BY MULUGETA GUDETA
The tenth anniversary of the passing away of the greatest Ethiopian modern artist passed largely unnoticed while the bulk of his artistic legacy and his former residence known as Villa Alpha are not yet turned into a public museum according to his will. Both his paintings and Villa Alpha are now waiting to be open to the public and welcome tourists who are long acquainted with Afewerk and his immortal works. Sadly enough prominent personalities in Ethiopia do not attract much attention when they are alive and they start to live in the public imagination often after their death.
Maitre Artist Afewerk Tekle was a controversial person as many of his contemporaries were. Though he was of a modest background his talent and acquaintance with the top members of the royal family under Emperor Haile Sellassie catapulted him into early recognition as the foremost Ethiopian artist whose gifts could transcend national boundaries and make him an international artistic figure.
The controversial nature of his character was not however related to his immense talent as an artist but to his personal opinions and sometimes quite eccentric behavior. Back in 1975, in an interview with Goh magazine, a publication issued by the then revolutionary youth organization, Afewerk was quoted as saying that the source of poverty in Ethiopia was laziness rather than exploitation by the ruling class as the revolutionaries maintained. This statement immediately earned him notoriety and quickly spread among the public, thereby associating the artist with the lives of the ruling class.
This had a negative impact on his popularity under the post-imperial regime that was a left-wing military junta that embraced socialist realism in arts rather than elitist trends imported from the West. Some of Afewerk’s early works like his depiction of Ethiopia as a mother embracing her baby, or that of the imperial coronation surrounded by priest and church symbols, earned him bad names and sometimes depiction as a monarchist and reactionary artist who represented the past rather than the future.
In an apparent attempt to disprove these allegations, Afewerk produced a work entitled “SEE, HEAR, SAY NO EVIL” which is an abstract painting with three people standing on a platform or so and represented in vivid colors of black, green and blue with a colorful landscape in the background. With this piece of art alone, Afewerk demonstrated that he lived up to his reputation as a modern artist and a man who could depict ordinary individuals in ordinary situations as he could paint priests and kings. The fact that the three characters are half-naked and do not have ears, mouths or eyes illustrate the central theme of the picture which Afewerk clearly showed in its title: “SEE, HEAR, SAY NO EVIL”
“Mother Ethiopia” is no doubt Afewerk’s masterpiece although there could be divergent interpretations of the painting in accordance with the class backgrounds of the critics. To some radicals, Ethiopia’s portrait as a corpulent and beautiful woman holding embracing her infant could be an exaggerated depiction of the country that was suffering from perennial hunger and poverty for most of the half century of imperial rule.
Even the picture of her child could be rejected outright because it was different from the picture of the average Ethiopian child, who, back in the 1974 Revolution emerged as an emaciated and fly-covered child. However, Afewerk might have worked on that picture with the idea of the future Ethiopia in his mind. Unfortunately, this infant did not appear to be born during and after his revolutionary years when the country was shaken by wars, famines and revolutions.
The painting entitled, “King Solomon Meets the Queen of Sheba” on the other hand is based on the Ethiopian legend and imagined by Afewerk, who did a great job in bringing the legend to life in popular imagination. Afewerk was also an excellent portrait and landscape painter who used vivid African colors to bring his personalities into life. The painting entitled, “the Afar Boy” is a good example.
“Afar Boy” is almost a real-life rendering of a young man standing against a rising sun on a beautiful dawn with desert landscape on the background. The contrast and the shadow light interplay have given the painting a hauntingly beautiful appearance while the light at the center may be interpreted as “hope of a new day”. Afewerk was also a master craftsman on stained glass as Lemma Guya was with paintings on animal skin.
It would not be erroneous to say that the history of Ethiopian art as divided into two major periods as before Afewerk and after. Before him, Ethiopian art was traditional, religion-inspire. The pictures were crudely made with home-made paints and brushes and on animal skins. The inspiration was predominately religious stories right from the Bible or the Old Testament. What Afewerk did was to imagine the Biblical stories as he found them in the version adopted by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and translate them into pictures that brought the stories back to life in a way that impressed the viewers.
