Metropolitan Fetish: African Sculpture and the Imperial French Invention of Primitive Art

By John Warne Monroe

From the 1880s to 1940, French colonial officials, businessmen and soldiers, returning from overseas postings, brought home wooden masks and figures from Africa. This imperial and cultural power-play is the jumping-off point for a story that travels from sub-Saharan Africa to Parisian art galleries; from the pages of fashion magazines, through the doors of the Louvre, to world fairs and international auction rooms; into the apartments of avant-garde critics and poets; to the streets of Harlem, and then full-circle back to colonial museums and schools in Dakar, Bamako, and Abidjan.

John Warne Monroe guides us on this journey, one that goes far beyond the world of Picasso, Matisse, and Braque, to show how the Modernist avant-garde and the European colonial project influenced each other in profound and unexpected ways. Metropolitan Fetish reveals the complex trajectory of African material culture in the West and provides a map of that passage, tracing the interaction of cultural and imperial power. A broad and far-reaching history of the French reception of African art, it brings to life an era in which the aesthetic category of "primitive art" was invented.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781501736377

Book preview

METROPOLITAN FETISH

African Sculpture and the Imperial French Invention of Primitive Art

JOHN WARNE MONROE

Cornell University Press | Ithaca and London

To Wendie Schneider, who gave me the idea, and to the unjustly anonymous African artists whose genius enlivens these pages

CONTENTS

Preface

INTRODUCTION:

The French Paradox of Primitive Art

1THE MAKING OF A METROPOLITAN FETISH:

A Fang Mask Transformed

2INVENTING ANTIQUITY:

Henri Clouzot, André Level, and the Universal History of Primitive Art

3THE WINGS OF SNOBBERY:

Paul Guillaume and the Launch of Art Nègre, 1911–29

4FROM ART NÈGRE TO ART PRIMITIF :

Black Deco, Ethnology, and Surrealism in the Late 1920s

5SELLING THE ARTS OF THE ANCESTORS:

Charles Ratton, the Art Market, and the Transatlantic Black Diaspora

6AUTHENTICITY WARS:

Primitive Art between Metropole and Colony

CONCLUSION:

With an Archival Prophecy

Acknowledgments

List of Archival Abbreviations

Notes

Index

A gallery of color plates

PREFACE

Many people know what primitive art is, but fewer agree on what to call it anymore. Since the late 1960s, when a new self-consciousness began to emerge among Western connoisseurs, alternative designations for this distinctive aesthetic category have proliferated: tribal art, ethnographic art, non-Western art, arts premiers. Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the leading auctioneers in the field, now opt for the cumbersome—if more neutral—Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. Encyclopedic art museums have generally come to rely on similar geographic terminology. Almost every scholarly study on the subject devotes a few lines to this problem of language in its opening section, preparing readers with the elaborate solicitude one uses before introducing a dotty older relative prone to voicing opinions no longer admissible in polite society. In my own case, I have decided to retain the terms primitive and primitive art, with the proviso that when used in this book, they refer to a set of historically contingent Western ideas and visions of otherness, not to any kind of ethnographic reality.¹ Here, I am following the example of Sally Price, who in her pathbreaking work used the sense of alienation these terms provoked to justify their strategic re-appropriation: in this case, she discovered, distance from present-day usage can draw salutary attention to the constructedness of the categories that the words name.²

In addition, and for the same reasons, when I discuss the period from 1905 to about 1930, I frequently use the term art nègre, which was by far the most common designation among French speakers of the time. Beginning in the early 1930s, the term art primitif gradually supplanted art nègre in general usage, and in the portions of my text covering that later period, I shift my vocabulary accordingly. The word nègre poses a translation problem of its own. First, its tie to race is complicated. Until the late 1920s in the world of connoisseurs and critics that I discuss here, the adjective nègre was often applied willy-nilly to any form of material culture produced by members of a society deemed primitive, whether African, Oceanic, or even Native American. Second, while the word nègre had clear negative connotations, most white French speakers of the early twentieth century did not consider it vulgar. Instead, as Brent Hayes Edwards has argued in his incisive discussion of this question, in French the word nègre had a nominal force that placed it "between nigger and Negro."³ Also, and crucially, the valence of the term shifted dramatically over the course of the period this book covers. Starting in the late 1920s, and with increasing emphasis in the 1930s, Francophone African and Antillean activists and intellectuals claimed the term nègre as a positive racial designation—though some continued to prefer the less fraught terms noir (black) and personne de couleur (person of color). This process of strategic political appropriation, which reached its climax with the rise of the négritude movement after World War II, added a new dimension to the word’s meaning that roughly parallels the one that the capitalized noun Negro assumed in American English during the period between the mid-1920s and the late 1960s.⁴ To acknowledge these subtleties of connotation, I leave the word nègre untranslated when it appears in my various quotes from French sources. I should also note that I have chosen to follow Marianna Torgovnick’s example by not placing quotation marks around these words when they appear in the text—though I want the reader to be aware that I have chosen this dated terminology intentionally, in the service of historical precision, and with the critical perspective that such punctuation attempts to convey.⁵

