Surface tensions: Empire, Parisian modernism, and "Authenticity" in African sculpture, 1917-1939

American Historical Review

Volumn 117, Issue 2, 2012, Pages 445-475

  Monroe, John Warne ^a  

^a IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84859851536     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.117.2.445     Document Type: Article

References (220)

1. Although the perceived "family resemblance" among objects of diverse geographical origin-from Africa to Polynesia to Alaska-that it once designated remains a part of the Western cultural landscape, primitive art" is no longer commonly used as a blanket term. Scholars of the topic, most notably Sally Price, have seized upon the sense of alienation this obsolescence has created to justify a strategic reappropriation. I am following Price's example here, using the term "primitive art" both because it was the current designation in the interwar period-particularly after the waning of the term art nègre in the mid-1920s-and because its distance from present-day usage helps draw attention to the historical contingency and constructedness of the aesthetic category it designates. Although I have chosen not to place the term within quotation marks in order to avoid a distracting proliferation of them, I use it with the critical distance such punctuation would convey.
2. Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 2001), 1-6;
3. Price, Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac's Museum on the Quai Branly (Chicago, 2007), vii-viii.
4. See also Daniel J. Sherman, "Post-Colonial Chic: Fantasies of the French Interior, 1957-62," Art History 27, no. 5 (November 2004): 773-774.
5. For a useful discussion of the pre-modernist aesthetic appreciation of objects from Africa, see Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven, Conn., 1994), esp. 7-28.
6. The conception of the distinction between nineteenth-century exoticism and the avant-garde idea of primitive art as classicism that I present here derives from Jean Laude, La peinture française et l'art nègre (Paris, 2006), esp. 13-43, 433-442.
7. Throughout this article, I follow standard scholarly practice in the field of African art by using the term "traditional" to refer to the kinds of African objects that early-twentieth-century connoisseurs would have perceived as potentially authentic.
8. For a further discussion of the pitfalls of terminology in this field, see Eli Bentor, "Challenges to Rural Festivals with the Return to Democratic Rule in Southeastern Nigeria," African Arts 38, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 44.
9. William Rubin, "Modernist Primitivism: An Introduction," in Rubin, ed., "Primitivism" in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, 2 vols. (New York, 1984), 1: 73.
10. Sybil Gordon Cantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Boston, 2003).
11. For a valuable compilation of early interventions in this polemic by Thomas McEvilley, William Rubin, and Kirk Varnedoe, see Bill Beckley and David Shapiro, eds., Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics (New York, 1998).
12. The quote comes from curator Kirk Varnedoe's preface in Rubin, "Primitivism" in Twentieth-Century Art, 1: x.
13. James Clifford, "Histories of the Tribal and the Modern," in Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 198.
14. This essay, a review of the "Primitivism" exhibition, first appeared in Art in America 73, no. 4 (April 1985): 164-177.
15. For broader theoretical articulations of this conception that have become touchstones in the literature, see Jean Baudrillard, Le système des objets (Paris, 1968);
16. and the work of Pierre Bourdieu, especially L'amour de l'art: Les musées d'art européens et leur public (Paris, 1968);
17. La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris, 1979);
18. and the essays collected in Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York, 1993).
19. Hal Foster, "The 'Primitive' Unconscious of Modern Art," October 34 (Autumn 1985): 47.
20. Fred R. Myers provides a useful survey of the development of this literature. See Myers, " 'Primitivism,' Anthropology, and the Category of 'Primitive Art,' " in Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susan Kuechler, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, eds., Handbook of Material Culture (London, 2006), 267-284.
