He was wrong. The Ife heads were made by Yoruba artists, mostly between the 12th and 15th centuries. But his mistake is the most useful lesson in this piece: the story of "art" most of us learned was told from one corner of the world, and it made the rest look like a footnote. The pieces in this series so far follow the European line. This is a short, deliberately incomplete tour of a few of the others, one stop per region, chosen to show a different idea of what art is for.
The tour, one stop per region:
- China — ink
- Japan — print
- India — bronze
- Persia & Islamic Spain — book & wall
- West Africa — metal
- The Americas — stone & cloth
- Australia — country
China: the mountain you walk into
Fan Kuan's Travelers among Mountains and Streams (around 1000 CE, National Palace Museum, Taipei) is a hanging scroll about two meters tall. A cliff fills most of it. At the bottom, tiny figures and pack mules cross a path. A waterfall falls in one thin line.
The painting isn't trying to record a view. It is built to make you feel how small a person is beside the mountain, and to invite a slow, wandering look. Chinese painters prized brushwork as a kind of handwriting, and the ink painting, the poem and the calligraphy were closely related arts. Fan Kuan's signature was hidden so well among the leaves that it wasn't noticed until 1958.
Japan: a print for everyone
Under the Wave off Kanagawa, better known as The Great Wave, is by Katsushika Hokusai, around 1830–32. It is a woodblock print: carved, inked and pressed by a team of craftsmen, sold cheaply in thousands of copies. Its deep blue was a then-fashionable imported pigment, Prussian blue.
Two things to notice. First, this was popular art, more like a poster than a museum treasure in its day. Second, it traveled: Japanese prints flooded into Europe after the 1850s and changed how Monet, Degas and Van Gogh composed pictures. Influence ran east to west as well as west to east.
The question isn't "did they have art like ours?" It's "what was this object for, and who was it made to move?"
India: a god in motion
In the temples of the Chola dynasty in southern India (in today's Tamil Nadu), bronze-casters around the 11th century perfected an image of the god Shiva as Nataraja, Lord of the Dance. He dances inside a ring of flames, one foot planted on a small figure representing ignorance, the other lifted. One hand holds a small drum (the rhythm of creation), another a flame (destruction).
These weren't made to stand in a gallery. Many were festival images: holes in their bases took poles, so priests and devotees could carry the dressed and garlanded god through the streets on their shoulders. A statue in a glass case is, in a sense, a dancer who has been asked to stand still.
Persia and Islamic Spain: art in the book and on the wall
A common myth says Islamic art avoids images of people. In mosques and religious books, figures are indeed generally avoided, and that pushed artists toward astonishing geometry, plant ornament and calligraphy. But courtly art is full of people. The Shahnameh (Book of Kings) made for Shah Tahmasp of Iran in the 1520s–30s contains 258 paintings. One of them, The Court of Gayumars, attributed to Sultan Muhammad, is crowded with jewel-like figures, rocks with hidden faces and tiny animals; a contemporary wrote that the boldest painters hung their heads in shame before it.
At the Alhambra in Granada, the 14th-century Nasrid palaces carry their poetry on the walls. Verses by the court poet Ibn Zamrak are carved into the stucco, and the domes dissolve into muqarnas, thousands of small honeycomb cells that make a ceiling look like it's made of light. Here the building is the book.
West Africa: portraits in metal, and a looted palace
Back to Ife. The heads are cast in copper alloy, with fine vertical lines across some faces and holes along the hairline and lips, possibly for attaching hair, beads or veils. They are portraits of an ideal: calm, balanced, royal.
A few hundred kilometers away, the Kingdom of Benin produced hundreds of cast brass plaques, mostly in the 16th and 17th centuries, that once covered the wooden pillars of the royal palace: kings, warriors, Portuguese traders, a running visual record of the court. In 1897 a British military expedition sacked Benin City and carried thousands of objects away to Europe. These "Benin Bronzes" are now at the center of the repatriation debate. Germany agreed in 2022 to transfer ownership of its holdings back to Nigeria, and the Smithsonian returned 29 that same year. The Netherlands agreed in February 2025 to hand back more than 100, and in February 2026 Cambridge University's archaeology and anthropology museum said about 100 more would go back within months. As of late 2026, the British Museum, which cares for the largest collection (over 900 objects from Benin), still has not; a 1963 law bars it from permanently giving away items in its collection.
The strongest case for return: the objects were taken by force, and they are royal and sacred heritage. The strongest case museums make for keeping or sharing: global access, conservation, and legal limits on giving away national collections. Both sides now largely agree the 1897 taking was a crime; the argument is about what follows.
The Americas: stone giants and cloth worth more than gold
The Olmec of the Gulf Coast of Mexico carved at least seventeen colossal heads from basalt boulders, some taller than an adult, around 3,000 years ago. The stone was dragged in from mountains dozens of kilometers away. Each face is distinct, and many scholars read them as portraits of rulers.
