Contemporary Ethiopian painting in traditional style: from church-based to tourist art.(Critical essay)

In this paper, I will explore how traditional church painting changed in the urban context of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, which was founded in 1886. These changes included how artists were educated, how paintings were marketed and sold, who bought them, and how they functioned. The style, technique, and iconography of paintings changed markedly as well. As a consequence of all of these changes, a new category of painting came into being which I have labeled "contemporary painting in traditional style" (Biasio 1993). As a general rule, art historians term this genre "secular painting" (Pankhurst 1966), "folk painting" (Girma Fisseha and Raunig 1985), "traditional painting" (Ricci 1989), or "popular painting" (Girma Fisseha and Raunig 1993). I have shown elsewhere that these expressions can be misinterpreted or are, to a certain extent, incorrect (Biasio 1993). When categorizing artistic genres, we should always take into consideration a variety of criteria, including the training of the artist, style, technique, iconography, function, and not least, the art consumers themselves.

I define "folk painting" as work produced by local artists for local indigenous consumption. In Ethiopia, this would include magic scrolls or icons commissioned by a farmer from a community-based, often poorly trained artist. "Traditional elite painting" was produced on commission, often from a ruler, by the very best artists. Folk painting and traditional elite painting are art forms grounded in local communities. They fulfill indigenous functions, are produced by artists with a traditional, often church-based training, and are intended for local consumption. Both terms can refer to wall paintings for churches, icons, illuminated manuscripts, and magic scrolls. In Ethiopia, these art forms must always be understood in a religious context. Even if a painting has a secular theme, if it appears in a church, it should be considered religious due to its function.

The term "popular painting" should be used to refer to art that developed in urban settings, often created by self-taught artists and directed towards the local population. This category includes, for instance, hand-painted signs on trucks and buses or advertising for hairdressers or other businesses. These are found in West Africa, particularly in Ghana as Doran Ross has explored in several contributions to this journal (for example Ross 2004), but rarely in Ethiopia, with the exception of restaurants, tej baitotch (honey-wine bars), and butcher shops (see Sher 1997, Mesfin Habtemariam 2007).

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CHURCH-BASED PAINTING

Since its Christianization in the fourth century, Ethiopia has followed a tradition of Christian religious painting. Emperors, kings, feudal lords, and high-ranking clerics were the main patrons of painters who worked independently or in monastery scriptoria writing and illuminating manuscripts, painting icons, and decorating churches with paintings. The development of Christian art reflects the internal development of the country as well as its contacts with both the Eastern and Western Christian worlds, and with Islamic and Indian traditions. The urban context of Addis Ababa created significant changes in the tradition of Ethiopian Orthodox painting and the emergence of the new category of painting that is the focus of this article.

The King of Shewa and later Emperor of Ethiopia, Menelik II (r. 1889-1909), (1) laid the foundation stone of the new capital, Addis Ababa, in 1886. Like his predecessors, he and his wife, Empress Taytu, built churches and donated churches and paintings, (2) and the new capital became a center of production for numerous painters. As Pankhurst (1966:18f.) mentions, many painters bore the title of Aleqa, which was conferred upon a priest or a debtera (3) who had reached a high level of education, or upon the head of a church or a monastery. Many of these painters came from Gojjam, a region in northern Ethiopia, very often from the monastery of Dima Giyorgis or the village Bichena Giyorgis. It is very difficult to identify painters because the artists usually did not sign their works. As their aim was to glorify God, signatures were considered immodest, and most painters were so well known in their communities that people would have known their work even without a signature. This practice was commonplace for traditional artists who had attended a church school and were trained by a painter-priest; however, painters began signing their work as they shifted to producing for the tourist art market. The influx of foreign visitors to Ethiopia during the reign of Menelik II also gave rise to two new themes, both of which are still depicted in paintings today: the visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon (Fig. 1) and the Battle of Adowa in 1896 (Fig. 2).