21. For other important contributions, see Rolande Bonnain, L'empire des masques: Les collectionneurs d'arts premiers aujourd'hui (Paris, 2001);
22. James Clifford, "On Collecting Art and Culture," in Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 215-251;
23. Annie E. Coombes, "The Object of Translation: Notes on 'Art' and Autonomy in a Postcolonial Context," in Fred R. Myers, ed., The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture (Oxford, 2001), 233-256;
24. Raymond Corbey, Tribal Art Traffic: A Chronicle of Taste, Trade and Desire in Colonial and Post-Colonial Times (Amsterdam, 2000);
25. Shelly Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (Berkeley, Calif., 1998);
26. Ivan Karp and Stephen D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, D.C., 1991);
27. Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow," African Arts 25, no. 2 (April 1992): 40-53, 96-97;
28. Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher B. Steiner, eds., Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds (Berkeley, Calif., 1999);
29. Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places;
30. Christopher B. Steiner, African Art in Transit (Cambridge, 1994);
31. Maruška Svašek, Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production (London, 2007);
32. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago, 1990).
33. Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places, 5, 126, emphasis in the original.
34. The controversy surrounding the creation of the Musée du quai Branly has already elicited a body of scholarly analysis. See Sarah Amato, "Quai Branly Museum: Representing France after Empire," Race & Class 47, no. 4 (2006): 46-65;
35. Bruno Latour, ed., Le dialogue des cultures: Actes des rencontres inaugurales du musée du quai Branly (21 juin 2006) (Paris, 2007);
36. Herman Lebovics, "The Dance of the Museums," in Lebovics, Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age (Durham, N.C., 2004), 143-177;
37. Price, Paris Primitive.
38. Price has also produced a useful overview of the increasingly voluminous commentary that has appeared in the years since the museum's 2006 opening;
39. Sally Price, "Return to the Quai Branly," Museum Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2010): 11-21.
40. The French journal Le débat devoted an entire issue to the new museum: Le moment du quai Branly, Special Issue, Le débat 147 (November-December 2007);
41. Le débat 148 (January-February 2008) contains three additional articles on the topic
42. Kwame Anthony Appiah, "De qui est-ce la culture?" (158-169);
43. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, "Le musée du quai Branly entre art et esthétique" (170-178);
44. Sally Price, "Réflexions sur le dialogue des cultures au musée du quai Branly" (179-192).
45. For interventions that give a sense of the competing agendas involved in this polemic, see Bernard Dupaigne, Le scandale des arts premiers: La véritable histoire du musée du quai Branly (Paris, 2006);
46. Marine Degli and Marie Mauzé, Arts premiers: Le temps de la reconnaissance (Paris, 2000).
47. For an introduction to this substantial literature in the specific field of African art, see Monica Blackmun Visona, Robin Poynor, and Herbert M. Cole, History of Art in Africa (New York, 2003).
48. For examples of recent catalogues from critically engaged museum exhibitions, see Christraud M. Geary and Stéphanie Xatart, Material Journeys: Collecting African and Oceanic Art, 1945-2000-Selections from the Geneviève McMillan Collection (Boston, 2007);
49. Frederick John Lamp, ed., See the Music, Hear the Dance: Rethinking African Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art (Munich, 2004);
50. Pamela McClusky, Art from Africa: Long Steps Never Broke a Back (Princeton, N.J., 2002).
51. The highest price fetched by a piece of primitive art at auction thus far is 5 million Euros, for a mask by a sculptor from the Fang people of Gabon sold in Paris on June 17, 2006. See the website of the Hôtel Drouot auction house, http://www.gazette-drouot.com/static/magazine_ventes_aux_encheres/enchere_collection_verite.html.
52. In a major exhibition catalogue, for example, the curator Alisa LaGamma recently proclaimed that by creating a rich, varied corpus of commemorative reliquary figures, "the peoples of equatorial Africa developed a sculptural form that would enter the pantheon of universal art"-an assertion meant to celebrate a triumphant revaluation of objects that were once dismissed as the "crude" and "hideous" work of "savages."
53. LaGamma, ed., Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary (New York, 2007), 178.
54. For "crude," "hideous," and "savage," see R. P. Henri Trilles, Chez les Fang; ou, Quinze années de séjour au Congo français (Paris, 1912), 246.
