Transmodern: An art history of contact, 1920–60 9781526160379

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Transmodern

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SERIES EDITORS Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its most basic structures by foregroundseries editors ing work that challenges the conventional periodisation and geographical subfields of traditional Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon art history, and addressing a wide range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.

Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its

These acknowledge impact of recentwork scholarship on our understanding of the mostbooks basicwill structures by the foregrounding that challenges complex temporalities and cartographies that have emerged through centuries of world-wide the conventional periodisation and geographical subfields of across national and trade, political colonisation and the diasporic movement of people and ideas traditionalborders. art history, and addressing a wide range of visual continental

cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.

To buy or to find out more about the books currently available in this series, please go to: https:// manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/rethinking-arts-histories/

These books will acknowledge the impact of recent scholarship on our understanding of the complex temporalities and cartographies that have emerged through centuries of world-wide trade, political colonisation and the diasporic movement of people and ideas across national and continental borders.

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Transmodern An art history of contact, 1920–60

Christian Kravagna Translated by Jennifer Taylor

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Christian Kravagna 2022 English language translation © Jennifer Taylor (2022)

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The right of Christian Kravagna to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This book was originally published as Transmoderne: Eine Kunstgeschichte des Kontakts (Berlin: b_books, 2017)

ISBN 978 1 5261 6036 2 hardback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for ­external or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.

   Cover: Dr Fahamu Pecou, Return to My Native…, 2012. © the artist and Backslash Gallery, Paris. Typeset by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire

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In memory of Marion von Osten (1963–2020)

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Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements

page viii xiii

Introduction

1 Towards a postcolonial art history of contact 2 In the shade of tall mango trees: art education and

1 39

transcultural modernism in the context of the Indian ­independence movement63

3 Transcultural beginnings: decolonisation, transculturalism, and the overcoming of race

4 Trees of knowledge: anthropology, art, and politics. Melville J. Herskovits and Zora Neale Hurston – Harlem circa 1930

90 107

5 The migrant as catalyst: Winold Reiss and the Harlem

Renaissance131

6 Encounters with masks: counter-primitivisms in Black

modernism149

7 Purity of art in a transcultural age: modernist art theory and the culture of decolonisation

182

8 Painting the global history of art: Hale Woodruff’s

The Art of the Negro221

Bibliography Index

254 276

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Figures

0.1 Rabindranath Tagore with the Mother and Paul Richard in Japan in June 1916, photograph. (Public domain, Wikimedia Commons).13 0.2 Albert Smith, portrait of René Maran on the cover of The Crisis, May 1922. The Crisis Publishing Co., Inc. NAACP. (Public domain, Wikipedia). 14 1.1 Claude McKay speaking in the Kremlin, c. 1923, photograph. Claude McKay Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. (Wikimedia public domain). 47 1.2 View of the exhibition La Vérité sur les colonies, 1931. Un peuple qui en opprime d’autres ne saurait être libre, photograph. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2003.R.20).50 1.3 View of the exhibition La Vérité sur les colonies, 1931. Fétiches européens, photograph. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2003.R.20).  51 2.1 Rabindranath Tagore with Mukul Dey, ‘Kiyo-san’ and another Japanese lady at Tomitaro Hara’s Sankei-en in Yokohama, Japan. 1 August 1916. (Public domain, Wikimedia Commons).  69 2.2 Abanindranath Tagore, Bharat Mata, 1905, watercolour on paper. Victoria Memorial, Kolkata. (Wikimedia Commons). 74 2.3 Gaganendranath Tagore, Meeting at the Staircase, c. 1923, watercolour on paper. National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. (Wikimedia Commons). 78 2.4 Gaganendranath Tagore, A Cubist Scene, c. 1923, ­watercolour on postcard. Collection P. & S. Mitter. 83 2.5 Stella Kramrisch, Abanindranath Tagore and other members of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, Calcutta 1922, photograph. Indian Society of Oriental Art. 85

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List of figures

4.1 Melville J. Herskovits with artefacts from Surinam, c. 1935, photograph. Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, IL. Courtesy of Northwestern University Archives. 111 4.2 Zora Hurston, half-length portrait, standing, facing slightly left, beating the hountar, or mama drum, 1937, photograph. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC. 115 4.3 Miguel Covarrubias, cover for Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston, J.B. Lippincott Co., 1935. Estate of Miguel Covarrubias, María Elena Rico Covarrubias. 116 4.4 Aaron Douglas, cover for Fire!!, 1926. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021.121 4.5 Alan Lomax, Zora Neale Hurston, Rochelle French, and Gabriel Brown in Eatonville, Florida, 1935, photograph. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.  124 5.1 Winold Reiss, cover for Survey Graphic, 6:6 (March 1925). Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, New York. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 132 5.2 Winold Reiss, Langston Hughes, c. 1925, pastel on illustration board, 76.3 × 54.9 cm. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of W. Tjark Reiss, in memory of his father, Winold Reiss. © Estate of Winold Reiss. 136 5.3 Winold Reiss, Elise Johnson McDougald, 1924, pastel on board, 76.4 × 54.8 cm. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Lawrence A. Fleischman and Howard Garfinkle with a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (CCO). 141 5.4 Winold Reiss, W.E.B. Du Bois, 1925, pastel on paper, 76 × 55 cm. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Lawrence S. Fleischman and Howard Garfinkle with a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (CCO). 142 5.5 Aaron Douglas, cover for Opportunity, June 1926. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021. 144 6.1 Walker Evans, Mask, 1935, gelatin silver print, 24.1 × 16.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Gift of Robert Goldwater, 1961 and 1962 (1978.412.1937). © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / bpk / Walker Evans. 150 6.2 Norman Lewis, Dan Mask, 1935, pastel on sandpaper, 46 × 31.8 cm, signed. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC,

ix

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x

List of figures

New York, NY. © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. 151 6.3 Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Les Statues meurent aussi, 1953, film stills. 153 6.4 Meta Warrick Fuller, Ethiopia Awakening, 1921, bronze, 170 × 40.6 × 73.6 cm. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, New York. The New York Public Library Digital Collections.  158 6.5 Malvin Gray Johnson, Negro Masks, 1932, oil on canvas, 50.8 × 45.7 cm. Hampton University Museum Collection, Hampton University, Hampton, VA.  160 6.6 Malvin Gray Johnson, Self-portrait, 1934, oil on canvas, 97.2 × 76.2 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Gift of the Harmon Foundation (1967.57.30). © 2021. Photo Smithsonian American Art Museum / Art Resource / Scala, Florence.161 6.7 Aaron Douglas, cover for The Crisis, November 1926. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021. 165 6.8 Loïs Mailou Jones, Les Fétiches, 1938, oil on linen, 64.7 × 54.0 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Museum purchase made possible by N.H. Green, R. Harlan, and F. Musgrave. © 2021. Photo Smithsonian American Art Museum / Art Resource / Scala, Florence. 166 6.9 Poster of Festac ’77, Lagos 1977. 169 6.10 Ousmane Sembène, La Noire de ..., 1966, film stills. 170 6.11 Nii Kwate Owoo, You Hide Me, 1970, film stills. 174 6.12 IAM, Tam Tam de l’Afrique, 1991, video stills. 176 7.1 Norman Lewis, Shapes, 1947, oil on masonite, 36.8 × 45 cm, signed. Private Collection. © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. 183 7.2 Norman Lewis, The Wanderer (Johnny), 1933, oil on canvas, 91.4 × 76.2 cm, signed. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. 197 7.3 Norman Lewis, Untitled (Police Beating), 1943, watercolour, ink and graphite on paper, 50.8 × 35.2 cm, signed. Rodney M. Miller Collection. © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. 199 7.4 Norman Lewis, Street Musicians, 1945, oil on canvas, 65.4 × 50.2 cm, signed. Private Collection. © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. 203

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List of figures

7.5 Norman Lewis, Untitled, c. 1947, oil on canvas, 76.2 × 90.2 cm, signed. Private Collection. © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. 7.6 Norman Lewis, Metropolitan Crowd, 1946, oil on canvas, 43.5 × 100.6 cm, signed. Delaware Art Museum, Louisa du Pont Copeland Memorial Fund and partial gift of Ouida B. Lewis in memory of Harvey W. Singleton (1994–48). © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. 7.7 Norman Lewis, Alabama, 1960, oil on canvas, 122.2 × 184.5 cm, signed. Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund (2017.1). © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. 7.8 Norman Lewis, American Totem, 1960, oil on canvas, 188 × 114.3 cm, signed. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, purchase, with funds from the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund in memory of Preston Robert and Joan Tisch, the Painting and Sculpture Committee, Director’s Discretionary Fund, Adolph Gottlieb, by exchange, and Sami and Hala Mnaymneh (2018.141). © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. 7.9 Norman Lewis, Rednecks, 1960, oil on canvas, 128.3 × 177.8 cm, signed. Private Collection. © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. 7.10 Wifredo Lam, Altar for Yemaya, 1944, oil on paper mounted on canvas, 148 × 94.5 cm. Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’art moderne, Paris. Inventory no. AM 1985–99. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021.  7.11 Wifredo Lam, Oya, 1944, oil on canvas, 160 × 127 cm. María Graciela and Luis Alfonso Oberto Collection. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021. 7.12 Wifredo Lam, The Sombre Malembo, God of the Crossroads, 1943, oil on canvas, 153 × 126.4 cm. The Rudman Trust. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021. 8.1 Hale Woodruff, The Art of the Negro (Native Forms), 1950–51, oil on canvas, 365.7 × 365.7 cm. Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta, GA. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021. 8.2 Hale Woodruff, By Parties Unknown, 1935, linocut, 48.9 × 38.3 cm. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, 2012.235. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021. 

204

204

205

207 209

210 212 213 222 225

xi

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xii

List of figures

8.3 Hale Woodruff, Afro Emblems, 1950, oil on linen, 45.7 × 55.9 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr and Mrs Alfred T. Morris, Jr. 1984.149.2. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021. 8.4 Alfred H. Barr, cover of the exhibition catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art, MoMA 1936. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Offset, printed in colour, 19.7 × 26 cm. The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. MA143 ©2021. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art / Scala, Florence. 8.5 Miguel Covarrubias, The Tree of Modern Art, Planted 60 Years Ago, 1933, illustration for Vanity Fair, May 1933. Estate of Miguel Covarrubias. María Elena Rico Covarrubias. 8.6 Ad Reinhardt, How to Look at Modern Art in America, illustration in PM, July 1946. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021. 8.7 Hale Woodruff, The Art of the Negro (Interchange), 1950–51, oil on canvas, 365.7 × 365.7 cm. Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta, GA. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021. 8.8 Hale Woodruff, The Art of the Negro (Dissipation), 1950–51, oil on canvas, 365.7 × 365.7 cm. Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta, GA. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021. 8.9 Hale Woodruff, The Art of the Negro (Parallels), 1950–51, oil on canvas, 365.7 × 365.7 cm. Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta, GA. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021. 8.10 Hale Woodruff, The Art of the Negro (Influences), 1950–51, oil on canvas, 365.7 × 365.7 cm. Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta, GA. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021. 8.11 Hale Woodruff, The Art of the Negro (Muses), 1950–51, oil on canvas, 365.7 × 365.7 cm. Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta, GA. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021. 8.12 Loïs Mailou Jones, Under the Influence of the Masters, The Negro History Bulletin, 2:7 (April 1939), 57. The Black History Bulletin / Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Howard University. Courtesy of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. 8.13 Loïs Mailou Jones, Expressing Thought Through Sculpture, The Negro History Bulletin, 2:6 (March 1939), 49. The Black History Bulletin/Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Howard University. Courtesy of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

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229 230 231 232 233 234 235 237

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Acknowledgements

My work over the last fifteen years on the art history of contact has benefited greatly from many discussions with friends and colleagues. Portions of the book have been presented as lectures at institutions like University of Barcelona, Tate Modern, University of Cambridge, National Gallery Prague, University of Zurich, University of Bern, ERG – École Supérieure des Arts Brussels, Collège d’études Mondiales Paris, Free University Berlin, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Warburg Haus Hamburg, the Centre for Advanced Studies at Ludwig-Maximilian-University of Munich, and the 33rd CIHA World Congress 2012 in Nuremberg. I am grateful for the comments of the audiences on those occasions. This book is based on the revision and translation of Transmoderne: Eine Kunstgeschichte des Kontakts published in 2017 with b_books in Berlin. I am grateful to Stephan Geene and b_books for the permission to translate the book into English. While the German book has benefited from continued encouragement by Susanne Leeb and critical reviews by Sabeth Buchmann, Helmut Draxler, Clemens Krümmel, and Susanne Leeb, the editors of b_ books’ PoLYpeN series, the English edition owes a lot of its enhancements to the suggestions of Amelia Jones and Masha Meskimmon and the very helpful comments of two anonymous external readers. I am grateful to all of them for their thorough reading and the motivation in the revision process that their thoughtful contributions provided. Versions of some chapters have previously been published in English. A first version of Chapter 2 was published in Transcultural Modernisms (Berlin: Sternberg, 2013), edited by our Model House Research Group. Doing research on transculturalism and decolonisation together with Fahim Amir, Eva Egermann, Moira Hille, Jakob Krameritsch, Christina Linortner, Peter Spillmann, and especially Marion von Osten in the framework of the research project Mapping Transcultural Modernisms between 2010 and 2012 helped shape my own understanding of the complexities of these topics. A first draft of Chapter 3 appeared in 2012 in the section ‘Unsettling Knowledges’ of the web journal transversal published by eipcp – European

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xiv

Acknowledgements

Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. I am grateful to Therese Kaufmann who encouraged me to further develop the transdisciplinary aspects of transcultural thought. Gabriele Genge and Angela Stercken included a shorter version of Chapter 6 in their edited volume Art History and Fetishism Abroad: Global Shiftings in Media and Methods (Bielefeld: transcript, 2014). Chapter 7 appeared as ‘Purity of Art and the Racial Politics of Modernism’ in Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War, edited by Anselm Franke, Nida Ghouse, Paz Guevara, and Antonia Majaca, published by Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2021. I am grateful to Anselm Franke for giving me permission to make use of the English translation commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt. A shorter version of Chapter 8 appeared as ‘Painting the Global History of Art: Hale Woodruff’s The Art of the Negro’ in Tate Papers, no. 30, autumn 2018. I am thankful to editors Christopher Griffin and Celia White. A slightly different version was published in ‘Global Art History’: Transkulturelle Verortungen von Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft, edited by Julia Allerstorfer and Monika Leisch-Kiesl (Bielefeld: transcript), 2017. At Manchester University Press, I thank Emma Brennan and Alun Richards. With patience and precision they have ensured that this project became a reality. I am also grateful to my translator, Jennifer Taylor, for her wonderful work, and to my student assistant, Jeremy Okello-Okello, who helped with obtaining image permissions. In addition to the people already mentioned, I would like to thank for valuable discussions, exchanges, suggestions and critique: Rasheed Araeen, Zeigam Azizov, Bea de Sousa, Burcu Dogramaci, Johannes Fabian, Elke Gaugele, Karin Gludovatz, Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat, Monika Juneja, Geeta Kapur, Yacouba Konaté, Sarat Maharaj, Christine Meisner, Viktoria Metschl, Matthias Michalka, Partha Mitter, Parul Mukherji, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Lisl Ponger, Maurita Poole, Stefan Römer, Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Hemma Schmutz, Devika Singh, Ruby Sircar, Ruth Sonderegger, Vivan Sundaram, Robert Farris Thompson, Monica Titton, Maja Vukoje, and Simone Wille. My parents Peter and Dorli Krawagna laid the foundation for my work a long time ago. I thank my father for the school of seeing, in the museums and in the fields, my mother for the writing lessons at the dining table and under the linden tree. Without the love and understanding of Cornelia Kogoj, who has been an important interlocutor at all stages of the project, this book would not have been realised. Her long-time commitment to the equality struggles of minorities in Austria has certainly influenced my own liberation-political approach to art history. This book is dedicated to her.

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Introduction

Spirit needs no visa. Robert Farris Thompson, Communiqué from Afro-Atlantis

Contact 1

In the early 1950s, the Guyanese painter Aubrey Williams had the opportunity to meet Pablo Picasso in Paris. This contact with the master of modernism had been arranged by Albert Camus. It turned out to be a disappointment for the young artist, who had moved from the British colony in South America to London shortly before. Picasso did not see him as a fellow-artist, Williams recalls in an interview with Rasheed Araeen,1 but instead considered him an exotic object of artistic interest: I did not like Picasso. [...] I remember the first comment he made when we met. He said I had a very fine African head and he would like me to pose for him. I felt terrible. In spite of the fact that I was introduced to him as an artist, he did not think of me as another artist. He thought of me only as something he could use for his own work.2

Simon Gikandi tells the story of this failed contact in an essay on Picasso’s relationship with Africa and Africans. He recounts how a certain conception of ‘Africanness’ that the co-founder of European primitivism had seized on upon his first encounter with African art at the Trocadéro in Paris prevented him from recognising Williams as a worthy colleague. Using the example of the most widely respected artist of the twentieth century and his misjudgement of the – later very well-known – Afromodernist, Gikandi corroborates the postcolonial criticism of the exclusion of non-Western artists by the European modernists.3 In order to be able to use the ‘African’ for their own aesthetic revolution, the modernists had to negate the presence of Africans as human beings and contemporary cultural producers.4 In Gikandi’s analysis, the contact case study serves to prove the failure of transcultural relationships that took place on the basis of late colonial power relations and under the

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Transmodern: an art history of contact

premises of modernist assumptions about the setting and the protagonists of modernism. Contact 2

John Biggers was one of the first African American artists to exhibit his work at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Biggers was still at the beginning of his career when he presented his large-format picture Dying Soldier in the exhibition Young Negro Art at the MoMA in 1943. It was the first group exhibition of Black artists at the institutional hub of modernism, at a time when the US art world was still highly segregated.5 The exhibition Young Negro Art and Biggers’s later so successful career can be traced back to a transcultural contact situation of a very different kind from the encounter between Williams and Picasso. The presentation at the MoMA was organised by the art educator Viktor Lowenfeld, an Austrian Jew who emigrated to the USA while fleeing from the Nazis, and who in 1939 accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Industrial Arts at the Hampton Institute in Virginia. Lowenfeld established an art class outside of the regular curriculum at Hampton, which Biggers enrolled in after initially planning to train as a plumber at the historically Black college. He later remembered: Viktor was entirely different from white Americans. He was completely untypical of any white person I’d ever met. [...] He said to us one of the reasons why he chose Hampton to come and work in was because the African American people are socially handicapped and he felt a kinship because of his own struggles in Germany (Austria) and what he had just endured there.6

Lowenfeld applied his own pedagogical programme to his work with disadvantaged young African Americans whose self-image was burdened by the effects of a racist society. Influenced while in Vienna by Oskar Kokoschka’s Expressionism and the art theory of Alois Riegl, he focused on eliciting the unrestrained expression of each individual’s relationship to his or her social world.7 Lowenfeld’s ‘art education practice of empowerment, resistance, and activism’8 was essentially based on his experiences as a member of a group that was subjected to racist persecution in his homeland. In an effort to eliminate the constraints on artistic expression resulting from social power relations, Lowenfeld for example initiated research into the African collection of the Hampton Institute, invited already established Black artists such as Hale Woodruff, Charles White, and Elizabeth Catlett to Hampton as guest lecturers, and held discussions with white and Black art experts. Samella Lewis, one of Lowenfeld’s students, remembers how his approach to teaching resolutely transcended the colour line:

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Introduction

It was a great cause for him, to work against segregation, prejudice [...] In a way he encouraged us to use art as an instrument or a tool to combat serious deprivation and prejudice, and the evils of discrimination. He forced us to take a position in relation to humanity and inhumane treatment of other peoples.9

Just as Picasso’s Africanism clouded his encounter with Williams,10 so did modern European primitivism and exoticism in general act as barriers to any fruitful transcultural contacts that artists might have had across colonial borders and colour lines. As a refugee fleeing from racist persecution and an outsider in American society, Lowenfeld did not succumb to this Africanism (or at least, he did so to a lesser degree) and was therefore able to broach fields of action that were not open to most white people. In addition to his European background in (art) education as a path to self-development, this was a prerequisite for the lasting impact of his teaching on African American modernism and the continuation of his teaching methods by artists such as John Biggers and Elizabeth Catlett.11 Even though the model of failure criticised by Gikandi is always kept in mind in this book and occasionally demonstrated,12 the following chapters deal instead with those productive moments of transcultural contact that, despite divergent experiences, bring forth articulations of another mode of modernism that was relevant to liberation politics. This book makes the case for a postcolonial art history of global modernism. The proposed approach of transmodernism is based on the motif of contact.13 Dimensions of the transmodern

In the first half of the twentieth century, encounters between artists, authors, and other stakeholders of various origins and different forms of artistic and intellectual socialisation, taking place all around the world – in the (former) colonies and in the Western metropolitan centres – gave rise to new and alternative forms of modern art. These manifestations of transmodernism emerged from transcultural relationships – between European and Indian, Indian and Japanese, or European and African American protagonists, for example – in which processes of exchange, collaboration, and the forming of alliances resulted in the mutual transformation of artistic concepts and ideas of aesthetics. In order to understand better the global dimension of modernism, which feels more obvious to us today than it did two or three decades ago, and to comprehend the global multiplication of artistic modernisms, it is necessary to start from those historical constellations in which transcultural modernisms not only took shape for the first time but were also understood as such by their protagonists and placed in a critical relationship to the prevailing model of the colonial diffusion of a particular Western concept of

3

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Transmodern: an art history of contact

modernism. The concept of the transmodern proposed here understands the diversity of global modernisms not merely in terms of the regional effects of the cultural dimensions of globalisation but as an intentional response to the colonial nature of dominant Western modernism, one that is situated within political agendas. The artistic and intellectual efforts that were analysed to arrive at the term proposed here strove (in varying ways) for a liberationist transformation of white- and Western-conditioned modernism. This applies to the beginnings of artistic modernism in India in the context of the independence movement, as well as to Fernando Ortiz’s theory of transculturation and Wifredo Lam’s transcultural painting as part of the struggle against US neocolonialism in pre-revolutionary Cuba. In Zora Neale Hurston’s theory of the critical appropriation of white culture by African Americans, formulated in the context of the Harlem Renaissance of the interwar period, this transformative dimension is explicitly linked to the transcultural aspect, while, in the painting of Norman Lewis and Hale Woodruff, Abstract Expressionism as ‘American-type painting’14 undergoes a subtle politicisation from the perspective of the Black experience of racism. As these and other examples detailed in the following chapters show, the transcultural dimension is a central characteristic of transmodernism. However, this is not its only distinguishing feature. In previous publications, some of which have fed into this book, I have used the term transcultural modernism.15 But this term no longer seems sufficient to me for understanding the political aspects of the respective artistic and theoretical statements in view of, among other things, the inflation of the transcultural in recent developments in art historiography, which threatens to bury the postcolonial critique of the culturally exclusive conception of white Western modernism.16 Aside from the danger of neglecting the decolonial transformation of modernism as the main thrust of many historical articulations of the transcultural, another argument can also be made for adapting the term’s usage. As especially Chapters 3, 4, and 7 make clear, critiques of cultural and political constructions of difference and the rigid border policies of hegemonic modernism are often formulated in languages and styles that transcend borders. Hurston mixes anthropological and literary writing in her publications on African American culture; Ortiz offers his analysis of transcultural Cuba in the form of a fable in which tobacco and sugar are the protagonists; and Norman Lewis’s painting ‘stains’ universalist abstraction with signs of social division. These transgressive practices in terms of disciplines and genres are characteristic of transmodern forms of expressions. They are based on an understanding of the problem complex of colonial lines of demarcation, racist segregation policies, and dogmatic dividing lines between scholarship and art, individual artistic genres, ‘pure’ painting and ‘literary’ painting (Clement Greenberg), and other forms of ‘purification work’ of Western modernity

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Introduction

(Bruno Latour).17 In articulations of the transmodern, the critical attitude towards the Manichean principles of modern thinking is also associated with resistance to the conventions and rules of writing and painting that were shaped by modern colonial thinking. The transmodern as designation for a decolonial force within modernity and modernism represents an attempt to condense its transculturalism (both as a practice and as an object of reflection), its transgressive processes, and its transformational agendas into one concept. The Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel proposed the term ‘Transmodern’ as ‘an explicit overcoming of the concept “Post-modernity” (since the latter still represents a final moment of Modernity)’.18 Dussel starts from the need ‘to reconstruct the concept of “Modernity” from an “exterior” perspective, that is to say, from a global perspective (not provincial like the European perspective)’.19 The postmodern critique of modernity would not have criticised its Eurocentric foundations and would itself have remained Eurocentric at its core. Drawing on Emanuel Levinas’s concept of exteriority, Dussel is interested in a (locally and politically) different critique of modernity, one that goes beyond the postmodern critique: Exteriority is a process that takes off, originates, and mobilises itself from an “other” place […] than European and North American modernity. From this “exteriority”, negated and excluded by hegemonic Europe’s modern expansion, there are present-day cultures that predate European modernity, that have developed together with it, and that have survived until the present with enough human potential to give birth to a cultural plurality that will emerge after modernity and capitalism.20

Dussel’s conception of modernity is thus geographical and temporal and an extension of its constituent actors. ‘Transmodernity displaces the linear and geographically enclosed timeline of Europe’s myth of autogenesis with a planetary spatialisation that includes principal players from all parts of the globe,’ writes Linda Alcoff on Dussel’s concept.21 Dussel however also speaks of a development after modernity, and of the ‘radical novelty’ of the transmodern intervention.22 My use of the term differs from Dussel’s in some points. The fundamental difference lies in the function of the term, which for Dussel takes the form of a programmatic concept, while I use it to describe a historical phenomenon. Dussel speaks of the need for new forms of intercultural dialogue between critics of their own culture from the ‘peripheries’ and the dominant culture of the West. He conceptualises transmodernity as a globally critical modernity and defines the legitimate participants in this discourse – those who move in between two cultures, their own and that of modernity – as being ‘on the path toward a trans-modern utopia’.23 Ramón Grosfoguel summarises

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Dussel’s project in an instructive comparison: ‘In opposition to the project of Habermas, which sees as its central task the need to complete the unfinished and incomplete project of modernity, Dussel’s transmodernity is a project that seeks through a long process to complete the unfinished project of decolonization.’24 The historical reconstruction of manifestations of transmodern art and theory formation in the early and mid-twentieth century, which is the subject of this book, demonstrates that the transmodern need not be proclaimed first of all as a decolonisation project to be tackled.25 In the following chapters, transmodernism is portrayed instead as a critical attitude towards the boundaries and exclusion mechanisms of dominant European modernism whose anti-colonial and anti-racist thrust represents a tendency within global modernism. The various forms that this transmodern tendency has assumed have marked critical emancipatory fractures in the Eurocentric image of modernism for the past hundred years. Apart from the categorical difference between Dussel’s transmodernity as the concept of a critical intercultural dialogue (in present and future) and my use of transmodernism as a designation of the transcultural global modernism of the twentieth century, much can be found in Dussel’s understanding of the concept that fits in with my reflections. The trans is transcultural because it addresses the critical articulation between (dominant and marginalised) cultures; it is transformative when it describes the critical transcending of Eurocentric modernism and postmodernism from a peripheral global perspective; and for Dussel, it is transversal, because – even before the intensification of the critical dialogue with Western thought – it focuses on the ‘intercultural South–South dialogue’.26 However, in the historical contact situations that I discuss, a clear distinction cannot always be made between transversal relationships among the colonised and those between the colonised and critical actors from the cultures of the West. For example, not only representatives from the colonised world participate in Pan-African congresses but also those from Western metropolises. The anti-colonial movement following the First World War was shaped equally by the relations of the colonised world to the Soviet Union and the Communist International and by connections between representatives of the colonised or Black world (Chapter 1).27 Similarly, Rabindranath Tagore’s World University at Santiniketan (Chapter 2) is distinguished by its pan-Asian axis but also by the pursuit of a synthesis of Eastern and Western forms of knowledge, not least by bringing together intellectuals from Europe and Asia in a place of transcultural learning. While up until the 1990s Eurocentric art historiography still demonstrated a large degree of ignorance towards modern art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, or considered non-Western or non-white modernisms in Europe and North America as a secondary offshoot of white Western modernism,

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nowadays there are various models for describing the complex relationships between dominant and until recently marginalised manifestations of artistic modernism. I will discuss some of the descriptive models that I consider productive below. My own approach, which arose from dealing both with these as well as, in my opinion, less convincing models of a global art history, is based on the insight gained from case studies that it is not sufficient to transfer conceptual instruments from postcolonial studies as well as cultural and diaspora studies to art history in a generalising way. Although concepts of transculturality, hybridisation, and syncretism have heuristic value in relation to global art history, they cannot simply be applied retrospectively to an art historiography that was for a long time exclusively Western in an effort to renew it and make it transregional. My own approach is sceptical of major concepts such as Global Art History or World Art Studies. Extending the discipline’s subject area, and aspiring to scholarly analysis of all cultures and epochs – strategies by which art history tries to compensate for its delayed realisation of the provincialism of its ethnocentrism disguised as universalism – cannot entirely allay the suspicion that this all ultimately merely abets a neoimperialist knowledge project.28 I myself would argue that the idea of a world art history is, if not entirely impossible theoretically, at the very least politically questionable due to the colonial nature of much of world history.29 With respect to the postcolonial challenges of art history (of modernism), I make the case for a perspective that begins with historical transcultural encounters between actors in the artistic field. Here, the focus is on contacts, relationships of exchange, and interactions between modernities and modernisms in different regions of the world, taking into account their colonial and postcolonial power relations and the different subject positions and political agendas of the respective actors. This contact-based history of transmodernism does not simply presuppose an already given transculturality of art, which would then be substantiated in individual accounts. Rather, the question is under which conditions and with which agendas the transcultural/hybrid/syncretistic was seized from the realm of colonial contempt by certain thinkers and artists, and re-evaluated within the framework of new, self-determined identity concepts and various projects for the liberationist political transformation of colonial or racist border regimes in society, scholarship, and the arts. Such an approach, rather than primarily pursuing the goal of a more comprehensive or even all-embracing picture of artistic modernism, seeks to create a more differentiated picture by examining those artistic and intellectual constellations that give rise to something that, borrowing from Homi Bhabha (‘contramodernism’) and Paul Gilroy (‘counter-cultures of modernity’),30 one might call a spectrum of counter-modernisms – aesthetic manifestations of oppositional movements and empowering policies under the conditions of colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial modernity. The reconstruction of significant

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shifts in the transcontinental fabric of modern art must focus on the concrete contact situations from which alternatives to Western modernism were able to arise that are considered influential today. Exploring such artistically and politically motivated encounters in terms of the tension between co-operation and confrontation at the colonial borders seems to me to bear the potential for overcoming the false dichotomy of Western and non-European art histories. A different clash of civilisations

