The White Haired Man With the Polythene Bag

Jean Michel Massing

Jean Michel Massing

giving a speech.
Image from
ArtReach 2016 A Success Story for Young Artists
at Spotted in Ely.
Accessed 16th July 2016.

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge

I met him after a public lecture by Wim Pijbes, General

Director of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, at the University
of Cambridge in May 2016. A white haired man, very
casually dressed and carrying a polythene bag, called out to
me as I left the lecture hall. He told me he liked my response
to an account given by the museum director about how a
painting at the museum had been renamed to remove all
reference to anything but the fact that the subject of the
painting was a girl with a fan, in the name of focusing on the
humanity of the girl and nothing else as would automatically
have been done if the girl had been Caucasian, which she
was not. I had countered with the observation that since the
girl was Black in a painting created at a time when Black
people were uncommon in the European country where the
painting was made, the artists intentions in creating a work
of art featuring a member of a race whose members were
not very visible in the country needed to be recognized. In
the light of that fact, why not call the painting Black Girl
With Fan?


The man who came up to me after the lecture observed that
the presence of Black people can be traced in Europe to
centuries before the present. I was mildly struck by his
knowledge, vaguely concluding that he might be a person
who did some reading in his spare time. He then told me he
had written a book on the subject. Ah, possibly a pensioner
who has found time to write a book a part of me began to
surmise. As we spoke, I was drawn by the mans energy, his
sense of vitality and his bonding friendliness.

"Young Girl Holding a Fan by Simon Maris the painting used to be called Young
Negro Girl" from "Young Negro Girl: Should Artworks With Offensive Names Get
an Update?" : "The Rijksmuseum is being criticised for removing racist words like
negro from the titles of its paintings. But theyre not being overly PC at all
theyre right" by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian, Tuesday 15 December 2015.
Accessed 16th July 2016.

I had taken pains to dress in a manner that would make me

feel more at ease amongst the kind of smart dressing I
frequently observed at the university, casual and formal,
with a suit jacket on top of a sharp pair of jeans. The man,
however, was totally casual, with no effort at distinction in
anything he wore, with the polythene bag he carried giving
him the look of a person who was returning from a visit to a
corner grocery store. As we spoke, however, a very sharply
dressed young woman came over to talk with him, looked
me over quickly, commenced talking with the man, looked
me over again quickly and continued her conversation with
him. They spoke about the mans work on art exhibitions as
she related to him with a degree of deference that struck me.
A passing man, also very sharply dressed in a suit jacket, tie
and formal trousers, greeted the man with the manner
reserved for a distinguished person. It began to dawn on me
that this man, so casual and friendly, might be much more in
social terms than I had been able to guess from his self
presentation.

When we continued our conversation after the woman left,
he spoke with pride of his knowledge of ten languages that
enabled him conduct research across a spectrum of cultures
and his challenges with working on a Yoruba divination tray
which his attention had been drawn to but which he could
not work on beyond a particular point beceause of his lack of
knowledge of Yoruba. The Ulm Opon Ifa, I ventured, that
being the example of that symbolic and functional form in
the literature on the field as known to me which seemed to
correspond to the description he was making of this
sculpture, and we agreed it was likely to be that example he
was referring to. I have a lot of books, he then told me, as if
he understood what I am, a person for whom books, along

The Ulm Opon Ifa

from
Lebendige Museumslandschaft, Living Museum Landscape

Accessed 16th July 2016

with my computer, are my most precious possessions, and

who would like to be able to spend part of the week living in
a massive bookshop or library, among the family members
represented by books, the collections of the efforts of
sapientia homo, the cogitations of the one creature whose
mode of communication enables world wide interaction
amongst members of the same species. Can I come and see
your library, I asked? Of course, he responded. I am at
Kings College. Write me after this week since Ill be busy
this week and lets get together, he said. He got on his
bicycle and cycled off.

Before he left, I asked what his name was. He told me it was
Jean Michel Massing. On getting home, after doing some
other things, I decided to find out more about this man and
began by Googling the title of the book he told me he had
written. I found the book had an entire page devoted to it on
the website of the publisher Harvard University Press, with
a video relating to the book presented by the stately figure
of Henry Louis Gates Jr, perhaps the most prominent Black
scholar in the US, who has dedicated his life to building the
institutional and scholarly structure of Black Studies using
print, film and the Internet, a central figure, if not the central
figure in the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard
, a constellation of academic luminaries, a prominent figure
in various controversial academic and larger public
incidents involving the place of Black people in the United
States and the archetypal figure of African-American success
in academia, moving from his father doing two jobs to send
him to school to his first degree at Yale and his PhD at
Cambridge, a movement between two of the worlds most
selective and prestigious academic institutions which is part
of a trajectory represented by his famous book The


The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the "Age of
Discovery" to the Age of Abolition, Part 2: Europe and the World Beyond.
Text by Jean Michel Massing.Edited by David Bindman Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Associate Editor Karen C. C. Dalton.
Accessed 16th July 2016

Signifying Monkey, brilliantly correlating African and

African-American symbolic and interpretive forms.
Publication of a book with Harvard University Press is a
signal achievement, academic publishers being the best
sources on any subject they publish, in my view, on account
of their very high standards, the Harvard brand, as the
worlds most prestigious university being an extra cachet,
and the sumptuousness, detail and scope of the book along
with the sheer elaborateness of its presentation on the
website as part of a massive project, a galaxy of critical
reconstruction of centuries of historical and social flows,
made if clear that the book which the white hared man had
told me about almost casually was a signal event in the study
of the image of the Black person in world .