Further south, in the Andes, the most prized art form wasn't painting or sculpture at all. For the Inca, the finest woven cloth, called qompi, was valued above gold and silver. The state gave it out as a reward for service and to seal political alliances, and it was woven by specialists, including women chosen and cloistered for the work. A European museum's ranking of "fine arts," with painting on top and textiles as "craft," simply doesn't fit.
Australia: painting the land's own story
In 1971, at the settlement of Papunya in the Central Australian desert, a group of senior Aboriginal men painted a mural of the Honey Ant Dreaming on a school wall, encouraged by a young teacher, Geoffrey Bardon. They soon moved to boards and canvas, founding what became the Western Desert painting movement. The designs, often read by outsiders as "dot paintings," map country, ancestral journeys and law. When some early boards were shown in public and revealed sacred designs, there were protests, and some artists in the 1970s took to veiling restricted elements under fields of dots. (The dots themselves aren't a secret code.)
Emily Kam Kngwarray (often spelled Kngwarreye), from Utopia in the Northern Territory, began painting on canvas in 1988, when she was roughly 78, and in the eight years before her death produced an estimated 3,000 works. In 2007 her Earth's Creation I (1994) sold for just over A$1 million, then a record for an Aboriginal artist.
The honest complications
- "Art" is itself a Western category. Many of these objects were made as ritual tools, royal regalia, gifts or teachings. Calling them art is a compliment, but it can also strip away their purpose.
- Influence was borrowing, and sometimes taking. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) drew on African and Iberian sculpture. In 1984 New York's Museum of Modern Art staged a show pairing modern works with "tribal" objects, and critics such as Thomas McEvilley attacked it for treating non-Western makers as anonymous raw material for Western genius.
- A tour like this is still a list chosen by an outsider. Seven stops can't stand for most of humanity. Treat it as a set of doors, not a map.
The takeaway
Great art traditions grew up all over the world, often aiming at things the European tradition didn't: a landscape to travel through, a god to carry, a palace wall that reads like a poem, cloth worth more than gold, a painting that is also a map of law. Ask what an object was for and who it was made to move, and it will usually make more sense than asking whether it looks like a museum painting.
Try this: next time you're in a large museum (or on its website), skip the European galleries and spend twenty minutes with a single object from somewhere else. Find out what it was used for before you decide what you think of it.
Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- Smarthistory and Wikipedia on Fan Kuan's Travelers among Mountains and Streams and the 1958 rediscovery of its signature.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Hokusai's Iconic Great Wave," on dating and Prussian blue.
- Smarthistory, "Shiva as Lord of the Dance (Nataraja)"; Victoria and Albert Museum and Smithsonian notes on processional bronzes.
- The Met, "The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp"; Aga Khan Museum collection entry for The Court of Gayumars.
- Patronato de la Alhambra on the palaces' poetic inscriptions (José Miguel Puerta Vílchez, Leer la Alhambra).
- National Geographic and the British Museum on the Ife heads and Frobenius's 1910 claim.
- British Museum collection records on the Benin plaques (dating, brass, palace pillars, 1897 looting) and its "Benin Bronzes" page (collection size, the British Museum Act 1963); Al Jazeera (July 2022) on the Germany–Nigeria accord; CNN (2022) on the Smithsonian's return; Restitution Matters (19 Feb 2025) on the Dutch agreement; The Art Newspaper (9 Feb 2026) on Cambridge's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
- Wikipedia's synthesis of archaeological sources on the Olmec colossal heads; World History Encyclopedia and Dumbarton Oaks on Inca qompi textiles.
- Wikipedia on the Honey Ant mural, Papunya Tula and Emily Kam Kngwarray; Art Gallery of South Australia, "To dot or not to dot"; Australian Museum on Kngwarray's output; NYU Grey Art Gallery on MoMA's 1984 "Primitivism" exhibition.
Go deeper
- 🌐 Smarthistory (free, expert-written essays and videos organized by region and period)
- 🌐 The Met: The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp (an essay with zoomable paintings)
- 📘 The Brutish Museums — Dan Hicks (a forceful argument about the Benin Bronzes and restitution)
- 🎧 A History of the World in 100 Objects — Neil MacGregor, BBC Radio 4 (short episodes, many from outside Europe)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: Art as the Mirror of Consciousness · The Story of Art in 10 Masterpieces
For Your Vocabulary
Handscroll / Hanging Scroll (Chinese painting formats, unrolled sideways or hung vertically) · Woodblock Print (an image carved into wood, inked and pressed, allowing many copies) · Nataraja (Shiva as Lord of the Dance) · Calligraphy (the art of beautiful writing, a major art form in Chinese and Islamic traditions) · Muqarnas (honeycomb-like vaulting of small cells used in Islamic architecture) · Lost-Wax Casting (making a metal sculpture from a wax model that is melted away) · Repatriation (returning cultural objects to their place or people of origin) · Qompi (the finest grade of Inca woven cloth)