A fundamental question concerns the way in which such c­ ounter-modernisms can be described and conceptualised through their relations to white Western modernisms. If one corrects the popular narrative of globalisation as a phenomenon of the late twentieth century by referring to the ‘intertwined histories’ (Edward W. Said) or ‘entangled histories’ (Shalini Randeria)31 of the cultures and economies of various regions of the world since the era of colonialism, the present demand for an epistemological ‘delinking’ (Walter Mignolo) – i.e., the decoupling of Western-capitalism-influenced categories of thought, norms, and values – appears to be a voluntarist evocation of the rebirth of decolonial thought and action.32 Western modernity, or, more precisely, the Western concept of modernity and modernism, is inextricably linked with global power derived from colonialism and its formations of knowledge. The ‘coloniality of modernity’ (Aníbal Quijano / Walter Mignolo) was initially the target of radical criticism in the anti-colonial writings of non-Western authors such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. From the perspective of those colonised, seemingly universal concepts of subjectivity, rationality, progress, and civilisation were termed supporting elements of a Western system of rule. Rather than simply rejecting the Western concepts of humanism and universalism, the anti-colonial critics subjected them to a new interpretation based on colonial experience, and within the framework of global alliances in anti-colonial struggles. Transmodernism takes the form of a non-uniform global movement to overcome the coloniality of modernism. Borrowing a term from recent globalisation critiques, one could imagine it as a ‘multitude’, an anti-­imperialist movement composed of many different movements, where the ties of communication and co-operation between individual actors are sometimes tighter, sometimes looser.33 Politically, the main artistic and intellectual thrust of the transmodern lies in the anti-colonial and anti-racist movements of the twentieth century. The transmodern project, if it can be conceptually unified at all, could be described as a tendency towards overcoming colonial ideas of borders, ‘race’, and ethnically defined cultural difference. This book links scholarly and philosophical approaches to transcultural thinking in the first half of the twentieth century with contemporaneous manifestations of

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transcultural aesthetics, ideas, and methods in fine art. The individual chapters are based on lectures and essays I have prepared for various art-historical and cultural studies conferences and publications between 2009 and 2016. Therefore, they also highlight different aspects of the contact motif, in other words the intellectual and artistic reflection on situations of cultural exchange and translation. As a whole they can be understood as conceiving a multifaceted alternative to the exclusionary logic of Western modernism and its global distribution under the auspices of the ‘colonial matrix of power’.34 In the German edition of this book, published in 2017, I strongly elaborated the cross-connections between the individual case studies. After substantial additions and adjustments were made before the book was translated, the English edition now features an even denser web of references between chapters. And yet the book does not follow a systematic approach. It is the product of ongoing developments in my art-historical and curatorial practice over the last twenty-five years that have led me – initially situated in the 1990s Austrian and German (art) discourse on migration and anti-racism – to proceed step by step on the meandering paths of the art history of contact, starting with publications and exhibitions on contemporary positions and continuing onward to research artists’ journeys and the colonial imagination, migration and racism, globalisation and cultural translation.35 The non-systematic form taken by the book reflects my scepticism towards ostensibly comprehensive projects whose claim to a ‘global’ history of art is pursued by the imperial spirits that the expansion of the Eurocentric canon was intended to exorcise. When I speak of transmodernism as a non-uniform movement, it means that the attempt to systematically capture this ‘multitude’ would inevitably fail. The historical examples of transmodern art and knowledge production discussed in this book counteract the dominance of a kind of modern thinking that Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls ‘abyssal thinking’. Santos describes this kind of thought as an epistemological characteristic of hegemonic modernism.36 This ‘abyssal thinking’ is based on the assumption of a fundamental difference – the construction of an abyss – between cultures, people, and their rights on either side of the colonial border. In terms of the intellectual and cultural achievements of people on both sides of the border, this thinking is manifested for example in the repeated reaffirmation of the categorical difference between Western knowledge and non-Western beliefs or superstitions.37 Against the background of current movements of bottom-up globalisation, Santos argues for ‘a new kind of thinking, a postabyssal thinking’,38 because global social justice cannot be achieved without global cognitive justice. While Santos sees ‘postabyssal thinking’ as a project for the present, I also shed light on historical manifestations of critical thinking that have already made an impact in the context of anti-colonial policies. The intellectual and artistic approaches of the first half of the twentieth century discussed in the

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following chapters are early examples of such critical work on these borders with the aim of bridging the colonial abyss theoretically and aesthetically in its epistemological and political dimensions.39 The epistemological abyss of which Santos speaks, and the model of his ‘solution’ for political power, can be traced back to the early days of colonial modernity. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro vividly describes how the earliest colonial contact between the Portuguese and Brazilian indigenous peoples reveals the difference between the exclusionary model of colonist thinking and an inclusive conception of identity on the part of the Tupi. In the sixteenth century, the Jesuits describe and bemoan the inconstancy of the natives that makes them so difficult to missionise.40 These people seemed absolutely willing and even eager to accept the missionaries’ teachings. Unlike other pagans the Jesuits had encountered, they neither refused nor seemed to want to defend their own faith, their own gods or idols against those of the Europeans. ‘These heathens have no idols for which they die, they believe everything that is said to them. The only difficulty lies in taking away their bad habits,’ writes a missionary.41 They embrace everything, and then soon simply forget it all again. Apparently, they are receptive but have a poor memory, the Jesuits conclude. The proverbial fickleness of the natives will become their essential trait in Western literature. Evidently, the gods of strangers are less foreign to them than any comprehension of an exclusionary dogma of one thing or another. There appears to be no concept of an essential identity, no strict demarcation from others, as in European ways of thinking. The cannibalistic Tupi seek to become the other by receiving him and adopting his nature. According to Viveiros de Castro, Amerindian thinking is characterised by an ‘opening to the Other’. The other is seen as essential in order to be able to conceive of oneself. Viveiros de Castro is interested in this purported inconstancy as a challenge to most of our fundamental concepts of culture and shows how the Portuguese respond to it. They see the inconstancy of the ‘Indian soul’ as being directly related to the political order of their society. Because they have no king (no hierarchical social order, no central authority) who could force them to believe (which the Jesuits would have welcomed), the recognition of a single religious truth is alien to the indigenous people. Only the earthly political system of subjugation ultimately guarantees submission to a single belief system, notes a missionary: Therefore, one cannot hope to achieve anything in this whole land with regard to the conversion of the heathen, unless many Christians come here and [...] subject the Indians to the yoke of slavery and oblige them to find shelter in the banner of Christ.42

The conceptual difference between the dogmatic identity model of the Europeans, which presupposes a mutually exclusive relationship between the

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Introduction

self and the other, and the indigenous peoples’ sense of being ontologically incomplete without a relation to the other is an innate component of the primal scene of the colonial encounter. Colonial violence is directed at eradicating these contradictions. Viveiros de Castro enquires into the foundations of understanding between an identitarian view of culture and one that, as with the Brazilian natives, is based on open relationships with others. An epistemological conflict thus characterises the colonial era and, with different symptoms, also the era of decolonisation in the twentieth century, when ‘the other side of the border’ (Santos) makes itself heard on a large scale for the first time. Of course, this does not mean a clash of civilisations in the sense described by Samuel Huntington, which would occur between different ethno-religious identities, for example Christian and Islamic culture.43 Rather, it is a clash of different models of civilisation, identity, and their relationships to concepts of ‘race’ and ethnicity under the asymmetrical power relations of colonialism. As will become apparent in the chapters of this book, the articulation of this collision of radically different conceptions of the cultural process, as described by Viveiros de Castro, underwent a decisive reorientation through the intellectual and artistic revelations in the context of decolonisation movements. The Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah makes a convincing distinction between two competing cultural models in his book In My Father’s House.44 Appiah compares the cultural life in his West African homeland – which he illustrates with a syncretistic wedding ceremony ­ that unites ritual acts from various religious backgrounds – with different practices in the West. On the basis of such observations, he distinguishes the ‘accommodative style’ of West African cultures from the ‘adversarial style’ of European approaches to culture and cultural difference. While the adversarial style is based on opposition, exclusion, and doctrine, the adaptive style is characterised by appropriation, inclusion, and plurality.45 These fundamentally different styles of understanding culture and identity came into contact and conflict in the colonial process. Appiah deals with the question of whether and to what extent elements of the Western adversarial model can be integrated into the West African accommodative model.46 On the other hand, for our own context, let us call to mind an opposing historical process: the adversarial model was forcibly carried into the colonised world, yet, at the same time, the colonial encounter between European and non-European cultural practices generated a proliferation of syncretistic and hybrid cultures.47 As a result of this contrary development, the denial and suppression of crossing borders and mixing became a central task of modern European philosophy, anthropology, and cultural theory. The hybrid and ‘impure’ became objects of contempt and persecution. In the Age of Enlightenment, with its dogmas of reason and progress, the discourse of cultural and ‘racial’

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difference became indispensable for the ideological affirmation and political consolidation of colonial borders. The theoretical production of racial and cultural purity is accompanied by the administration of these ideas in the politics of segregation and cultural repression. Against this background, the transcultural paradigm becomes a counter-model to colonial modernism. Anti-colonial interconnection and the critique of the exclusive concept of culture: an example

Thinkers from the colonised world began to articulate this connection as early as the beginning of the twentieth century. Criticism of the exclusive cultural model became an important part of the criticism of foreign rule, racist segregation, and colonial oppression.48 In the first chapters of this book, I will explore the historical conditions that gave birth to transcultural thinking in the context of decolonial movements and their intellectual networks. At this point an example should suffice, one which paradigmatically illustrates the global connections of the actors and the mobility of their ideas. In the famous lectures on nationalism Rabindranath Tagore held in 1916 on a lengthy lecture tour of Japan and the USA,49 the Bengali poet emphasised the connection between the exclusive model of Western civilisation and the destructive force of the First World War, which brought the violence of colonial practice to Europe50 ‘The spirit of conflict and conquest is at the origin and in the centre of western nationalism,’51 Tagore said, repeatedly emphasising the exclusionary character of Western civilisation as the basis of nationalism: The western Nation acts like a dam to check the free flow of western civilisation into the country of the No-Nation. Because this civilisation is the civilisation of power, therefore it is exclusive; it is naturally unwilling to open its sources to those whom it has selected for its purposes of exploitation.52

In his 1916 speech in Japan, which was mainly cast as a warning to a country that Tagore saw as already being on the road to nationalism and imperialism, he elucidated the global dimension of the exclusive conception of society: The political civilisation which has sprung up from the soil of Europe and is overrunning the whole world, like some prolific weed, is based upon exclusiveness. It is always watchful to keep the aliens at bay or exterminate them. It is carnivorous and cannibalistic in its tendencies; it feeds upon the resources of other peoples and tries to swallow their whole future.53

In December 1921, René Maran became the first Black writer to win the Prix Goncourt, the highest French literary prize. In the preface to his novel Batouala – Véritable Roman Nègre, the Martinique-born author, who

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Introduction

Rabindranath Tagore with the Mother and Paul Richard in Japan in June 1916, photograph. (Public domain, Wikimedia Commons).

was a colonial civil servant in French Equatorial Africa, reckons with the political and literary whitewashing of colonialism, citing the Indian Nobel laureate: Civilization, civilization, pride of the Europeans and charnel-house of innocents, Rabindranath Tagore, the Hindu poet, once, at Tokio, told what you

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Albert Smith, portrait of René Maran on the cover of The Crisis, May 1922. The Crisis Publishing Co., Inc. NAACP. (Public domain, Wikipedia).

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were! You have built your kingdom on corpses. [...] You are might prevailing over right. You are not a torch, you are a conflagration. You devour whatever you touch.54

Maran’s novel was immediately well received by the African American intellectual community.55 In its March 1922 issue, The Crisis – the journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois in New York – the African American writer Jessie Fauset gives the novel high praise in her review, quoting these sentences from Maran’s preface.56 Fauset describes the passage as a ‘white-hot indictment’ of colonial Western civilisation, but neglects to go into Maran’s reference to Tagore. All the more indicative of the degree of global interconnection between decolonial agendas at the time is the fact that the Indian writer appears in another article just one page before the review of Maran’s novel. The unattributed article on ‘Gandhi and India’ paints a vivid picture of the liberation strategies of Swaraj and non-cooperation, the boycott of English products, and the tactics of non-violent resistance, mentioning Tagore as one of the most prominent figures to have demonstratively renounced in accordance with Gandhi’s programme the knighthood awarded him by the British empire.57 Like most other issues from those years, this edition of The Crisis is mainly concerned with US race problems. With its references to the Franco-African colonial context and the South Asian liberation struggle – which meet up here in the persons of the first non-Western Nobel laureate for literature and the first Black Goncourt Award winner – the issue demonstrates the global horizon of political and artistic agendas of decolonisation after the First World War. The award of the prize to Maran, in turn, was owing in part, according to some authors, to the intellectual climate that had brought about the Pan-African conferences of those years.58 Further on in the journal, a news bulletin reveals the transcontinental internationalism of anti-colonial activity in Africa: Reuter’s informant emphasizes the growing cohesion of native races throughout the continent. He says the strongest factor in the development of antagonism to the whites is skillful propaganda fostered by an extreme section of American Negroes. Circulars coming from nationalist sources in India and Egypt and from Pan-African societies in the United States, translated into five of the principal African languages, are distributed in enormous numbers throughout Africa. Booklets of 25 to 30 pages urge that the time has come for the black races to assert themselves and throw off the white yoke.59

Noteworthy is the seemingly neutral tone of this report, as it was published only a few months after the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had financed the Second Pan-African Congress in London, Brussels, and Paris (as it had the First Pan-African Congress in 1919), in which

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Du Bois acted as secretary and – as can be read on page 214 of the issue – 112 delegates from Africa, Europe, North and South America, the Caribbean, and India participated.60 This interweaving of threads of anti-colonial or anti-racist s­ elf-organisation, literature, and cultural theory in this issue of The Crisis is paradigmatic for the mobility and global consciousness of the critics of nationalism, colonialism, and racism active in India, Japan, Europe, Africa, and the USA.61 In the first chapter of this book I go into the creation of anti-colonial coalitions after the First World War in more detail, explaining how they were tied to new concepts of cultural identity. Composite cultures and the transformation of modernity

Along with criticism of the Western exclusionary model with its ‘spirit of conflict and conquest’ (Tagore), such efforts towards a decolonial reorganisation of the world also developed new ideas for the synthesis of cultural elements of various provenance: post-essentialist concepts of ‘composite cultures’, to use an expression coined later by Édouard Glissant.62 Rabindranath Tagore’s critical analysis of nationalism and the imperial exclusivity of the Western cultural model attains its true significance in his warning against anti-colonial nationalism in India, which was veering towards false homogenisation in its struggle against foreign rule. Instead of subscribing to an intrinsic identity, he admonished, it was important instead to invoke unity in diversity and an open relationship to the other, something that Tagore regards as the historical strength of India.63 In the first four chapters of this book, some of these post-essentialist cultural concepts and composite identities, such as those of Tagore in India, Paulette and Jane Nardal in Paris, Fernando Ortiz in Cuba, and Melville Herskovits in the USA, are related to the respective transnational networks within which these proposals were formed. The term ‘transmodern’ refers to the transcultural global modernism that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century from contacts between actors of different backgrounds, positions in the colonial power structure, and artistic-intellectual socialisation. It takes shape in the context of political, cultural, and epistemological movements aiming to overcome the coloniality of modernity with its adversarial (Appiah), exclusive (Tagore), and abyssal (Santos) concepts of culture and identity. Artistic transmodernism is to be regarded as an aesthetic variant of political and theoretical endeavours to discredit rigid concepts of difference, which are expressed most strikingly in the concept and politics of ‘race’ and ideologically manifested in the modernist dogma of the purity of art. In opposition to the dogmas of borders, separation, and purity, the corresponding transmodernist approaches set in motion a dynamic view of culture with respect to its transformation

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Introduction

in the course of migration, contact, influence, exchange, translation, and reinterpretation. In my opinion, the best study on the history of contact within ­transmodernity – though not of the artistic kind – is Leela Gandhi’s book Affective Communities.64 Her portrayal of anti-colonial thinking around the turn of the twentieth century looks at ‘deviant’ movements within the West from an agency-centred perspective in the context of liberation movements in the colonies. Gandhi refuses crude divisions into opposing blocs (such as imperialist versus nationalist). Instead, she spotlights the ‘immature’ politics (borrowing a reproach made by Lenin against the utopian socialists) of homosexuals, vegetarians, animal rights activists, spiritualists, and aesthetes in England, in order to delineate their sympathies and concrete alliances with actors in the colonies (in this case India). Based on their own experience of social marginalisation, these groups often turn against the imperialist mainstream of their time in their quest for fellowship beyond normative affiliations with nation, gender, or religious creed. In this context, categories such as friendship, love, closeness, and self-chosen kinship in thought and action come into play, which prioritise affinities in relation to (nonconformist) ways of living and solidarities, even with non-human existences, which were effective on both sides of the colonial border. Gandhi’s focus on these ‘minoritarian alliances’65 in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offers opportunities for further investigations into artistic ‘elective affinities’ across the seemingly fixed borders of the colonial system of rule. Although I do not use Gandhi’s concept of ‘affective communities’ in my own research, some of the relationship qualities she emphasises also play a role in my contact studies. In addition to the Jewish–African American coalitions (Franz Boas, W.E.B. Du Bois, Melville Herskovits, Zora Neale Hurston), which are based on mutual experiences of discrimination (Chapters 3 and 4), this applies in another form to the relationship of the German immigrant Winold Reiss to the African American philosopher Alain Locke and the young artist Aaron Douglas (Chapter 5), the collaboration of the exiled French Surrealists with Aimé Césaire and Wifredo Lam (Chapter 7), and the relationship of theosophical spiritualist Europeans like Stella Kramrisch and Ernest Havell to the representatives of Indian modernism in the context of the independence movement (Chapter 2). Santos’s ‘abyssal thinking’ and the colonial policy of the border cannot always be grasped in geographical terms. They also create their political and social divisions within a country and a city. In the USA of the Jim Crow era, the colonial frontier runs through every street and every bus, through the entire educational system, and finally through the artistic field. With the ‘colour line’ of segregation, the colonial border runs through all of Western society and its institutions.66 Thus, for my perspective on the transformative potential of contact situations, it is also important to look at encounters, confrontations,

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and collaborations between artists and scholars who work in the same place but belong to different social circles and cultural milieux based on attributions of origin and ‘race’, and are therefore separated from each other institutionally and discursively. In the following chapters, this applies for example to the relationship between the Black writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and the white Jewish anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, from which both sides benefited in their development, even if their careers took discrepant courses due to their different subject positions in their field of research; to the role of the German painter Winold Reiss in the visual culture of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; as well as to the difficult relationships of Black artists to the New York Abstract Expressionist scene in the 1940s, which are of great significance for the critical consideration of the universal claim of abstraction. Before proceeding in the next step to discuss proposed terms for alternative modernisms, let me first insert a note on the term ‘modernism’. If, for the purpose of contrasting Euromodernism and transmodernism, I have thus far spoken of ‘Western modernism’, some may perceive this as an inadmissible generalisation. Of course, European and North American modernism are already diverse. Their tendencies, schools, or currents articulated themselves in no small measure through conflict and competition with each other. The emphasis on difference, the demarcation from and the struggle against other modernist propositions is part of the very essence of a modernism founded on concepts of progress, innovation, originality, avant-garde, and social relevance. And yet, these differences can still be integrated into a single image of modernism, like a family picture that demonstrates togetherness despite internal tensions and thus also makes it clear who does not belong to the family. I would like to illustrate this with an example. In 2005, Thames & Hudson published the monumental survey work Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism by Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Yve-Alain Bois.67 For many of the critical young art historians of my generation in the early 1990s, the authors’ older publications (and the journal they edited, October), which were oriented towards psychoanalysis, critical theory, and post-structuralism, had been important frames of reference for the development of our own parameters, methods, and endeavours to situate art criticism and art-historical practice in a social context. Our expectations of a different portrayal of twentieth-century art by our old role models in Art since 1900 were then ultimately not fulfilled. At least not for those who in the meantime, through the reception of postcolonial theory and the examination of questions of migration, racism, and cultural identity, had begun viewing the relationship of artistic modernism to the colonial history and culture of the West in a new light. To be sure, Art since 1900 made some shifts in the weighting and interpretation of the various manifestations of Western modernism – for example, in terms of the status

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of Eastern European avant-gardes and of media such as photography. And for the last twenty years of the century (at least in US art) the book also took into account issues of race, gender, and representation. In the end, however, it was precisely this expanding of the canon of twentieth-century art that demonstrated the tenacity of art-historical Eurocentrism. The chronological ordering of the ‘key moment[s] in the history of twentieth-century art’68 from 1900 to 2000 ignores everything up to 1950 that did not happen in Europe and North America. We find nothing here on Japanese, Indian, African, Arab, or Latin American modern art. No Semana de arte moderna in São Paulo in 1922, nothing on anthropophagic modernism in Brazil, no Bauhaus in Calcutta in 1922. Wifredo Lam, perhaps the most significant artist for the postcolonial turn in art, rates not a single mention in the book. His Jungle would have deserved to be recognised as its own ‘key moment’ for 1943. Despite Surrealism’s prominent place in the volume, no mention is made either of the anti-colonial exhibition La Verité sur les colonies in 1931, nor of the Caribbean routes of central Surrealists. The account of the second half of the century is hardly any different. Major events such as the Premier festival mondial des arts nègres in 1966 in Dakar have no place in this history of modern art. Even the authors’ US-centric perspective remains trapped within a narrow framework. The description of the Federal Arts Project of the 1930s is purely white, although it did in fact include many Black artists. Likewise, a white (and all-male) history of Abstract Expressionism and postwar painting is recounted here that omits Black painters like Norman Lewis, Hale Woodruff, and Alma Thomas as well as collective projects like Spiral 1963 and important events like the Atlanta Annual that Woodruff had organised since 1942. From the perspective of transmodernism, but also from the point of view of other art-historical approaches to transcultural or global modernism, Art Since 1900 in its monumentality seems like the final word on Eurocentric art history. In the book there are exactly two windows providing a peek outside the hermetic world of white Western modernism: for 1933 an entry on the Mexican ­muralists – the event being the scandal over Diego Rivera’s painting in Rockefeller Center in New York City – and for 1943 an entry on the publication of James Porter’s book Modern Negro Art. With the latter article, Black modernism of the first half of the century is summarily ticked off on six pages. It is also noticeable that all of the texts in the book were written by Foster, Krauss, Bois, and Buchloh, with the exception of the two articles mentioned above, whose author is indicated only as ‘AD’. It was apparently necessary to look for an outside author to grant the marginal inclusion of the Other.69 So if we can speak of the dominant Western modernism or Euromodernism despite internal differences, it is not primarily because of it being situated in Europe and North America. Tendencies towards transmodernism were in fact unfolding in these regions all the time. The real hallmark of Western

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modernism is instead its monological universalism, following in the tradition of Enlightenment philosophy and eighteenth-century aesthetic theory as developed by Kant and Hume. This is a universalism that bases its claims to truth on a worldview in which the Other is not an interlocutor of equal standing but a mere projection surface, a foil for difference and a resource for inspiration or appropriation. The identity of this universalism is founded on exclusivity. The paradigmatic artist-subject of Euromodernism speaks about the Other – about naive glass painting, Orthodox icons, the outsider art of the insane, non-European art, indigenous art, etc. – to his fellow artists, critics, and collectors. In the early 1990s, Griselda Pollock already used the example of how Paul Gauguin positioned himself in the artistic field to elaborate a characteristic pattern of Euromodernist self-reference via the detour of the non-European. She described the ‘gambits’ of the avant-garde artist using the model of a triad of reference (to the current art scene), deference (to the representative of the most advanced position), and difference (significant demarcation of one’s own progressive achievements).70 The detour via  the  colonial realm and cultural difference is one of the central routes of this technique of distinction in the self-referential system of Western modernism. Terms describing a different modernism

Since the 2000s, some art historians have proposed new terms to use to describe modern art from a global or transcultural perspective which intersect with my own approach. Chika Okeke-Agulu uses the term ‘postcolonial modernism’ in his book on Nigerian modernism to characterise those artistic developments that were involved in the decolonisation of culture and society during the years of transition from a colonial to an independent Nigeria.71 Okeke-Agulu describes how overcoming in both the academic and art fields a colonial modernism dominated by the ruling British was part of the national liberation movement and its cultural strategies for forming a modern African self-image. In the 1950s and 1960s, the artists of the Zaria Art Society in particular established with their concept of ‘Natural Synthesis’ one such instance of postcolonial modernism by significantly synthesising selective references to African and Nigerian as well as to European modernist traditions and stylistic means. ‘In doing so,’ writes Okeke-Agulu, ‘they asserted that modernist and progressive artists must be willing to acknowledge in their work the diverse contradictory local and foreign elements that constituted Nigerian and African identity’.72 In Okeke-Agulu’s understanding of postcolonial modernism, this transculturality of motifs, forms, and techniques is intentional in trying to construe a self-determined reply to the colonial constructs of what is African while also pointing to the colonial ideology of the Western

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Introduction

original and the African imitation of modernism. As in my own understanding of the term, ‘postcolonial’ does not primarily denote for Okeke-Agulu political, social, and cultural structures after the colonial era but emphasises instead the decolonial agenda for transforming colonial structures, ways of thinking, and ideas. Nigerian postcolonial modernism attests not least to the artistic articulation of the challenges and contradictions of subjects in search of a postcolonial identity. The term postcolonial modernism could be used to accurately describe some of the manifestations of global modernism discussed in this book. There are, however, two arguments against the general use of the term in relation to the examples I examine. On the one hand, the label ‘postcolonial’ describes artistic manifestations in the immediate context of the political decolonisation of the country concerned, as in the case of Okeke-Agulu’s study of Nigerian modernism in the 1950s and 1960s, more convincingly than it does, for example, the beginnings of Indian modernism in anti-colonial movements half a century earlier, or African American modernism in the interwar period. On the other hand, individual chapters of this book are dedicated to early forms of thinking on transculturality in anthropology, cultural studies, and literature that developed their theoretical power in contexts of anti-colonialism and anti-racism and thus also became relevant for later postcolonial thinking in the narrower sense but do not coincide with it. In my usage, ‘postcolonial’ stands more for the critical perspectives on unequal relations between Western and non-Western, white and Black modernisms working towards a new conception of art history that does justice to the functions and meanings of modern art in the context of anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles than for the historical phenomena illuminated by these perspectives.73 Such perspectives on art historiography, as represented by Okeke-Agulu, Partha Mitter, Geeta Kapur, Monica Juneja, Salah Hassan, Okwui Enwezor, and Kobena Mercer, to name but a few of the most influential authors, are already shaped by concepts, models of thought, and methods from the postcolonial studies of the late twentieth century. Kobena Mercer proposed in the first volume of the four-volume book series he published, Annotating Art’s Histories, the term ‘cosmopolitan modernism’.74 The use of the term cosmopolitan in the context of a postcolonial art history of global modernism may come as a surprise in view of the Eurocentric history of the notion. The concept of cosmopolitanism afforded its most influential representatives, such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant, a philosophical basis for the alleged superiority of universal moral judgements and the aesthetic sensibilities of the European citizen of the world over the peoples ostensibly bound by the confines of their origins, thus contributing to the establishment of modern racism.75 Mercer, however, is referring not to this ideological-normative cosmopolitanism of the centre but to a critical

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cosmopolitanism based on experiences of diaspora, transcultural migration and exchange relations. He brings up the concept of ‘discrepant cosmopolitanism’ developed by James Clifford in his influential text on ‘travelling cultures’. According to Clifford, the discrepant cosmopolitanisms of diaspora cultures, of uprooted and transplanted subjects, cannot be separated from specific and often violent histories of political and cultural interaction. The notion that certain classes of people are cosmopolitan (travellers) and others bound to a certain place (natives) would, from the perspective of such discrepant cosmopolitanisms, be nothing other than the ideology of the powerful travel culture of Western elites.76 These critical or discrepant cosmopolitanisms, represented in the early twentieth century by Rabindranath Tagore, W.E.B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, Jane and Paulette Nardal, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, among others, are of great significance because they offer a transcultural alternative both to the Eurocentric universalism of Western cosmopolitanism and to the nationalistic responses of the colonised and the essentialist counter-projects launched by minorities. For the art history of global modernism, Mercer’s project, which focuses on a triple interaction between ‘non-western artists, minority artists within the West, and western art movements that have engaged with different cultures’,77 is methodologically one of the most promising. My own approach coincides not only with the questions posed in Mercer’s book on this point but also with the procedure for attaining a (preliminary) postcolonial concept of global modernist art through a series of case studies rather than via a grand-scale Global Art History. The present book differs from Mercer’s series in that it takes greater account of the transdisciplinary dimensions of the intellectual, political, and artistic milieus from which the art of transmodernism emerges. The importance that I attach to these milieux has resulted above all in those chapters (3 and 4) that trace the early history of transcultural thought. In my opinion, this perspective is necessary for a better understanding of the historical position of transmodernism in relation to the exclusionary norms of dominant Western modernism. It can make clear how the transculturality of art was expressed in the context of related theoretical formulations. The complicated relationship of transmodern art to the universalising dogmas of white modernism and the institutional fortification of its terrain is the main theme in particular of the last two chapters. They look at the purism of US modernism with its aesthetic border politics in the context of the contemporary segregation of the ‘races’ and its counterpart in the separation of white and Black art worlds. From the perspective of artists who were largely structurally excluded, located on the other side of the colonial border drawn through the middle of society, these chapters ask about the possibilities for crossing that border and the aesthetic consequences of such transgression in the historical context of the early Civil Rights movement.