Who then is this man, Jean Michel Massing, I tried to find
out. The book page described him as professor in Art History
at the University of Cambridge. I then Googled him, finding
out a little more about him and learnt he had been head of
the Department of Art History at the university. I was quite
busy with a number of projects at the time and so did not go
far with that research. After that week, I wrote him and he
invited me over to meet in his office at Kings College. On
entering the office, I left the outside world into a cavern of
books, a space almost with the ambience of a warehouse,
with books stacked floor to ceiling on nearly all sides of the
room, with a table in the centre. He showed me his
impressive collection of Osanyin staffs, an elegant working
in metal of a thin rod around the head of which a number of
delicately crafted birds are poised, Osanyin being the
Yoruba orisa or deity of vegetative nature as a space of
interaction between humans and nature that yields
knowledge of the properties of plants, that being one way of

"Yoruba Osanyin Staff 29, Nigeria, 5"w, 16".

These iron staffs, surmounted by birds and dedicated to Osanyin, deity of herbal
medicine, promoted healing and discouraged witchcraft. The birds honor the powers of
elderly women, who could transform themselves into birds, to gain their support in the
healing. The staffs were placed in the ground next to the ailing person. This small staff is
unusual in that it has a snake passing through it". Image and verbal text from
Hamilton Gallery. Accessed 16th July 2016. I find the summation about witchcraft made
here puzzling because the women believed to be able to transform themselves into birds are
the ones known in Yoruba lore in terms of the equivalent of how witches were traditionally
perceived in Europe, that transformative ability being understood as part of their power as
witches.


Iron Staff of the Yoruba God Osanyin #2".
Image source: The Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic at Duke University.
Accessed 16th July 2016.

Iron Staff of the Yoruba God

Osanyin 2.

Image source: The Sacred Arts
of the Black Atlantic at Duke
University. Accessed 16th July
2016.

10

Iron Staff of the Yoruba God Osanyin 2.

Image source:
The Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic at Duke University.
Accessed 16th July 2016.

11

Iron Staff of the Yoruba God Osanyin 2.

Image source:
The Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic at Duke University.
Accessed 16th July 2016.

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describing the deity, the possession of those artworks

suggesting a significant degree of exposure to aspects of
classical African art and investment in collecting it. He
showed me his books, both those written by him and those
by others, in the sheer delight that suffuses him when
talking about the world of knowledge.

He then invited me to lunch in the royal magnificence of the
Kings College dining hall. During the lunch we discussed our
various academic development and plans. What do you do
for relaxation I asked him, after he had told me about his
relentless writing, studying and working with students,
describing his delight in contributing to the building of
minds. What is relaxation?, he responded.

On the 1st of July 2016 I attended his retirement
celebrations at Cambridge. An unforgettable experience. His
former students, now working in various capacities in
different parts of the world, gave papers on their own work
and described his influence on their careers. Caucasian,
Asian and Black people were represented among those
students, a scope of pedagogical interaction reflective of the
book launched at the celebrations and meant to suggest the
scope of Michel Massings scholarship running from Europe
to Africa, Tributes to Jean Michel Massing : Towards a Global
Art History, a high point of the celebrations for me being his
description of his greatest pride as not being his books
covering the 40 years he has been an academic at Cambridge
and before then, evident in his list of publications which I
saw is itself like a small book, but his students. The
effusiveness of his students in their testimonies about him
both in public and in my private conversations with them, a
most delightful experience of introduction to various

13

An image of King's College dining hall that does not in any way suggest its
magnificent expanse, rising to a vaulted complex ceiling like a cathedral gastronome,
a cathedral of gastronomy. Image source : "Georgian Gothic: the Hall at King's" from
the website of King's College, Cambridge. Accessed 16th July 2016.

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scintillating worlds of knowledge represented by their

varied professional backgrounds as well as my personal
experience with him in my brief but unforgettable
interaction with the man confirmed that assertion, a
quintessential academic marked by plain living and high
thinking, as one person describes the academic ideal, but in
the case of Jean Michel Massing, also shaped by a childlike
and deep humanity and care.

White hair attracts great respect in the culture of Southern
Nigeria where I come from. It represents the achievement of
the longevity that most people hope for as well as greater
opportunity for the distillation of the kind of wisdom that
can only be reached with the transformations enabled by the
press of experience in the passage of time. That perspective
does not suggest escaping from a critical response to people
on account of their age, but a recognition of creative
possibility which may or may not be actualized by the
person in question and respect for a person who has gone
farther than oneself on the same journey one is travelling.
Two proverbs, among many, the second modified by me,
distill this wisdom:

A child might have as many clothes as his father, but not as
many rags.

What a person of lesser wisdom might not be able to see
from the top of a tree is clearly observed by a wiser person
even while seated.

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