This is not however to say that Afewerk was a religious painter in the sense of those traditional artists who lived and worked within the church compounds or those artists who had not theoretical knowledge of painting. He simply used religious stories to make his point as many artists did before him. By doing so, the artist not only preserved past religious events but also added a new dimension to paintings by traditional artists who lacked the length and depth of Afewerk’s talent and inspiration.
Contrary to allegations by his critics that Afewerk was interested only on big personalities rather than in ordinary individuals, he has left behind many paintings of men in the street or doing their works in varying environments. Beautiful but ordinary women have posed for him and the result is pictures of pretty Ethiopians with their characteristic big eyes, slender bodies, well-shaped faces and long hairs. Afewerk may even be considered the best painter of Ethiopian women figures although he lived alone for most of his life and married only in later age.
Far from that, Afewerk is the artist who borrowed the Biblical stories and made them the inspirations for his amazing painting but also re-imagined them with the tools of modern painting and the knowledge he gained through his studies and visits in Europe and more particularly in the former Soviet Union where his works are respected and his status as a celebrated artist was the greatest in his early years.
Afewerk Tekle was born in the old and historic town of Ankober but he had no family ties with the Shoan aristocracy that emerged following the accession of Emperor Menelik II to the throne. He was a young man when the Italian fascists occupied Ethiopia although he had vivid memories of his childhood and adolescent years. According to one biographical note, he was “born in Ankober, in Shewa Province, to ethnic Amhara parents Feleketch Yamatawork and Tekle Mamo. Afework grew up under the Italian occupation during the Second World War. Following the war in 1947, Afewerk decided that he wanted to help rebuild Ethiopia and elected to travel to England to study mining engineering.”
However, Afewerk soon abandoned his engineering studies to develop his artistic talents and enrolled in art schools in Europe. Wikipedia Encyclopedia tells us an interesting episode that accompanied Afewerk’s departure to England. It says, that “Before departing, Afewerk, together with other students leaving to study overseas, was addressed by Emperor Haile Selassie. Afewerk recalls being told “you must work hard, and when you come back do not tell us what tall buildings you saw in Europe, or what wide streets they have, but make sure you return equipped with the skills and the mindset to rebuild Ethiopia.”
Maybe to the disappointment of the emperor, Afewerk did not return equipped with skills to build Ethiopia. “Afewerk had already shown talent as an artist as a child, decorating several walls in his home town. Whilst at boarding school in England, this talent was recognized and encouraged by his teachers. As a result, Afewerk was persuaded to switch from engineering and enroll in Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. He then went on to the Slade School of Art where he studied painting, sculpture and architecture.”
Returning to Ethiopia as a university graduate, Afewerk could have accepted an assigned ministerial post, but instead decided to spend time travelling around the provinces of Ethiopia to get more experience of his native country and culture, which he reflected in his paintings. In 1954, he held his first one-man show in Addis Ababa, at Hall that gave him the funds to travel around Europe for two years. He learnt how to design and construct stained glass windows. He also made a special study on Ethiopian illustrated manuscripts in the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the Vatican Library.”
The great Ethiopian artist died on April 10, 2012 and was buried at the Trinity Cathedral Church in the presence of many dignitaries and an appreciating public. He died at a time he was struggling to do some of his great works that would make him artistically quite immortal. For many years he has been insisting on painting a mural at the Meskel Square, probably like the celebrated Mexican artist Diego Rivera whose murals are world-famous and had historic significance.
Afewerk did not live up to his dream largely due to uninviting political developments and regimes that did not give sufficient attention to art work that was largely considered a luxurious indulgence of the rich classes. Afewerk did not however die a disappointed artist as he was earning a great deal of money from his works and lived in comfort at the Villa Alfa where he did most of his paintings and spent decades in relative isolation as many famous artists did in the past. He will certainly be remembered as the Ethiopian artist who dominated the art scene for over half a century and left behind no successor worth his talent.
The Ethiopian Herald April 15/2022