55. Critic Peter Schjeldahl, taking the praise a step further, wrote that the sculptor of one of the figures included in the show-now known as the "Black Venus"-"beggars Brancusi." Schjeldahl, "Into Africa," The New Yorker, November 5, 2007, http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/notebook/2007/11/05/071105gonb_GOAT_notebook_schjeldahl.
56. See, e.g., Simon Gikandi, "Race and the Modernist Aesthetic," in Tim Youngs, ed., Writing and Race (London, 1997), 147-165;
57. Wendy Martin, " 'Remembering the Jungle': Josephine Baker and Modernist Parody," in Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush, eds., Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism (Stanford, Calif., 1995), 310-325;
58. Carole Sweeney, From Fetish to Subject: Race, Modernism, and Primitivism, 1919-1935 (London, 2004).
59. Fredric Jameson, "Modernism and Imperialism," in Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis, 1990), 64.
60. Over the last twenty-five years, the study of Europe's colonial past has gone from being a marginal subfield to a matter of central historiographical concern.
61. Robert Aldrich provides a useful discussion of "the new colonial history" and its relation to European efforts to work through the colonial past in "Remembrance of Empires Past," Fields of Remembrance, Special Issue, PORTAL: Journal of Multidisciplinary and International Studies 7, no. 1 (January 2010): 1-18.
62. For an influential statement of the crucial role of ambivalence in understanding empire, see Homi K. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," in Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), 85-92.
63. Grappling with this distinctive tension between the universal and the particular has become one of the central historiographical issues in the study of France's empire. See, e.g., Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, Calif., 1997);
64. Elizabeth Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000);
65. James E. Genova, Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity, and the Limitations of Mimicry in French-Ruled West Africa, 1914-1956 (New York, 2004);
66. Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900-1945 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992);
67. Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago, 2005).
68. For a valuable recent discussion of this question and its implications both for scholars of Europe and for those defined as "non-modern" in Western terms, see the various contributions to the AHR Roundtable "Historians and the Question of 'Modernity,' " American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (June 2011): 631-751,
69. of which the following are of particular relevance to the concerns of this article: Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, "Modernity: The Sphinx and the Historian" (638-652);
70. Carol Gluck, "The End of Elsewhere: Writing Modernity Now" (676-687);
71. Lynn M. Thomas, "Modernity's Failings, Political Claims, and Intermediate Concepts" (727-740).
72. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, Calif., 2005), 4.
73. Ibid., 232, 231.
74. Ibid., 231.
75. For "thinking like an empire," see Frederick Cooper, "States, Empires, and Political Imagination," ibid., 153-203.
76. Jules David Prown, "The Truth of Material Culture: History or Fiction?" in Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery, eds., History from Things: Essays on Material Culture (Washington, D.C., 1993), 4.
77. Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places, 82-99.
78. Michael C. FitzGerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art (Berkeley, Calif., 1995);
79. Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1994).
80. Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, 7.
81. The complex factors involved in this transformation of objects from elsewhere makes it a distinctive problem in the history of material culture: a form of reception that entails both a physical and a conceptual remaking of the items being perceived, carried out with little concern for the intentions and experiences of their original creators. Material and discursive acts associated with connoisseurship-mounting on custom-made bases, "restoration," formal aesthetic analysis-imposed new meanings on African objects that then underwent their own process of metamorphosis as they circulated across the globe.
82. On the use of material cultural analysis in history, see Leora Auslander, "Beyond Words," American Historical Review 110, no. 4 (October 2005): 1015-1045.
83. Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1986);
84. Laude, La peinture française et l'art nègre;
85. Jean-Louis Paudrat, "From Africa," in Rubin, "Primitivism" in Twentieth-Century Art, 1: 125-175.
86. See, e.g., the very different analyses presented in Patricia Leighten, "The White Peril and L'art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anti-Colonialism," Art Bulletin 72, no. 4 (December 1990): 609-630;
87. Rubin, "Picasso," in Rubin, "Primitivism" in Twentieth Century Art, 1: 241-340.
88. Steiner, African Art in Transit, 100-129.
89. Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places, 37-42.