Finally, there is the complex matter of labeling. The conventional practice for identifying works of historical African art assumes a direct correlation between an object’s style and the ethnic identity of its maker, often using an ethnonym (Baule, Senufo, Fang) in place of an artist’s name. In practice, however, as Susan Gagliardi has observed, this conflation obscures key facts: that works of African sculpture are produced by individuals, not an ethnic collective; that the definitions of various ethnic groups are historically contingent, and sometimes more a matter of colonial expediency than indigenous reality; that the boundaries between these groups are fluid; and that in Africa interchange among neighbors has been the historical rule rather than the exception.⁶ Similarly, when identifying particular forms in a given style, it is standard practice to associate them with specific ritual functions designated with ethnic names. A standing human figure in Baule style, for example, will typically be identified as either a spirit spouse (blolo bla or blolo bian) or a diviner’s nature spirit figure (asie usu). This tendency to impose functional categories obscures the fact that the original makers, uses, and ethnic origins of the vast majority of historical African objects in Western hands are in fact not documented—a consequence both of norms of field collection established in the colonial period and of connoisseurial approaches first developed in the early twentieth-century market for primitive art. For the sake of clarity, in the text and the captions of this book, I have chosen to retain the ethnic designations that scholars of historical African art commonly use when they classify objects by style. At the same time, however, I want the reader to be aware that such designations are externally imposed terms of art—products of the very history I am analyzing here—rather than indicators of some sort of seamless connection between style, culture, ethnic identity, and ritual use. Therefore in the captions, unless the name of an artist is known or a sobriquet has been agreed upon by scholars, I have chosen to identify objects as the creations of unidentified individuals working in particular styles. To aid the reader, I locate these styles by naming the present-day nation-states where most of the people who identify with them are found. In describing specific objects, I use generic terms, giving a more detailed indication of original function in cases where the documented history of the object and the evidence provided by its material condition are especially clear.

MAP 1

French Colonies in sub-Saharan West and Equatorial Africa, c. 1925

INTRODUCTION

The French Paradox of Primitive Art

Œil: bouton ouvre-toi large rond pointu pour pénétrer mes os et ma croyance. Transforme mon pays en prière de joie d’angoisse. Œil de ouate coule dans mon sang.

Eye: button open wide round pointed to pervade my bones and my belief. Turn my country into a prayer of joy of anguish. Eye of cotton wool flow in my blood.

—Tristan Tzara, Note 6 sur l’art nègre, 1917

This book’s goal is to say something new about a subject that has come to seem deceptively familiar: the French reception of African art in the first four decades of the twentieth century and, more broadly, the development of primitive art as a Western aesthetic category. Critics, journalists, art dealers, and scholars have written enough about this topic in their various ways that a skeptical reader could be forgiven for assuming it to be completely exhausted. Almost every undergraduate who takes a survey course in twentieth-century art hears a few oft-retold encounter stories, such as Pablo Picasso’s fateful 1907 visit to the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro, or Maurice de Vlaminck’s purchase of three mysterious figures for the cost of a round of drinks, or Henri Matisse’s impulsive decision to buy the little statuette he saw in a curiosity-shop window. Aspiring collectors of historical African art, dreaming their way through coffee-table books and auction catalogues, quickly discover the names of certain legendary critics and dealers—Guillaume Apollinaire, Carl Einstein, Paul Guillaume, André Level, Félix Fénéon, Charles Ratton—and the dramatic boost in value a provenance including those names confers. In equally short order, new collectors often begin a struggle to master the peculiar conception of authenticity that obtains in the world of what the market now calls tribal art, which is also a legacy of these progenitors. Every graduate student whose interests touch on the subject reads at least a few classics from the substantial body of critical literature that, since the 1980s, has striven to deconstruct this whole edifice of modernist mythmaking and connoisseurial discernment. While each of these approaches has its own value, each misses a crucial aspect of the picture: the impact of the distinctive historical context in which the way of seeing we now associate with primitive art first took shape.