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Introduction

Some readers of this book may look in vain for a certain term used in the latest discussions of a post-Eurocentric art history. ‘Decolonising art history’ has become a popular slogan in recent years in calls for the critical transformation of art history as a discipline and of museums and art schools. A few of the leading art journals have of late surveyed critics, scholars, curators, and artists on their respective understanding of the term and its application.78 Frieze, for example, launched a four-part series of ‘Decolonial Documents’ in 2018. In the February 2020 issue of Art History, Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price published responses from colleagues to questions about the call to ‘decolonise art history’. And in the autumn of 2020, October published the answers to its own ‘Questionnaire on Decolonization’. These documents, which also articulate strong objections, all make for profitable reading. Their contributions to the discussion contain numerous inspiring as well as critical reflections on the concept and its terminology, coming in large part from people whose own practice is part of the effort to bring about lasting changes in art historiography and its institutions. That said, however, ‘decolonise’ has also rapidly gained currency in recent years as a slogan that a variety of people are laying claim to for a variety of different reasons.79 In many cases, the slogan is coupled with the gesture of a radical new beginning whose revolutionary language is rhetorically powerful but not always based on a concrete transformational practice. Even though a different concept is at issue here than in the case of Global Art History, which I critically examine in the first chapter of this book, the two are united by their character as demand, their push for immediate action, and a tendency to neglect those projects in art, art criticism, and art history that have been contributing to the critique and decolonial transformation of art institutions for decades, even without regularly spouting the fashionable buzzword. As this introduction has long since made clear, most of the references in my art-historical perspective spotlight decolonial practices by artists, writers, and cultural producers throughout the twentieth century. This kind of historical perspective on the protracted struggles for political, cultural, and epistemic decolonisation inevitably engenders scepticism of the current use of the term, which sometimes gives the impression that the task of decolonisation can now finally be tackled and then put behind us. Out of respect for the achievements of the protagonists of this book, and in recognition of the need to persevere in dismantling the colonial legacy in Western cultural studies, museums, universities, etc., using the term ‘decolonising’ for my own work would seem presumptuous. On method: counterpoint and contact

In order to understand the transmodern counter-current to the prevailing Euromodernism, its various manifestations must be considered in relation to

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the white modernisms that until recently were understood as being authoritative. The critical reconstruction of these relations requires a methodological orientation. Various art movements as well as trends in thinking about race and culture must be put into perspective. Given the cultural interconnectedness of colonial modernism, it is not enough to provide separate accounts of modern art in Europe, in India, or in Africa, or to write separate histories of white and Black modernisms in the USA – even though this has often been done in the past. That the dominant Western art historiography had no interest in considering non-European modern art is already obvious. But alternative projects that seek to counteract the exclusion of entire regions or population groups from the recognised history of art also often provide separate accounts. This tendency is particularly evident in those cases in which the negated or marginalised art was produced not somewhere far away but in close proximity to the canonised art. Thus, in addition to the Eurocentric white art history, an African American art history has also been recounted in the USA for several decades, with publications that often paint a picture of ethnic homogeneity. As the respective statuses of white and Black art historiography are extremely different in terms of institutionalisation and overall social recognition, their tendencies towards homogenisation are scarcely comparable. And the historical necessity of creating a dedicated space (for exhibition as well as historical representation) for the art of oppressed groups is undisputed. Still, however, it is surprising how few publications and exhibitions on US art have considered both white and Black – and other (indigenous, Latinx, etc.) – movements, scenes, and artists together, or sufficiently highlighted their intersections. ‘Spoken and unspoken delineations between white and raced art histories must also be carefully considered,’ writes Richard Hylton, ‘as they are more a hindrance than a help in establishing progressive views of art history’.80 According to my understanding of colonial modernity and its anticolonial challenges in the twentieth century, two main methodological tools are needed in order to comprehend the cultural dynamics of transmodernity: a contrapuntal view and the perspective of contact. Both colonial and anticolonial manifestations of modernism, both dominant and marginalised art movements (along with their theoretical, literary, and political underpinnings) need to be examined in counterpoint, because only then can insights into essential features of both sides be gained. And beyond that, the connecting links, the transitions, the passages or the bridges between the two sides (of the abyss) must also be taken into account. We must take a closer look at the contacts that were made in the course of resistance against the colonial division of the world and of art, contacts that enabled a selective or lasting overcoming of the colonial borders or the racist ‘colour line’ in Western societies.

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As for this counterpoint, Edward Said already pointed the way in Culture and Imperialism: If at the outset we acknowledge the massively knotted and complex histories of special but nevertheless overlapping and interconnected experiences – of women, of Westerners, of Blacks, of national states and cultures – there is no particular intellectual reason for granting each and all of them an ideal and essentially separate status. Yet we would wish to preserve what is unique about each so long as we also preserve some sense of human community and the actual contests that contribute to its formation, and of which they are all part.81

Said sees a need for a ‘contrapuntal perspective’ that allows us ‘to think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations, its internal coherence and system of external relationships, all of them coexisting and interacting with others’.82 Half a century before Said, Fernando Ortiz had already applied a contrapuntal perspective as a method for understanding the nexus of colonialism, modernity, and cultural identity (see Chapter 3). Fernando Coronil writes in his introduction to the new English edition of Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint: ‘It is significant that two critics of imperialism developed, independently of each other and fifty years apart, a contrapuntal perspective for analyzing the formation of cultures and identities’.83 Coronil points to the tendency towards an entrenched bipolar viewpoint that casts everything in terms of centre versus periphery, West versus Orient / Third World, which can be found also in analyses that are critical of imperialism, and he criticises their (unintentionally) fixed views of self versus Other. These need to be destabilised by dynamic conceptions of exchange: In my view, challenging an imperial order requires overturning the Self-Other polarity that has served as one of its foundational premises. This requires that cultures be seen, as Ortiz and Said propose, in contrapuntal relation to each other rather taken to be autonomous units, that their difference be historicized rather than essentialized, and their boundaries and homogeneity be determined, not assumed.84

One way to advance this historicisation of difference is to focus on concrete protagonists whose thoughts and actions not only were located along boundaries but also promoted their transformation. The attentive study of both possible and impossible contacts, of both likely and exceptional relations between actors, can test whether these boundaries are in fact firm or more elastic and permeable. Leela Gandhi, in her contact study, speaks of the ‘irremediable leakiness of imperial boundaries’.85 I would argue with Gandhi

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that this leakiness should not be understood as a given intrinsic property of the colonial fortress that would sooner or later cause the imperial order to collapse, as some determinist positions of postcolonial thought assume.86 We must instead turn our attention to those who, in acts of ‘innovative border crossing’,87 caused those holes and cracks in the colonial fortress – and in the fortress of Euromodernism – to appear in the first place. The investigation of these productive contacts, collaborations, and alliances in art, in the field of science, and in political action is the necessary complement to the contrapuntal view. When we talk about historicising the dynamics and shifts in the relationship between Euromodernism and transmodernism, I believe it is methodologically necessary to also historicise the terms we use to come to an understanding of these dynamics. Aimé Césaire already analysed and attacked colonial rule in the 1950s by examining the motif of contact. In his essay Discourse on Colonialism, he enquires into the conditions produced by the clash of civilisations under the colonial order. Césaire criticises here the hypocritical modern Western discourse that presents violent exploitation as an act of civilising other societies. In general, the poet and politician views bringing cultures together as a vital force – ‘for civilizations, exchange is oxygen’.88 But he asks readers to consider: ‘Has colonization really placed civilizations in contact? Or, if you prefer, of all the ways of establishing contact, was it the best? I answer no.’89 Césaire passes a clear sentence on the destructive violence of the colonial model of encounter. And yet he sees this model as part of the horizon of many possible kinds of cultural contact: I spoke of contact. Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses. No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production.90

Because the colonial practice of contact dehumanises the coloniser and degrades the colonised into an instrument, it leaves no room for ‘human contact’. So much for Césaire’s reckoning with the extreme narrowing of the spectrum of possible contacts under the colonial regime. Nevertheless – against all the resistance put up by this regime of violence – contacts of a completely different quality and historical significance could in fact be established. It would be hard to find a better example of this than the author of Discourse on Colonialism himself, who founded the Négritude movement in 1930s Paris with Léon Damas and Léopold Sédar Senghor; worked with Picasso, the Surrealists, and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance; and established a

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Introduction

platform for transcontinental encounters between Black and white thinkers and artists in the 1940s with the journal Tropiques.91 Césaire’s internationalism links the transversal (in Dussel’s sense) relations between representatives of the colonised and the racially discriminated on the one hand, and the critical dialogues between Black and white intellectuals, activists, and artists on the other. This multiplicity of contacts drives the dissolution of both colonial borders and the boundaries of thought and writing. Suzanne Césaire, working in wartime Martinique, which was under the control of the Vichy regime, discusses the significance of the Surrealist concept of freedom for the postcolonial and post-fascist rebirth of colonised Black peoples, thus identifying the necessity of overcoming colonially constructed identities: ‘It will be time finally to transcend the sordid contemporary antinomies: Whites-Blacks, Europeans-Africans, civilized-savage’’92 The Caribbean transculturation of Surrealism – ‘tightrope of our hope’, as Suzanne Césaire writes93 – into a tool for anti-colonial liberation owes much to a series of ‘innovative border crossings’ (like those Gandhi analysed in the British-Indian context) that demonstrate the possibility of ‘human contact’ with its potential for inspiration, liberation, and change. In the midst of the decolonisation movement – and as a contribution to it – the Césaires and their milieu engaged in critical reflection on the (anti-)colonial dialectic of contact. In contrast to the hierarchical contact of colonial oppression, which Aimé Césaire rejects in Discourse, numerous authors and artists of the time pushed for dialogue-based and egalitarian contact as a means of liberation from the political and epistemic violence of colonialism. Historicising the concept of contact can therefore give us some clarity on an important point: contact is not merely a motif that can be helpful to us today in describing historical encounters between cultures. Rather, it was already a key subject of dispute in the artistic and theoretical process of decolonial renegotiation of power relations.94 To highlight just one artistic example from this book: Hale Woodruff’s cycle The Art of the Negro, to which the concluding chapter is devoted, presents a painterly reflection on the ambivalence of cultural contact. Concurrently with Césaire’s Discourse, Woodruff’s murals juxtapose the destructive violence of colonial contact with scenes of fruitful exchanges reaching from classical antiquity to modernity, confirming Césaire’s dictum: ‘for civilizations, exchange is oxygen’. ‘What was once a monologue about otherness became a dialogue about difference,’ writes Kobena Mercer in Travel and See.95 Mercer is referring here to the changing status of Black artists of the diaspora in the art world as a result of the equality policies and critical race discourses of the 1980s and 1990s. His vivid formulation on the changing character of relations could also be applied to the scenes of encounter from the 1920s to the 1950s that are the focus of this book. Perhaps the changes rung in by transmodernism traced in the following chapters can also be understood as a movement whose

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effects became more visible in the late twentieth century. This book argues in favour of this earlier historical approach. On the other hand, it was the struggles of the 1980s and 1990s and their strategies, methods, and terms that first allowed us to grasp the significance of the radical dislocations initiated by the dynamics of transmodernism in the first half of the twentieth century.96 The cultural productions of the Black diaspora since the 1980s on issues of race and representation have, according to Mercer, begun ‘to unsettle the either/or logic of dichotomous reasoning which, for the most part of the past century, had locked down our ability to understand cross-cultural interaction in the visual arts’.97 As stated above, one of the aims of this book is to comprehend the break-up of colonial constructs of opposition as already characteristic of transmodern art and thought. We are in fact dealing here with important chrono-political challenges to an art history of modernism that has begun to reflect critically on its Eurocentrism and its logic of progression, challenges that have yet to be definitively answered. In the first chapter, I argue against the present fixation on ‘global contemporary art’ in a discourse that operates with the paradigm of post-1989 globalisation whenever it comes to the inclusion of non-Western art in the scope of art criticism, art theory, and the exhibition industry. This discourse perpetuates the exclusion of non-European modernism and gives its representatives the satisfying feeling of being part of the first generation in the art world to think and act ‘globally’. In opposition to this denial of history, which avoids confronting the racism of colonial modernity and the resistance to its regime of violence, I see the thrust of my book as being closer to an argument put forward by Monica Juneja: Instead of positing a progression from the modern to the contemporary in terms of collapsing distance, a transcultural perspective could be more usefully deployed to examine the specific dynamic between distance and proximity that operates within individual and different historical periods and at different sites across the globe.98

This approach allows us to realise that the relationship between the ‘monologue about otherness’ and the ‘dialogue about difference’ (Mercer) cannot be described in terms of a temporal sequence alone. As the case studies in this book show, we must already assume in the early to mid-twentieth century a fraught co-presence of these two ways of speaking. In contrast to the dominant colonial monologue of Euromodernism, we are now witnessing transmodern dialogues or polylogues about identity and difference, culture and modern art. This co-presence articulates a conflict that goes hand in hand with the political conflicts of decolonisation but also with the epistemological conflict between theories of transculturality that point ahead to postcolonial concepts of culture, as well as with the tenet of purity, which stems from the racist tradition of colonialist thought.99 A mere co-opting of hitherto

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Introduction

marginalised modernisms into the global horizon of art history can in no way do justice to the dimensions of this complex conflict. Whether we call them transmodern or postcolonial, transcultural or multiple, contextual or cosmopolitan, the discrepant modernisms cannot simply be integrated into a reformed version of the art history of modernism. A great deal of research still needs to be done in order to better understand the numerous worldwide variations of the ‘modern’ in art and their complicated relations to each other.100

Notes 1 See Rasheed Araeen, ‘Conversation with Aubrey Williams’, Third Text, 1:2 (1987), 25–52. 2 Aubrey Williams in conversation with Rasheed Araeen, quoted from Simon Gikandi, ‘Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference’, Modernism/modernity, 10:3 (2003), 455. 3 Aubrey Williams’s paintings can be seen today in exhibitions of the postwar art collections at the Tate Modern and the Tate Britain in London. 4 The fact that other Black artists had better experiences with Picasso is highlighted by the positive memories of Wifredo Lam, who met Picasso in the late 1930s and was supported by him and introduced to the Paris Surrealists, which resulted in numerous collaborations and longstanding friendships. Max-Pol Fouchet, Wifredo Lam (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafica, S.A., 1983), pp. 108–12. This comment does not however intend to question Gikandi’s argumentation, which is cogent beyond this individual case. 5 In Chapter 7, I discuss, among other things, the relationship of the white New York School avant-garde to Black artists’ possibilities of articulation under the conditions of the widely segregated art world of the 1940s and 1950s. 6 Quoted from: Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb, From Swastika to Jim Crow: Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges (Malabar: Krieger Publishing Company, 1993), p. 98. 7 Viktor Lowenfeld and African American modernism is the subject of my current book project. See also Christian Kravagna, ‘The Art of Liberation: Viktor Lowenfeld and African American Modernism’, in Hildegund Amanshauser and Kimberly Bradley (eds), Navigating the Planetary: A Guide to Navigating the Planetary Art World – Its Past, Present, and Potentials (Vienna: Verlag für moderne Kunst 2020), pp. 94–114. 8 Ann Holt, ‘Lowenfeld at Hampton (1939–1946): Empowerment, Resistance, Activism, and Pedagogy’, Studies in Art Education, 54:1 (2012), 7. 9 ‘An interview with Samella Lewis / Interviewer: Harry Henderson’, Henderson Papers, Penn State University Archives, University Park, PA, quoted from Holt, ‘Lowenfeld at Hampton’, p. 12. 10 I have borrowed the term ‘Africanism’ from Toni Morrison, who developed it within the framework of her critical analysis of the literary imagination of ‘blackness’ in white American literature: ‘I am using the term “Africanism” [...] for the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify,

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as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people.’ Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 6–7. 11 Elizabeth Catlett ‘developed new teaching strategies based on the example of art educator Viktor Lowenfeld [...] From Lowenfeld she learned to work from the physical sensations of her own body and from her visual responses to form – to render the physicality of her “knowledge from within”.’ Melanie Anne Herzog, Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2000), p. 35. 12 Especially in the last two chapters, which focus on the tensions between modernist border politics and transmodernist crossing of borders. 13 On the concept of the ‘contact zone’, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1997). In regard to both authors and with a stronger focus on art and art theory within the ‘negotiations in the contact zone’, see also Renée Green, ‘Slippages’, in: Other Planes of There: Selected Writings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 230–55. Green’s text was published first in German as ‘Gleitende Verschiebungen’, in Christian Kravagna (ed.), Agenda: Perspektiven kritischer Kunst (Vienna: Folio, 2000), pp. 133–59. 14 This is how Clement Greenberg referred to New York School paintings by artists including Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still, and Jackson Pollock. Clement Greenberg, ‘American-Type Painting’, in Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (eds), Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (London: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 93–104. 15 See Christian Kravagna, ‘Im Schatten großer Mangobäume: Kunsterziehung und transkulturelle Moderne im Kontext der indischen Unabhängigkeitsbewegung‘, in Tom Holert and Marion von Osten (eds), Das Erziehungsbild: Zur visuellen Kultur des Pädagogischen (Vienna: Academy of Fine Arts / Schlebrügge Editor, 2010), pp. 107–30; and Model House Research Group (ed.), Transcultural Modernisms (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013). 16 On the inflation and depoliticisation of the transcultural paradigm, see Christian Kravagna, ‘When Routes Entered Culture: Histories and Politics of Transcultural Thinking’, in Karin Gludovatz, Juliane Noth, and Joachim Rees (eds), The Itineraries of Art: Topographies of Artistic Mobility, 1500–1900 (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015), pp. 35–56. See also ‘Understanding Transculturalism: Monica Juneja and Christian Kravagna in Conversation’, in Transcultural Modernisms (see note 15), pp. 22–33. 17 Clement Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, Partisan Review, 7:4­ (July–August 1940), 296–310; Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, in John O'Brian (ed.), Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1993, pp. 85–93. For criticism of the ‘Great Divide’

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Introduction

in Western modernism, see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1993). 18 Enrique Dussel, ‘Transmodernity and Interculturality: An Interpretation from the Perspective of Philosophy of Liberation’, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1:3 (2012), 17. Probably the earliest use of the term transmodern can be found in Petru Dumitriu, Die Transmoderne: Zur Situation des Romans (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1965). In his work of literary theory, the Romanian writer addresses issues of the literary reintegration of (romantic) traditional and (elitist) modernist avant-garde, autonomous, and committed narratives that avoid false alternatives to modernism and anti-modernism. See also Matthias Bauer, Romantheorie und Erzählforschung: Eine Einführung (Stuttgart and Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 2005), pp. 63–70. Dumitriu’s concept of transmodernity has only marginally to do with the problems discussed in this book. The Spanish philosopher Rosa María Rodríguez Magda has made the case for a ‘transmodernist’ overcoming of modernism and postmodernism since publishing her book La sonrisa de Saturno: hacia una teoría transmoderna (Barcelona: Editorial Anthropos, 1989). Her demand for a transmodern dialectical synthesis of modernism and postmodernism under conditions of globalisation is, like Dumitriu’s approach, based on a temporal diagnostics that requires a necessary rethinking of the present. Both uses of the term have little to do with my conception of the transmodern, which is not obliged to imagine any kind of ‘post’ – neither in the sense of a postmodernism nor as a synthesis of modernism and postmodernism. For a comparable discussion of Rodríguez Magda and Enrique Dussel, see Aldo Ahumada Infante, ‘Transmodernidad: dos proyectos disímiles bajo un mismo concepto’, Polis: Revista Latinoamericana, 34 (2013), 1–12. https://journals.openedition.org/ polis/8882 (accessed 12 August 2021). Sam Bardaouil recently brought up the term ‘transmodernism’ in the context of modern art in the Arab world. He sees in the transmodern paradigm a way ‘to refute the notions of center and periphery’ and to counter Said’s binary image of West versus Orient with the more complex position of the artists of Arab modernism. ‘Such a notion would be able to position these artists as a unique link within a multi-latticed chain of international nodes, each making its distinct contributions and formulating its unique response to a global discourse on modernist thought and practice.’ Sam Bardaouil, ‘Transmodernism: A Renewed Outlook on Modernism in the Arab World’, in Susanne Gaensheimer, Kathrin Beßen, Doris Krystof, Isabelle Malz, and Maria Müller-Schareck (eds), museum global: Microhistories of an Ex-centric Modernism, exh. cat. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 2018), pp. 208–11. 19 Dussel, ‘Transmodernity’, p. 37. 20 Enrique Dussel, ‘World-System and “Trans”-Modernity’, Neplanta: Views from South, 3:2 (2002), 234. 21 Linda Martín Alcoff, ‘Enrique Dussel’s Transmodernism’, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1:3 (2012), 63.

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22 Dussel, ‘Transmodernity’, p. 42. 23 Ibid., p. 49. 24 Ramón Grosfoguel, ‘Decolonizing Western Universalisms: Decolonial Pluriversalism from Aimé Césaire to the Zapatistas’, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1:3 (2012), 96–7. 25 Although I fully agree with Dussel’s view that the project of decolonisation is not complete. 26 Dussel, ‘Transmodernity’, p. 48. 27 Even anti-colonial South-South contacts often occurred in connection with the organising and publicising force of the Comintern. See, among others, Hakim Adi, Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919–1939 (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2013); Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 28 For a critique of various approaches to World Art History or Global Art History, see Monica Juneja, ‘Global Art History and the “Burden of Representation”’, in Hans Belting, Jakob Birken, Andrea Buddensieg et al. (eds), Global Studies: Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011), pp.  274–97. See also Chapter 1 below. For a different account and critique of world art history, see Susanne Leeb, Die Kunst der Anderen: ‘Weltkunst’ und die anthropologische Konfiguration der Moderne (Berlin: b_books, 2015). 29 ‘Today, a world history or a universal history is an impossible task,’ Walter Mignolo writes, and continues: ‘Or perhaps both are possible but hardly credible. Universal histories in the past five hundred years have been embedded in global designs.’ Walter Mignolo, Local Histories / Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 21. 30 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). 31 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books (Random House), 1994); Shalini Randeria, ‘Geteilte Geschichten und verwobene Moderne’, in Jörn Rüsen, Hanna Leitgeb, and Norbert Jegelka (eds), Zukunftsentwürfe: Ideen für eine Kultur der Veränderung (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1999), pp. 87–96. See also Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria, ‘Einleitung: Geteilte Geschichten – Europa in einer postkolonialen Welt’, in Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria (eds), Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002), pp. 9–49. 32 Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto’, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1:2 (2011), 45–63. 33 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2000). In this context, we might also think of the image of the ‘many-headed hydra’ for this multiplicity of counter-hegemonic

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Introduction

forces through which the enslaved, dispossessed, and exploited oppose the regulatory power of transatlantic capitalism in the age of colonialism. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker use this ancient mythical image of Hercules fighting the hydra in their book The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London and New York: Verso, 2000). 34 Mignolo, ‘Epistemic Disobedience’, pp. 45–63. 35 Some of these exhibitions were: Routes: Imaging Travel and Migration, Grazer Kunstverein, Graz 2002; Migration: Globalisation of Cultural Space and Time, Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi, 2003 (with Amit Mukhopadhyay); Planetary Consciousness, Kunstraum of Leuphana University Lüneburg, 2008; Living Across: Spaces of Migration, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 2010; Ghosts of the Civil Dead, transit.sk, Bratislava, 2016. 36 ‘Modern Western thinking is an abyssal thinking. It consists of a system of visible and invisible distinctions, the invisible ones being the foundation of the visible ones. The invisible distinctions are established through radical lines that divide social reality into two realms, the realm of “this side of the line” and the realm of “the other side of the line”.’ Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies from the South: Justice against Epistemicide (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 118. 37 For a critique of these distinctions, see Valentin Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, James Currey, 1988). 38 Santos, Epistemologies, p. 124. 39 Among the most incisive later formulations (1980s and 1990s) of thinking on the limits of nation, ‘race’, language, and culture are the works of Chicana/ Chicano authors and artists who experiment with language and genre boundaries, such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. See Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007); Guillermo Gómez-Peña, The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems & Loqueras for the End of the Century (San Francisco: City Lights, 1996). Both authors refer to early transmodern approaches, such as that of the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos. See Chapter 3 below. 40 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul: The Encounter of Catholics and Cannibals in 16th-Century Brazil (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2011). 41 The Jesuit Manuel da Nóbrega in his ‘Dialogue on the conversion of the heathen’ (1554), quoted from Viveiros de Castro, ibid., p. 8. 42 José de Anchieta, Apostle of Brazil (1555), quoted from Viveiros de Castro, ibid., p. 74. 43 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 44 Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 45 Ibid., pp. 107–36.

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46 A similar question is at the centre of the educational conflict in a Senegalese family during French colonial rule in West Africa described by Cheikh Hamidou Kane in his 1961 novel L’aventure ambiguë. Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ambiguous Adventure (London: Heinemann, 1972). 47 ‘Modernity and modernism were always already syncretic in practice, while in discourse they have remained normatively Eurocentric until quite recently,’ write Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips in their introduction to Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips (eds), Mapping Modernism: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2018), p. 6. 48 The most direct form of modern recourse to a pre-colonial (and in this case ‘cannibalistic’) openness towards the other can be found in Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagic Manifesto of 1928. 49 During his ten-month tour, Tagore spoke in twenty-five American cities following his speeches in Japan. He received high fees, which he invested into the building of his World University at Santiniketan. Thus, the poet used his critique of nationalism and imperialism to finance his project of an intercultural educational institution. 50 ‘The furies of terror, which the West has let loose upon God’s world, come back to threaten herself.’ Rabindranath Tagore, The Spirit of Japan (Tokyo: IndoJapanese Association, 1916), www.gutenberg.org/files/33131/33131-h/33131-h.htm (accessed 12 August 2021). 51 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Nationalism in the West’, in Nationalism (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2009), p. 46. 52 Ibid. Tagore uses the term ‘No-Nation’ to describe communities within the colonial sphere that are not governed by the nation-state. 53 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Nationalism in Japan’, in Tagore, Nationalism, p. 8. 54 René Maran, Batouala, trans. Adele Szold Seltzer (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1922), pp. 9–10. 55 See the chapter ‘On Reciprocity: René Maran and Alain Locke’, in Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 67–118. 56 Jessie Fauset, ‘No End of Books’, The Crisis, 23:5 (March 1922), 208. 57 ‘Gandhi and India’, The Crisis, 23:5 (March 1922), 203–7. 58 ‘I believe [...] that Maran’s receiving the Prix-Goncourt was, in large part, due to the general mood and atmosphere created by the Pan-African Conference of 1919.’ Alice J. Smith, ‘René Maran’s Batouala and the Prix-Goncourt’, in Contributions in Black Studies, 4 (1980), p. 31. http://scholarworks.umass.edu/ cibs/vol4/iss1/4 (accessed 12 August 2021). 59 ‘Africa’, The Crisis, 23:5 (March 1922), 229. 60 After the congress, a petition was handed to the Assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva with demands for the rights of Black people in Africa and the world and for the self-determination of Black societies. 61 Jessie Fauset’s account of the Second Congress provides a compelling example of how to build or bolster global anti-colonial awareness at meetings such as the

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Introduction

Pan-African Congresses. Jessie Fauset, ‘Impressions of the Second Pan-African Congress’, The Crisis, 23:1 (1921), 12–18. 62 Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). 63 See the texts ‘Indiens Vergangenheit als Gegenwart’, in Rabindranath Tagore, Das goldene Boot: Lyrik, Prosa, Dramen, ed. Martin Kämpchen (Düsseldorf and Zurich: Artemis and Winkler Verlag, 2005); ‘Bharatbarser Itihaas’ (India’s History) and ‘The Relation of the Individual to the Universe’, Tagoreweb, http://tagoreweb.in/Render/ShowContent.aspx?ct=Essays&bi=72EE92F5-BE5040D7-6E6E-0F7410664DA3&ti=72EE92F5-BE50-4A37-2E6E-0F7410664DA3 (accessed 12 August 2021). 64 Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2006). 65 The term ‘minoritarian alliances’ was coined in the 1990s in the context of the anti-racist movement in Austria by the Initiative on Minorities and refers to the formation of coalitions between various discriminated groups to enforce their rights beyond classical identity politics. See ‘Minoritäre Allianzen’, Stimme – Zeitschrift der Initiative Minderheiten, 100 (Autumn 2016); ‘Minoritäre Allianzen’, Kulturrisse, 1 (2002); as well as Hakan Gürses, ‘Wechselspiel der Identitäten: Bemerkungen zum Minderheitenbegriff’, SWS-Rundschau, 4 (1994), 353–68. 66 ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,’ wrote W.E.B. Du Bois in several of his publications starting at the turn of the century; among other places, in ‘The Forethought’ in Souls of Black Folk [1903]. See W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (Minneapolis: First Avenue Editions, 2016), p. 11. In 2016/17, the Musée Quai Branly in Paris presented the exhibition The Color Line: Les artistes africains-américains et la ségrégation, curated by Daniel Soutif, on the relationship between art and segregation in the USA. The exhibition catalogue was published by Flammarion in Paris. See also my review of the exhibition: Christian Kravagna, ‘In einem anderen Land’, Texte zur Kunst, 27:106 (2017), 217–22. 67 Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004). 68 Ibid., p. 10. 69 They found the author they were looking for in Amy Dempsey, a former student of Krauss. Her full name can be found after a prolonged search in the book’s colophon, under the note ‘assistance in the preparation of this book’. Amelia Jones already noted this fact in a contemporary review of the book. Amelia Jones, review of Art since 1900, Art Bulletin, 88:2 (June 2006), 377. It is noteworthy that, while the third, expanded edition of Art since 1900 published in 2016 was supplemented with an introductory text by David Joselit on ‘Globalization, networks, and the aggregate as form’, virtually no further revisions to the Eurocentric picture of modern art up to 1950 were deemed necessary.

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70 ‘Reference ensured recognition that what you were doing was part of the avantgarde project. Deference and difference had to be finely calibrated so that the ambition and claim of your work was measured by its difference from the artist or artistic statement whose status you both acknowledged (deference) and displaced.’ Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits, 1888–1893: Gender and the Color of Art History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1992), p. 14. 71 Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2015). 72 Ibid., p. 8. 73 I understand this term in the sense meant by James Clifford, as intervention: ‘There are no postcolonial cultures or places: only moments, tactics, discourses. “Post-” is always shadowed by “neo-”. Yet “postcolonial” does describe real, if incomplete, ruptures with past structures of domination, sites of current struggle and imagined futures.’ James Clifford, ‘Diasporas’, in Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 277. 74 Kobena Mercer (ed.), Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2005). 75 See Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011); Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Achieving Our Humanity: The Idea of the Postracial Future (New York and London: Routledge, 2001). 76 James Clifford, ‘Traveling Cultures’, in Clifford, Routes, p. 36. 77 Kobena Mercer, ‘Introduction’, in Mercer, Cosmopolitan Modernisms, p. 8. 78 ‘Decolonial Documents’, Frieze, October–November 2018. www.frieze.com/tags/ decolonial-documents (accessed 12 August 2021). The German edition of this book was reviewed by Devika Singh in part one of the series, 29 October 2018; Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price, ‘Decolonizing Art History’, Art History, 43:1 (February 2020), 8–66. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/14678365.12490 (accessed 12 August 2021); Huey Copeland, Hal Foster, David Joselit, and Pamela M. Lee, ‘A Questionnaire on Decolonization’, October, 174 (Autumn 2020), 3–125, https://direct.mit.edu/octo/article/doi/10.1162/ octo_a_00410/95978/A-Questionnaire-on-Decolonization (accessed 12 August 2021). 79 We must in particular consider here the objections to the universal use of the term ‘decolonise’, which is associated from indigenous perspectives primarily with a radical reorganisation of land and property relations in those nations that emerged from settler colonies. A second bloc of critical commentary identifies the contradiction between the recent popularity of decolonial debates in journals (such as October) and the meagre interest these platforms had shown until recently in the problems in art and society associated with the decolonise debate. 80 Richard Hylton in his response to the questionnaire on ‘Decolonizing Art History’, Art History, 43:1, 27. 81 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 36.