90. For discussions of authenticity in this field that emphasize the value of "in-culture" use, see Fakes, Fakers and Fakery: Authenticity in African Art, Special Issue, African Arts 9, no. 3 (April 1976);
91. Joseph Cornet, "African Art and Authenticity," African Arts 9, no. 1 (October 1975): 52-55;
92. Henri Kamer, "De l'authenticité des sculptures africaines/The Authenticity of African Sculptures," Arts d'Afrique noire 12 (December 1974): 17-40.
93. Although the most recent of these publications is more than thirty years old, the vision of authenticity they articulate is still widely accepted among collectors and dealers. An awareness of the very different conceptions of "art" that exist in African and Western contexts has become an important part of the methodology used by scholars of art in Africa.
94. For important early works on this question, see Herbert M. Cole, "Art as a Verb in Iboland," African Arts 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1969): 34-41, 88;
95. the essays by Daniel J. Crowley [1966], James W. Fernandez [1966], Roy Sieber [1959], Leon Siroto [1965], and Robert Farris Thompson [1966] reprinted in Carol F. Jopling, ed., Art and Aesthetics in Primitive Societies (New York, 1971);
96. Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion: Icon and Act in the Collection of Katherine Coryton White (Berkeley, Calif., 1974).
97. For non-French collectors who looked to Paris as a primary source for objects in this period, see Jacob Epstein, Epstein: An Autobiography (London, 1955);
98. Liliane Meffre, Carl Einstein, 1885-1940: Itinéraires d'une pensée moderne (Paris, 2002);
99. Mary Ann Meyers, Art, Education, and African-American Culture: Albert Barnes and the Science of Philanthropy (New York, 2003);
100. the discussion of Josef Müller in Louis Perrois, Ancestral Art of Gabon from the Collections of the Barbier-Mueller Museum (Dallas, 1986);
101. Miklós Szalay, ed., African Art from the Han Coray Collection, 1916-1928 (Munich, 1998).
102. For a broadly conceived account of the sociocultural consequences of colonial domination in Equatorial Africa, see Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, Wis., 1990);
103. on the impact of the draft, see Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C., 2006).
104. See, for example, the account of the early collecting career of Pierre Vérité, as described in the lavish catalogue prepared for the sale of his collection by Alain de Monbrison and Pierre Amrouche: Encheres Rive Gauche, Arts primitifs: Collection Vérité (Paris, 2006).
105. Coombes, Reinventing Africa, 43-62.
106. Henri Clouzot and André Level, "L'art nègre," La gazette des beaux-arts 61, no. 700 (July-September 1919): 313-314.
107. Level, as organizer of the famous Peau de l'ours investment group before World War I, played a central role in the shaping of the market for modernist art as it came to exist between the wars.
108. FitzGerald, Making Modernism, 15-46.
109. Paul Guillaume and Thomas Munro, Primitive Negro Sculpture (New York, 1926), 2, 13, 9-10, 13.
110. All passages quoted here appear in both the English- and French-language versions of this text. See Guillaume and Munro, La sculpture nègre primitive, trans. Paul Guillaume (Paris, 1929).
111. This equation of aesthetic power in African sculpture with the spiritual purity of the anonymous creator's intention-an idea that echoes nineteenth-century views of medieval art-is an enduring trope that first appeared in the earliest systematic critical attempt to approach ethnographic objects as art.
112. Carl Einstein, Negerplastik (1915; repr., Munich, 1920), xiii-xvi.
113. Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, Pa., letter from Paul Guillaume to Albert Barnes, November 6, 1924.
114. "Actualités," Les arts à Paris 1 (March 15, 1918): 3.
115. "Une esthétique nouvelle-l'art nègre," Les arts à Paris 4 (May 15, 1919): 3.
