Word: benin
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...which has nothing whatever to do with the civilized European concept of Beauty, but which stems directly from the basic emotion of fear. But one fact is plain to all eyes: in any showing of African art the bronzes and carvings of the vanished Kingdom of Benin are definitely superior in spirit and technique to other Negro art. Proudly last week in Manhattan the distinguished Knoedler Galleries put on display 31 objects which constituted the most important collection of Benin art ever exhibited in the U. S. Follow the Equator westward across Africa to its crotch where the Guinea coast...
...first dispatches to reach London gave Benin the name it has since held- "The City of Blood." Grinning King Overami did not want Consul Phillips to enter his town because for three months he and his chieftains had been slaughtering living slaves in memory of the dead King Adolo. The stench of rotting corpses was overpowering. Blackamoors had been crucified to ladders made between two trees, left there to feed the buzzards. On the city's mud altars the carved tusks and terrifying bronze heads, displayed in Manhattan last week, were caked thick with dried human blood...
...British force looted the city thoroughly, burned it to the ground, shot six chiefs responsible for the Phillips massacre, exiled grinning King Overami to Calabar, where he died in 1914, and brought back not only the first Benin bronzes Europe had ever seen, but practically the entire output of an art that had ceased to exist after...