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Introduction

82 Ibid. 83 Fernando Coronil, ‘Introduction to the Duke University Press Edition – Transculturation and the Politics of Theory: Countering the Center, Cuban Counterpoint’, in Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press 1995), p. xl. 84 Fernando Coronil, ‘Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories’, Cultural Anthropology, 11:1 (February 1996), 73. 85 Gandhi, Affective Communities, p. 3. 86 Gandhi takes issue here with the ‘naturalist theatre of “interstitiality” and “inbetween-ness”’, for example in Homi Bhabha’s models of hybridity and mimicry. Gandhi, Affective Communities, p. 5. 87 Ibid., p. 7. 88 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), p. 33. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., p. 42. 91 See also Chapters 1 and 7 below. 92 Suzanne Césaire, ‘1943: Surrealism and Us’ [‘1943: Surréalisme et Nous’, Tropiques, 8–9, October 1943], in Suzanne Césaire, The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941–1945), ed. Daniel Maximin, trans. Keith L. Walker (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2012), p. 38. 93 Ibid. 94 In parallel with the controversies on dimensions of contact addressed here, a debate was also taking place in anthropology on methodological questions of the study of cultural contact and resulting changes in ways of life. In his introduction to the book Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa, Bronislaw Malinowski formulates the demand for an understanding of ethnographic contact studies as ‘applied science’, the results of which should be translated as effectively as possible into ‘practical rules of conduct for the administrator, the missionary, entrepreneur, or teacher’. In contrast to the emancipatory politics of contact in Césaire, Nardal, Ortiz, Tagore, etc., however, these contact studies were ultimately in the service of optimising colonial administration. Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Introductory Essay on the Anthropology of Changing African Cultures’, in Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa (London: Oxford University Press for the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, 1938). 95 Kobena Mercer, Travel and See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 3. 96 My own historical research perspective on post- and decolonial agendas in modernism was significantly shaped by encounters and collaborations in the 1990s with artists such as Rasheed Araeen, Renée Green, Adrian Piper, Fred Wilson, and many others. 97 Mercer, Travel and See, p. 4. 98 Monica Juneja, ‘“A very civil idea ...”: Art History, Transculturation, and WorldMaking – with and beyond the Nation’, Journal of Art History, 81 (2018), 470.

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99 See Chapters 1, 3, 4, 7, and 8 below. 100 To name a few publications not mentioned thus far that, apart from important regional studies, have recently contributed to the discussion: Jill H. Casid and Aruna D’Souza (eds), Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014); Pauline Bachmann, Melanie Klein, Tomoko Mamine, and Georg Vasold (eds), Art/Histories in Transcultural Dynamics: Narratives, Concepts, and Practices at Work, 20th and 21st Centuries (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017); Julia Allerstorfer and Monika LeischKiesl (eds), ‘Global Art History’: Transkulturelle Verortungen von Kunst und Kunstgeschichte (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2017); Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips (eds), Mapping Modernism: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2018); David Joselit, Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2020). An excellent introductory reader that brings together important older texts is Elaine O’Brien, Everlyn Nicodemus, Melissa Chiu et al. (eds), Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

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Towards a postcolonial art history of contact

In the last ten to twenty years, a new globalist discourse has taken hold in parts of Western art historiography and the exhibition scene. All the talk of taking a more global viewpoint can be understood as a response to growing pressure to waste no time in redressing our approaches in many different areas. In museums and art history institutes, a phenomenon can be observed that might be described by borrowing the notion of ‘thrust reversal’ from aviation. Institutions that until recently held fast to their accustomed Eurocentric point of view – unperturbed by postcolonial studies, migration, and critical race studies – are now energetically proclaiming the need for a global turn in our understanding of art and art history. A discrepancy has become apparent between the decades-long refusal to align art-historical perspectives and museum collection practices with the changes evident in the postcolonial migration society and the new pathos underlying the calls to orient academic and curatorial work more globally. This abrupt change of heart from conventional Eurocentrism to the new globalism can be observed as a tendency particularly (but not exclusively) in German-speaking countries, where the postcolonial challenges facing art history were largely ignored in the 1980s and 1990s. This sudden pivot to the paradigms of the global or the transcultural – without any political foundation in post- or decolonial approaches – brings with it problems that will be addressed in the following pages. Rhetoric of the global

As justification for the urgency of reorienting academic art history and the programmes of museums of modern art, reference is often made to 1989, the year when the end of the Cold War brought about lasting changes in the global world order. These changes entailed the (retroactive) launch of a new, more global understanding of art and art history. In their highly acclaimed publication The Global Contemporary, Hans Belting and Peter Weibel paint a historical picture of the resulting global reorganisation of the

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art world, positing that it was only through the events around 1989 that the ­non-Western world became empowered to articulate itself in all its cultural and political diversity, thereby contesting the exclusivity of Western art and demanding its share of the spotlight in the international art establishment and discourse.1 In this dating of a global art consciousness to the post-1989 era, reference is often made to the exhibition Magiciens de la terre (1989 in Paris) as the point of departure for global art. But this late date ignores all the historical achievements of the anti-colonial movements that went before, as well as the heatedly contested histories of non-Western modernisms. Likewise forgotten when pinpointing the origins of global art in terms of exhibition history is the contemporary criticism of Magiciens de la terre. Among other issues, commentators found fault with the anthropological-exoticist approach to non-Western contemporary art inscribed in this exhibition and the evident denial of a non-Western modernism.2 Other initiatives, most of them university-based, have attempted to establish a global perspective predicated on a combination of Area Studies or its art-historical cousins such as East Asian, Islamic, and Latin American art history. They are thus working toward applying analytical parameters such as cultural transfer, cultural translation, and transculturality across epochs. Such parameters are borrowed from recent postcolonial theories, developed there out of the analysis of concrete power constellations in the context of colonialism, diaspora, and migration. From this somewhat hasty generalisation based on paradigms that until recently received little attention within the discipline of art history, it is by all means possible to develop new descriptions of the transregional constitution of even older artistic phenomena in different parts of the world. However, many of these academic efforts manifest their own version of presentism. Here, the fixation on the present does not concern the subject of inquiry (art itself), as in the case of global contemporary art. It can be found instead in the urgency with which the need to ask new questions is flaunted with the grand gesture of a fresh start and the aura of a paradigm shift. Current discussions about a global art history are hence usually guided by the question of whether and how Western forms of art historiography can lay claim to global validity. The art historian James Elkins, frequently cited in these debates, asks in the introduction to the anthology he edited, Is Art History Global?, ‘if art history is, or could become, a single coherent enterprise throughout the world’.3 He suggests five arguments that could speak for either an affirmative or negative answer to that question. The five arguments against a global validity of art history are: 1.  What counts as ‘art history’ in many countries is newspaper art criticism. 2. Art history, as a named discipline and a department in universities, is ­principally known in North America and Western Europe.

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Towards a postcolonial art history of contact

3.  Art history is closely affiliated with senses of national and regional identity. 4.  Art history seems to be dissolving into image studies or visual studies. 5.  […] there are different kinds of publications for different art historians.

The arguments for the existence of a globally coherent art historiography, which ultimately prevail in Elkins’s account, are: 1.  It can be argued [...] that some of the best scholarship in the field is done by writers who know a lot about theories, and conversely that scholars who are not conversant with theories run the risk of producing texts that are out of touch. 2.  The distinction between art history and art criticism still holds. 3.  Art history remains focused on a specific canon of artists. 4.  Art history is guided by a stable series of narratives. 5.  Art history depends on Western conceptual schemata.4

In a remarkable argument for answering in the affirmative – ‘art history is becoming a global enterprise’5 – Elkins starts by citing the high concentration of institutionalised art history in North America and Western Europe and the heavy fixation on the canon of Western art history and proceeds to the observation that art history practised in other regions of the world employs the same methods and references. There would therefore appear to be no alternatives: ‘There is no non-Western tradition of art history,’6 Elkins states, but not without at the same time finding what he deems the exotic flavour of local variations on prevailing Western standards appealing. Such an assertion of the non-existence of alternative approaches to art history is already questionable on the grounds of its adamant either/or structure, with which no form of transculturality can ever be comprehended. And yet the possibilities for the practice of art historiography are in fact not exhausted by the alternative of either following ‘Western’ methods and concepts or working completely independently of them. One example of a more nuanced understanding of the question can be found in an Indian debate on art history, colonialism, and anti-colonial nationalism that draws on the work of the eminent art historian Ratan Parimoo: One accuses him of purism and formalism maintaining a naive emphasis on western methods. [...] One criticizes him for assuming too easily, or worse, celebrating art history as ‘an achievement of European scholarship’. But he used the European strain to contest a British legacy, and to create displacements in the colonial roots of the discipline while also critiquing the nationalist ­position.  [...] Yet one cannot argue that Parimoo was unaware of or naïve about his enterprise. He was more engaged with the issue of how to formulate a new art history for India in that context, and he sought to do so within the constraints of the discipline, not by dismissing it a priori with a sense of guilt.7

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As the arguments presented here show, Western methods of art history can be appropriated in very different ways and applied for different purposes, including to critique Western positions. In the next chapter, reference is made to an older debate on how to adequately adapt European methods of art historiography to India at the time of the independence movement, based on the example of Stella Kramrisch, who taught art history at Rabindranath Tagore’s Visva-Bharati University starting in 1921. In the case of Elkins, however, the question posed at the beginning of his reflections – ‘Can the methods, concepts, and purposes of Western art history be suitable for art outside of Europe and North America?’ – can already be answered in the affirmative after only a few pages. Elkins’s question-and-answer game on the challenges faced by art history given a global horizon is an instance of the often hypothetical and unhistorical character of the questions academic art history asks of itself. Parul Dave-Mukherji has spoken in this context of ‘the way nonWestern art histories are invoked in the current redressing of Eurocentrism’.8 The approaches outlined here manifest two problematic tendencies, which can be described using the terms dehistoricisation and depoliticisation. The one ‘school of thought’, based primarily in the curatorial context, takes a positive view of the recent globalisation of art and its worldwide contemporaneity. By fixating on the present (post-1989), however, it simultaneously negates the modernity of non-Western art across the hundred years before. The other ‘school’, at home mainly in the field of academic art history, often adapts theoretical fragments and concepts from postcolonial, migration, and diaspora studies in order to apply them without hesitation to the art of all epochs and regions of the world. By drafting a new picture of a transcultural history of art that has ostensibly always been there, it negates in a different way the global art of modernism, whose exponents were already posing questions about transcultural and transcontinental connections in art practice and critique much earlier and with different motivations. Both versions of presentist globalism tend to turn the crisis in the definition of art and art-historical practice triggered by an increasing acknowledgement of cultural diversity into an all-encompassing aspiration to map world art, or into a transhistorical generalisation of concepts that were originally developed in specific historical and political contexts. This also entails presumptions and appropriations that are incompatible with the postcolonial critique of cultural and historiographical Eurocentrism. A different internationalism

In order to counter these problematic tendencies in global art history with a different perspective, we must begin by examining historical constellations in which the colonial worldview and the hegemony of Western notions of

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civilisation and culture, progress and modernity, were challenged. To do so requires taking a closer look at a historical period when decolonisation was beginning to alter world politics, leading to striking shifts in the visual arts. The modernist movement in the first half of the twentieth century will thus be the focal point of our considerations on the global dimension of art. This will also make it possible to examine the close connections between globalisation in the arts and liberationist movements such as anti-colonialism, Pan-Africanism, anti-racism, and the US Civil Rights movement. These links constitute a key feature of transcultural modernism and therefore necessarily form part of any consideration of this subject. The ‘globalisation’ of modern art in the first decades of the twentieth century began in a political and discursive context marked by transcontinental networking between anti-colonial movements coupled with the concurrent struggle against racist discrimination in Western societies. Hence, at the exact point in history when colonial empires were experiencing their greatest expansion, the foundations were already being laid for a ‘postcolonial’ world. In the art field, significant changes can be discerned during this period in the interchanges between artists working in different regions of the world, many of them acting against the backdrop of similarly fraught situations. The novelty of this transmodern art production is perhaps most strikingly illustrated by comparing it to the prevailing relations between the arts of different cultures in Western Euromodernism. It is undisputed that Japonisme in late nineteenth-century European art and primitivism in early twentiethcentury art were both important factors for the aesthetic renewal of Western modernism. But artists such as Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso did not discover Japanese woodblock prints or African sculptures through transcultural contacts between European artists and their Asian or African colleagues. Instead, those in the West primarily encountered aesthetic difference through the agency of protagonists in the European art world who themselves had come into contact with works of art and cultural artefacts from other regions of the world. This contact took place within the framework of world expositions, ethnological shows, museums, and shops, all of which played a part in shaping Western artists’ perceptions of foreign aesthetics – in the absence of any dialogue with the actual producers of these artworks – into an idée fixe of what constituted the nature of the Other. The internationality of canonised modernism was a European, and later a European–North American, affair. Hence it remained firmly anchored in the viewpoint of the colonising world. With nascent transcultural global modernism in the early twentieth century, particularly after the First World War, fundamentally new relationships were then formed between the arts and artists on either side of colonial borders. In many areas of the world, the unidirectional appropriation displayed by Euromodernism was replaced by a much sought-after though variously

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motivated encounter with representatives of a different art (or one perceived as related) – in other words, by actual interaction and communication between cultural producers from different cultural regions. This development ran parallel to the patterns of Euromodernism described above, although it was overshadowed by them for a long time. The difference between the internationality of Western modernism that formerly dominated art history and the internationality of transcultural global modernism that was driven forward primarily by non-Western actors cannot be represented in a simple scheme of before and after. Nor can the characteristic paradigm shifts of transmodernism be meaningfully captured in any temporal ‘post’ model. Both manifestations of artistic modernism unfolded in the same period so that they coexisted and positioned themselves in relation to one another. As the individual chapters of this book show, Euromodernism and transmodernism developed not only in different world centres but often in one and the same place. It is possible to illustrate the differences between Euromodernism and transmodernism for one thing by the very different character of artists’ intercontinental travel. The colonial artist’s journey, for example the travels of Paul Gauguin, Emil Nolde, Paul Klee, and Henri Matisse, led from Western cities to the colonial realm (and back again). These trips to the South Seas or North Africa did not bring the travellers into contact with their colleagues there. The very idea of such interchanges between fellow artists is alien to the colonial model of the artist’s journey. In the art of Euromodernism, influences flow exclusively in one direction: from non-European aesthetics into the discourses and competitive relations between Western artists.9 In contrast, the journeys of early transcultural modernism are marked by the establishment of contacts, mutual invitations, and the founding of associations, publications, and institutions for reciprocal exchange. Their transnationalism transcends the geographical, cultural, and ‘racial’ boundaries of the colonial world order. The early days of Indian modernism with its institutions and platforms (Indian Society of Oriental Art and its journal Rupam; Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘World University’ and art academy in Santiniketan) are thus closely linked to the invitation of Western and East Asian artists to Calcutta. These invitations were in turn the result of contacts made by writers like Tagore or curators such as Okakura Tenshin on their travels in Europe, America, and Asian countries.10 In Paris, the African American artists of the New Negro movement sought contact with both European modernists and the ‘ancestral arts’ (Alain Locke) of their African roots.11 The Parisian contacts between African, Afro-Caribbean, and European writers and artists gave rise, among other things, to the journal Tropiques, published in Martinique in the early 1940s by Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, and René Ménil. Wifredo Lam, a paradigmatic artist with a transcultural visual language, illustrated several

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issues and was repeatedly discussed in the journal, which would become an important forum for transcultural thought and syncretic aesthetics.12 Lam’s painting mediated between pictorial concepts from European modernism and elements of the Afro-Cuban culture of his homeland, which he rediscovered after his flight from Europe. His hybrid figures with their human, animal, and mythological elements populate picture spaces full of lush vegetation, primarily sugar and tobacco, two crops Fernando Ortiz analysed contemporaneously in his book Cuban Counterpoint as a symbol of slavery and (neo-) colonialism in one case and freedom and self-determination in the other.13 Even later major cultural events such as the Premier festival mondial des arts nègres, held in 1966 in Dakar, can be traced back to the Pan-African focus of anti-colonial politics and Black aesthetics in interwar Paris. Anti-colonial alliances

The historical background behind all of these artistic contacts and the condition that made them possible was the internationalisation of the anti-colonial and anti-racist movements in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. These alliances reached their first peak with the end of the First World War, although transregional axes of resistance movements had already been formed in earlier phases of colonialism, for example in the context of the revolution in Haiti around 1800.14 The First World War was a key factor in this internationalisation of resistance because the mobilisation of colonised people from all continents as soldiers fighting on the side of the colonial powers saw millions of people who had until then been ‘relegated to their place’ in colonial doctrine travelling far and wide. ‘The Great War set in motion a massive movement of black Folk (and many others too). Everywhere, African Peoples were crossing boundaries – regional and provincial, national and imperial, continental and oceanic – on a scale unseen since the end of the Atlantic slave trade.’15 Even during the war, the revolution in Russia and Lenin’s anti-imperialist policies had brought a new global player on to the scene who propagated the self-determination of peoples. With his demand for the liberation of all colonies, Lenin was to become a lasting reference point for the anti-colonial movements.16 Another figurehead for peoples living under colonial foreign rule at the end of the war was the US President Woodrow Wilson with his new blueprint for peace, in which he incorporated Lenin’s demand for selfdetermination. The great hopes placed by the colonised peoples in Wilson’s programme were however soon to be dashed in the course of the Paris peace talks when it became clear that the concept of self-determination was to be included in the treaty provisions for European nations under foreign rule but not for the colonies. Germany’s colonies in Africa, for example, were not recognised as liberated territories – a demand made by the Pan-African Congress

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under the leadership of W.E.B. Du Bois – but were instead placed under the control of the colonial powers England and France. Similarly, the German colony of Kiautschou was not returned to China but was initially placed under the administration of the Japanese Empire. Uprisings in several Asian and African countries in the spring of 1919 – including the May Fourth movement in China and the anti-colonial revolution in Egypt – were direct consequences of frustrated expectations of a new, postcolonial, world order. Demonstrations in India led to the Amritsar Massacre in April 1919 and in its aftermath, with the Non-Co-operation movement led by Gandhi, to the strengthening of the Indian independence movement.17 Widespread disillusionment at the policies of the League of Nations, which basically reinforced the existing colonial world order, led to new structures for the transcontinental self-organisation of anti-colonial movements as well as a strengthened alliance of these movements with the anti-imperialist policies of the young Soviet Union. In February 1919, W.E.B. Du Bois organised the first Pan-African Congress during the peace negotiations in Paris, with delegates from Africa, the Caribbean, and the USA in attendance. The participants aspired, among other things, to transform the colonies in Africa that had been under German rule until the World War into a free state for Blacks from the Black Atlantic region. During the same period, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association was agitating from its base in New York across three continents for a free Black nation in Liberia, utilising instruments including the Negro World newspaper published in multiple languages and the Black Star Line shipping line. The Pan-African movement had already established its first transcontinental organisational structures immediately after Ethiopia’s victory over the Italian invaders at the Battle of Adua in 1896, a highly symbolic achievement for Africa and the Black diaspora. Henry Sylvester Williams, a native of Trinidad, began in 1897 to lay the groundwork for the Pan-African Conference, which finally took place in London in July 1900. This conference is where Du Bois – arriving from Paris, where his Exhibit of American Negroes was on display at the 1900 World Exposition – met the Haitian lawyer, diplomat, and conference co-organiser Benito Sylvain. Sylvain was there as a delegate for both Haiti and Ethiopia, which he had visited after Emperor Menelik’s victory over the Italians, with the goal of establishing an axis of free Black nations as ‘Grand Protectors’ of the Pan-African Association and of Blacks all over the world. For Du Bois, whose involvement up to this point had focused on US race relations, this encounter would be seminal in terms of his work in Pan-Africanism and his ‘Ethiopianism’, which I will discuss in Chapter 6 in the context of the artistic reclamation of African heritage.18 Such meetings of initially just a few Black intellectuals, lawyers, etc. from Africa and the African diaspora rapidly gave rise to extensive and transcontinental networks for political activism.19

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Claude McKay speaking in the Kremlin, c. 1923, photograph. Claude McKay Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. (Wikimedia public domain).

Transcontinental / transdisciplinary

Most of these anti-colonial and anti-racist networks were not founded for purely political purposes. Artistic and scientific contributions also played an important role in their endeavour to forge new alliances and cultural identities. This was true from the 1920s at the latest, when the discourses of the English- and French-speaking renaissances of Black culture began to crossfertilise each other by way of personal meetings as well as in publications. Of particular importance here were the numerous encounters and exchanges between activists, literary figures, and artists based in the USA (especially Harlem in New York, Atlanta, and Washington, DC) and Paris, who each in turn had their own contacts to Africa and the Caribbean islands.20 These relationships found a journalistic forum in magazines such as Les Continents (Paris) and Opportunity (New York). The canonical contact situation that initiated the Négritude movement in the 1930s and initially manifested itself in the journal L’Étudiant Noir resulted from encounters in Paris between Aimé Césaire (Martinique), Léon Damas (French Guyana), and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) as well as contacts between those intellectuals at home in the African French discursive realm with the authors of the American New

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Negro movement. These intellectual liaisons among members of the African diaspora from three continents, which would be seminal for developments that continued until the 1960s, would hardly have been possible, though, without the mediation of the central figures Jane and Paulette Nardal from Martinique, made possible in part by their command of both French and English. The Nardal sisters – long marginalised in histories of Négritude – were part of the circle around the writer René Maran21 and ran their own Paris salon, which attracted Black artists and scholars from three continents. The activities of the Nardals, who (with Léo Sajous from Haiti) published the journal La Revue du Monde Noir in English and French from 1931 to 1932, were highly influential on the intercontinental horizon, and not only because of the women’s role as intermediaries between Black liberation politics and Black modernist aesthetics.22 Equally formative were their reflections on composite Afro-European identities in colonial and envisaged postcolonial contexts, which I will discuss below. As a consequence of the above-mentioned disillusionment with the colonial world order as confirmed by the League of Nations, the International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism was held in Brussels in 1927 with delegates from 134 organisations from all around the world, and the League against Imperialism and for National Independence was founded. Conferences like this one, with participants including Jawaharlal Nehru, Ho Chi Minh, Mohammad Hatta, and Kwame Nkrumah, provided a way for the participants to share their experiences, objectives, and strategies, making it possible for them to take a united stand vis-à-vis the colonial powers and the world press. Further conferences promoting decolonisation policies were held following the Second World War, among which the 1955 Bandung Conference is the most significant.23 These milestones in the global networking of anti-colonialism were able to build on the many smaller organisational formats and publication organs that preceded them. In the 1920s, there were numerous such organisations in Paris alone, such as the Union Intercoloniale, the Ligue Universelle pour la Défense de la Race Noire, and the Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre, as well as periodicals including La Race Nègre, Le Cri des Nègres, Le Paria, Les Continents, and La Dépêche Africain. If Harlem was the centre of Black culture in the 1920s, it was in these Paris circles and at the Brussels Congress of 1927 that viable alliances of Pan-African, Arab, and Asian anti-colonial activists were formed.24 For our art-historical context, we should mention here what was likely the very first anti-colonial exhibition, La Verité sur les colonies, held in Paris in 1931, as a significant event. Often described in art history publications as a counter-exhibition mounted by the Surrealists in response to the Colonial Exhibition in Paris, it was actually a co-operative project of the Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre and the French section of the League against

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Imperialism along with a few authors and artists from the Surrealist circle. As a contribution to the broad-based protests against the Colonial Exhibition, which had been co-initiated by the Vietnamese Comité de Lutte, the anticolonial counterpart took place in the Soviet pavilion built by Konstantin Melnikov for the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes in 1925. Against a backdrop of banners emblazoned with Marx quotations on the self-determination of peoples, the show presented African art juxtaposed with Christian ‘fetish objects’. The exhibition and its accompanying projects – which included the distribution of a fake guide to the official Colonial Exhibition (Le Véritable Guide de l’Exposition Coloniale) that exposed France’s ‘civilising activity’ in the colonies as a regime of violence and exploitation, as well as calls for boycotts circulated on flyers (‘Ne visitez pas l’Exposition Coloniale’) – made use of propaganda vehicles, communications guerrillas, and artistic alienation. These strategies are remarkable both for the diversity of methods used and for the political alliances they reveal between African, Asian, and European activists.25 The anti-colonialism espoused by many Surrealists, although associated with a problematic exoticism, can thereby be seen as a precondition for their later collaborations with African and especially Caribbean writers such as Aimé Césaire and painters such as Wifredo Lam.26 Conceiving transculturality

The inseparable relationship between the colonial world order and racist thinking called not only for political agitation but also for a response from academia. In the African American context, for example, the encounter between W.E.B. Du Bois and the anthropologist Franz Boas, whom Du Bois invited in 1906 to speak to his Black students at Atlanta University about the achievements of African civilisations, launched a collaboration that would continue until well into the mid-twentieth century between the Black Civil Rights movement and critical (anti-racist) anthropology.27 In terms of contact, the collaboration between the African American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and the white anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits in the 1920s would also have a lasting impact on art and scholarship, not least in terms of the relationship between ‘objective’ and engaged research.28 In the French-speaking context, too, links can be discerned between e­thnographic-scientific reconsideration of the concept of ‘race’ and political and artistic statements. Already in the late nineteenth century, the aforementioned Benito Sylvain was working on organising an international conference to scientifically invalidate the racist thinking of Western modernity. It was his ambition to bring together the best scholars in Paris on the occasion of the 1900 World Exposition in order to disprove once and for

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View of the exhibition La Vérité sur les colonies, 1931. Un peuple qui en opprime d’autres ne saurait être libre, photograph. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2003.R.20).

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View of the exhibition La Vérité sur les colonies, 1931. Fétiches européens, photograph. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2003.R.20).

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all the theory of superior and inferior races. Sylvain referred to this pseudoscientific theory as a ‘moral monstrosity which is based, whatever one might say, solely on the idea of the exploitation of man by man’.29 Instead of realising his project for an anti-racist scientific conference, however, Sylvain subsequently assisted Henry Sylvester Williams in organising the Pan-African Conference in London. The accounts by the Haitian politician and ethnologist Jean Price-Mars, who was part of the Nardal sisters’ circle, of magico-religious practices in Haiti (written in the context of the US occupation of the country) contributed to a reassessment of the African heritage of those complexly composed Black identities that Jane Nardal sought to describe in the late 1920s using the term ‘Afro-Latin’. ‘Nardal imagined the merging of Frenchness/Latin-ness and African-ness/blackness into a new identity, a new self-consciousness.’30 Jane and Paulette Nardal developed their concepts of composite identities within the framework of the Black international and on the basis of a thorough critique of the exoticist and primitivist concepts of Blackness in Western modernist art and entertainment culture, particularly in the ‘Negrophilia’ of the 1920s.31 In response to this fetishistic stereotyping, they proposed realistic descriptions of complex identities that would open up a rich spectrum of possibilities for the cultural creativity of Black subjects. ‘The Nardals’ remit is to promote the activities of black internationalism, with a particular focus on the ways in which cultural crossovers took place between the colonies and the metropole and on how the idea of racial and cultural métissage functioned within this international scene.’32 The newly acquired consciousness of what it meant to be Black in the diaspora and the shared experience of very differently constituted subjects was acknowledged as identity-forming, but it was not to be placed in opposition to the imprint of European culture and education, nor should it become merely its product: ‘On the contrary, he must learn to profit from others’ acquired experience and intellectual wealth, but in order to know himself better and to assert his personality.’33 The crucial point of these contacts between stakeholders from linguistically, historically, and culturally diverse regions can be described using the concept of translation. To produce the ‘internationalisme noir’ of which Jane Nardal spoke, translation work in the literal sense was necessary, as the Nardals themselves undertook in their bilingual journal.34 But it was also a matter of translating the experience of a conflict-prone confrontation between Western and African cultures into a new identity, a double sense of belonging that would be directed against both passive assimilation into the dominant Western culture and any essentialist concept of Black culture. Characteristic of the many different manifestations of transcultural global modernism in the various regions of the world is the rethinking of concepts of culture and identity in cross-practice constellations – anti-colonial/anti-racist

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politics, art, science, and philosophy. Reflections on and artistic expression of composite cultures, which Édouard Glissant would later describe as ‘cultures composites’ as opposed to ‘cultures ataviques’, is a characteristic feature of transmodernism.35 Being Black and American (Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’), Indian and Western (Tagore’s ‘cultural inclusiveness’), African and French (Nardal’s ‘afro-latinité’) and conceptualising this experience poses an artistic and theoretical challenge to the protagonists of transmodernism. In the context of decolonial movements in the interwar period, transcultural thinking amounted to a political necessity in the fight against colonial borders and their colour lines without however succumbing to nationalist or separatist concepts.36 Contrary to the practice of unilateral appropriation of other cultures and aesthetics in Euromodernism and the diffusionist notion that all that was new would be produced in the Western culture centres and send out ripples to the ‘peripheries’, the practice of encounter, interchange, and alliance-building across cultural and colonial boundaries in transmodernism tends to be decentralised, multilateral, and intentional.37 When the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore opened his Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan in 1921, he understood this ambitious project to be a countermodel to the colonial education system of the British and, at the same time, to a narrowly conceived Indian nationalism. Lecturers from many Western and Asian countries were hired so that they could together study – ‘free from all antagonisms of race, nationality, creed or caste’ – the encounter between East and West.38 The study of the human mind ‘in its realisation of different aspects of truth’ was to be pursued from these diverse cultural standpoints.39 Originally established in the spirit of pan-Asian aspirations and in the context of the political Swadeshi movement and the Bengali cultural renaissance as a counter-draght to Western dominance in the Indian art world,40 these international contacts were continually expanded, leading to a legendary exhibition in Calcutta in 1922 in which Bauhaus artists were featured alongside their Indian colleagues.41 Contact rather than influence

Partha Mitter has noted in an important essay that the ‘universalist’ project of art history still remains trapped in the constraints of Western epistemology. Despite earnest efforts, it has not been possible to simply remedy this circumstance through a (once again culturally determined) self-reflexivity. The widespread acceptance of the canon of Western art history has resulted in a phenomenon Mitter describes using the expression ‘pathology of influence’. In this notion, Western art is considered the gold standard for all nonWestern ‘derivatives’: ‘As an art historical category, [...] influence ignores