In this book, I seek to provide that missing piece by bringing the disciplinary tools of intellectual and cultural history to bear on material that previous scholars have tended to study from the points of view of art history, critical theory, or anthropology. This approach leads me to reread oft-cited texts in new ways, to assemble a significant body of previously overlooked historical sources—archival documents, ephemera, articles from the periodical press—and to broaden the usual analytical scope by synthesizing secondary material from a range of subfields that have generated vast literatures of their own, but have not previously been considered together in terms of what they tell us about the French reception of African art. In the process, building on the key innovations of Yaëlle Biro and Daniel J. Sherman, I look beyond the boundaries conventionally drawn in studies of this topic.¹ Certainly, the major figures of the avant-garde, the art market, and French ethnology are fundamental to our understanding of the sweeping transformation in Western taste that the idea of primitive art represents, and they feature prominently in the chapters that follow. At the same time, however, it is important to remember that even in the interwar period, the idea of primitive art—or as it was more often called, art nègre—also had a broader impact. It was a mainstream phenomenon that exerted a telling influence on popular representations of Africa, fashion, conceptions of black identity developed by people of African descent across the Atlantic world, and the policy choices of colonial administrators.

A study of this type must answer three key questions. The first two are comparatively simple and closely linked: Why France, and why African art in particular? After all, objects made by people from a wide range of societies deemed primitive—not only African but also Oceanic, Native American, and Asian—inspired modernist artists across Europe and the United States in this period. Despite this, actors in the art market have long taken the central importance of Parisian modernists and African sculpture for granted. Countless critical essays and auction catalogues present Paris as the crucible from which the modernist way of seeing primitive art emerged, and treat historical African sculpture as its paradigmatic form. To understand why this assumption has taken root, we need to begin by looking at some key factors that set the French case and the African case apart. The third question is more complex: Given the aesthetic category of primitive art’s clear roots in what are now recognized as dated and inaccurate assumptions about certain types of culture defined as Other, why does it maintain such a strong hold on the Western imagination and even continue to exert an influence beyond the West? The answer here derives from the answers to the first two questions. The distinctive circumstances in which the French learned to appreciate African sculpture created a way of perceiving cultural Others that was highly ambivalent—an expression of cultural power on the one hand, and a recognition of potential equality on the other.

France and African Art

If we were to look at the history of the social sciences in isolation, France would seem an unlikely birthplace for the category of primitive art. The conception of otherness that underpins this way of perceiving objects was less a French invention than a British, German, and American one. It assumed its defining form in the second half of the nineteenth century, in tandem with the rise of anthropology, a new academic discipline that sought to develop a comprehensive science of man encompassing physiology, evolution, prehistory, social organization, customs, and beliefs.² From the 1870s onward, anthropologists concerned with the latter three topics increasingly described what they studied as culture and took a particular interest in cultures they defined as primitive.³ Primitive cultures were allegedly collective rather than individualistic, religious rather than secular, timeless rather than historically dynamic, and characterized by intuitive rather than rational thought processes. Early anthropologists imagined that these characteristics were similar to those of humanity’s primordial ancestors and therefore saw cultures deemed primitive as valuable windows into modern—which tended to also mean Western and civilized—humanity’s distant past.

So-called primitives were usually located in places far from centers of European learning, so for information about them, practitioners of anthropology turned to ethnographies: texts that sought to provide more or less systematic descriptions of particular cultures on the basis of firsthand observation. For the most part, in the early years of the discipline, the primary gatherers of ethnographic data were either colonial administrators or missionaries, whose observations served as grist for the theorizing of academic anthropologists. As the Anglo-American and German traditions of sociocultural anthropology developed in the early twentieth century, however, the old reliance on ethnographic data gathered by others gave way to a new disciplinary practice in which anthropologists began to conduct fieldwork themselves.⁴ Ethnographic museums were crucial to the spread and codification of this new discipline around the turn of the century. By 1900, Britain, Germany, and the United States boasted richly funded institutions devoted to the collecting and display of objects made by peoples deemed primitive. Systematically catalogued in the museums’ reserves, these collections served academic anthropologists as a fund of empirical evidence. Picturesquely deployed in dioramas or labeled in vitrines, they served a popularizing function, introducing the wider viewing public to anthropological theories about human difference and the nature of progress.⁵

Reliance on ethnography tightly bound anthropology to what historians now call the new imperialism, a defining geopolitical development of the second half of the nineteenth century, in which European governments expanded into Africa, Oceania, and Asia with unprecedented force, increasingly placing the territory they conquered under direct civilian government control. After the famous Berlin conference of 1884–85, sub-Saharan Africa became a primary venue for this expansion, and one that spoke especially strongly to the anthropological preoccupation with the primitive. Where European observers perceived South Asia and North Africa as regions characterized by ancient, once-powerful civilizations now in the advanced stages of decadence, they imagined Africa below the Sahara, Oceania, and some parts of the Americas to be places where human beings could still be observed in an almost precivilized state. As such, these regions exerted a special fascination: they provided a vision of what noncivilization and nonmodernity looked like that could be used, depending on the agenda at play, as a way of either reinforcing or questioning the West’s perceived superiority.