116. While Guillaume occasionally expresses opinions in his correspondence about the poor quality of other African sculpture collections-in particular, the famous one established by Stewart Culin at the Brooklyn Museum-he rarely spells out the explicit reasons for his judgments. Instead, the connection he drew between age and aesthetic quality emerges most clearly in a comparative analysis of two figures from the Lagoon region of present-day Côte d'Ivoire in Primitive Negro Sculpture (misidentified as "Guinea," pp. 126-129). Christa Clarke argues convincingly that this portion of the text was written not by Guillaume but by Thomas Munro under the close guidance of Albert Barnes. At the same time, however, the date attributions on which it is premised-that one figure was made in the fourteenth century and the other in the fifteenth (p. iii)-are clearly Guillaume's, and it is reasonable to suppose that his chronological judgment was implicitly based on an assessment of the differences in sculptural quality explicitly articulated in the text. For a few letters indicating Guillaume's assessment of Culin's taste, see Barnes Foundation Archives, letter from Barnes to Guillaume, October 6, 1922; letter from Guillaume to Barnes, November 6, 1922; letter from Guillaume to Barnes, February 16, 1923; and letter from Guillaume to Barnes, April 15, 1923.
117. For Clarke's analysis of Barnes's and Munro's roles in the writing of Primitive Negro Sculpture, see Christa J. Clarke, "Defining Taste: Albert Barnes and the Promotion of African Art in the United States during the 1920s" (PhD. diss., University of Maryland, 1998), 82-117.
118. A more condensed presentation of the case appears in Clarke, "Defining African Art: Primitive Negro Sculpture and the Aesthetic Philosophy of Albert Barnes," African Arts 36, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 40-51, 92, 93.
119. For the formulation of this argument about the alleged historical stasis of "primitive" peoples that would have been most familiar to early connoisseurs in Paris, see Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (Paris, 1910).
120. Broader overviews are provided by William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530-1880 (Bloomington, Ind., 1980);
121. e siècle (Paris, 1999);
122. Christopher L. Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago, 1985), 3-65.
123. Maurice Delafosse, "Sur les traces probables de civilisation égyptienne et d'hommes de race blanche à la Côte d'Ivoire," L'Anthropologie 11 (July-December 1900): 431-451, 543-568, 677-690.
124. Clouzot and Level, "L'art nègre," 315.
125. Ibid., 321.
126. The "Pahouin" or "Black Venus," a reliquary figure by a sculptor from the Fang people of presentday Gabon currently in the collection of the Musée Dapper in Paris, received its sobriquet in 1933 when it was exhibited in London by the well-known French dealer André Lefevre.
127. LaGamma, Eternal Ancestors, 178.
128. Henri Clouzot and André Level, Sculptures africaines et océaniennes: Colonies françaises et Congo belge (Paris, 1923), plate XXII.
129. For rats, see Susan Mullin Vogel, African Aesthetics: The Carlo Monzino Collection (New York, 1986), 148;
130. for abrasion, see Louis Perrois and Marta Sierra Delage, The Art of Equatorial Guinea: The Fang Tribes (New York, 1990), 110.
131. According to Perrois, this intentional abrasion was generally focused on a few key areas of the sculpture: nose, mouth, hands, and navel.
132. Louis Sonolet, "L'art dans l'Afrique occidentale française," La gazette des beaux-arts 65, no. 740 (September-October 1923): 232.
133. Doran H. Ross and Roy Sieber, "Interview with Roy Sieber," African Arts 25, no. 4 (October 1992): 40.
134. Eva L. R. Meyerowitz, "Ibeji Statuettes from Yoruba, Nigeria," Man 44 (September-October 1944): 105-107.
135. While she does not mention this particular object, Meyerowitz notes that Yoruba commemorative twin figures were frequently subject to "a vigorous cleaning process" once they were in "European hands." In addition, she writes, "some European collectors unfortunately polish up their African carvings to such an extent as to alter their appearance completely."
136. The clearest indication of this aesthetic change is the African objects illustrated in the catalogue for the 1931 sale of works from the primitive art collections of André Breton and Paul Eluard.
137. Alphonse Bellier, Charles Ratton, and Louis Carré, Collection André Breton et Paul Eluard: Sculptures d'Afrique, d'Amérique, d'Océanie (Paris, 1931).
138. For a more detailed study of the surrealist reception of primitive art, see Louise Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic (London, 2003).