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significant aspects of cultural encounters, especially the enriching value of cross-fertilization of cultures.’42 We can understand the symptoms of this mindset of centre versus periphery, original versus imitation, as an arthistorical variant of the diffusionism described by James Blaut, a paradigm that was central to the coloniser’s worldview.43 Mitter therefore advocates for a shift from the discourse of originality to a more ‘heterogeneous’ definition of global modernism, proposing as method a ‘contextually grounded study of non-Western modernisms that engages with the socially constructed meaning of artistic production’.44 This proposal can be wholeheartedly supported as long as the parameters for understanding global modernisms are specified beyond the established normativity of Western modernism. Focusing here on the contacts between those involved in differently situated modernisms is, in my opinion, particularly promising for promoting a deeper understanding of the active production of a transcultural modernism. In recent years, several publications have contributed to a critical broadening of the perspective on modernist art in keeping with Mitter’s appeal. Among the best of these is undoubtedly the book series Annotating Art’s Histories,45 edited by Kobena Mercer. It is impressive, among other things, because none of the numerous contributions to the four volumes sketches a global history of art, while the monographic or regionally oriented essays as a whole paint a radically new picture of the diversity of conditions, interests, and aesthetics of modern art practice between 1900 and 1980. It is significant that the publication project is supported by the London Institute of International Visual Art (InIVA), an institution that emerged in 1994 from the cultural and political struggles of artists from the colonial diaspora living in Britain. The first symposium organised by InIVA took as its theme the critique and postcolonial redefinition of ‘internationality’,46 reflecting these artists’ combat against the provincial and ideological interpretation of that concept in the Western art world (here primarily the British art scene). This critique has been able to draw on a history of demands made by artists from the African and Asian diasporas, including those published by Rasheed Araeen in 1978 in his first journal, Black Phoenix. At that time Araeen already called for the ‘clear rejection of Western art history as the mainstream’ and propagated instead an ‘international movement, which is different from and in opposition to Western art. This would, of course, require the development of our own international platform [...] through which we could exchange our ideas directly without Western intermediaries/interference, creating historic links between the peoples whose emergence can offer a new hope to all mankind.’47 Araeen created just such a platform for art and art history from a ‘Third World’ perspective with the journal Third Text, founded in 1987. From these institutions and publications from the 1980s and 1990s, the trajectory of

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‘global’ art history in Britain can be traced back further to, for example, David Medalla’s Signals Gallery in London in the early 1960s, a pioneering centre of global avant-gardes which, among other things, first presented in Europe the Brazilian avant-garde in the orbit of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica.48 The exhibition The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, curated by Araeen at the Hayward Gallery in 1989, vividly recounted this very story. It is telling that the globalist art history of the last two decades, driven by a sudden reversal of thrust, has very rarely referred to this ground-breaking project for a genuinely new critical perspective on the history of modern art. Magiciens de la Terre represented the Eurocentric point of view of a team of white ­curators – a postmodern version of the anthropological and primitivist legacy of colonial modernism. As Geeta Kapur has noted, the curatorial paradigm of the exhibition ‘set up a binary between the indigenous and the avantgarde’ and mapped this difference in geographical and ethnic terms.49 In contrast, The Other Story, presented the same year, embodied the political agenda of postcolonial critique in the art context. The exhibition supplied evidence of an internationalism among ‘Asian’ and ‘African’ artists in Britain that had developed on the basis of migration and which far exceeded the mainstream of the narrow, almost provincial British art world of the postwar decades.50 Furthermore, it revealed the mechanisms by which established institutions, art historiography, and art criticism systematically rendered these developments invisible.51 The political content of The Other Story consisted, among other things, in Araeen’s linking the exclusion of Black art to the racial discrimination against the migrant working class in Britain. How might the post-Eurocentric reorientation of Western art history have developed if art historians and museum curators had granted The Other Story the central role in recent exhibition history that they have regrettably ascribed to Magiciens de la terre? It might then have tried to depart from the discipline’s Eurocentric limitations not by taking a diffuse global approach but rather by focusing more attention on the meanings and functions of art in postcolonial societies, shaped as they are by migration, (institutional) racism, and problems of national identity as well as by a proliferation of diverse cultural expressions, narratives, and image repertoires. In an important text from 2002, Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff asked why critical art history in Germany has left out the ‘postcolonial turn’.52 Schmidt-Linsenhoff, one of the first art historians in Germany to combine issues of colonialism and racism with feminist approaches to representation, gender, and scopic regimes, argued that ‘the strangely obdurate disinterest [of art history] in a socio-politically explosive subject area’53 could be explained by the repression by German society of the country’s colonial history and its aftermath. The refusal to accept the postcolonial critique has made it largely impossible for the art history discourse to grasp the historical dimensions of the German racism that

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prevailed during the reunification period after 1990 and the ‘ubiquitous visual stereotypes of foreignness’54. The essay is all the more relevant from today’s perspective because the (political dimension of the) discrepancy between the denial of the postcolonial turn in German-language art history and its later enthusiasm for the global or transcultural turn has only really become clear quite recently. Ten years after Schmidt-Linsenhoff’s critique, in summer 2012, during a discussion at the International Congress of Art Historians in Nuremberg, the German art historian Horst Bredekamp openly called for an end of postcolonialism. Only when postcolonialism (and what he called the ‘feeling of guilt’ it instils in ‘us’) is finally a thing of the past will we be able to approach research on global art history in a relaxed manner.55 Can we derive from this statement that transculturality and globalism have become an academically sanctioned version of postcolonial critique in an attempt to rid ourselves of the problem of power relations? Recently, Parul Dave Mukherji has critically noted that the conferences she is invited to increasingly tend towards the adoption of a transcultural paradigm in place of a postcolonial approach. The critical problem with this trend might be an eventual loss of the political dimension. ‘Given the recent dismissal of postcolonial discourse in the contemporary art world, it is important to resist such a move and instead use it to reclaim the political.’56 The individual case studies of a postcolonial art history of contact in the following chapters of this book are written in the spirit of such resistance to the depoliticisation of the transcultural. The following case studies provide more detailed arguments for a historical-political perspective on transcultural modernism. David Joselit recently made an interesting proposal for understanding the increasing integration of diverse modernisms. Joselit argues that since the 1980s a process of synchronisation of three different genealogies of modern art has taken place. He is referring here to Socialist Realism, postcolonial modernism, and the artistic underground (in Latin America and Eastern Europe, among other places) ‘that developed in dialectical opposition to Euro-American modernism’. Joselit argues that ‘these modern genealogies, arising in diverse locations around the world during the early and mid-twentieth century, are synchronized with one another, as well as with Western modernism, to produce what we call “global contemporary art”’.57 Although Joselit traces individual genealogies back to the 1960s or 1970s, he sees the real upheaval as having taken place in the developments of the last twenty years of the twentieth century. For Joselit, as for other authors I have cited, it was the forces of capitalist globalisation and the end of the Cold War that produced a contemporaneity of art. In my perspective, it was the transcontinental networks engendered by decolonisation movements and anti-racist struggles that paved the way for ‘global’ artistic exchange relations. Even though I thus hold a different view of the historical production of

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contemporaneity in art, the motif of the synchronisation of diverse modernisms seems to me to indicate a central problem in contemporary art history that has yet to be definitively resolved. How transmodernism and the history of ‘global contemporary art’ relate to each other will surely be the subject of further research. If today it is easy to get the impression that artists from the global South had only been waiting for Jean-Hubert Martin and his exhibition Magiciens de la terre to enter their global phase, this historical image is still false even if it is clothed in the garb of a pseudo-postcolonial critique of Eurocentric modernism. The ‘denial of coevalness’ that Johannes Fabian had described for ethnology58 also shaped scholarly and curatorial practice in other disciplines, including art history, in the context of colonial modernity.59 And yet, the anti-colonial movements and the artists of transmodernism have in fact already been fighting for their contemporaneity for a century in the form of a counter-hegemonic internationalism. With their transcontinental contacts and transcultural aesthetics, they presented a critical alternative to the Western white internationality of Euromodernism decades before the globalism of the post-1989 era. Notes 1 Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel (eds), The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds (ZKM Karlsruhe and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 2 In an interview with Belting in The Global Contemporary, Jean-Hubert Martin, the curator of Magiciens de la terre, is practically glorified as a pioneer, while the magazine Kunstforum International, for example, was already looking back critically at the exhibition in 1992. Kunstforum International, 118 (World Art – Global Culture) (Spring 1992). Cf. also Lucy Steeds, Pablo Lafuente, and JeanMarcPoinsot, Making Art Global (Part 2): ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ 1989 (London: Afterall Books, 2013). For a new interpretation of the exhibition’s bearing for artists from the ‘peripheries’ see Monica Juneja, Can Art History Be Made Global? Meditations from the Periphery (Berlin: De Gruyter 2022). 3 James Elkins, ‘Art History as a Global Discipline’, in Elkins (ed.), Is Art History Global? (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), p. 14. 4 Ibid, pp. 5–19. Some of the arguments, both pro and con, are not free of basic Eurocentric assumptions. 5 Ibid., p. 21. 6 Ibid., p. 19. 7 Ajay Sinha, ‘Envisioning the Seventies and Eighties’, in Gulammohamed Sheikh (ed.), Contemporary Art in Baroda (New Delhi: Tulika, 1997), p. 152. Quoted in: Shivaji K Panikkar, ‘Prof Ratan Parimoo: A Journey in Art History’, in Shivaji K Panikkar, Parul Dave Mukherji, and Deeptha Achar (eds), Towards a New Art History: Studies in Indian Art (New Delhi: D.K. Printworld [P] Ltd, 2003), pp. 1–2.

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8 Parul Dave Mukherji, ‘Art History and Its Discontents in Global Times’, in Jill H. Casid and Aruna D’Souza (eds), Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), pp. 88–9. 9 Christian Kravagna, ‘The Artist as Traveller: From the Travelogues of the (Post-) Modernists’, in Matthias Michalka (ed.), The Artist as ..., MUMOK Vienna (Nuremberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2006), pp. 101–24. Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993). 10 Inaga Shigemi, ‘The Interaction of Bengali and Japanese Artistic Milieus in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (1901–1945): Rabindranath Tagore, Arai Kanpō, and Nandalal Bose’, Japan Review, 21 (2009), 149–81. 11 Alain Locke, ‘The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts’, in Locke (ed.), The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance [1925] (New York: Touchstone, 1997), pp. 254–67; Theresa Leininger-Miller, New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922–1934 (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001). 12 Aimé Césaire and René Ménil, Tropiques, 1941–1945: Collection Complète (Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place, 1978). Cf. also Celia Britton, ‘How to Be Primitive: Tropiques, Surrealism and Ethnography’, Paragraph, 32:2 (2009), 168–81. 13 Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar [1947] (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995). See also Chapter 3 below. 14 Michael O. West and William G. Martin, ‘Haiti, I’m Sorry: The Haitian Revolution and the Forging of the Black International’, in Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins (eds), From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 73–104. 15 Michael O. West and William G. Martin, ‘Contours of the Black International’, in West et al., From Toussaint to Tupac, p. 9. 16 Bipan Chandra, ‘Lenin on National Liberation Movements’, India Quarterly, 27:1 (January–March 1971), 40–56. 17 Erez Manela, ‘Dawn of a New Era: The “Wilsonian Moment” in Colonial Contexts and the Transformation of World Order, 1917–1920’, in Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier (eds), Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 121–49. 18 James Quirin, ‘W.E.B. Du Bois, Ethiopianism and Ethiopia, 1890–1955’, International Journal of Ethiopian Studies, 5:2 (2010–11), 1–26. 19 According to various accounts, between twenty-eight and thirty-two delegates attended the London conference. Tony Martin, ‘Benito Sylvain of Haiti on the Pan-African Conference of 1900’, in Martin, The Pan-African Connection: From Slavery to Garvey and Beyond (Wellesley: The Majority Press, 1983), p. 202. Cf. also Andreas Eckert, ‘Bringing the “Black Atlantic” into Global History: The Project of Pan-Africanism’, in Conrad and Sachsenmaier (eds), Competing Visions, pp. 237–57. On Pan-Africanism in general, see Hakim Adi, Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919–1939 (Trenton, London; Cape Town: Africa World Press, 2013); Jonathan Derrick,

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Africa’s ‘Agitators’: Militant Anti-Colonialism in Africa and the West, 1918–1939 (London: Hurst Publishers, 2008). Despite the importance of Moscow and the Comintern to the anti-colonial struggles and Pan-Africanism in particular, it must be assumed that the political orientations, methods, and forms of organisation of anti-racist and anti-colonial movements of this period were quite diverse. Claude McKay and Otto Huiswoud, for example, were initially radicalised in the African Blood Brotherhood, which was founded in Harlem in 1919. Another important element in the historical background was certainly the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919, when violent riots broke out against African Americans across the northern industrial cities of the USA, sparked by competition for scarce jobs between war veterans and the approximately five hundred thousand migrant blacks who had arrived from the south in the course of the wartime Great Migration; this was a prime example of the new entanglement of race and class in these struggles. Cyrill Briggs, the Caribbean-born founder of the African Blood Brotherhood, which was originally conceived as a self-defence organisation, believed that the translation of these labour struggles into racist violence signalled the necessity of uniting white and Black working-class communities in an anti-capitalist movement and increasingly saw Bolshevism as the solution for a society that would be equal in ‘racial matters’ as well. This leftist movement positioned itself against the populist Black Nationalism and ‘Back to Africa’ agenda of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, but also proposed a radical alternative to Du Bois’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which was regarded as bourgeois-integrationist. The momentous visit of McKay and Huiswoud to Moscow in 1922 was the result of the African American effort to internationalise the ‘Negro Question’ – an effort that Du Bois’s Pan-African organisation also pursued by other means – and, of course, also of the internationalisation strategies of the Russian communists. On the trip, McKay proposed holding a worldwide ‘Negro Congress’, for which, however, no suitable venue could be found in the following years. During his six-month stay in the Soviet Union, where he became an honorary member of the Moscow Soviet, McKay published articles in Russia on ‘The Racial Issue in the United States’ as well as writing on ‘Soviet Russia and the Negro’ for the journal The Crisis (December 1923), edited by Du Bois. 20 The best account of the literary-political networks between Paris and New York is provided by Brent Hayes Edwards in The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). For a recent account of the transmodern art scene in 1960s Paris, see Elizabeth Harney, ‘Constellations and Coordinates: Repositioning Postwar Paris in Stories of African Modernisms’, in Harney and Ruth B. Phillips (eds), Mapping Modernism: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press 2018), pp. 304–34. 21 Cf. the corresponding passage in the Introduction above. 22 Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude Women (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), and Sharpley-Whiting, Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris between the Two World Wars (Albany:

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State University of New York Press, 2015). See also the chapter ‘Feminism and L’Internationalisme Noir: Paulette Nardal’, in Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, pp. 119–86. 23 Jürgen Dinkel, ‘Globalisierung des Widerstands: Antikoloniale Konferenzen und die “Liga gegen Imperialismus und für nationale Unabhängigkeit” 1927–1937’, in Sönke Kunkel and Christoph Meyer (eds), Aufbruch ins postkoloniale Zeitalter: Globalisierung und die außereuropäische Welt in den 1920er und 1930er Jahren (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2012), pp. 209–30. 24 Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 25 Jody Blake, ‘The Truth about the Colonies, 1931: Art Indigène in Service of the Revolution’, Oxford Art Journal, 25:1 (2000), 35–58. Cf. also the chapter ‘Challenging the Exposition: The Anticolonial Opposition’, in Patricia A. Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition (Paris, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 96–129; and Brigitta Kuster, ‘Sous les yeux vigilants / Under the watchful eyes: On the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris 1931’, eipcp: transversal 5, 2007, https:// transversal.at/transversal/1007/kuster/en (accessed 12 August 2021). 26 Lori Cole, ‘Légitime défense: From Communism and Surrealism to Caribbean Self-Definition’, Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, 4:1 (2010), 15–30. 27 Lee D. Baker, ‘The Location of Franz Boas within the African-American Struggle’, in Friedrich Pöhl and Bernhard Tilg (eds), Franz Boas: Kultur, Sprache, Rasse. Wege einer antirassistischen Anthropologie (Vienna and Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2009), pp. 111–29. 28 See Chapter 4 below. 29 Benito Sylvain in a letter to Anténor Firmin, 2 January 1895. Quoted in Martin, ‘Benito Sylvain of Haiti’, p. 203. The Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin was the author of the treatise De l’égalité des races humaines (1885), in which he countered the arguments in Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853). 30 Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude Women, p. 40. 31 Nardal’s analyses anticipate much of what was later expressed by Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison with regard to the psychopathology of the Africanist imagination in white culture. 32 Carole Sweeney, From Fetish to Subject: Race, Modernism, and Primitivism, ­1919–1935 (Westport and London: Praeger, 2004), p. 122. 33 Jane Nardal, ‘Black Internationalism’, in Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude Women, p. 106. Originally published as ‘Internationalisme noir’, La Dépêche Africaine, 15 February 1928, p. 5. 34 ‘Paulette Nardal became the most important cultural intermediary between the Harlem Renaissance writers and the francophone university students who were to become the core of the Negritude movement.’ Maryse Condé, ‘O brave new world’, Research in African Literatures, 29:3 (1998), 7. 35 Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). 36 For more detail, see Chapter 3 below.

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37 I emphasise that this is a tendency because a categorical contrast would not do justice to the two sides. 38 Ramachandra Guha, ‘Introduction’, in Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2009), p. xxiv. 39 Rabindranath Tagore, quoted in: Uma Das Gupta, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 69. 40 Rustom Barucha, Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore & Okakura Tenshin (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). 41 See Chapter 2 below. 42 Partha Mitter, ‘Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery’, The Art Bulletin, 90:4 (2008), 538. For another critical account of the ‘periphery’ – as both a location and political position – and its agency in dismantling global hierarchies see Juneja, Can Art History Be Made Global? 43 James Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographic Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: The Guilford Press, 1993). 44 Mitter, ‘Decentering Modernism’, p. 544. 45 From 2005 to 2008, four volumes in the series were published by MIT Press. Cosmopolitan Modernisms 2005, Discrepant Abstraction 2006, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures 2007, and Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers 2008. 46 Jean Fisher (ed.), Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts (London: Kala Press, 1994). 47 Rasheed Araeen, ‘Preliminary Notes for a Black Manifesto’, quoted in Araeen, Making Myself Visible (London: Kala Press, 1984), pp. 14–15 and 94. 48 Cf. Signals, August 1964–March 1966. Facsimile edition of the Signals News Bulletin, ed. Institute of International Visual Arts (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1995). 49 Geeta Kapur, ‘Curating across Agonistic Worlds’, in Parul Dave Mukherji, Kavita Singh, and Naman Ahuja (eds), InFlux: Contemporary Art in Asia (New Delhi: Sage, 2013). Quoted in https://criticalcollective.in/ArtistInner2.aspx?Aid=0&Eid=207 (accessed 12 August 2021). 50 Rasheed Araeen, The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain (London: Hayward Gallery, 1989). 51 Jean Fisher, ‘The Other Story and the Past Imperfect’, Tate Papers, 12 (2009), www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/no-12/the-other-story-andthe-past-imperfect (accessed 12 August 2021). 52 Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, ‘Kunst und kulturelle Differenz oder: Warum hat die kritische Kunstgeschichte in Deutschland den postcolonial turn ausgelassen?’, in Kunst und Politik. Schwerpunkt Postkolonialismus, Jahrbuch der GuernicaGesellschaft, 4 (2002), 7–15. The edition of the yearbook edited by SchmidtLinsenhoff came out the year that documenta 11 in Kassel, with Okwui Enwezor as director, made German art history’s (and German society’s) problem with postcolonialism much more visible. 53 Ibid., p. 10. 54 Ibid.

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55 Horst Bredekamp, statement on the occasion of the panel discussion ‘Global Ethics for a Global History’, 33rd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art, Nuremberg, 17 July 2012. When one considers the ongoing debates about the Humboldt Forum in Berlin with its wide-ranging problem complex of national identity construction, colonial history, and the violent routes taken by so many objects into Western museum collections, one recognises the imperial cynicism of such a proposition. 56 Dave-Mukherji, ‘Art History and its Discontents in Global Times’, p. 89. 57 David Joselit, Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2020), p. xxi. 58 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 59 Iftikhar Dadi writes: ‘Modern art has long been global, but its practice was uneven, dependent upon educational opportunities, travel and exchange, patronage, and recognition.’ Borrowing a term coined by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Dadi speaks of ‘a vicious cycle of “sanctioned ignorance,” especially in Western institutions’ that impeded the recognition of modernisms in the ‘developing regions’ of the Third World or Global South. Iftikhar Dadi in his response to ‘A Questionnaire on Decolonization’, October, 174 (Fall 2020), 27.

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In the shade of tall mango trees: art education and transcultural modernism in the context of the Indian independence movement Issues of training and education were of the utmost importance in the politics of European colonisers overseas. This was especially true in the heyday of European imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a ‘refined’ concept of ideological and cultural infiltration as a ‘civilising mission’ had begun to supplant, or at least supplement, the crude policy of physical exploitation of resources and labour. In particular in those colonies where a relatively small group of colonisers was dealing with a large indigenous majority, the colonial powers had to construct a social order that could rely on a class of natives who had acquired through appropriate training the knowledge and skills needed to work in the areas of public administration, the organisation of trade, the expansion of infrastructure, and the adaptation of production processes to the needs of the colonial economy. In general, education and training programmes were designed to turn out colonial subjects who would bridge the gap between the white ruling culture and the masses under their domination, who were understood as being radically different. Homi Bhabha described this colonial interest in education as ‘the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite’.1 Only by means of a class of such ‘reformed’ colonial subjects did it seem possible to sustainably establish European-style political structures and adapt them to regional conditions. Equally important, the training measures were intended to make the colonial subjects identify as much as possible with the moral and cultural values, legal norms and social practices of the colonial power, thus guaranteeing acceptance of the social order it had established. A class of interpreters

Education in the arts was also assigned a key role in the colonisation process. The British East India Company, for example, founded the first schools of painting immediately after its victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, which would anchor its rule over large swathes of eastern and northern India, thus

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laying the foundations for the British Empire. At these schools, local artists, who had often lost their former patrons with the decline of the regional ruling dynasties, were taught Western painting techniques and enlisted to produce pictures catering to the interests of the new rulers. Partha Mitter writes on this chapter of colonisation: The East India Company employed artists for its wide-ranging economic surveys and documentation of natural history. British residents commissioned paintings of Indian flora and fauna from Indian artists who were trained in western techniques such as perspective, chiaroscuro, and the picturesque idiom popularized by the landscape artists Thomas and William Daniell. The new rulers also engaged artists to produce ethnographic subjects, especially castes and professions, which enjoyed popularity during the Enlightenment.2

In the course of the nineteenth century, the British system of art education was further expanded in India and its curricula standardised according to the London model. Western techniques such as oil painting and genres such as landscape and portrait painting became dominant, supplanting art forms that had been practised in India for centuries, such as miniature painting at the courts of the Mughal rulers. Traditional folk arts and crafts were marginalised in the wake of modernisation and industrialisation, and by the midnineteenth century the tastes of the elites, and, as Mitter writes, to some extent the lower classes as well, had become thoroughly Victorian.3 The colonial art policy in India has to be seen as part of the more general British considerations as to what constituted appropriate colonial educational measures. In terms of the ideological background behind these measures, the legendary words of the politician, historian, and writer Thomas Macaulay in an official statement in 1835 on educational policy in India are illuminating. It is worth quoting Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Indian Education’ at some length, as it highlights the colonial gesture of superiority in distinguishing between the colonisers’ own language and culture and those native to the colony: We have a fund to be employed as Government shall direct for the intellectual improvement of the people of this country. The simple question is, what is the most useful way of employing it? All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are moreover so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them. It seems to be admitted on all sides, that the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be effected only by means of some language not vernacular amongst them. What then shall that language be? One-half of the Committee maintain that it should be the English.

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In the shade of tall mango trees

The other half strongly recommend the Arabic and Sanscrit. The whole question seems to me to be, which language is the best worth knowing? I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the Committee who support the Oriental plan of education.4

The educational system envisioned by Macaulay aims at ‘a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’.5 According to this concept of mimicry, which Homi Bhabha has described as fundamental to the colonial discourse on education, the colonised subject should not remain in a state of absolute otherness, because, were these people to feel, think, and act completely differently from the colonisers, the colonial administration could not establish a social and economic order according to its own precepts. The Others, therefore, in order to function within the colonial system, ought not to be completely different. But neither should they be made completely equal, for such equality would call into question the principle of domination by a ‘superior culture’. The discovery of Indian arts and crafts

By circa 1850, when educational concepts based on Macaulay’s model were reflected as well in newly established art schools in Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, and the taste of many Indians had already become Victorian, attitudes began changing in England as people began to call into question the conviction of the absolute superiority of British culture in all areas. Thus, while a process of Westernisation of culture was under way in India, a social and cultural critique was developing in England that would draw on, among other things, traditional Indian ways of life and artistic practices. The background behind this change of heart in certain intellectual and artistic circles was a feeling of unease with rampant industrialisation and its consequences for modern society. Social reformers, art theorists, and artists such as John Ruskin and William Morris criticised the fragmentation of society, the alienation of workers from their labour, which was now subject to mechanised processes, and the dehumanisation of human beings that accompanied the division of labour in production. Ruskin thus wrote in 1853 in The Nature of Gothic:

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We have much studied and much perfected [...] the great civilized invention of the division of labour; we only give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men: – Divided into mere segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.6

In their quest to restore a humane, joyful, and fulfilling mode of production, Ruskin and other thinkers influenced by his writings drew on premodern, in particular medieval, organisational units such as the Gothic building lodges, in which communities they saw a variety of different talents working together to attain a higher goal. The theorists contrasted this (idealised) form of organisation of labour, which also anchored the village community, with the capitalist reality of modern-day cities. Ruskin’s anti-industrial critique of civilisation would later be an important influence on India’s independence movement when in the early twentieth century Gandhi, under the sway of Ruskin’s writings, began to reorient his life and political activities. Before that, however, the mid-nineteenth century would see the rise of intense debates on the relationship between art and industry, the quality of English design and decorative arts, and the question of their international competitiveness. An important crystallisation point for a partial reassessment of Britain’s own cultural achievements versus those of colonised Indian society was the first world’s fair in London, known as the Great Exhibition of 1851. While this enterprise was clearly geared towards underscoring the pre-eminence of British industry and Britain’s leading position as colonial power, what struck many an influential advocate of post-industrial reform in the applied arts was instead the quality of the craftsmanship and design of the objects presented in the Indian section. In his 1856 book The Grammar of Ornament, one of the central publications of the Arts and Crafts movement, Owen Jones recalled his momentous encounter with Indian arts and crafts a few years before: The Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations in 1851 was barely opened to the public ere attention was directed to the gorgeous contributions of India. Amid the general disorder everywhere apparent in the application of Art to manufactures, the presence of so much unity of design, so much skill and judgment in its application, with so much of elegance and refinement in the execution as was observable in all the works [...] excited a degree of attention from artists, manufacturers, and the public, which has not been without its fruits.7

Owen Jones, Sir George Birdwood, William Morris, and others admired the organic unity of Indian design principles across the various disciplines,

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In the shade of tall mango trees

which they saw as rooted in ancient traditions, whereas English design was in their view tainted by the pressures of innovation, showmanship, and interdisciplinary competition. Compared to Indian hand craftsmanship, machine execution in Britain restricted design there to inauthentic imitation and an eclectic mix of historical models to which any links had long since been severed by the industrial break with what went before.8 ‘In India,’ wrote George Birdwood in The Industrial Arts of India, ‘everything is hand wrought, and everything, down to the cheapest toy or earthen vessel, is therefore more or less a work of art.’9 The enthusiasm for the applied arts of India was thus conjoined among some influential thinkers with their social reformist quest for pre- and postindustrial models of society. They found an ideal embodiment of this notion in simple Indian village life – which not only seemed to offer its artisans, organised in guilds, non-alienating conditions of production but was moreover conceived in terms of a real existing utopia of non-alienated life – all of which was now threatened by British colonisation. Patrick Brantlinger pointed out that: Birdwood’s portrayal of preindustrial Indian village culture with its craft guilds producing beautiful works of (decorative) art must have appealed to Morris, who perhaps inferred that, if ‘nowhere’ (that is, utopia) existed anywhere in the present instead of in the medieval past or the communist future, then that place might well be the villages of India that were as yet undamaged by capitalist industrialization.10

Rabindranath Tagore and Santiniketan: Swadeshi and education reform in India

This new attitude towards Western versus Indian culture would represent a significant factor in the development of artistic modernism in India, one that also played a role in the reorientation of some of India’s art schools around 1900. It would however be misguided to consider the educational reforms in India and the reorientation of art training as predicated solely on Western ideas or the influence of their European protagonists. For, although some Western thinkers and artists in the late nineteenth century displayed an anti-industrial fascination with Indian village life, very few were guided by an anti-colonialist mindset. Some, like Ruskin, were even able to reconcile a pronounced imperialism with their idealisation of pre-industrial ways of life. In contrast, some of the protagonists of Indian modernism expressed similar sentiments regarding urban versus village culture, industry versus handicrafts, Western versus Indian arts, as a way of a striving for cultural and political self-determination. As far as art itself was concerned, British interest in the context of the Arts and Crafts movement was mainly confined to Indian

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crafts and design, while the leading Indian figures pushing for educational reform oriented their efforts on a broader conception of art and thus worked to formulate decidedly contemporary forms of artistic expression. Although these new forms were clearly at odds with the Victorian academicism of the British art schools, the artists were by no means generally averse to all Western influences. Rabindranath Tagore, who in 1913 was the first non-Western author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, is probably the best example of a genuine synthesis of a political identity based on a recourse to native traditions and a cosmopolitan spirit of openness towards other, and not only Western, cultures. Born into a wealthy entrepreneurial family in Calcutta, the writer and later painter had a privileged upbringing, taught by private tutors and surrounded by artists of various disciplines in his family home. The British school system, to which he had scarcely been exposed himself, thus appeared to him early on in stark negative contrast to the liberal and open-minded spirit of the world he grew up in. Another experience Tagore had as a young man that would be of equal importance to his intellectual development and the educational institutions he later founded was a job his father assigned him, as a counterweight to what he saw as Tagore’s excessively cerebral absorption in poetry, dance, and theatre. After a few years of training in England, Tagore was enlisted to oversee some of the family’s landholdings far from the city and his parents’ cultivated home, giving him an opportunity to learn about the way of life and culture of the impoverished rural population. The prose he would develop based on his impressions, with which he established the genre of the Bengali short story, tells of this rural life and its colonial framework. When his own children reached school age, Tagore, highly critical of the British educational system, founded his own school in 1901 on one of the tracts of land his father had acquired. In Santiniketan (place of peace), 150 km north of Calcutta, Tagore developed an alternative pedagogy that was less concerned with imparting knowledge, much less Western knowledge, but rather with nurturing the students’ own innate talents through creative activity and the teacher’s example. Teachers and pupils lived together, lessons took the form of theatre, and dance and play were to be integrated as far as possible into daily life. The idea of happiness, the most fundamental of human emotions, was used innovatively in Santiniketan. There was a minimum of curriculum but roundthe-clock routine of varied activity which included sense-training for the students, taking long walks into the country, observing how differently human beings lived, and collecting materials for a museum of human habitats [...] Activities like singing, reciting, story-telling, acting in plays and readings from world literature were most important to the school.11

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Rabindranath Tagore with Mukul Dey, ‘Kiyo-san’ and another Japanese lady at Tomitaro Hara’s Sankei-en in Yokohama, Japan. 1 August 1916. (Public domain, Wikimedia Commons).