France came notably late to this social-scientific project, despite the fact that by 1900 it controlled the world’s second-largest empire, with substantial possessions in Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Oceania, South America, and Africa. Though Paris got its own ethnographic museum in 1878, the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro did not flourish in the way its counterparts elsewhere in Europe and the United States did. Instead, by the 1890s the institution was chronically underfunded, its collections neglected, and its acquisitions budget nonexistent. In her classic study of the museum’s early history, Nélia Dias attributes this decrepitude to a variety of intellectual factors unique to France, including the stubborn contention of rival schools of anthropological thought and competition from the ascendant discipline of sociology, which did not share early anthropology’s penchant for the study of objects in museums.⁶ In addition, France’s ideology of empire proved inhospitable to the approaches typical of British, American, and German anthropology. All three, in varying ways, sought to discern the inherent logic of cultures deemed primitive, which they analyzed as coherent, self-contained systems. Late nineteenth-century French proponents of imperial expansion, in contrast, developed a concept of their nation’s civilizing mission that left little room for such holistic analysis, and instead sought to transform specific customs and beliefs deemed barbaric into ones that struck French observers as more evolved.⁷ Many late nineteenth-century missionaries, who were important early gatherers of ethnographic information in French sub-Saharan Africa, took a related approach.

This French tendency to neglect ethnography, or to be content with studies compiled on an amateur basis by colonial administrators and missionaries whose formal responsibilities lay elsewhere, would change only after World War I. At that point, a need to respond to—and in effect, short-circuit—new claims for rights among colonized peoples helped shift French policy toward what administrators called an associationist approach.⁸ This new regime emphasized the difference of colonized societies; ethnographic knowledge, in turn, became a crucial means of constructing this difference and rendering it comprehensible. The practice of ethnography itself did not become professionalized in France until the mid-1920s—a process that Alice L. Conklin has investigated in magisterial detail.⁹ As she shows, ethnography finally found its place in the French university system as a part of the new discipline of ethnology, which was initially defined as a social science encompassing aspects of both physical and fieldwork-based sociocultural anthropology.

Ethnology’s notably late appearance on the French intellectual stage had fateful consequences for the history of twentieth-century art. When Parisian avant-garde painters and sculptors began looking at certain objects from Africa in new ways around 1905, they did so in a comparative institutional and intellectual vacuum. German, British, and American modernists had many of their early encounters with the primitive in well-maintained museums, and could seek further information from a growing number of detailed, rigorous ethnographies if they chose. For their French counterparts, in contrast, the primitive seemed above all obscure and mysterious, a matter of objects encountered in flea markets and ramshackle vitrines, their significance only discernible by aesthetic intuition—with help from much creative reading of missionary accounts and explorers’ travelogues. Actors in the early twentieth-century Parisian art world thus developed their own approach to the primitive with comparatively little input from ethnographic museums or academic social science.

Though these artists, dealers, and connoisseurs also saw Oceanic and pre-Columbian American material, it was African sculpture that most strongly captured their attention. There are multiple reasons for this, having to do with both the geopolitical fact of empire and the state of avant-garde taste between 1905 and 1925. At that point, France’s brutal pacification of its African colonies had largely come to an end. The ensuing steady back-and-forth traffic of businessmen, administrators, soldiers, and merchant seamen brought an unprecedented number of African objects to the metropole. Oceanic and pre-Columbian objects were rarer, and perhaps as a consequence, observers did not tend to set them apart: in French usage during this period, the term art nègre referred to all sculptural objects and textiles made by people deemed primitive, regardless of their geographical or chronological location. In addition, the distinctive formal characteristics of the African sculpture available at the time, such as its geometric stylization and bold deployment of volume in space, responded strongly to the formal concerns of the dominant schools of the period’s avant-garde, fauvism and cubism. It was the confluence of these factors—relatively abundant supply, a tendency to confuse the black African with a more generalized notion of the primitive, and the distinctive way that African sculptures looked—that made African sculpture paradigmatic. The techniques of seeing invented in Paris in this period proved highly adaptable and did much to grind the cultural lens through which current connoisseurs perceive what they now call tribal art, arts premiers, or ethnographic art.

