While the historiography of art as an academic discipline can hardly be construed as a science, it is nevertheless governed by certain dominant paradigms in both of the senses that Thomas Kuhn intended. First, at any point in time there is a constellation of beliefs, values, and techniques shared by the community of scholars who comprise the discipline known as art history. This can be further broken down, altered, and refined for the various sub-fields, but taken together, the separate facets constitute a “way of seeing” art history which differs substantially from the “way of seeing,” say, political history.Applying Kuhn's second and more rigorous sense, the historiography of art is dominated by certain paradigms which serve as exemplars or models of puzzle-solutions. While these change over time (it is no longer permissible to ascribe German expressionism to “national character,” for example), they are so powerful that they function as unquestioned assumptions when in force. Even more importantly, they are frequently invisible because they are rarely made explicit. In European art history, the dominant paradigms have coalesced into entities such as “The Baroque” or “Mannerism” which are largely ontological models used to simplify the otherwise intractable complexity of European art styles and movements.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center and Regents of the University of California are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African Arts.Alarge proportion of the most exciting artistic production in Africa today comes from a number of artists who typically belong to the artisan or skilledworker class, and engage in artistic activity as a spare time occupation. With a limited amount of formal schooling, they live in the towns or cities, and straddle the gap between the educated urban elite and the rural peasant. Ulli Beier made particular note of this situation in his Contemporary Art in Africa (p. 107). Being very selectively Westernized, they tend not to know about (or react to) worldly devices such as international painting competitions or foreign fellowship programs. They are seldom chosen to spend a year in Iowa or at the Slade. Rather, they become known through informal local patronage, and the extent of their reputations depends heavily upon who their patrons happen to be.Richard Ndabagoye, a printmaker who has been active in Kampala over the last decade, is an example of this type of artist. He was born in the Kigoma region of (then) Tanganyika in 1937 and attended primary school there. His father was Habwe and his mother a Tutsi from Burundi. Ndabagoye came to Uganda in 1960 with the intention of seeking out his father-in-law in Bugerere, near Kampala. He looked for a job at the M-akerere School of Fine Art solely because he knew a Tanzanian friend who worked there. Subsequently, he was hired to help in the graphics department, and to do various odd jobs around the school. His only previous exposure to art was a bit of drawing instruction received in a missionary school.Jonathan Kingdon, an artist and lecturer who noticed Ndabagoye's interest in printmaking, taught him lithography. Later in 1962 a second member of the staff, Michael Adams, taught him the etching process. His first prints, Gods of the Rocks and River Bird were made that year. Encouraged by the Art School staff, his productivity began to increase, and a personal style began to develop. This culminated in a full-scale exhibition of his work in 1967 at the Nommo Gallery in Kampala. The show was an overwhelming success and established Ndabagoye as an important artist within Uganda.
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