In addition to this holistic pedagogical approach, which included physical exercises, artistic activities, experiences in nature, and everyday cultural observations but also integrated the pupils in processes of self-organisation and reproductive work for the maintenance of the school and gardens, Tagore made sure the teaching staff came from different cultural backgrounds and

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the student body was composed of diverse social classes, with differences between students from town and country, high and low castes, negotiated in as free an atmosphere as possible. His hope was to cleanse the student’s heart of slavish submission to ­orthodoxy [...] He described the Santiniketan school as ‘an indigenous attempt in adapting modern methods of education in a truly Indian cultural environment’. The idea in itself was a protest against the ‘soulless’ universities introduced by the alien rulers.12

The early days of Tagore’s activities as an educational reformer coincide with a period of rising Indian nationalism and a burgeoning spirit of resistance to British colonial policy. The British administration’s partition of Bengal into West and East Bengal in 1905, carried out with the aim of weakening the national cohesion, incited vehement opposition and brought forth the first major nationalist movement.13 The so-called Swadeshi movement (Swadeshi means literally one’s own land, self-sufficiency, economic independence) called for boycotts of English products in an effort to support the rural population by strengthening its economic foundations, and also relied on civil disobedience. Due to the unflagging resistance, the partition of Bengal was revoked in 1911. Years later, Gandhi would refer to Swadeshi as part (‘the soul’) of Swaraj (self-government / self-rule). Rabindranath Tagore was involved in the Swadeshi movement, lending support primarily through speeches, appeals, songs, and poems. But when violent confrontations with Muslims broke out in the course of the mainly Hindu-led resistance, Tagore – who embraced the idea of peaceful coexistence and exchanges between ethnic and religious groups as part of the age-old Indian values he cherished  – ­withdrew from direct political involvement in order to pursue his ideals through the educational institutions he had founded. One consequence of his identification with Swadeshi, while however rejecting the use of violence and distancing himself from militancy, was Tagore’s later founding of the centre for rural reconstruction known as Sriniketan, just a few kilometres away from his first school in Santiniketan, which can be viewed as part of the agenda for self-determination that guided the Swadeshi movement. K.N. Panikkar writes in this regard: The Swadeshi programme was [...] not confined to the more popular boycott of foreign goods in which people participated all over the country. More importantly, it undertook constructive work and institution building, which made the period of the Swadeshi movement one of the most creative epochs in modern Indian history. It promoted national education, stimulated national culture and encouraged national industries.14

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The treasure in your own home: imitation is not art

This comprehensive perspective in terms of unified educational, cultural, and economic renewal efforts in the spirit of national self-determination differs markedly from the romanticising notions outlined above that Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts movement projected on to Indian village life and its artisanal creativity. While Ruskin and his followers warned against capitalist destruction of the pre-industrial living and working conditions in the Indian countryside in order to preserve a cherished folk art heritage – not least as a source of inspiration for the Arts and Crafts revival in England – Indian artists and reformers, among whom a penchant for idealisation was likewise not unknown, nevertheless on the whole took a more sober view of the state of affairs. Tagore wrote in a letter to his son in 1910: ‘A deep despair now pervades rural life all over our country, so much so that high-sounding phrases like home rule, autonomy etc. appear to me almost ridiculous and I feel ashamed even to utter them.’15 Even though Tagore drew inspiration for his literary works from the simple life of this poor rural population, which had not yet submitted to cultural colonisation, he was equally concerned with fundamentally improving their living conditions. Although with Santiniketan he had been able to revive consciousness of the importance of old Indian values on the horizon of world culture, no progress could be made without restructuring the rural economy, which had been devastated by the economic policies of the colonial power, and undertaking corresponding measures in the social and healthcare sectors. In keeping with Tagore’s non-nationalistic spirit, he chose to tackle the reforms by way of the centre for rural reconstruction in Sriniketan, through new methods of farming and by organising agricultural co-operatives with the help of Western experts such as the English agriculturist Leonard Elmhirst. ‘The Sriniketan “center” was made up of a number of demonstration units where economists, agriculturalists, social workers, doctors, midwives, and specialists in various fields of rural industry and education worked on the problems brought to them by the villagers.’16 These educational endeavours, whether in the field of primary education in Santiniketan, in the context of agricultural reorganisation in Sriniketan, or at the Visva-Bharati World University founded by Tagore in 1921, formed a resolute counter-draght to the British model of education based on Macaulay’s notion of the human chameleon (‘mimic man’) that Homi Bhabha described in his analysis of the colonial policy of mimicry. The various reforms within the framework of Swadeshi rejected this policy in order to replace it with a new Indian subject who could draw on his or her own cultural resources and place them in a fruitful dialogue with Western and Asian stimuli. Artists such as Rabindranath Tagore were well aware that, as Bhabha puts it, ‘to be

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Anglicized is emphatically not to be English’.17 In a 1905 text titled ‘Imitation Is Not Art’, Tagore emphasised with reference to the visual arts that within the colonial power matrix the status of the original can never be attained by emulating a model: ‘The artists of this country are about to literally lose their own vision by engaging in [...] a strange imitation of foreign style.’18 Tagore speaks of the ‘poison seed of imitation’ that had in his opinion found its way into all spheres, not only art, ‘even into our minds, indeed even into our hearts’. He goes on to warn that ‘There is simply no greater danger to the country.’19 This colonisation of consciousness had to be countered by radical means – and not merely exchanged for a dull nationalism. Efforts had to be made to liberate the gaze, to open blinded eyes, first of all to the qualities of the arts of India itself, which had been disregarded under colonial influence. On this basis, it would then be possible to develop a genuine feeling for the art of other cultures. One of the central missions was the reform of art education, which was to be oriented towards other models than the mostly mediocre examples of Western painting that set the tone in the colonially influenced art schools: ‘We have been admitted to the art school, but we have no idea what the ideals of the fine arts of our own country are.’ In order to learn about those ideals, it would first be necessary to ‘forcibly destroy the blindness induced by Western paintings. Otherwise we will have no interest in seeing what our own country has to offer; blinded by disdain, we will perpetually overlook the treasure resting in the chest in our own home.’20 Anti-colonial art policies, spirituality, and transcultural modernism

Tagore put into practice his demands for a reorientation of art education for the purpose of national cultural self-discovery with the Bengal School founded in Calcutta. Two personalities initially set the tone here, the painter Abanindranath Tagore, a nephew of the famous writer who was undoubtedly influenced by his thinking, and the English art educator Ernest Binfield Havell. Havell had been appointed director of the Government School of Art in Calcutta in 1896. He undertook to introduce students to the artistic heritage of their own country. One of his first endeavours in this direction was the amassing of an extensive collection of Mughal paintings for the art school. This ‘treasure resting in the chest in our own home’, as Tagore put it, was then made available to the art students for study. Havell’s anti-academic attitude, which also led him to sell the Western paintings in the school, and his attempts to introduce Indian teaching methods were initially met with fierce resistance, even leading to a strike by his students.21 In Abanindranath Tagore, however, Havell found an Indian partner who as a young painter had himself been party to a Western academic education and then began to distance himself from it in order to seek an artistic form of expression in keeping

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with the intentions of the Swadeshi movement. The collaboration of Havell and Abanindranath at the Bengal School offers a significant illustration of the formation of a transcultural modernism. Abanindranath is a prime example of an artist working in the political context of burgeoning Indian nationalism, here with a cosmopolitan twist in light of the worldly and sophisticated Tagore family. Havell in turn represents a type of Western intellectual whose attitudes towards (Western) culture and civilisation were shaped by a critical view of modernisation coupled with an anti-materialism inspired by Indian spiritual traditions. Ernest Havell was thus part of the tradition of the anti-industrial Arts and Crafts attitude described above and its appreciation for Indian crafts. Havell’s thinking was also influenced by Theosophical teachings. His book The Basis for Artistic and Industrial Revival in India (1912), in which he draws on authors including Ruskin and Birdwood, was published by the Theosophist Office in Adyar, Madras. Although Theosophy was in fact a Western adaptation of Eastern teachings, it very soon had an impact on India, the country where many of its basic ideas had originated. The Theosophical Society, which Helena Blavatsky and others initially founded in New York, moved its headquarters to Adyar near Madras (now Chennai) in 1882. Without going into more detail here on the doctrines of the Theosophical movement, it should suffice to reference the idea of an all-encompassing higher unity of human beings that the Theosophists in India set against the racist structure of the colonial system.22 They tried to reinforce the (higher) value placed by Indian cultures, religions, and attitudes on the relationship between humanity and nature, and also to inculcate these values in Indians who had meanwhile distanced themselves from their cultural roots under the influence of colonial ideologies. Many Theosophists became involved in Hindu and Buddhist religious reform movements and participated in the development of religious schools and curricula. Some, like Annie Besant, were also politically active, whether within the Indian National Congress or in their own political movements. The Theosophical emphasis on spirituality was of paramount importance for Havell’s writings on Indian art and his activities in the field of artistic education. In Theosophy, art is regarded as a central form for expressing a spiritual understanding of the world, and the Indian tradition is deemed superior in this sense to the materialistic worldview in the West. In clear opposition to the Macaulay doctrine, which he called ‘foolish’, Havell assumed that the West had more to learn from India than vice versa. According to him, contemporary Indian art needed to draw on its own traditions, free itself from imitating Western art, and thus re-establish its identity. Indian art should correspond to Indian life and the Indian spirit: ‘For, the harmony which art, justly applied, brings into human life is truly an echo of that eternal harmony which sustains the universe.’23

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Abanindranath Tagore, Bharat Mata, 1905, watercolour on paper. Victoria Memorial, Kolkata. (Wikimedia Commons).

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Havell never saw art as an end in itself, and he disapproved when others demoted art to the status of a mere amusement for social elites. Convinced that the highest form of art is the art of life, he strove to firmly anchor art in national education in order to enable India to regain its intellectual and cultural freedom. ‘The artistic spirit [...] is essentially a sociable one, and helps to develop the civic consciousness.’24 When Havell spoke of the direction to be taken by the new art schools and universities, he pointed out that one could not simply propagate a return to the old Indian forms of art practice as a counter-model to adopting Western educational institutions. It was instead a matter of creating a whole new institution – ‘one that is comprehensive enough to embrace all aspects of national culture and tradition, while keeping the doors open, in the true spirit of ancient Hinduism, to all modern thought’.25 With its central ideas of promoting spirituality, the integration of art and life, and the combination of a recourse to national traditions with an openness to the new, Havell’s programme corresponded to many of the ideas of cosmopolitan nationalism put forward by Indian social and cultural reformers of his day.26 Abanindranath Tagore, whom Havell is said to have introduced to the masters of Mughal painting,27 had studied East Asian painting in his search for a new style beyond Anglo-Indian imitation and was engaged in lively correspondence with Japanese painters and critics. The Japanese were in turn searching in India for religious and cultural foundations for an ‘Asian’ response to the Westernisation tendencies in Japanese culture in the wake of Japan’s opening after the mid-nineteenth century.28 Abanindranath’s teaching at the Calcutta School of Art, under director Havell, thus conjoined Theosophically informed concepts of spirituality with pan-Asian alliances that were likewise aligned along the opposition of Western or materialist versus Eastern or spiritual. The return to the roots in the development of Indian modernism thus did not mean a strict demarcation from other ­cultures – despite the rejection of the mimesis entailed in the colonial understanding of art.29 Rather, at the heart of this revival of the Indian spirit was a conception of the ‘true’ essence of Indian culture based on the idea of unifying diversity. Based on the ideas of the unity of humankind in the divine, the harmony of humanity with the manifold phenomena of nature, and the connection of the soul with the universe, Rabindranath Tagore stresses that ‘the only path to attaining truth consists in the interpenetration of our being with all things’.30 Applying this philosophy to Indian culture of the past, Tagore sees India’s historical achievement as its striving and ability to bring together what is different: ‘God has drawn peoples of all kinds to India. [...] India has assimilated everything, accepted everything.’31 It is with respect to this very point of how differences are dealt with that Tagore distinguishes between civilisations:

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There are two ways to go about it: Either one protects one’s own society and civilisation by dismembering, killing, or expelling the other, or one tames the other by applying one’s own rules and grants it a place in the midst of one’s own well-arranged order. By following the first method, Europe has kept alive a conflict with the whole world; by following the second method, India has sought to gradually make everyone her own.32

Ernest Havell pursued similar reasoning when he identified the strength of Indian art and architecture of the past as consisting in the creative exchange between the Muslim Mughal court and the artistic principles of the Hindu artists and craftspeople employed by it. The reform of educational institutions was strongly tied to these ideas of bringing together diverse influences. Already in his first school in Santiniketan, Tagore had made sure to balance both the composition of the student body according to their social and regional origins and the cultural backgrounds of the teaching staff. This approach is manifested even more clearly in the transdisciplinary teaching practices and ‘multicultural’ courses offered by his Visva-Bharati World University beginning in 1921.33 The concept of bringing unity to diversity also entailed integrating mental with physical activity, play with learning, practical care for nature (for example in the school’s gardens) with experiencing it spiritually. Havell, like Tagore (and later Gandhi), also attached importance to collaboration between pupils and students in designing, cleaning, and maintaining the school buildings: ‘The work of making and keeping the environment of the College beautiful with trees and plants and flowers should not be left entirely to servants and gardeners, but should be a part of the College curriculum.’34 Learning became a social process here, with the goal of collectively shaping the environment in which it took place. Against the backdrop of Swadeshi and the rejection of colonial educational practices, these holistic pedagogical models can be understood as laboratories for a new, postcolonial society. Transcontinental modernism

In this transcultural Indian modernism, the original Indian values of Rabindranath Tagore are synthesised with the pan-Asian approaches of Abanindranath Tagore and the ideas of Ernest Havell, informed by Theosophy and the Arts and Crafts movement. This cultural climate then spawned contacts with the Bauhaus in Weimar, an instance of true transcontinental modernism. A large-scale exhibition of works by Bauhaus artists and their students was held in Calcutta in the winter of 1922, organised by the Indian Society of Oriental Art, which had been founded in 1907 by Abanindranath and his brother, the painter Gaganendranath Tagore.35 This was the debut

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exhibition outside Germany for the Bauhaus, which had been founded just a few years before, in 1919, and it was accompanied by a presentation of contemporary artists from the Bengal School, thus bringing two progressive art schools and their educational models into direct contact. What Rabindranath Tagore practised with his policy of international invitations and encounters at the World University in Santiniketan was continued here through the medium of the exhibition. The Bauhaus artists for their part had long been interested in Tagore and the Indian worldview. In May 1921, the writer’s sixtieth birthday was celebrated with lectures and readings at the German National Theatre in Weimar. It is not known whether Tagore was on hand to meet the Bauhaus artists in person. But there were undoubtedly similarities between the Bauhaus teaching methods and Tagore’s pedagogical approach. Important to the conception and intellectual orientation of the reformist school in Weimar were at least two frames of reference that could be linked to India: the grounding of the Bauhaus programme in ideas from the Arts and Crafts movement, which, as described above, had been influenced by Indian arts and crafts, and the Theosophical (or more generally spiritual and esoteric) worldviews that were represented above all by the teachers Johannes Itten and Wassily Kandinsky. As early as 1910, Kandinsky referred to the Theosophical teachings of Helena Blavatsky when formulating the theoretical principles for the development towards abstraction in On the Spiritual in Art. He recognised Theosophy as a forward-looking alternative to the materialistpositivist viewpoint espoused by Western modernism: ‘There is also an increasing number of men who place no trust in the methods of materialistic science when it deals with questions referring to such “non-matter” or matter inaccessible to our minds – just as artists are looking for assistance from the Primitives and their almost forgotten methods. These vital methods, however, are still alive among the Primitives, to whom we turn in disdain, from the high peak of our so-called knowledge.’36 Kandinsky saw in Helena Blavatsky ‘perhaps the first person who, after many years in India, tied a strong knot between the “savages” and our culture’ and regarded the Theosophical Society as the manifestation of one of the greatest spiritual movements of his day.37 The influence of Asian views of the world on Bauhaus teaching was probably strongest in the case of Johannes Itten.38 In the preliminary course he taught, Itten was concerned with ‘developing people in their totality as creative beings’.39 He took issue with the idea of teaching based on students merely imitating their teacher and instead fostered learning propelled by ‘inner enthusiasm’. After delving into Eastern philosophy, Theosophy, and anthroposophy, but especially Persian Mazdaism (Zoroastrianism), Itten came to the realisation that ‘we must counter-balance our externally oriented scientific research and technological speculation with inner-directed thought

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Gaganendranath Tagore, Meeting at the Staircase, c. 1923, watercolour on paper. National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. (Wikimedia Commons).

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and practice’.40 From his studies of the Mazdaznan teachings, which, like Theosophy, represent a Western adaptation of Eastern beliefs and wisdom, Itten designed a holistic model of instruction that included morning gymnastics and breathing exercises for relaxation and strict dietary guidelines that at least temporarily governed the vegetarian menu of the Bauhaus cafeteria. ‘The training of the body as an instrument of the mind is of great importance to the creative individual.’41 Itten himself executed artistic works based on songs by the Persian poet Hafiz; illustrated quotations from Ernst Otto Haenisch (Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha’nish), the founder of the esoteric Mazdaznan movement; and styled himself through his clothing, hairstyle, and demeanour as a quasi-religious teacher of a comprehensive form of art and life.42 It is difficult to reconstruct today the concrete considerations that led to inviting the Bauhaus to come to Calcutta. But it is clear that the holistic pedagogical approaches and the inspiration they drew from Asian sources, the high value placed on craftsmanship in art education at the Bauhaus, and the school’s concept of reintegrating the arts into life with the aim of shaping society would have appealed to Tagore at a time when he was in the process of building a new university in Santiniketan. The Austrian art historian Stella Kramrisch, who had only been teaching art history in Santiniketan for a few months, was put in charge of the exhibition project. On his travels through Europe, America, and Asia, Tagore had always been on the lookout for teaching staff for his alternative educational institutions. He met Kramrisch in 1920 on a visit to Oxford University, where she was holding lectures on Indian art. The young art historian had earned her doctorate in 1919 under Josef Strzygowski in Vienna with a thesis titled Untersuchungen zum Wesen der frühbuddhistischen Bildnerei Indiens (Studies on the nature of early Buddhist art in India). At Tagore’s invitation – after he had tried to entice Strzygowski, famous for his work on Asian art, to work in India as well – Kramrisch came to Santiniketan a few months after they had met in England to teach Indian and Western art history at the Kala Bhavan Art School.43 In the curriculum of Visva-Bharati University, lecture titles such as ‘IndoChinese Cultural Contacts’ and ‘Contacts between Ancient India and the West’ show that Tagore’s aim was not merely multicultural coexistence but a deeper understanding of the historical and contemporary exchange relations between the cultures.44 Stella Kramrisch was able to build on the research of her teacher Strzygowski, who was interested above all in the artistic and cultural connections between Asia and (Northern) Europe. Kramrisch can be considered a link between Indian art and Western modernism during the years in question. She had studied the Bhagavad Gita and engaged with Theosophy and anthroposophy in her youth, and later referred to publications by Ernest Havell in her dissertation, while her understanding of modern art was informed early on by Kandinsky and his treatise On the Spiritual in

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Art.45 While still in Vienna, Kramrisch had met Johannes Itten, who ran a private art school there, and both were active in Theosophical circles and in the artists’ group ‘Freie Bewegung’ (Free Movement). At Strzygowski’s invitation, Itten gave a lecture at Vienna’s Institute of Art History in 1917 on the subject of composition theory.46 Kramrisch would later contact Itten from India. In May 1922, very soon after her arrival there, she began to correspond with him in order to initiate an exhibition of Bauhaus art in Calcutta.47 She wrote on behalf of the Society of Oriental Art, outlining to the professor in Weimar the plans for an ‘international exhibition of living art’ for the autumn of the year on the Society’s premises. Kramrisch asked Itten for ‘earlier and also quite recent works of your own [...] and also some representing the entire Bauhaus oeuvre, especially works by Mr Klee’.48 Student works were also requested for the exhibition. In her first year in Santiniketan, and soon in Calcutta, Kramrisch befriended Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore, the leading figures of the Bengal School. In the years that followed, she not only pursued her research on Indian classical art but also participated in critical discussions on Indian modernism and its relationship to the West. As demonstrated above, early Indian modernism’s transcultural relations were initially in the direction of East Asia. With Kramrisch’s engagement, however, the connection with European modernism was now intensified. ‘Stella Kramrisch was the central figure who brought this strand of influence and engagement with European painting into the Santiniketan artistic milieu.’49 Furthermore, a new way of speaking and writing about the new Indian art was established – ‘a new vocabulary of formalist consciousness’ in the tradition of the Vienna School of art history, as Sanjukta Sunderason puts it.50 According to Barbara Stoler Miller, Kramrisch devoted herself to elaborating an ‘Indian art history as an intellectual discipline in which formal history, archeology, iconography, and religion all had their legitimate roles to play’.51 We can confirm that Kramrisch brought together in her work the various approaches to art -historical research in Vienna – the formalism of Alois Riegl, Max Dvořák’s interest in expression and the spiritual, and the Asian–European perspective of Strzygowski – and expanded them to include Indian influences.52 In 1922, she published a series of articles that can be read as a discursive background for the encounter between Indian modernism and Bauhaus art that would take place at the exhibition. The articles refer to both older and modern art and address fundamental differences between European and Indian traditions, the historical relations between the two sides, and the form taken by their exchanges in the present. At the end of her article ‘Indian Art and Europe’, which appeared in July 1922 in the journal Rupam published by the Indian Society of Oriental Art, Kramrisch describes – following a historical

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consideration of the largely separate development of Indian and European art – the new and still open but dynamic form of exchange between the two cultures. After criticising the colonial ‘transplantation [...] of European tradition into Indian art schools’ as being ‘artificial and useless’, she continues: One feature of the present age must not be overlooked. Not only Indian art, but first of all the Indian outlook, has a deep effect on modern Western spirituality, while at the same time the East accepts European civilization. Whatever the result may be, this exchange means movement. Movement is a sign of life, and life is productive; whether it is in the purposed sense or by contradiction and reaction makes no difference.53

Kramrisch cites mutual interchanges as a productive force for both sides and a counter-model to the unidirectional colonial dissemination of the European concept of art. As described above, Rabindranath Tagore had already made the problem of imitation of Western art the subject of a critical debate in 1905, without however going into more detail about the arts themselves. Kramrisch first addresses the question of the identity of modern Indian art against a transcultural horizon in her critical response to Benoy Kumar Sarkar’s essay ‘Aesthetics of Young India’, published earlier that same year in Rupam.54 In his essay, Sarkar strongly objects to some of the arguments put forward in the journal on the necessity of linking modern Indian art to Indian traditions. This merely reflects the position of Western Orientalists, he contends. And he emphatically rejects the supposed opposition between ‘Western materialism’ and ‘Indian spirituality’ asserted both in Europe and India, arguing that these are not essential characteristics but rather unhistorical constructs. Sarkar rejects in general (and in more detail in his 1922 book The Futurism of Young Asia) any ‘race-classification of culture and philosophy’ and calls for the opening up of modern India to world forces (vishva-shakti) and the European and Asian sciences and arts: ‘Kinship with world-culture is the only guarantee for India’s self-preservation and self-assertion.’55 In her response, Kramrisch pleads for self-affirmation on the part of Indian art of its own innate characteristics as prerequisite for a fruitful openness to the arts of other regions: ‘To know her own necessity of significant form should be the first endeavour of artistic young India. Then there will be no danger or merit in accepting or rejecting French space-conception, Russian colorism and Chinese line and the like, for imitation is impossible where personality is at work.’56 Only from this self-confident stance would it be possible to borrow from other concepts and design principles without simply assuming the role of passive recipient, epigone, or poor copy of the original. As Kramrisch makes clear elsewhere, the spiritual inspiration flowing from East to West allowed European artists to discover in Japanese, Chinese, and Indian art a confirmation of their own inner

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urge for e­ xpression. In contrast, modern India had up to this time had no opportunity for freedom of expression under the prevailing colonial art and education policies.57 Modern India found itself confronted with the ‘British academy export, which was always two generations behind what was happening in the West’.58 Under the conditions of unambiguous power relations between the colonising and colonised cultures, opening up artistically to the West could be effective for Indian artists only if they first became aware of the foundations and nature of their own national traditions. And if they did so without lapsing into ‘art nationalism’.59 Kramrisch addresses the question of how a productive connection between artistic languages of different origins can be established using the concrete example of the Indian response to Cubism. Starting with a description of some works by Gaganendranath Tagore (whose name is however not mentioned in the text), Kramrisch discusses in ‘An Indian Cubist’ the deliberate adoption of design elements from the European avant-garde and their transformation into a formal language befitting the spirit of the Indian artist. An Indian Cubism in and of itself would be a paradox according to Kramrisch, since European Cubism took static objects as starting point for a strictly geometric pictorial order, which would be diametrically opposed to ‘the ever moved, flowing life of an Indian work of art’.60 Using Tagore’s paintings as an example, she describes the possibility of adapting Cubist design principles to an art whose motifs are not concrete objects but rather the expression of a feeling, an imaginary scene, or a vision. This form of appropriation is therefore not a mere influence but an intentional stylistic borrowing for the purpose of making an artistic statement that is somewhat remote from the concerns of French Cubism. To do so, certain translation processes are necessary: ‘The transformation of cubism, as a principle of composition from a static order into an expressive motive, is the artist’s contribution to Indian art and cubism alike.’61 Apart from the fatal alternative of sealing oneself off from ‘foreign’ artistic idioms on the one hand and their mere imitation on the other, there is thus a third way: their selective and transformative transfer into a specific cultural context: ‘Cubism therefore has its mission in Indian art, if it becomes absorbed by it.’62 This attitude towards transcultural appropriation becomes even clearer in the article ‘European Influence on Modern Indian Art’, printed in the same issue of Rupam without attribution immediately after Kramrisch’s ‘An Indian Cubist’. The text, most probably written by the journal’s editor Ordhendra Coomar Gangoly,63 presents a critical examination of the category of ‘influence’, which it ultimately rejects as an expression of (colonial) power relations: The crux of the whole question lies in an intellectual and spiritual synthesis of Eastern and Western culture in which the question of ‘influence’ is an

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Gaganendranath Tagore, A Cubist Scene, c. 1923, watercolour on postcard. Collection P. & S. Mitter.

irrelevant and misleading topic. The word ‘influence’ inevitably suggests a domination or the supremacy of one over the other. In the field of art, to produce works under the domination of an outside influence is the worst form of aesthetic catastrophe.64

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Thinking in terms of influence – an expression of the diffusionist model of the spread of innovations from the Western centre to the peripheries of the colonised world65 – must be discarded in the context of a political and cultural movement of independence and self-determination. In its place, we must find other models to describe transcultural interchanges and how they are reflected in art. With the concept of (intellectual and spiritual) ‘synthesis’, the author has already ventured a proposal in the sentences quoted above. However, ‘synthesis’ becomes more than abstract concept only when its effects on artistic practice can be demonstrated concretely. The author therefore takes as his point of departure the dilemma in which Indian artists find themselves when they refuse to submit to the ‘domination of an outside influence’ and yet are still interested in a serious engagement with European art. The crucial point here is to transform the relationship to the Other from the passivity of a recipient, as the colonial matrix dictates, into an active form of selective appropriation based on one’s own way of seeing things: ‘The moment the outside influence is absorbed and made part of one’s own mental equipment – it ceases to be an influence – because it ceases to dominate on the mind or sterilise it – it has become an enriching factor, a fertilising medium.’66 Like Kramrisch in her text on the potential for an Indian Cubism, the author (O.C. Gangoly) quoted above likewise uses the verb ‘absorb’ to describe the active process of adopting or incorporating Western forms of expression. However, he adds more emphasis to it: ‘If India is to benefit by her contact with new ideas she must absorb, assimilate, “conquer” and make them her own.’67 The productive problematisation of ‘influence’ in these discussions on the prospects for Indian modernism represents a very early version of the postcolonial critique of Eurocentric art history and its conceptualisations, which Partha Mitter then continued in 2008 with his deconstruction of the ‘pathology of influence’.68 With the 14th Annual Exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art in December 1922, which presented Bauhaus artists alongside their colleagues from the Bengal School, the contemporary debate on the identity of Indian modernism and its relationship to European art took on a vivid physical dimension and the character of an event. The exhibition, featuring works by Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, and other artists and students of the Bauhaus, as well as works by Indian artists including Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, and Sunayani Devi, brought together for the first time modern art movements from Europe and India. As no photos or detailed descriptions exist, little is known about the form taken by the show. We do know though that Indian and Western art were presented not side by side but in separate sections. As the catalogue documents, not only Bauhaus artists but also many other examples of modern art from European countries and the USA were shown, some

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In the shade of tall mango trees

Stella Kramrisch, Abanindranath Tagore and other members of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, Calcutta 1922, photograph. Indian Society of Oriental Art.

of them in the original (including Wyndham Lewis) but many in reproduction (including Gino Severini and Henri Matisse). In the contemporary debates on Indianness and modernity, ‘the spiritual’ often appeared as a central concept. When Kramrisch explicitly refers to Kandinsky and his famous book title On the Spiritual in Art in her introduction to the catalogue of the Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta, urging the Indian public to view the exhibition attentively – ‘for then they may learn that European Art does not mean “naturalism”’69 – it becomes clear that this extraordinary exhibition project can also be seen as part of the art education programme that Havell and the Tagores and their associates had launched at the turn of the century in opposition to colonial art policy and art education. By appealing to the ‘essence’ of Indian culture as a way of bringing unity to diversity, and by forming a transcontinental alliance of the ‘spiritual’ and of ‘expression’, it was possible to relegate to its ideological corner the kind of ‘naturalism’ whose principle of imitating visible reality was seen as a structural parallel to the colonial demand to adapt to the ruling culture. Notes 1 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 86.