This transformation in taste also had a commercial dimension. By the early 1910s, a small group of Parisian collectors, dealers, and critics, inspired by avant-garde artists, had begun to buy, sell, and admire African objects—especially wooden masks and figure sculptures. For these enthusiasts, the objects in question were no longer curios or ethnographic specimens; they were what Theodor Adorno would call autonomous works of art, objects with no purpose other than to be beautiful, contemplated in splendid isolation as sources of aesthetic pleasure.¹⁰ Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, these freshly art-ized objects took a steadily more sharply defined place in a larger cultural and market structure: the canon-building support system of private galleries, engaged collectors, journalistic critics, and museum curators that took shape in Paris after the decline of the Académie des beaux-arts in the second half of the nineteenth century. This system was crucial to the development of aesthetic modernism; it has since become familiar as the art world, the international framework in which most contemporary artistic creation occurs.¹¹ Paris was the first place where it emerged fully formed and remained its unrivaled global center throughout the period this book covers. When academic ethnology began to assert its intellectual presence in the later 1920s, therefore, it necessarily did so in a landscape that modernist art and its new market structures had already done much to shape.

Here, then, are the answers to our first two questions. Why France, and why Africa? Because of a striking confluence of historical factors, intellectual, cultural-economic, and geopolitical. A tardy embrace of sociocultural anthropology and the precocious emergence of a new kind of contemporary art market placed Paris in a distinctive position. Actors in its art world enjoyed an unusual combination of imaginative license and cultural power in their efforts to make sense of the wooden masks and figures arriving in steadily growing numbers from African colonies, a class of exotic object that developments in the artistic avant-garde had caused to seem especially relevant. The defining step in this process of making sense was the invention of a powerful conception of authenticity that placed the late nineteenth-century anthropological idea of the primitive in a framework constructed according to the disciplinary logic of art history, which, of course, is also in many ways the logic of value attribution in the art world.

Recognizing the nature of this art historical conception of authenticity is crucial to understanding why the French case has been so important to the history of primitive art as an aesthetic category. This idea of what makes an object legitimate can be difficult to discern, however, because it is so closely tied to a vision of cultural authenticity derived from ethnographic discourse. This second form of authenticity, which a number of scholars have lucidly analyzed in different ways, is a condition that tends to conflate perceived cultural integrity—a sense of connection to a precolonial African or Polynesian past—and perceived value.¹² According to this understanding, the more authentic an object or custom appears to be, the greater its worthiness. Cultural authenticity also has a paradoxical relation to the present. On one hand, it is assumed to be under permanent threat by encroaching modernity; on the other, it depends on a racialized idea of cultural purity, and therefore makes authenticity a quality that people with the appropriate heritage can potentially revive by embracing what seem to be historic traditions. Cultural authenticity appealed in a variety of complex ways to intellectuals in the black diaspora, French colonial administrators, and academic ethnologists. Its influence grew over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, and it developed in revealing tension with the vision of art historical authenticity that actors in the modernist art world had been projecting onto primitive art since the early 1910s. Both shared basic assumptions about cultures deemed primitive and their relation to modernity, but one envisioned authenticity primarily as a characteristic of people; the other, as a characteristic of objects.

This tension derives from the fact that art historical authenticity relates to aesthetic judgment in a different way from its cultural counterpart. Art historical authenticity is not identical with importance or beauty. Instead, it is a prerequisite for any further judgments about either trait. One can imagine, for example, an authentic Picasso—definitively proven to be by the artist’s hand—that connoisseurs judge to be a minor work, and perhaps even one of inferior aesthetic quality. A forged and therefore inauthentic Picasso, in contrast, cannot be considered a Picasso at all, however beautiful it might seem to those unaware of its questionable status. Indeed, from the perspective of the discipline of art history, it becomes invisible in a certain way—it is not part of the artist’s oeuvre, and is therefore an object on the basis of which no valid historical or aesthetic conclusions about the artist can be drawn. In the case of African art, an elaborately wrought figure sculpture and a crudely carved spoon might both be authentic and therefore candidates for legitimate connoisseurial assessment, but only the former would be a contender for the highest degree of admiration as a masterwork. An ebony letter opener or an artificially aged mask in a traditional style made for sale at the Abidjan airport, in contrast, would be inauthentic and therefore unworthy of any notice at all. Determinations of art historical authenticity thus entail an act of boundary drawing between what is worthy of serious consideration and what is consigned to scholarly invisibility and aesthetic disdain.