139. Susan Vogel has explored this phenomenon by playing with display conventions in a variety of provocative ways in her exhibitions of African sculpture. For the best-known example, see Vogel, Art/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections (New York, 1988).
140. Wendy A. Grossman has done crucial work on the role of photography in the early reception of African objects as art in the United States and Europe. See Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens (Washington, D.C., 2009);
141. Grossman, "Photography at the Crossroads: African Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Cordula Grewe, ed., Die Schau des Fremden: Ausstellungskonzepte zwischen Kunst, Kommerz und Wissenschaft (Stuttgart, 2006), 317-340.
142. For early examples of illustrations of African sculpture in art magazines in addition to the examples cited elsewhere in this essay, see, e.g., Carl Einstein, "De l'art nègre," L'action 12 (April 1922): 47-56;
143. Henri Clouzot and André Level, "La décoration des textiles au Congo Belge," L'amour de l'art 4, no. 6 (June 1923): 569-572;
144. P.V.M., "Les arts anciens de l'Afrique noire," L'amour de l'art 10, no. 11 (November 1930): 462-465;
145. images published throughout Paul Guillaume's journal Les arts à Paris, 1918-1935;
146. L'art nègre, Special Issue, Cahiers d'art 2, no. 7-8 (1927);
147. Arsène Alexandre, "Le blanc et le noir," La Renaissance de l'art français 2, no. 8 (August 1919): 317-322.
148. Bénédicte Garnier, "Kichizo Inagaki, ébéniste de Rodin," in François Blanchetière et al., eds., Rodin: Le rêve japonais (Paris, 2007), 86-92.
149. Steiner, African Art in Transit, 100-106.
150. The documents held in the Archives of the Museum of Modern Art gathered in the carton "Exhibition 39" provide a clear sense of the crucial role that the French dealers Charles Ratton and Louis Carré played in the 1935 MoMA exhibition-contributing not only objects but also the benefit of their knowledge and connoisseurship. See especially the list of lenders, which shows that the three primary donors to the exhibition, in terms of number of objects, were Ratton, Carré, and Paul Guillaume's widow; and the substantial folder devoted to Ratton in "Registrar Correspondence." See also the Joseph and Ernest Brummer Records in the Cloisters Archive Room, Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries, New York, folder "Correspondence 1932-1937," letter from Ernest Brummer to Joseph Brummer dated January 21, 1935, in which Ernest, reporting from Paris to his brother in New York, mentions Ratton's departure for the United States with a substantial inventory of African objects purchased in partnership with Carré, whom Ernest calls "crazy" for making such a large financial commitment.
151. The term "white cube" was coined by Brian O'Doherty in an influential series of articles critiquing modernist conventions of display published in Artforum in 1976, reprinted in O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley, Calif., 1999).
152. Clouzot and Level, "L'art nègre," 311.
153. Guillaume and Munro, Primitive Negro Sculpture, 48-49.
154. Marcel Astruc, "A une idole noire," Vogue 8, no. 3 (March 1, 1927): 39.
155. Alexis Roland-Manuel, "Le sacre du printemps," Montjoie! Organe de l'impérialisme artistique française 1, no. 9-10 (June 14-29, 1913): 13, emphasis in the original.
156. For perhaps the classic statement of this conception, which envisions the history of modern art as a series of movements engaged in dialectical progress toward "geometrical" and "non-geometrical" abstraction,
157. see the art-historical flowchart prepared by the Museum of Modern Art's first director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., on the original dust jacket of Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art (New York, 1936).
158. Le Corbusier, "Les arts dits primitifs dans la maison d'aujourd'hui" (flyer, Paris, 1935), 2.
159. As Christa Clarke has shown (see fn. 46), Guillaume's role in the production of the text was less extensive than his credit as co-author would indicate. It is nevertheless possible to judge the extent to which the book reflected his opinions by comparing the English-language edition with the French translation he published in Paris three years later. Guillaume's translation retained all the passages quoted in this article, but eliminated the final chapter of the original edition, which was devoted to a series of elaborate formal analyses of particular objects in the Barnes collection. This omission enraged Barnes, and did much to contribute to Guillaume's final rupture with him in 1929.
