposed to the black servants and slaves (the Arabic influenced term abasha, from which “Abyssinian” derives, means “mixed”).

The folk paintings that depict the story of Makeda, her visit to Israel, the conception of Menelik and his low-cast half-brother, the son of the black servant that accompanied his mother, and Menelik’s coronation as sovereign of Ethiopia (as “lion of Judah”), are strange but not unique objects. I started to collect paintings that represented the conquests of the Muslim invader Mohamed Grañ and the martyrdom of Christopher da Gama, the battle of Adwa fought between Ethiopians and Italians in 1896 (celebrated as the first African victory against the European colonial powers), scenes from the life of emperor Thewodoros and his death after the defeat in Magdala against an Anglo-Indian punitive expedition, etc. Some of the paintings I bought were low quality pastiches, usually sold to the infrequent tourists that venture into Ethiopia. But as I explored the hidden corners of the shops and tents of the Markato, the great market of Addis Ababa, I started to find more delicate, and more aesthetically seductive, pieces. I discovered some paintings produced by well-known painters like Jembere Hailu (deceased in 1999), whose personal styles lend an unsuspected strength to the most conventional themes.

I later showed these folk paintings to the Director of the Comics Library of Lisbon, João Paulo Cotrim, and proposed him this exhibition, to draw public’s attention to the characteristics of sequenciality and narrativity in Ethiopian art. Thanks to his enthusiasm and also to Ato Girma Fisseha’s dedication and efficiency, it was possible to complement the paintings I had brought back from Ethiopia with a number of others from the City of Munich’s Museum of Folklore, where the latter is curator of the Ethiopian collection, to offer a more rich and coherent vision of this type of art.

One thing that is common to most of these paintings is the fact that they are thought of as “stories” that share a share a number of codifying elements. Just like the fidël – the syllabic writing of Amharic language -, they are usually “read” from left to right and from top to bottom. The use the same visual grammar as the painted frescos visible in Ethiopian Orthodox churches: i.e., the importance of the eyes, the opposition between beneficial characters represented as full-faced, and malignant ones represented in profile, the use of plain flat colours, the drawing of black lines as contours of the figures, etc. They are also usually un-influenced by representational techniques designed to create illusions of perspective and tri-dimensionality.

But these paintings equally reveal a selective appropriation of certain pictorial traits of Western origin. The French anthropologist Marcel Griaule once noted in a small article on Ethiopian lay painting that this genre can easily incorporate graphic, technical and stylistic innovations, unlike what happens with religious icon production, which demand that the painter respects a tradition of representation that is defined by the clergymen. In truth, a most seductive aspect of these pictures lies in the delicate equilibrium between an old tradition of sequential painting and the limited introduction of circumstantial innovations.

It is also quite relevant that the painter who produces these “folk” paintings is frequently the same who paints church icons, who renovates the frescoes in the outside walls of the Maqdas (the inner sanctuary of churches), who paints touristy images and manufactures copies of traditional motifs.

The way the Ethiopian painter dynamically alternates between the different genres deserves some attention, for that can be an important clue to inspect the status of plastic art as conceived in Ethiopia and in the West.

Traditionally, the perception that a religious icon is not to be venerated in itself, for it is simply a vehicle for venerate a sacred person, means that its intrinsic value as a work of art is quite meaningless, in Ethiopia. In principle, an icon is always the copy of another icon. It is this quality that helps the faithful in attaining spiritual strength that emanates from the represented sacred person: that is, the icon is not venerated because it is a relic to be idolatrised, but because it is a link in the chain of representation and copy that connects the faithful to the original image, which is the invisible nature of the sacred person created by God. In Western civilizations, due to a complex historical process, the art of painting overvalues the artist’s illusive creativity, as well as aspects of stylistic, semantic and technical originality of his/her work of art. Moreover, a pronounced dichotomy between ideas of representation and reproduction, and between copy and original, tends to obscure questions that are on the contrary highlighted in Ethiopian art, be it religious or lay (“historic”).

On the other hand, the determination of the value of the contemporary work of art in the West in terms of its proclaimed “originality” (a value defined mainly by a market with a set of quite specific rules) is a question that is largely irrelevant in Ethiopian art. On the other hand, Western “artistic” painting clearly subordinates the elements of narrative sequentiality to the various aspects of the mimesis, since at least the Rinascimento, in the end of the 15th century. On the contrary, Ethiopian sequential art still respects a ancient historical background that is, to a certain degree, common to Western sequential art or graphic literature (the so-called “comics”): that which originates in the dynamic association between orally or written stories and their graphic representations, in Western and Eastern Christian traditions.

This formal connection between Ethiopian sequential art and Western comics, even if faint, highlights a number of common characteristics that call for comparative study: an “original” image is reproduced and multiplied by typographic mechanisms (in the case of printed comics) or by handcrafted means (in the case of Ethiopian sequential art), these multiple “copies” are easily accessible whereas the “original” image isn’t, a more or less elaborate iconographic grammar is dynamically enmeshed with literary written discourse.