For art nègre, connoisseurs in the Parisian art world looked to what was already a rather dated ethnographic conception of the primitive when they drew these boundaries. The criteria of art historical authenticity they used, therefore, perpetuated a fateful nineteenth-century Western decision to imagine these objects as the collective, anonymous creations of distinct tribes, produced for spiritual or social rather than commercial reasons. Academic anthropology has long abandoned the assumptions on which interwar Parisian dealers, critics, and collectors relied when they transposed their vision of the authentic primitive into the discourse of art history and connoisseurship. Nevertheless, this conception of authenticity remains an article of faith in many parts of the art world—a striking fact that leads us to our third question.¹³

The Aesthetic Category of Primitive Art

The continued existence of the aesthetic category of primitive art is a much more complex enigma to resolve than the questions of why France and why Africa. The path to my proposed solution begins with a famous manifestation of early twentieth-century French connoisseurship’s aesthetic legacy: the curator William Rubin’s landmark 1984 exhibition Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. The show, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was conceived on an ambitious scale, drawing together 150 works of Western art and 200 objects from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.¹⁴ For Rubin, the art-making process was a universal human activity, and juxtapositions revealing formal affinities between tribal and modern works—a mask in Tusyan style from Burkina Faso and a sculpture by Max Ernst, for instance—served the salutary purpose of demonstrating that the West did not have a monopoly on creative genius. While he conceded that tribal artists might have thought of their creations in terms very different from those of their Western counterparts, he considered this problem to be a matter of incidental importance, since the ‘art-ness’ of the best tribal objects alone demonstrates that great artists were at work and that a variety of aesthetic solutions were arrived at, however little the artists themselves might have agreed with our description of the process. Rubin presented this insistence on art-ness as an act of inclusion, dignifying people who had lived their lives on the periphery by showing their greatest creations—as selected by his discerning curatorial eye—to be worthy of display in the hallowed galleries of a major art museum alongside canonized Western masterworks. Like all great art, he wrote, the finest tribal sculptures show images of man that transcend the particular lives and times of their makers. ¹⁵

These bold assertions of human universality inadvertently provoked a field-transforming controversy. Not only did Rubin’s show occur in New York, the city that after World War II supplanted Paris as the capital of Western contemporary art, but it was also well-timed to generate a new kind of critique. During the 1980s, scholars and critics embarked on a searching reassessment of the assumptions about art, culture, and society that underpinned aesthetic modernism; the universalistic swagger of Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art struck many of them as a glaring case in point, triggering a burst of polemical commentary that has since inspired an entire scholarly subfield. The earliest contributions questioned the exhibition’s underlying assumptions from the points of view of critical theory and sociocultural anthropology, seeing ethnocentric prejudice and arrogance where Rubin saw open-mindedness and tolerance. Broadly speaking, these critiques and those that have followed depend on a view of art not as universal but as what James Clifford calls a category defined and redefined in specific historical contexts and relations of power.¹⁶ From this perspective, assertions of the transcendent aesthetic appeal of primitive art might have seemed inclusive at first glance but were in fact symptoms of what Thomas McEvilley condemned as Western egotism still as unbridled as in the centuries of colonialism and souvenirism.¹⁷ In Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art, critics observed, this domineering tendency was implicitly present everywhere but went unquestioned. As Hal Foster put it, no counterdiscourse was posed: the imperialist precondition of primitivism was suppressed, and ‘primitivism,’ a metonym of imperialism, served as its disavowal.¹⁸ Rubin’s recognition of the Western art-ness of tribal objects, in other words, was a form of imperialism by other means; even more disturbingly, it was an act of domination that denied its true nature, presenting itself as a gesture of egalitarian acceptance.

Subsequent critiques have taken these insights as points of departure, moving from analysis of the specific circumstances of Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art to a more general exploration of Western ideas of the primitive, and the ways in which the consumption and reception of primitive art continue both to reveal and to perpetuate such ideas. The evidence in these critiques tends to be a mixture of material from present-day Western sources, usually from the United States and France—museum exhibition catalogues, newspaper articles, magazine advertisements—and ethnographic data, derived either from interviews with Western dealers and collectors or from fieldwork among groups of people who produce or participate in the wholesale market for primitive art.¹⁹ For these scholars, a rigorous skepticism of universalistic aesthetic claims is a way to reverse what Sally Price calls "the dehumanization of Primitive Art and its makers, and instead to acknowledge their cultural diversity, intellectual vitality, and aesthetic integrity."²⁰

Though this critical literature has been developing for decades, the questions it raises remain stubbornly unresolved. The world of connoisseurs, collectors, dealers, and curators of what once would have been called primitive art still looks in many ways just like it did in 1984. Certainly, art museums have become more conscious of the historical contingency of the conception of authenticity on which primitive art has long depended, and are highly attuned to what is now a vast body of scholarship that aims to understand African and Oceanic objects from the points of view of their creators.²¹ Curators have also embraced contemporary works—often politically charged and explicitly anticolonial—made for the international market by artists from the Global South. Despite these changes, however, when it comes to historical material from these regions, the norm is still to select objects for display according to standards of aesthetic quality and authenticity that first took shape during the period that this book covers. These standards are also still the mainspring of a market in which objects widely acknowledged to be masterworks can command prices in the millions. For many in this milieu, a universalizing conception of aesthetic value continues to appear not as a tool of crypto-imperialist domination but as a positive means of fostering a more inclusive worldview in the museum-going public. Similarly, scholars of modernism as a transnational phenomenon have noticed that the tropes of European primitivism, when strategically appropriated by those they define as Other, can turn the cultural tables in intriguing ways, inspiring new visions of independence and creative possibility.²²