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2 Partha Mitter, Indian Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 172. 3 Ibid., p. 173. 4 Thomas Macaulay, ‘Minute on Indian Education’, www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/ pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html (accessed 12 August 2021). 5 Macaulay, ‘Minute on Indian Education’, quoted in Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 87. 6 John Ruskin, ‘The Nature of Gothic’, in Ruskin, Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 43. 7 Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament [1856] (New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2001), p. 241. 8 See also the chapter ‘The Victorian Interlude’, in Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 221–51. 9 George C.M. Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India [1880], quoted in Patrick Brantlinger, ‘A Postindustrial Prelude to Postcolonialism: John Ruskin, William Morris, and Gandhism’, Critical Inquiry, 2:3 (1996), 477. 10 Brantlinger, ‘Postindustrial Prelude’, p. 479. With the word ‘nowhere’ Brantlinger is referring to the utopian novel News from Nowhere by William Morris, published in 1890. 11 Uma Das Gupta, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 20–1. 12 Ibid., p. 22. 13 A major violent uprising against the British had already taken place in 1857, the so-called ‘Great Mutiny’, also known as the ‘Great Rebellion’ or ‘Sepoy Rebellion’. The Indian side (including Nehru) would later cast this event as ‘The first war of independence’. 14 K.N. Panikkar, ‘From Revolt to Agitation: Beginning of the National Movement’, in SAHMAT (ed.), Indian People in the Struggle for Freedom: Five Essays (New Delhi: Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust [SAHMAT], 1998), p. 39. 15 Rabindranath Tagore in a letter to his son Rathindranath, quoted in Das Gupta, Rabindranath Tagore, p. 35. 16 Das Gupta, Rabindranath Tagore, p. 37. 17 Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 87. 18 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Nachahmen ist nicht Kunst’ [1905], in Rabindranath Tagore, Das goldene Boot. Lyrik, Prosa, Dramen, ed. Martin Kämpchen (Düsseldorf and Zurich: Artemis und Winkler Verlag, 2005), p. 337. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., p. 335. 21 See the chapter ‘The British Raj: Westernization and Nationalism’, in Mitter, Indian Art, pp. 177–81. Mitter interprets the resistance of students as well as the nationalist press to Havell’s reform moves as a sign of how deeply British art policy had already moulded Indian taste.

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22 We should however not neglect to mention that Theosophical concepts later also inspired racist distinctions that then gave rise, among other things, to European forms of antisemitism. 23 Ernest Binfield Havell, The Basis for Artistic and Industrial Revival in India, Adyar, Madras: The Theosophist Office, 1912 (Kessinger Publishing’s Rare Reprints, 2008), p. 4. 24 Ibid., p. 16. 25 Ibid., p. 84. 26 See also the chapter ‘Towards the Twentieth Century: A Reassessment of Present Attitudes’, in Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, pp. 252–86. 27 Mitter, Indian Art, p. 178. 28 Cf. the chapter ‘Orientalism, Nationalism, and the Politics of Narration’, in Debashish Banerji, The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2010), pp. 24–53. A nuanced account of Indo-Japanese contacts as well as travel by artists and thinkers between Japan and India is offered by Inaga Shigemi in ‘The Interaction of Bengali and Japanese Artistic Milieus in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (1901–1945): Rabindranath Tagore, Arai Kanpō, and Nandalal Bose’, Japan Review, 21 (2009), 149–81. 29 For a critical perspective on Havell’s art policies as a project to ‘return India to its past’, see: Osman Jamal, ‘E.B. Havell and Rabindranath Tagore: Nationalism, Modernity and Art’, Third Text, 14:53 (2000), 19–30. Abridged reprint in Elaine O’Brien, Everlyn Nicodemus, Melissa Chiu et al. (eds), Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2013), pp. 150–63. 30 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Die Beziehung des Einzelnen zum Universum’, in Tagore, Das goldene Boot, p. 404. 31 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Indiens Vergangenheit als Gegenwart’, in Tagore, Das goldene Boot, p. 397. 32 Ibid. 33 ‘Visva-Bharati became a place where cultures would meet, exchange ideas, and practise peaceful coexistence. [...] Scholars, artists, and students of many nations had been coming together in Santiniketan since 1921 to explain their language and culture to Bengali students and professors in the shade of tall mango trees and to themselves learn from Indian life.’ Martin Kaempchen, ‘Nachwort’, in Tagore, Das goldene Boot, p. 557. 34 Havell, Artistic and Industrial Revival, p. 90. 35 The guest appearance by the Bauhaus in India was reciprocated in 1923 by an exhibition of modern Indian art in Berlin. The ‘Ausstellung Moderner Indischer Aquarelle’ at the Kronprinzenpalais of the Nationalgalerie was organised by Benoy Kumar Sarkar. 36 Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art (New York: Guggenheim Foundation, 1946), p. 25. On Kandinsky’s esoteric library, see Reinhard Zimmermann, ‘Der Bauhaus-Künstler Kandinsky – ein Esoteriker?’, in Gustav-Lübcke-Museum Hamm (ed.), Johannes Itten – Wassily Kandinsky – Paul Klee. Das Bauhaus und die Esoterik (Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2005), pp. 46–55.

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37 Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, p. 25. 38 Cf. the chapter on Itten in Rainer K. Wick, Bauhaus: Kunstschule der Moderne (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2000), pp. 92–130. 39 Johannes Itten, Gestaltungs- und Formenlehre: Mein Vorkurs am Bauhaus und später (Ravensburg: Otto Maier Verlag, 1975), p. 8. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., p. 9. 42 Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin (ed.), Das frühe Bauhaus und Johannes Itten (OstfildernRuit: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1994). 43 On the plans to bring Strzygowski to Santiniketan to establish an art history institute, see Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 101. 44 See the chapter ‘Visva-Bharati, a World University’, in Das Gupta, Rabindranath Tagore, pp. 66–72. 45 Barbara Stoler Miller, ‘Stella Kramrisch: A Biographical Essay’, in Barbara Stoler Miller (ed.), Stella Kramrisch, Exploring India’s Sacred Art: Selected Writings of Stella Kramrisch, (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 1994), pp. 3–33. See also the chapter ‘The Formalist Prelude’, in Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947 (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), pp. 15–27. 46 Boris Friedewald, ‘Das Bauhaus und Indien: Blick zurück in die Zukunft’, in Regina Bittner and Kathrin Rhomberg (eds), Das Bauhaus in Kalkutta: Eine Begegnung kosmopolitischer Avantgarden, exh. cat. Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2013), p. 125. 47 Kris K. Manjapra, ‘Stella Kramrisch and the Bauhaus in Calcutta’, in R. Siva Kumar (ed.), The Last Harvest: Paintings of Rabindranath Tagore (Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing; New Delhi: National Gallery of Modern Art, 2011), p. 36. 48 Letter from Stella Kramrisch to Johannes Itten, 5 May 1922. Thüringisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar, Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar Nr. 57, Bl. 1r. 49 Tapati Guha-Thakurta in conversation with Regina Bittner and Kathrin Rhomberg, in Regina Bittner and Kathrin Rhomberg (eds), Das Bauhaus in Kalkutta: Eine Begegnung kosmopolitischer Avantgarden, exh. cat. Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2013), p. 98. 50 Sanjukta Sunderason in conversation with Regina Bittner and Kathrin Rhomberg, in Das Bauhaus in Kalkutta, p. 97. ‘Kramrisch accepted [Ananda] Coomaraswamy’s idea that Indian art was “symbolic” reflecting the perception of the mind rather than that of the retina, which distinguishes the aims of Indian art from Western art’, writes Rajesh Singh, ‘The Writings of Stella Kramrisch with Reference to Indian Art History: The Issues of Object, Method and Language within the Grand Narrative’, East and West, 53:1/4 (December 2003), 134. 51 Stoler Miller, ‘Biographical Essay’, p. 12. 52 Kris Manjapra speaks in this connection of ‘Stella Kramrisch’s entangled inheritances’. Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement, p. 240. 53 Stella Kramrisch, ‘Indian Art and Europe’, Rupam, 11 (July 1922), 85–6.

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54 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, ‘The Aesthetics of Young India’, Rupam, 9 (January 1922), 8–24. 55 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Futurism of Young Asia (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1922), pp. 305–7. 56 Stella Kramrisch, ‘The Aesthetics of Young India: A Rejoinder’, Rupam, 10 (April 1922), 67. 57 Stella Kramrisch, ‘The Present Moment of Art, East and West’, The Visva-Bharati Quarterly, 3 (October 1923), 223. 58 Stella Kramrisch, ‘Indische Malerei der Gegenwart: Zur XV. Ausstellung der “India Society of Oriental Art”, Calcutta 1924’, Der Cicerone, 16 (1924), 954. 59 Ibid. 60 Stella Kramrisch, ‘An Indian Cubist’, Rupam, 11 (July 1922), 109. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 I am grateful to Partha Mitter for his expertise on the question of authorship of this text. 64 N.N., ‘European Influence on Modern Indian Art’, Rupam, 11 (July 1922), 109. 65 James M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographic Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1993). 66 N.N., ‘European Influence on Modern Indian Art’, p. 109. 67 Ibid. 68 Partha Mitter, ‘Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery’, The Art Bulletin, 90:4 (December 2008), 531–48. See also Chapter 1 above. 69 Stella Kramrisch, ‘Exhibition of Continental Paintings and Graphic Arts’, in Catalogue of the 14th Annual Exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, 1922, pp. 21–3, quoted in ‘The Fourteenth Annual Exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art’ (unattributed article), Rupam, 13–14 (January–June 1923), 18.

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Transcultural beginnings: decolonisation, transculturalism, and the overcoming of race

When we take a critical look at the history of modernity today and attempt to approach the phenomena of transcultural modernism from a ­post-Eurocentric perspective, we usually operate with a dynamic notion of culture that we have borrowed from postcolonial studies, critical migration and diaspora studies, critical anthropology, and parts of globalisation theory. It is clear that several of the terms used to examine classical modern conceptions of culture have become part of our language through works published since the early 1990s. Against the backdrop of economic globalisation and socio-political debates on migration and multiculturalism, criticism was voiced toward the end of the twentieth century of a nationally defined conception of culture and of the idea, propagated in particular by modern ethnology, of separate and ethnically distinct cultural spheres. While conservative authors such as Samuel Huntington responded to these developments with warnings of a ‘clash of civilisations’,1 thereby operating with the essentialist notion that each culture is a distinct entity unto itself, others opted for a more precise examination of the transitions, exchanges, constellations, and mutual exchange of cultural traits and practices, not only in the current era of globalisation but also throughout the history of modernity, colonialism, and decolonisation. Arjun Appadurai has analysed the process of cultural globalisation as a complex dynamics of diverse ‘flows’ and ‘scapes’, emphasising the global production of locality and bringing attention to transnational identity-scapes.2 Homi Bhabha has focused on the ‘in-between of culture’ and on the hybridisation processes that are part of cultural practices and the production of culture, which he presents as counter-movements to the sharp boundaries drawn between the cultures of the colonisers and the colonised, and has recognised a postcolonial ‘contramodernity’ within these processes.3 Mary Louise Pratt has historically examined ‘contact zones’ as sites of agency, power relations, and resistance along colonial borders.4 James Clifford has countered anthropology’s fixation on a static and place-bound conception of culture with a paradigm of ‘routes’, advocating for a particular emphasis to be placed on ‘traveling cultures’.5

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With the concept of the ‘Black Atlantic’, Paul Gilroy radically severed the link between culture and territory, examining the marks left by the slave trade, colonialism, and diasporic cultural movements on the Atlantic, in which he sees a ‘counterculture of modernity’.6 Recalling that these (and numerous other) widely read volumes were published in the 1990s, one could be inclined to situate the emergence of transcultural studies at a time when – to adhere for a moment to a common historical narrative – globalisation followed on the division of the world into two parts in the decades of the Cold War. However, tracing the history of transcultural thought further back, an increasing number of variations on writings of this kind can be observed to arise between the two world wars. The idea here is not to pinpoint the very first theory of transculturality but instead to locate the early development of transcultural studies within the historical-political contexts from which they emerged and to highlight their connections with decolonial movements, anti-racist thought, and new, post-ethnic notions of cultural identity, as well as with nation-building processes. A review of the most important publications from the American context shows that the era in which transcultural studies began appearing in Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, and the USA was the same era when the fascist systems in Europe emerged as the climax of the race ideologies that had been developing since the eighteenth century. The modern Western conception of culture is founded on the notion that a people, nation, and/or race are the bearers of culture and that it is necessary to demarcate boundaries between cultures and races in order to ensure ‘purity’ and to dominate or even annihilate purportedly inferior races. By contrast, each of the contributions to early transcultural thought discussed in the following is based on an earnest, if at times problematic, attempt to overcome race as a determining factor of culture. ‘At least in part, it was in response to allegations that “mongrel-ruled” Latin America was hopeless […], that intellectuals in Latin America began to speak of cosmic races and mixed, tropical civilisations.’7 Gilberto Freyre in Brazil, Fernando Ortiz in Cuba, José Vasconcelos in Mexico, and Melville J. Herskovits in the US have, each in their own way, endeavoured to decouple race from culture, to view the boundaries between European, Amerindian, and African cultures as permeable and, instead of distinguishing between cultures or races, to acknowledge and closely examine their hybrid forms, even downright propagating such hybrid forms as a means of undoing racist orders of domination. The set of problems from which these theoretical approaches arise, both on a political and a social level, can also be read as an after-effect of slavery and its abolition in the late nineteenth century.

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Gilberto Freyre and Brazilian hybridity

Of the entire American continent, the country with the largest African population and, in 1888, the last to abolish slavery was Brazil. The liberation of the Black population and the transition from empire to republic in 1889 not only brought about fundamental changes in the country’s social order and economic relations of production, it also raised the question of Brazilian national identity. One of the earliest political responses was the so-called ‘embranquecimento’, an immigration offensive with the goal of intensifying immigration from Europe to accelerate the modernisation of Brazil by shoring up the white labour force. This policy of ‘whitening’ Brazilian society carried on the tradition of racist colonial European thought with its association of progress with whiteness, while also being directly embedded in eugenics discourses that invoked the ‘problem’ of ‘degeneration’ through ‘miscegenation’.8 In the earlier decades of the twentieth century, and in opposition to this concept of white superiority, numerous scholars and artists developed Brazilian identity concepts based on the mixing of European, African, and Amerindian elements, which had been going on for hundreds of years.9 Alongside the psychologist Arthur Ramos’s research on Black cultures, which began in the 1920s and wherein he studied and observed, among other things, ‘the merging of African deities with Christian saints and the divinities in the Indian theology’10 within the ‘syncretic’ religious notions and practices of Candomblé, the work of the sociologist Gilberto Freyre had a particularly strong impact on Brazil’s post-ethnic identity model as well as on international transcultural research. Following in the footsteps of German-American anthropologist Franz Boas, who had supervised his doctorate in New York, Freyre continued to decouple cultural analysis from biologically determined racial dispositions by underscoring the importance of historical, economic, and social factors. Although the concept of race remains present in Freyre’s work, he speaks out against a determinist interpretation thereof and against the notion of racial superiority or inferiority. In his book Casa grande e senzala (The Masters and the Slaves), first published in 1933, Freyre describes the ‘formation of an agrarian, slave-holding and hybrid society’,11 which, since the very beginnings of Portuguese colonisation, had witnessed the ongoing intermingling of ethnic groups and mutual influence, in terms of both spiritual and material culture. Freyre underscores the ability of the Portuguese colonisers to overcome the climate conditions in the tropics and their willingness to forge sexual and family bonds with Indian and African women as conditions for the ‘success’ of colonisation in Brazil, and attributes the strength of Brazilian society and the beauty of its culture to its hybridity: ‘The contact of European culture with that of the aborigines was smoothed by the oil of African mediation.’12 Freyre describes the influence of the African slaves’ eating habits on the Europeans

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Transcultural beginnings

and how the stories told by Black nurses stimulated white children’s imaginations, and speaks of Christianity in the masters’ houses as influenced by the ‘superstitions’ of the slave hut. Freyre’s valorisation of the African components of Brazilian culture played a formative role in forging a new national self-image that recognised African and Indian blood in the veins of every Brazilian, leading to the repealing of discriminatory laws.13 Later, Freyre was rightly accused of sugar-coating the colonial violence that shaped relations during slavery. Upon this basis, he proclaimed a ‘social democracy’ (later: ‘ethnic democracy’) in Brazil, with equal rights for all population groups, which was exposed as a national myth that had served to obscure social inequality for many decades to come.14 Among Freyre’s harshest critics is the Afro-Brazilian writer, painter, and Pan-Africanist Abdias do Nascimento. He interprets the elevation of ethnic mixing to a national ideology, against the backdrop of the prevailing racist repression, as a strategy for obliterating the country’s Black population. And he labels the willingness of the Portuguese colonisers to associate with indigenous and African women, which many have cast in a positive light, as sexual exploitation.15 To Freyre, he attests ‘a special talent’ for the ‘coinage of euphemisms in the attempt to paint Brazilian racial harmony in the rosiest hues possible’.16 None the less, the positive value Freyre placed on the creativity generated within processes of ‘miscegenation’ (mestiçagem) and processes of cultural hybridity gained widespread appeal in the 1930s, for example among US researchers and Black Civil Rights activists who faced racial segregation (Jim Crow Laws) within their own social contexts.17 From today’s perspective, perhaps the most remarkable thought in Freyre’s interpretation of the conditions under which the Brazilian or ‘Luso-tropical’ society emerged is found in an argument he uses to explain the Portuguese colonisers’ adeptness in terms of adaptation and integration. Because the Portuguese were what he terms ‘bicontinental’ even before their American expansion, the category of race carried little significance for them. The geographic and climatic proximity to Africa and the long history of Moorish presence had made the Portuguese a ‘people existing indeterminately between Europe and Africa’,18 which, by integrating Islamic religious elements into its culture, for example, had developed the capacity to merge opposing elements. To whatever extent this may be true or false, it is relevant for the concepts of transculturality that later developed in that it assumes the existence of a culture (and population) that has always been mixed, thereby undermining the ideologies of cultural separation and racial purity that were predominant throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Although Freyre uses this concept to argue that Brazil’s colonial practices were markedly different from those of other colonisers, in particular the British but also the Spanish, thereby fostering a ‘Luso-Brazilian’ brand of nationalism, his ideas are none the less indicative of conceptions of

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culture and identity that later emerged. For instance, in his theory of creolisation, Édouard Glissant distinguishes between the ‘composite cultures’ of the Americas, particularly in the Caribbean, where the creolisation process is more recent, and ‘atavistic’ forms of culture where identity is derived from a singular common root, pointing out that the latter underwent creolisation long before.19 From this perspective, Freyre’s reflections on a composite African–European Portuguese culture even before colonial expansion are of theoretical relevance. However accurate or inaccurate Freyre’s account of the social and cultural relations among Brazil’s diverse population groups may have been, the international significance of his description of the productivity of mixing is summed up by Henry Louis Gates, Jr: ‘At the time Casa Grande e Senzala was published, Germans were rallying behind Hitler and his calls for Aryan purity. Freyre took the completely opposite view, arguing that its racial mix was essential to bringing Brazil to the height of its cultural and societal potential. Whitening had been a mistake.’20 José Vasconcelos and the concept of raza cosmica

Between the 1920s and 1940s, the main problem characteristic of the research in this field is the overcoming of race as an explanatory model for social and cultural differences. From today’s perspective, it is not easy to comprehend the difficulties that scholars, even those who were politically anti-racist, faced in devalorising the concept of race within social and cultural science.21 The protagonists discussed here differ from one another both in terms of their academic biographies and the degree of progress they made regarding their own perceptions of race. Freyre and Ortiz both made radical transitions over the course of their careers, from early studies concerned with the ‘decadence’, lack of physical vigour (Freyre), and criminality (Ortiz) of certain groups, to employing social and economic models for explaining modes of behaviour and cultural practices. As we have already seen, despite the radical revaluation of processes of mixing and the valorisation of culture, Freyre’s ideas about the sexual union between members of different ethnic groups still strongly rely on the concept of race. This is reminiscent of the Mexican philosopher and politician José Vasconcelos, who, in 1925, announced the end of racial difference through the mestizaje and proclaimed the emergence of a universal ‘synthetical’ race in his book La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race). What had already come to pass in Latin America would later spread throughout the world – the disappearance of all known races through their fusion into a singular ‘cosmic race’ that combines all the better attributes of the former races. A new aesthetic era of humanity would emerge from Latin America, under the sign of love, beauty, and creativity, bringing the era of rationality and racial or cultural purity to an end. ‘What is going to emerge out there is the

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definitive race, the synthetical race, the integral race, made up of the genius and the blood of all peoples and, for that reason, more capable of true brotherhood and of a truly universal vision.’22 Regardless of the fact that his project may appear merely utopian and esoteric, or in part rely on former notions of evolutionist race theory, the context in which Vasconcelos formulates his ideas is the Mexican revolution, which the author actively participated in. As a government minister between 1921 and 1924, he worked on democratising the educational system as a component in the process of restructuring Mexican society.23 One significant difference from Freyre’s identity model of mestiçagem and hybrid culture in Brazil is that Vasconcelos’s approach is explicitly transnational and aimed at a Latin American racial and cultural synthesis. Viewed within the context of the struggle against contemporary forms of US imperialism on the American continent, the leitmotif of Latin America serves throughout his entire essay as an antithesis to the Anglo-Saxon concept of segregation and hierarchical racial and cultural orders, examples of which he sees in white supremacy and the US segregation policy. Nancy Leys Stepan recognises in Vasconcelos’s project ‘a fascinating instance of the use of constructive miscegenation and the inversion of the valuations built into European and North American racism’.24 This project for reconceiving the values of Western racism in the mestizaje is however for her the expression of a ‘fantasy of national unity which did almost as much to mystify the very real cultural, social, class, and political divisions of Mexican society as the Europeans’ reverse theory of hybrid degeneration did mystify their own divisions’.25 In the 1980s, Vasconcelos’s ‘cosmic race’ did however become a reference point for Chicana feminism and the ‘border thinking’ propagated by Gloria Anzaldúa, who refers to the diametrically opposed theories of ‘miscegenation’ circulating in the period between the world wars: Opposite to the theory of the pure Aryan, and to the policy of racial purity that white America practices, his [Vasconcelos’s] theory is one of inclusivity. At the confluence of two or more genetic streams, with chromosomes constantly ‘crossing over’, this mixture of races, rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool. From this racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollination, an ‘alien’ consciousness is presently in the making – a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer. It is a consciousness of the Borderlands.26

Fernando Ortiz and transculturation

Cuban concepts of transculturality, of which Fernando Ortiz is the most prominent theorist, were developed within the political and economic

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context of a postcolonial Cuba facing the threat of neocolonialism. In 1933, Ortiz himself had been a consultant for the short-lived revolutionary government under Ramón Grau San Martín and had written Contrapunteo Cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar), published in 1940, during the Batista dictatorship, which had catered to the economic interests of the USA, which in turn gave the regime its support. The fact that Ortiz founded the ‘Cuban Alliance for a Free World’ shortly after his book was published, and acted as chairman of the Cuban Society Against Racism from 1936 to 1940, is a clear indication of the anti-imperialist and anti-racist direction of his analyses of Cuban history, economy, and society in Cuban Counterpoint and other works. In 1906, as a young scholar still largely influenced by biological concepts of race and evolutionary models of history, he published his first book, Hampa afro-cubana: los negros brujos (Afro-Cuban Underworld: The Black Sorcerers), an anthropological study of criminality and a treatise on Afro-Cuban ‘backwardness’ and ‘deviance’. He was influenced in his thinking by the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who wrote the foreword for the book.27 Ortiz would later take up a sociological or anthropological approach that emphasised the importance of cultural and economic rather than biological factors for progress. In his works to follow, however, he still focused on the backwardness of Cubans and how to overcome this predicament. Although Ortiz at first adopted a EuropeanWestern notion with regard to the kind of ‘civilisation’ Cuba must achieve, he soon developed a deep appreciation for regional popular cultures and began writing about Cuban folk music and its African influences, among other things.28 In Cuban Counterpoint, Ortiz traces the economic, social, and cultural development of Cuba from its colonial beginnings up to the time the book was written. He depicts the history of Cuba as an interplay between tobacco and sugar, which function as actors whose historical contexts constitute counterpoints that have contributed to shaping Cuban society and culture. Cuban Counterpoint is both an academic study and a literary work. It combines in singular fashion the analysis of a vast amount of written and visual sources with the narrative form of a fable, borrowing this mode from the poem ‘Pelea que ovo Don Carnal con Doña Quaresma’ by the medieval Spanish priest Juan Ruíz, which is framed as an allegorical dialogue between Carnival and Lent.29 The sugar economy had been bound up with capitalism from the outset (investments, machines, credits, banks ...), unlike tobacco, which as ‘the child of the savage Indian and the virgin earth is a free being’.30 The differences between tobacco and sugar consist in intensive versus extensive cultivation, quality versus quantity, and individuality versus uniformity. Sugar requires energy, machines, and the division of labour, and it creates time pressure, since it has to be processed quickly, as well as intermittent ‘jobs’ for many.

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Sugar consumes and destroys the land, because more energy (forests) and means of transport (railways) are needed to produce a greater volume. Tobacco requires knowledge instead of machines, and careful attention and selection of soil, light, and leaves; it offers regular jobs for few and prospers in smaller agricultural units. Tobacco and sugar also bring different cultures with them. The one is simple, rural, and folkloristic, the other an urban high culture influenced by Europe. Tobacco generated an independent middle class; sugar brought about the extremes between master and slave, the rich and the working class. ‘In the history of Cuba sugar represents Spanish absolutism; tobacco the native liberators. Tobacco was more strongly on the side of national independence. Sugar has always stood for foreign intervention.’31 Sugar not only brought slavery and is the reason that the slave trade and slavery persisted in Cuba for so long (until 1886), it also stands for the deprivation of freedom in general, for Cuba’s status as a colony and its economic backwardness even after colonialism – ‘keeping Cuba in the economic status of a colony’.32 Ortiz’s descriptions of the sugar industry are reminiscent of the current economies of transnational corporations: ‘As though the whole country were one huge mill, and Cuba merely the symbolic name of a great central controlled by a foreign stockholders’ corporation.’33 Ortiz refers to the development of class-consciousness among the tobacco workers in the nineteenth century, emphasising in particular the public readings that took place in the tobacco workrooms. While the noise in the sugar mills made communication impossible, and the old ‘work songs’ of the slaves could no longer be heard, the silence of the tobacco workrooms made them well suited for readings that were also used to promote local political propaganda. ‘They worked with tobacco leaves and book leaves.’34 Within this branch of industry, the first workers’ unions were founded and newspapers printed, and the tobacco workers provided the strongest support for the revolutionary struggle for Cuban independence. In the section ‘On the Social Phenomenon of “Transculturation” and Its Importance in Cuba’, Ortiz introduces the term transculturation.35 He himself deems it a ‘neologism’, and a ‘substitute for the term acculturation, whose use is now spreading’.36 Acculturation is used to describe the process of transition from one culture to another, and its manifold social repercussions. But transculturation is a more fitting term. I have chosen the word transculturation to express the highly varied phenomena that have come about in Cuba as a result of the extremely complex transmutations of culture that have taken place here, and without a knowledge of which it is impossible to understand the evolution of the Cuban folk, either in the economic or in the institutional, legal, ethical, religious, artistic, linguistic, psychological, sexual, or other aspects of its life.37

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The true history of Cuba is the history of its interconnected transculturations. The indigenous, Spanish, African (here, Ortiz mentions many and makes some distinctions based on cultural relativism), European, Jewish, and Asian groups who settled on the land bit by bit had been uprooted and had to adapt to a ‘new syncretism of cultures’, ‘faced with the problem of disadjustment and readjustment, of deculturation and acculturation – in a word, of transculturation’.38 Ortiz writes: ‘This vast blend of races and cultures overshadows in importance every other historical phenomenon.’39 I am of the opinion that the word transculturation better expresses the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is what the English word acculturation really implies, but the process also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as a deculturation. In addition it carries the idea of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called neoculturation.40

Similarly to Freyre in Brazil, Ortiz was later criticised for his ‘cubanidad’ construction of identity, with which all ethnic and cultural differences could be overcome. However, the professed equality through mixing had not eradicated social inequality. Nevertheless, the materialist and anti-imperialist perspective of Ortiz’s contrapuntal narrative of the history of Cuban transculturations is far removed from Freyre’s harmonising tendencies. ‘With respect to cultural contact, Ortiz’s concept of transculturation introduced a crucial shift away from mestizaje, the ideology of racial mixing and integration that had broadly characterised the discourse of Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century.’41 What is also remarkable about Ortiz’s account of transculturation processes is that he consistently avoids addressing the clash of two cultures in the colonial contact zone, emphasising instead the internal diversity of African, European, Asian, and American cultures, so that each new group of immigrants already faced a syncretism that influenced them and to which they also contributed. Bronislaw Malinowski, a leading anthropologist of his time, whose later work focused on the processes of ‘culture contact’, enthusiastically adopts the new term ‘transculturation’ and declares acculturation to be ‘ethnocentric’ in his introduction to the 1940 Spanish edition of Ortiz’s book. He seeks there to appropriate Ortiz’s decidedly historical approach as belonging to the functionalist school of thought he himself represented. Malinowski recognises the ‘moral connotation’, which problematically implies that the ‘primitive’ (must) adapt to Western culture, and highlights the heuristic advantages of transculturation, which describes a mutual exchange of cultural traits, a process through which new realities – ‘original and independent’ – emerged.42

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Melville Herskovits and early African American studies

The fact that acculturation need not always be understood as a one-sided process when applied to cultural transformation in situations of contact is demonstrated in the works of the US anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, one of the pioneers of African American studies. In the late 1920s, Herskovits began researching Black cultures in the Americas and their connections to Africa. He was in contact with his senior ‘colleagues’ Freyre, Ramos, and Ortiz in the 1930s and 1940s, adopting certain terms they had developed, including Ramos’s syncretism.43 While Freyre’s and Ortiz’s studies on cultural contact and mutual transformation are instrumental for the development of post-ethnic concepts of national identity, Herskovits’s research is embedded within the context of racial discrimination in the USA. Unlike Freyre’s and Ortiz’s early works, which still use a biologistic and evolutionist framework, Herskovits, coming from the anti-racist school of Franz Boas,44 detaches culture from the idea of racial determinism from the very beginning. This goes so far as to cause the young Herskovits to make even the slightest trace of cultural difference between African Americans and white Americans disappear in his earliest essays. In 1925, he writes about his observations of life in Harlem ‘of the African culture, not a trace’, consciously avoiding anything suggestive of a link between genetics and culture, since this had been the predominant idea behind race theory in the USA.45 Therefore, when Herskovits holds that African Americans showed ‘complete acculturation’ to (white) US culture, it is indeed to be understood in the sense of assimilation. However, when he then speaks of ‘acculturation’ in his later texts, the term has taken on greater complexity and comprises many of the meanings Ortiz subsumes under the term transculturation. As a member of a committee set up by the Social Science Research Council in 1935 to outline ‘acculturation studies’, Herskovits defines the term in a Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation as follows: ‘Acculturation comprehends those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original cultural patterns of either or both groups.’46 Upon further specification, the difference between the terms is addressed: ‘under this definition, acculturation is to be distinguished from culture-change, of which it is but one aspect, and assimilation, which is at times a phase of acculturation’.47 In his field studies in West Africa, Suriname, Brazil, and the Caribbean, Herskovits developed a refined instrument for studying cultural transfer, the adoption and appropriation of cultural elements in situations of contact under conditions of colonial rule and slavery within the African American context. Herskovits’s historical significance can be attributed to his book The Myth of the Negro Past, published in 1941 and highly controversial at the time