160. Guillaume and Munro, La sculpture nègre primitive;
161. and Barnes Foundation Archives, letter from Barnes to Guillaume, March 1, 1929.
162. Paudrat, "From Africa," 153-154.
163. A photograph of the installation, designed by Edward Steichen, appeared in the 1916 issue of the journal Camera Work. See Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, 15.
164. In addition to Grossman, "Photography at the Crossroads" and Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, see Virginia-Lee Webb, Perfect Documents: Walker Evans and African Art, 1935 (New York, 2000).
165. Alain Locke, "The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts," in Locke, ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (1925; repr., New York, 1997), 256.
166. Archives nationales de France, fonds Louis Carré, 389 AP 29, dr. 1, "Relations avec l'amérique, sécrétariat, 1935-1945," subfolder marked "Voyage New York 1935."
167. Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (New York, 2000);
168. Jody Blake, Le Tumulte Noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris (University Park, Pa., 1999).
169. Jean-Louis Paudrat, "Primitive Arts in Paris on the Threshold of the Thirties," Art Tribal: Bulletin de l'Association des amis du musée Barbier-Müller (1996): 46.
170. The two auctions were the sales of the collections of André Breton and Paul Eluard, and of Georges de Miré. See Bellier, Ratton, and Carré, Collection André Breton et Paul Eluard;
171. Alphonse Bellier, Charles Ratton, and Louis Carré, Collection G. de Miré: Sculptures anciennes d'Afrique et d'Amérique (Paris, 1931).
172. Benoît de L'Estoile, Le goût des autres: De l'exposition coloniale aux arts premiers (Paris, 2010), 33-72;
173. Patricia A. Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).
174. Henri Vallois, "L'Exposition coloniale de Paris et les congrès (1931)," L'Anthropologie 42 (1932): 57-58.
175. For a classic analysis of this shift, see James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Surrealism," in Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 117-151.
176. Alice L. Conklin, "The New 'Ethnology' and 'La Situation Coloniale' in Interwar France," French Politics, Culture and Society 20, no. 2 (2002): 29-46;
177. Élise Dubuc, "Le futur antérieur du Musée de l'homme," Gradhiva 24 (1998): 71-92.
178. As Clifford was the first to note, this generation of ethnographers had close ties to the artistic avant-garde. For a thought-provoking and useful exploration of these connections, see Julia Kelly, Art, Ethnography, and the Life of Objects: Paris, c. 1925-35 (Manchester, 2007).
179. Perhaps the most influential early product of this intellectual shift was the Danish collector Carl Kjersmeier's four-volume study of African sculpture, which organized objects taxonomically into ethnically and geographically defined "style centers." The notion of "tribal style" that Kjersmeier's work codified remains a powerful, if contested, theoretical lens for students of African art.
180. Kjersmeier, Centres de style de la sculpture nègre africaine, 4 vols. (Paris, 1935-1938).
181. For assessments of Kjersmeier's significance, see Laude, La peinture française et l'art nègre, 435;
182. Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, 70-76.
183. For a wide-ranging critique of this taxonomic approach, see Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, "One Tribe, One Style? Paradigms in the Historiography of African Art," History in Africa 11 (1984): 163-193.
184. Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State, 76.
185. Alice L. Conklin, "Civil Society, Science, and Empire in Late Republican France: The Foundation of Paris's Museum of Man," Osiris, 2nd ser., 17 (2002): 255-290;
186. Dubuc, "Le futur antérieur du Musée de l'homme";
187. Daniel J. Sherman, " 'Peoples Ethnographic': Objects, Museums, and the Colonial Inheritance of French Ethnology," French Historical Studies 27, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 669-703.
188. The information presented here about the circumstances of Senghor's speech comes from Janet G. Vaillant, Black, French, and African: A Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 147-165.