Critics of universalism have been equally vocal, however, and scholars have continued to subject Western assumptions to rigorous scrutiny.²³ Among students of historical African art in the United States, this conflict has produced what Susan Vogel, an eminent figure in the field, described in 2005 as a full-fledged crisis. Though the classical arts of Africa remain as rich and inexhaustible a subject for study as Roman art or Shakespeare, she wrote, scholarship on the topic seems—if anything—quite exhausted. In large part, she argued, this exhaustion was a product of the paralyzing ‘angst’ created by the fact that scholarship in African art has always been conducted under the shadow of the politics of race in America and the legacy of Colonialism in Africa.²⁴ Vogel’s simultaneous acknowledgement of the affirmative power of aesthetic universalism—the idea that the classical arts of Africa can stand alongside Shakespeare—and recognition of the angst that accompanies a heightened awareness of the possible historical contingency of just such ideals, reveals the extent of the dilemma the Western concept of primitive art entails, even when the term itself is no longer used.

The explanation I would suggest for this proliferation of competing meanings is that the category of primitive art is obstinately both/and. It simultaneously seems to reinforce prejudices about the savage other and to provide a means of overcoming them. This paradox can be seen as a ramification of a larger contradiction, one that the political philosopher Étienne Balibar finds at the heart of the very concept of the universal as it took shape in the West during the age of democratic revolutions in the later eighteenth century.²⁵ Balibar suggests that this universal is a category with multiple coexisting meanings, riven with contradictions and for that reason also charged with possibilities for provoking change. First, he argues, there is the universality created by the global fact of capitalism, which throughout the modern period has drawn individuals and societies into an ever more interconnected market. Second, Balibar posits what he calls a fictitious universality, a commonality among individuals that is constructed through a process of strategic legal definition.²⁶ This is the universality of the modern democratic nation-state, which depends on acts of distinction drawing between those entitled to the full rights of citizenship and those denied them. Fictitious universality defines some individual particulars as irrelevant for the purposes of determining who can be a fully participating citizen while continuing to consider others—such as race, property ownership, place of birth, or gender—as too essential to be counteracted by the principle of legal equality, and therefore potential grounds for the continued deprivation of full citizenship rights.

What the fictitious universality of a given nation-state deems an essential justification for exclusion from full citizenship can change—and has changed—over time. This possibility leads Balibar to his third mode, ideal universality, the understanding of the concept that served as the ideological mainspring of the American and French Revolutions.²⁷ Ideal universality posits a fundamental connection between equality and liberty and therefore tends to challenge fictitious universality, which claims to promote liberty but simultaneously entails the drawing of distinctions among people in a way that denies equal status to some. This makes ideal universality a force for change in the direction of greater inclusion: it gives those relegated to unequal status a justification for claiming equality. This is especially true in France and the United States, nation-states that set great store by the ideals posited in such documents as the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Under these governments, a claim on behalf of a group denied rights on the basis of some difference fictitiously defined as essential, such as women or people of African descent, can be couched as a demand that the state live up to the Enlightenment-derived self-evident truths of universal equality upon which it was founded.²⁸

What Balibar identifies as the ambiguous, intrinsically contradictory character of the concept of universality in the context of the nation-state has attracted much attention from practitioners of what scholars of France call the new colonial history. Tyler Stovall, a notable contributor to this literature, has observed that one of its guiding principles is the idea that ‘France’ is not just limited to the European hexagon but is itself a product of the colonial encounter, both at home and overseas.²⁹ Expanding the boundaries of France in this way places an even greater emphasis on the animating tension between fictitious universality, with its tendency to exclude, and ideal universality, with its potential to expand the ranks of those considered equal. In the case of sub-Saharan Africa, one of the key theaters of French empire, several major studies have demonstrated this contradiction’s central importance.³⁰

France’s program of imperial expansion in West and central Africa began in the early 1880s, shortly after the consolidation of the Third Republic, when a version of the revolutionary tradition of 1789 was enshrined as the founding national mythology: the fire-breathing Marseillaise, previously forbidden for its radicalism, became the official national anthem in 1879; Bastille Day became the fête nationale in 1880. In this context of republican revival, overseas conquest was not simply a matter of exploitative domination; it seemed to be a humanitarian project. French advocates of empire claimed that colonization would transform allegedly benighted non-Europeans by civilizing them, thus equipping them to become potential citizens and equals. At the same time, though, as Frederick Cooper observes, the practical operation of the French colonial system depended on the maintenance of clear-cut boundaries demarcating colonizer from colonized, civilized from primitive, core from periphery. Sustained French domination, and many of the substantial material benefits that accrued from it, required the maintenance of a stark inequality between native and European. The coexistence of these two currents, inclusive and exclusionary, universalistic and particularizing, made the space of empire into a terrain where concepts were not only imposed but also engaged and contested.³¹ An ongoing tension between the imperial conception of colonized people as subjects, often based on racist assumptions that took physical differences to be essential, and the republican promise of legal equality and universal citizenship, became a defining characteristic of France’s political life.

