Word: africanism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Down at Dunster House, the humanities have taken on an exotic cast this year. An expert on witchcraft has just filled the room left by a tall African named Selbourne Mvusi, who was billed as a "Zulu artist." Of genuine Zulu origin, Mvusi produces sombre, impressionistic oils and mournful woodcuts. He is studying art education at Penn State, at the suggestion of Professor Gordon All-port, who also invited him to Dunster House...
With that, Mvusi began taking liberal arts courses, history and literature for the most part. His interest in art developed on its own, since South African art has been stamped out, and standard fine arts courses do not exist in Negro universities. "Even in white universities they don't admit non-Europeans in fine arts courses," Mvusi points...
...film job was tempting. "So many African pictures are being made these days that this film company wanted to hire a full-time native artist. I was young and romantic and I could see myself with beret and cigar, you know...
...with the recent decision of the South African government to overhaul native education--"Education for the Bantu"--art and the humanities have suffered, and the pioneer art education project has suffered as well. So this is really the best time for Mvusi to be studying in America...
...from Spinoza. He escaped from his bourgeois surroundings into adolescence, studied in Venice, bummed in Paris, took to art. It was a spiraling fall to greatness. Living ever more loosely, he froze his style to crystalline perfection. His carvings of heads and figures look like keen white refinements of African idols-which also influenced his pictures...