189. For a useful timeline of Senghor's life and accomplishments, see Jacques Louis Hymans, Léopold Sédar Senghor: An Intellectual Biography (Edinburgh, 1971), 259-262.
190. Ibid., 151.
191. Senegal occupied a distinctive situation among French colonies. From the 1880s, when the French extended their control over the region's interior, Senegal was divided into two parts, the urban communes (Dakar, Gorée, Rufisque, and Saint-Louis) and the rural protectorat. Creoles and Africans born in the communes, known as originaires, enjoyed a privileged status as French citizens. Africans born outside the communes, such as Senghor, were subjects rather than citizens, and were accountable not to metropolitan French law but to the colonial legal system known as the indigénat.
192. Michael C. Lambert, "From Citizenship to Négritude: 'Making a Difference' in Elite Ideologies of Colonized Francophone West Africa," Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 2 (April 1993): 239-262.
193. For Coppet's attention to Senghor's report, see the pencil notes from Coppet on its first page, Archives nationales du Sénégal [hereafter ANS], O-614 (31).
194. Vaillant provides information about Senghor's tour and presentation to the Paris conference;
195. Black, French, and African, 155-165.
196. These initial discussions would provide the foundation for what would later become the ideology of Négritude, which first reached a broad audience with the 1948 publication of Léopold Sédar Senghor, ed., Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Paris, 1948).
197. Perhaps the most important of these journals for the young Senghor was the Revue du monde noir, which grew out of the well-known salon held in the early 1930s by the Nardal sisters, Paulette, Andrée, and Jane. The Nardals, who were from the West Indies, served as a link between the Anglophone and Francophone black worlds; their Revue published many of the American writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
198. Hymans, Léopold Sédar Senghor, 33-35;
199. Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 94-97.
200. For more on the transnational black community that took shape in Paris during this period, see Jennifer Anne Boittin, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (Lincoln, Neb., 2010);
201. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass., 2003);
202. Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (New York, 1996), esp. 25-129;
203. Sweeney, From Fetish to Subject.
204. Léopold Sédar Senghor, "Paris" [1961], in Senghor, Liberté I: Négritude et humanisme (Paris, 1964), 313-314.
205. Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State, 155.
206. For a letter expressing Senghor's intention to study "African ethnology and linguistics" by commuting to Paris from Tours, see ANS O-718/931, letter to Albert Charton, inspecteur général de l'ensiegnement, dated August 17, 1935.
207. See the typescript of the address and report in ANS O-614 (31). An abridged version of the address is collected in Senghor, Liberté I, 11-21.
208. ANS O-614 (31), "Le problème culturel en AOF," 5, 4, 6, 13, 10.
209. ANS O-614 (31), Report by Léopold Sédar Senghor to Marcel de Coppet, "L'enseignement en A.O.F.," 22.
210. ANS O-613 (31), dossier Jean Dado, report signed Albert Charton, January 20, 1937.
211. Ibid., report signed J. Le Gall, March 16, 1937, 2, 1.
212. Ibid., letter from Jean Dado, April 2, 1937.
213. For a description of these bas-reliefs, see Michel Leiris and Jacqueline Delange, African Art, trans. Michael Ross (London, 1968), 191-192.
214. For two different perspectives on this paradox, see Conklin, A Mission to Civilize,
215. Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State.
216. This conception of traditional African sculpture played an important role in the art history of post-independence Senegal, in part because of the influence of the Négritude-based cultural policy that Senghor developed as the country's first president.
217. Elizabeth Harney, In Senghor's Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960-1995 (Durham, N.C., 2004), esp. 1-104.
218. Susan Vogel, "Whither African Art? Emerging Scholarship at the End of an Age," African Arts 38, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 12.
219. Sidney Littlefield Kasfir has ascribed this bifurcated approach to the position of African art scholarship, which, especially in the United States, has uneasily attempted to join the very different-and often contradictory-disciplinary concerns of anthropology and art history.
220. Kasfir, African Art and the Colonial Encounter: Inventing a Global Commodity (Bloomington, Ind., 2007), esp. ix-xi.