Here, then, we move toward an answer to the question of why primitive art has proved so remarkably durable as a Western aesthetic category. From its inception in early twentieth-century Paris, it was a product of the continuous negotiations over inclusion and exclusion that thinking like an empire entailed, and as such could serve both as a means of criticism or resistance and as an instrument of domination.³² At root, this paradox involved a conflict between the ideal universality that Rubin had in mind when he extolled the transcendent power of all great art, and the fictitious universality of art historical authenticity, as conceived by French observers and imposed on African objects. Appreciation of authentic objects could foster a new kind of broader understanding, enabling bearers of one civilization to develop a sense of another’s subtleties and achievements. At the same time, however, the poignancy of the impact that these objects made for Western viewers relied on an implicit sense that the capacity to produce art historically authentic objects was something that Africans lost when they became modern. In practice, therefore, contemporary Africans were considered to be unable to replicate the creative feats of their ancestors. With this aesthetic double bind, early twentieth-century connoisseurs of primitive art recapitulated a paradox at the heart of the Third Republic’s vision of empire. Natives, in the grand tradition of French republicanism, were widely acknowledged as potential equals, but in practice, equality was permanently deferred. Even so, that ideal of potential equality could serve as a powerful tool for subverting dominant assumptions—in Balibar’s terms, a way of confronting the arbitrary, unjust distinctions of a fictitious universality with the inclusive, egalitarian promise of an ideal one.

As we have seen, this ambivalence continues to challenge scholars, who have simultaneously elaborated an incisive critique of the assumptions upon which Western appreciation of primitive art depends and a compelling case for the universal aesthetic value of certain historical objects from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Rather than viewing these two lines of argument as mutually exclusive, therefore, it might be useful to consider them as intertwined products of the historical context in which they emerged. Crucially, the case of African sculpture in France during the first four decades of the twentieth century allows us to discern the complex ways that cultural power was implicated in the contradictory understandings of universality that practitioners of the new colonial history have analyzed so productively. During this period, the French political capital was also the capital of modern art, a place where young artists and writers from across the globe came to make their reputations. Paris, then, was both a cultural and an imperial metropole. Perhaps as a consequence of how different disciplines construct their objects of study, scholars have generally chosen to focus on one of these aspects of the city’s history or the other. Even when they acknowledge points of contact between the arts and empire, studies of the critics, painters, sculptors, composers, literary writers, and art collectors who defined modernist Paris tend to inhabit a very different scholarly universe from the one that social and political historians have constructed around the colonial boosters, politicians, immigrants, and anti-imperialist activists who were present in the city at the same time.³³

The French reception of African sculpture provides us with a vantage point that lets us see the connections between these two worlds, the modernist and the imperial, in a new way. Enthusiastically admired in metropolitan studios, homes, and galleries, these objects—isolated on hardwood bases for aesthetic contemplation, judged by the same formal standards as cutting-edge contemporary sculpture—also remained stubbornly concrete manifestations of the inequality on which empire depends. The artists, collectors, critics, and dealers discussed in the following chapters generally did not see themselves as propagandists for colonial conquest. Many, in fact, strongly opposed it. Nevertheless, the aesthetic approach to African sculptures that they developed grew from a set of historically contingent assumptions about the nature of primitive man that resonated with the French ideology of empire. The system of connoisseurship that primitive art entailed also helped transform certain objects into masterpieces of world art, however, and by virtue of that act, made it possible for them to lead very different discursive lives elsewhere. Perhaps because of its intrinsically contradictory, ambivalent nature, the idea of primitive art quickly became—to borrow Benedict Anderson’s term—modular, susceptible to appropriation, redefinition, and use for a variety of conflicting purposes, not only in the French metropole and its colonies but also across the globe.³⁴

Plan of the Book

Of course, since every book has a finite number of pages, the approach taken here imposes certain limitations. Most crucially, I am primarily concerned with what happened after the objects at the heart of my argument—African sculptures in wood—arrived in France, and therefore do not, for the most part, consider the complex meanings and histories they already had in their places of origin. In making this