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of its publication, both within the field of anthropology as well as in a broader discourse on US race relations. Herskovits demonstrates the perpetuation of African elements in the linguistic, religious, social, and cultural practices of Blacks in the Americas. In terms of method, he focuses on ethnohistory and formulates a critique of structural functionalism, which conceives of the present as the only temporal axis. His extensive data and examples thus reject the popular myth supported by racist sciences whereby African American population groups had lost their culture through uprooting and enslavement, or willingly given it up in the face of the ‘superiority’ of their masters’ white culture. The scientific mainstream around Herskovits interpreted differences in Black lifestyles and forms of expression as mere ‘degenerations’ of white civilisation resulting from African Americans’ racially based ‘inability’. On the contrary, one of the central statements in Herskovits’s book on the contemporary debate concerning race versus culture reads: ‘Culture is learned, not inborn [...] the factor of race does not enter’.48 As the circumstances of cultural contact situations can vary greatly depending on political and social power relations, Herskovits traces their modifications by elaborating a finely differentiated set of concepts. ‘Retention’ and ‘reinterpretation’ present the two processes whose respective relationships to one another allow the dynamics of transformation in cultural contact to be described in more detail, whereby these relationships can take thoroughly different forms: from an insistence on old elements, to ‘borrowings’ from new ones, as well as their reinterpretation in particular aspects (language, belief, art), depending on the conditions under which they occur.49 Herskovits’s empirical studies debunk distorted images presented by the myth of the ‘Negro past’ as arguments for legitimising racial suppression in the USA. At the close of the first chapter, he defines the political meaning of a scientific examination of the history and presence of African cultural elements in that country: To give the Negro an appreciation of his past is to endow him with the confidence in his own position in this country and in the world which he must have, and which he can best attain when he has available a foundation of scientific fact concerning the ancestral cultures of Africa and the survivals of Africanisms in the New World.50

African American intellectuals and activists largely welcomed Herskovits’s research, as it often provided them with the empirical data for their own interpretation of African American culture.51 Manuel Querino and Afro-Brazilian culture

If one emphasises the positive reception of these sociological and anthropological studies on the transculturality of African American religions, songs, dances,

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Transcultural beginnings

stories, language use, etc., it is necessary at this point to address a structural problem within the history of research on early transcultural thought. For similar studies were conducted simultaneously by Black researchers, whose work did not receive the same recognition. One of the reasons these researchers have largely been forgotten is certainly the fact that, in comparison to white scholars, they faced more difficult conditions in terms of research and publishing. Manuel Querino (1851–1923), who is considered the first Black historian in Brazil, and who was also active as an artist, teacher, and politician, had to fight for the abolition of slavery before he could conduct his research (unaffiliated with a university) on Afro-Brazilian religious and popular cultural practices, including Bahian customs and cookery.52 ‘Querino was the first known black intellectual who wrote several books on the subject of the centrality of people of African descent in Brazil,’ writes Tshombe Miles.53 Today, when authors establish that several of Gilberto Freyre’s arguments for his model of Brazilian identity were taken from Querino, they also point out that the same Black researcher was also an activist in the autonomous organisation of workers and in the Afro-Brazilian struggle for equal rights, thus by no means in a situation where Freyre’s social/ ethnic democracy had actually been put into practice.54 Although he holds views similar to Freyre’s on the productivity of cultural mixing, Querino’s research on Afro-Brazilian culture is embedded in a history of resistance to objectification and e­ xploitation – from enslavement in Africa to plantation violence and the Quilombo dos Palmares community, to the exploitation of Black workers in Bahia.55 And while Freyre’s appreciation of the African contribution to the ‘beauty’ of Brazilian culture is often vague in its argumentation, Querino’s studies go into detail with regard to material culture and spiritual expressions. This ranges from the food lore of Afro-Brazilian dishes and their functions in the festive calendar of the people of Bahia to questions of the redesign of public space in Salvador after the slavery era, to the social conditions for artists’ work.56 In his book O colono preto como fator da civilização brasileira (The Black Settler as a Factor of Brazilian Civilisation), Querino intervenes in established narratives of Brazilian historiography by describing Africans as the group that, on the basis of the knowledge and skills they brought with them, did the actual work of colonising the country, making a significant contribution to its civilisation in the process – as opposed to the Portuguese, who were driven by greed and violence and were not suited for the work.57 In A raça Africana e os seus costumes na Bahia (The African Race and Its Customs in Bahia) (1916), an anthology of his ethnographic studies of the diverse African groups in Bahia, their occupations, social and religious practices (including Candomblé), and their varied technical and artistic skills, Querino used (and published) photographic sources and employed oral history.58 Querino thus took an explicit counter-stance in the early twentieth c­ entury to the racial thinking of the scientific mainstream and the ideology of the embranquecimento. Like Freyre after him, he emphasised

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the cultural productivity of the mestiçagem. Unlike his white colleague, however, Querino shows no tendency to derive from this concept a construct of national identity that would obscure the social inequalities between population groups and classes. As Christianne Silva Vasconcellos and Bruno Pinheiro note, Querino is among those intellectuals who, despite their pioneering work, were long ignored by the Brazilian academy because their methods did not conform to the formal rules for university research.59 This is just one example from the immediate context of the contributions discussed in this chapter that addresses the beginnings of the analysis and theory of transculturality in the Americas. Each of these contributions has in its own right and with a more or less lasting effect played a part in forging a new understanding of culture and in overcoming ‘race’ as a scientific paradigm and category of political order. Though some of the arguments may seem problematic from a historical perspective, the approaches cited here were none the less significant contributions to an early transnational discourse on decolonising the notion of culture. Following this overview of some of the most influential contributions to thinking on transculturality in the first decades of the twentieth century, the next chapter will focus on a single study that takes a closer look at the relationship addressed with Freyre and Querino between established theories of hybrid culture and related but marginalised Afro-diasporic perspectives. On the basis of the work of Melville J. Herskovits and Zora Neale Hurston, I examine a paradigmatic case of the interplay between progressive white academic research and critical Black research in the field of tension between art and science. Notes 1 Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 2 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 1996). 3 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 4 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 5 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 6 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). 7 Alejandro de la Fuente, ‘Afro-Latin American Art’, in Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews (eds), Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2018), p. 379. 8 Nancy Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

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9 Of key importance for Brazilian art and literature was the Movimento antro­ pofágico led by Oswald de Andrade, Mário de Andrade, and Tarsila do Amaral. 10 Arthur Ramos, The Negro in Brazil [1939], trans. Richard Pattee (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, Inc., 1951), p. 94. 11 Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization [1933], trans. Samuel Putnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 3. 12 Ibid., p. 78. 13 For a detailed account of Freyre’s contribution, see Peter Burke and Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke, Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008). 14 Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal, ‘Mestizaje in Latin America’, in Robin Cohen and Paola Toninato (eds), The Creolization Reader: Studies in Mixed Identities and Cultures (London and New York: Routledge 2010), pp. 257–65. For a critique of the sexist and antisemitic facets of Freyre’s writings, cf. Jeffrey D. Needell, ‘Identity, Race, Gender and Modernity in the Origins of Gilberto Freyre’s Oeuvre’, The American Historical Review, 100:1 (February 1995), 51–77. 15 Abdias do Nascimento, ‘Genocide: The Social Lynching of Africans and Their Descendants in Brazil’, in Nascimento, Brazil: Mixture or Massacre? Essays in the Genocide of a Black People (Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1989), pp. 57–93. 16 Ibid., p. 71. 17 Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Black in Latin America (New York and London: New York University Press, 2011), pp. 12–58. For an examination of the exchanges between Brazilian thinkers such as Freyre and Ramos and African American intellectuals, see Paulina L. Alberto and Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, ‘Racial Democracy and Racial Inclusion’, in De la Fuente, Afro-Latin American Studies, pp. 264–316. 18 Freyre, Masters and Slaves, p. 4. 19 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 20 Gates, Black in Latin America, p. 44. 21 In his book El engaño de las razas (1946), Fernando Ortiz painted an apt picture of the ghostly survival of the notion of ‘race’ and of racism: ‘Certainly one can speak of the “racial spectre” in more than one sense: Races are unreal like spectres, but they inspire very strong emotions. That is why racism is so fearsome’. Quoted in Anke Birkenmaier, The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature between the Wars (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), https://reader.bookshout.com/reader/9780813938806/preview (accessed 12 August 2021). 22 José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race: La raza cósmica [1925], trans. Didier T. Jaén (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 20. 23 As Secretary of Public Education, Vasconcelos was responsible for the major commissions given to Mexican muralists. His philosophy of racial mixing corresponds with David Alfaro Siqueiros’s transmedia theory of art, which I discuss in Chapter 7 below. 24 Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics, p. 147.

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25 Ibid. p. 151. 26 Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘La conciencia de la mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness’, in Anzaldúa, Borderlands – La Frontera: The New Mestiza [1987] (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007), p. 99. 27 Fernando Ortiz, Hampa afro-cubana: los negros brujos (Apuntes para un estudio de etnología criminal) (Madrid: Librería de Fernando Fé, 1906). 28 Fernando Coronil, ‘Introduction to the Duke University Press Edition: Transculturation and the Politics of Theory: Countering the Center, Cuban Counterpoint’, in Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar [1947] (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. xviii. 29 Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, pp. 3–4. 30 Ibid., p. 56. 31 Ibid., p. 71. 32 Ibid., p. 80. 33 Ibid., p. 64. 34 Ibid., p. 92. 35 Ortiz traces the transculturation of tobacco (consumption) from a social and ritualistic phenomenon among the indigenous population to its demonisation by the colonisers and the first appropriation by the slaves from Africa, and onward to its medical and economic uses in Europe, which were oriented on status, distinction, and profit. 36 Ibid., p. 97. 37 Ibid., p. 98. 38 Ibid., p. 98. 39 Ibid., p. 99. 40 Ibid., pp. 102–3. 41 Birkenmaier, The Specter of Races, p. 10. 42 Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Introduction’, in Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, pp. lvii–lxiv. 43 Kevin A. Yelvington, ‘The Invention of Africa in Latin America and the Caribbean: Political Discourse and Anthropological Praxis, 1920–1940’, in Yelvington (ed.), Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2006), pp. 35–82. 44 In 1910, Boas had already identified the US ‘race problem’ as mainly being a problem of racial prejudice. Franz Boas, ‘The Real Race Problem’, The Crisis, 1:2 (December 1910), 22–5. 45 Melville J. Herskovits, ‘The Negro’s Americanism’, in Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Touchstone, 1997), p. 359. For a detailed account of Herskovits’s intellectual biography, see Jerry Gershenhorn, Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press), 2004. 46 Robert Redfield, Ralph Linton, and Melville J. Herskovits, ‘A Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation’, Man: A Monthly Record of Anthropological Science, 35 (October 1935), 145–6. 47 Ibid., 146.

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48 Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), p. xxi. 49 Ibid., chapter IV. 50 Ibid., p. 32. 51 The Myth of the Negro Past appeared as part of a study on race relations in the USA, commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation and headed by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal. The study bore the title An American Dilemma and dealt with the contradiction between the ‘American Creed’ (freedom and equal opportunity) and the reality of racial discrimination. Gunnar Myrdal, The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1944). The book had a major influence on desegregation policies in the 1950s and 1960s, including the decision by the US Supreme Court in the case Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Cf. Charles Stewart, ‘Syncretism and Its Synonyms: Reflections on Cultural Mixture’, in Cohen and Toninato (eds), The Creolization Reader, pp. 289–305. A brilliant critique of Myrdal’s assimilationist stance is provided by the writer Ralph Ellison in ‘An American Dilemma: A Review’, in Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), pp. 303–17. 52 E. Bradford Burns, ‘Manuel Querino’s Interpretation of the African Contribution to Brazil’, The Journal of Negro History, 59:1 (January 1974), 78–86. 53 Tshombe Miles, Race and Afro-Brazilian Agency in Brazil (London: Routledge, 2019), p. 40. Miles lists the following books by Querino: As artes na Bahia – escorço de uma contribuição histórica (The Arts in Bahia: A Historical Contribution, 1909), Artistas Baianos (Bahian Artists, 1909), Bailes pastoris (Pastoral Dances, 1914), A Bahia de outrora vultos e fatos populares (Popular Figures and Facts of Bahia, 1916), A raça Africana e os seus costumes na Bahia (The African Race and Its Customs in Bahia, 1916), O colono preto como fator de civilização Brasileira (The Black Settler as a Factor of Brazilian Civilisation, 1918), and A arte culinária na Bahia (The Art of Bahian Culinary, 1928). 54 Gates, Black in Latin America, pp. 40–58. See also Maria das Graças de Andrade Leal, ‘Education and Work; Race and Class in the Thinking of a Black Intellectual: Manuel Querino – Bahia (1870–1920)’, Brazilian Journal of History of Education, 20 (2020), www.scielo.br/j/rbhe/a/vnJWvgyckCH3XpDVP65Dcnn/?lang=en (accessed 12 August 2021). 55 Niyi Afolabi, ‘Reversing Dislocations: African Contributions to Brazil in the Work of Manuel Querino, 1890–1920’, History Compass, 11:4 (2013), 259–67. 56 Bruno Pinheiro, ‘Memórias de uma desilusão: Manuel Querino e as reformas urbanas de Salvador (1912–1916)’, Clio: Revista de Pesquisa Histórica, 35:2 (2017), 75–88. 57 Manuel Querino, O Colono preto como fator da civilização brasileira [1918] (Jundiaí, SP: Cadernos de Mundo Inteiro, 2018). See also Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, ‘Manoel Querino e a formação do “pensamento negro” no Brasil, entre 1890 e 1920’, paper presented at the 28th Encontro Nacional da ANPOCS, 28 October 2004 (Caxambu, MG, 2004). https://de.scribd.com/document/138237337/ Manuel-Querino-e-a-formacao-do-pensamento-negro-no-Brasil-de-A-S-AGuimaraes (accessed 12 August 2021).

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58 Christianne Silva Vasconcellos, ‘O uso de fotografias de africanos no estudo etnográfico de Manuel Querino’, Sankofa. Revista de História da África e de Estudos da Diáspora Africana, 4 (December 2009), 88–111, www.revistas.usp.br/ sankofa/article/view/88747 (accessed 12 August 2021). 59 Ibid., p. 109, and Pinheiro, ‘Memórias de uma desilusão’, p. 86.

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Trees of knowledge: anthropology, art, and politics. Melville J. Herskovits and Zora Neale Hurston – Harlem circa 1930

Academic work on overcoming ‘race’ as a heuristic category was closely linked in the first half of the twentieth century with the decolonisation of the concept of culture. As argued in the previous chapter, the developmental strands of theories of transculturality were interwoven with political movements against colonial and neocolonial dispositifs of power and against the hierarchical ordering of societies based on the ‘race’ principle. The authors of the anthropological and sociological treatises that during this period examined cultural contact situations under (post)colonial conditions, coining new terms such as syncretism or transculturation to draft new concepts of culture and identity, were often themselves situated in transdisciplinary production contexts. The push and pull between ‘pure’ scholarship and social criticism was joined here by – not always conflict-free – connections between academic and artistic research practices on the same or related problems. The critical work undertaken on an essentialist conception of cultural difference that had become questionable and the resulting theoretical support for processes of cultural translation, exchange, and mutual transformation could not fail to have an impact on conventional demarcations between different genres of knowledge production. While in the chapter on Winold Reiss I discuss how in the formative phase of African American modernism in the interwar period the German painter played a role in configuring transcultural aesthetics in the context of the New Negro movement,1 I would like to take a look here at Melville Herskovits, an author who is situated in the context of ‘transcultural beginnings’ and who operated in the same historical, regional, and political realm as Reiss in terms of the fraught relations between scholarship, political engagement, and artistic inquiry. The American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, the son of Jewish immigrants from what is now Slovakia, was one of the early proponents of transcultural thinking and made a significant contribution to the study of the cultures of the area that would later be called the Black Atlantic.2 The German painter Winold Reiss, who immigrated to New York in 1913, collaborated with African American intellectuals and artists to leave a substantial mark on the

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aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance through the extraordinary transformation of his exotic interest in other cultures. It may seem ill-advised to take two white protagonists, Herskovits and Reiss, as the starting point for an examination set within the realm of Black emancipation politics. But there are good reasons for this choice. Our relationship today to the arts and sciences of the colonial past often manifests itself in a quandary: On the one hand, there is a tendency to excuse historical transgressions by referring to an overpowering zeitgeist that shaped the protagonists of a particular era; on the other hand, we must avoid historical descriptions and representations that are based on the hindsight and critical awareness gained from the vantage point of postcolonialism and representational critique. Pierre Bourdieu has spoken in this context of the ‘unthinkable of an epoch’: Those who nowadays set themselves up as judges and distribute praise and blame among sociologists and ethnologists of the colonial past would be better occupied in trying to understand what it was that prevented the most lucid and the best intentioned of those they condemn from understanding things which are now self-evident for even the least lucid and sometimes the least well-intentioned observers.3

And yet the unthinkable of an epoch is never quite fixed. In order to adequately assess the actions and scholarly or artistic achievements of people in the past, it is thus indispensable to gauge what kind of scope of thought and action was open or closed to certain subjects in certain situations. We must therefore turn to the conditions and motivations that enabled some to think or do what others could not. Herskovits and Reiss lend themselves to such a line of inquiry because one comes from the field of anthropology entangled in the colonial politics of racism and the other from the realm of colonial primitivist or exoticist painting, and yet they both managed to transcend their disciplinary imprinting and progress towards an emancipatory transformation of conventions. The African American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston will then intervene in this historical interrogation of white protagonists in their relations to Black politics, a figure whose practice in the immediate environment of those above paradigmatically shifted the boundaries of scholarship and art. Hurston’s manoeuvring between the fields not only reveals the persistence of those boundaries but also points to the unequal economic and institutional (or publishing) opportunities between the wars for Black and white research on transcultural phenomena. Anthropological research between objectivity and political commitment

In several respects, the formation of African American modernism in the interwar period exemplifies the complex interweaving of alliances and

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collaborations between those who were working towards overcoming a society divided by the concept of ‘race’ while trying to transcend boundaries that came to the fore or were newly drawn within the groups involved in the course of these policies. Whereas the political empowerment strategies of African Americans in the USA starting in the early twentieth century were dominated by the antagonisms between ‘integrationists’ (W.E.B. Du Bois and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), ‘accommodationists’ (Booker T. Washington), and ‘separatists’ (Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association), the divergent political positions on issues such as civil rights and education were also accompanied by scholarly differences of opinion on the ‘racial’ and cultural identity of African Americans, as well as varying ideas about the role of art in the context of Black self-representation in American society. Even among protagonists who were closely allied politically, there were still strong disparities with respect to the way methods were applied or their own positioning between the ideal of scientific objectivity versus committed or ‘partisan’ research on race issues. As stated in Chapter 3 above, the historical significance of Melville J. Herskovits is owing primarily to his book The Myth of the Negro Past, which, based on extensive data on the survival of African elements in religious, social, and cultural practices of Blacks in America, rejected the widespread view that African culture had been lost in the process of transatlantic enslavement. When the book came out in 1941, it was fiercely debated both in expert circles and in the public discourse on US race relations. According to Herskovits, cultural dynamics could be understood only by applying an ethnohistorical approach to explore the forms of cultural exchange and mutual influence over longer periods of time. Building, among other things, on the concept of syncretism as coined by the Brazilian anthropologist Arthur Ramos in his research on the fusion of African deities and Catholic saints in the Black cultures of Brazil,4 Herskovits developed a differentiated set of concepts for studying a spectrum of acculturation processes. He therefore also examined African American culture from the perspective of its emergence and development as a ‘reaction to slave status’. Referring to the numerous revolts and diverse forms of resistance in the everyday life of the enslaved, he rejected the widespread impression of passivity or submissiveness on the part of plantation workers.5 On an empirical basis, the anthropologist finally came to the unequivocal conclusion that ‘race’ plays no role in the analysis of culture: ‘Culture is learned, not inborn, [...] the factor of race does not enter,’ he wrote in the introduction to Myth of the Negro Past.6 Herskovits was convinced that the dissemination of knowledge about African cultures and their partial persistence in America would both give African Americans a new sense of self-esteem and influence general opinion about them, helping to reduce tensions between the ‘races’.7 His study was received almost euphorically by the

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majority of Black intellectuals of his day. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in a review of the book: ‘Dr. Herskovits’ Myth of the Negro Past is epoch-making in the sense that no one hereafter writing on the cultural accomplishments of the American Negro can afford to be ignorant of its content and conclusions.’8 In the documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, the African American historian Vincent Brown, one of the film’s producers, talks about how it is an irony of history that we owe our modern understanding of the African diaspora in America to an ‘outsider’ like the Jewish immigrant son Herskovits, who thus helped shape the self-image of generations of African Americans.9 Given the genesis of Herskovits’s thought in the political and cultural context of the New Negro movement, what Brown notes may still be surprising, and yet the emergence of African American cultural studies appears to have been a contested but collective project involving scholars, activists, and artists. Herskovits’s achievements in the recognition and study of African American culture would probably have been unthinkable without the influence of the new vitality of African American high and popular art in the context of Black empowerment. Likewise, his theory of transculturality owes much to the transdisciplinary milieu of the New Negro movement. When Alain Locke published his anthology The New Negro in 1925, a collection of poetic, narrative, scholarly, and journalistic texts on the state of modern Black culture in the USA, he included a contribution by the young Melville Herskovits in the section ‘The Negro and the American Tradition’. The point of view reflected in this text, titled ‘The Negro’s Americanism’, is practically contrary to the position Herskovits would take fifteen years later in Myth of the Negro Past. On the question of whether there is a distinct Black culture in America, Herskovits makes some – rather impressionistic – ­observations on Harlem, ranging from what people wear to social institutions and political organisations, to sexual relations, and comes to the conclusion that African Americans display a ‘complete acculturation’:10 ‘What I was seeing was a community just like any other American community. The same pattern, only a different shade!’11 This ascertainment of a radical adaptation to the dominant culture is easier to understand if one considers the question Herskovits asks at the beginning of his article: ‘Should I not find there [in Harlem], if anywhere, the anomalous cultural position of the Negro, of which I had heard so much?’12 If an anomalous quality is the (discriminatory) alternative, then highlighting total acculturation appears to be an act of recognition. Any ‘racial’ or social group – Herskovits cites Jews as an example – that lived in the country long enough would eventually be acculturated and literally Americanised. Herskovits does mention the social ostracism to which Blacks and Jews are subjected to varying degrees, citing race pride and the protests against such exclusion, but he describes such articulations of identity by way of resistance as seemingly futile.13

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Melville J. Herskovits with artefacts from Surinam, c. 1935, photograph. Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, IL. Courtesy of Northwestern University Archives.

In contrast to the distinction between biological ‘race’ and Black culture in America he so clearly formulated later in Myth of the Negro Past, Herskovits avoids in his essay for The New Negro attributing any special traits to a person’s ethnicity, apparently fearing this would be interpreted as a belief in genetic disposition. Even though Franz Boas, the founder of American cultural anthropology and Herskovits’s teacher, had campaigned for the scientific separation of ‘race’ from culture since the closing years of the nineteenth century, scientific racism continued to be a strong factor in the 1920s. Only in a single passage in Herskovits’s article does he acknowledge cultural difference,

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although taking pains at the same time to keep this difference free of any ethnic overtones, emphasising instead a sociological differentiation between urban and rural ways of life: ‘What there is to-day in Harlem distinct from the white culture which surrounds it, is, as far as I am able to see, merely a remnant from the peasant days in the South. Of the African culture, not a trace.’14 The reference to the Great Migration from the southern states to the centres of the North during and after the First World War, and the total denial of African vestiges, correspond with Herskovits’s denial of Jewish culture during an era of pronounced American antisemitism. In a text titled ‘When Is a Jew a Jew?’, Herskovits, who had attended Jewish schools and synagogues as a child and had even begun training as a rabbi, writes: ‘The Jew has ever taken on the color of the culture in which he lives, and far from identifying himself with his own typical culture (whatever there may be of it) he usually tries to become as completely acculturated as is possible to the culture in which he finds himself.’15 Two years after the article on American Blacks (‘complete acculturation’), Herskovits thus delivers exactly the same description of Jews in America (‘completely acculturated’).16 One can sense in these early texts the pressures under which even progressive scholars struggled with the concept of ‘race’ in a politically fraught climate (race relations, nationalism, restrictive immigration policies), a concept that had not yet been released from its biological determinism and whose political consequences they criticised.17 What it was that ultimately caused Herskovits to radically reverse his position on the retention of African cultural elements is not easy to determine, and he is likely to have had more than one reason for doing so. Paradoxically, Herskovits first had to conduct a study operating with methods of scientific racism in order to arrive at new questions. Between 1924 and 1928, the years in which the assimilationist articles cited here were written, he was at work on an anthropometric study of the Black population with the intent of scientifically subverting biological determinism in anthropology. The study was published in 1928 under the title The American Negro: A Study in Racial Crossing. Herskovits combined data he obtained from anatomical measurements, which today seem absurd and were also criticised by some of his contemporaries,18 with genealogical surveys of the family histories of the study subjects, revealing that the majority of American Blacks had a ‘mixed racial background’, while as a whole they nevertheless showed little variation in physiognomic features. This led to a fundamental questioning of the anthropological concept of ‘race’: ‘If race was defined as a group with similar physical traits and if a group that was proven to be of mixed racial origin demonstrated physical homogeneity, then racial categories (defined in biological terms) were rendered meaningless.’19 In order to be able to carry out this study at all on a large cohort of Black Americans, who had good reason to object to such methods, Herskovits

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had to rely on contacts with opinion leaders who could build trust among the study subjects (many of them students). His teacher Franz Boas had put Herskovits in touch with important Black journals such as Opportunity and The Crisis and also with prominent intellectuals including W.E.B. Du Bois and the philosopher Alain Locke. Both men would continue to support his work later on, as they usually welcomed the research results as scientific grounding for their emancipation policies. An alliance between anti-racist anthropology and African American equality politics that had been launched earlier in the century by Franz Boas’s lecture for Du Bois in Atlanta thus continued to bear fruit.20 Considering that scientific justifications of ‘racial’ differences had very direct relevance to issues such as legislation and adjudication, the paradigm shift in anthropology that Boas and his students initiated by rejecting evolutionism and explaining differences in terms of social, historical, and political circumstances was of vital importance to the struggle for African American rights. Lee Baker has on the other hand pointed out that Boas’s critique of Social Darwinist thought, a critique that was for a long time vehemently rejected by both the scientific establishment and the broader public, began to have an impact only when it was taken up by Black activists working to overcome racism.21 Both sides thus benefited from each other. Can the assistant speak?

In order to understand Herskovits’s change of heart on the question of the existence of a distinct African American culture, we can begin by looking at an incident that has been cited several times to clarify Herskovits’s scholarly turn.22 In 1927, Herskovits wrote to the Austro-German musicologist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, with whom he had shortly before begun to correspond about their respective research, that he had noticed in his Black assistant for the American Negro study peculiarities of movement, speech, and singing that were ‘typically Negro’, even though the assistant’s ancestry was more white than Black. In making this observation, he was casting doubt on Hornbostel’s conviction of an ‘innate’ disposition to music and a certain genetically inherited ‘motor behavior’, thus introducing the factor of cultural transmission of African elements: ‘Could it [...]  not be a cultural remnant brought to America by the African slaves, which their descendants retained even after the songs themselves were fundamentally changed according to the European pattern?’23 On the basis of these considerations, Herskovits developed a systematic research programme to investigate through comparative studies in West Africa, South America, and the Caribbean the question of the African cultural heritage of the American Blacks, the results of which were then summarised in Myth of the Negro Past.

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This anecdote of a white scholar’s epistemic observation of a Black female assistant, which has been elevated to a key scene ushering in a paradigm shift in African American Studies, conceals a more complex dimension of knowledge production concerning Black culture in the context of white-Black research relations. The person mentioned in the correspondence was in fact Zora Neale Hurston, who, like Herskovits, studied anthropology with Franz Boas and was helping out her somewhat more advanced colleague Herskovits by taking skull measurements of African Americans in Harlem. Hurston was not only a leading writer of the Harlem Renaissance and a key researcher on African American folk culture. During a phase when many Black intellectuals advocated cultural accommodation, she was also a vehement defender of the reality of cultural differences between Black and white Americans. Seeing as Hurston worked on Herskovits’s study two summers long, it is quite disconcerting to see her importance to her colleague’s scientific progress reduced to the ‘typically Black’ features of her outward appearance. If Herskovits noticed his collaborator’s particular way of speaking, singing, and moving, as he writes in the letter to Hornbostel, then it is hard to imagine that the content of what Hurston was saying and doing should have escaped him entirely. Descriptions of Hurston by her biographer Robert Hemenway and numerous contemporaries note that she was well known in New York as a storyteller and (comic) performer of scenes from stories from the Black South. ‘She was a perfect mimic,’ writes Hemenway, and ‘“Zora stories” circulated widely’.24 Arnold Rampersad points out that the writer always styled herself a ‘child of the black South’, adding: ‘She draped black folk culture about herself like a fabulous robe creating an inimitable and unforgettable personality. This degree of identification set her apart from virtually all other writers, black and white.’25 Zora Hurston represented a segment of Black life in America in the 1920s that was prominent but not personally experienced by most New York artists and intellectuals.26 Growing up in the self-governing Black municipality of Eatonville, Florida,27 Hurston had not had the negative experiences with racism that her fellow artists from white-dominated or segregated towns had, and she brought this divergent experience aggressively into the discussion of the New Negro. ‘In an assimilationist era, when black intellectuals stressed the similarities between the races, Hurston proudly affirmed the cultural differences,’ writes Robert Hemenway.28 Even before she began her first fieldwork on African American folk culture in 1927 in her home state of Florida, Hurston had often paraded the folklore repertoire of sayings, stories, and songs she had been learning since childhood at New York social gatherings.29 Alice Walker, who was instrumental to Hurston’s rediscovery in the 1970s, describes Hurston’s self-assured, independent Black persona celebrating cultural difference as non-colonised consciousness: ‘In her easy self-acceptance,

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Zora Hurston, half-length portrait, standing, facing slightly left, beating the hountar, or mama drum, 1937, photograph. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

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Zora was more like an uncolonized African than she was like her contemporary American blacks, most of whom believed, at least during their formative years, that their blackness was something wrong with them.’30 In view of the widely attested performative character of Hurston’s confident Blackness, we can’t help but be astonished to see it reduced to the

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Miguel Covarrubias, cover for Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston, J.B. Lippincott Co., 1935. Estate of Miguel Covarrubias, María Elena Rico Covarrubias.

object of an anthropological observation in the Herskovits story. Shouldn’t we expect instead that the cultural pride in the lore and communication arts of her native southern community that Hurston so memorably demonstrated in New York would have given her colleague some alternative insights into the existence of a particular African American culture, rather than what is suggested by the oft-repeated narrative of her ‘different’ body language? Herskovits was the more academically experienced of the two in 1927, but in terms of Black culture he was largely ignorant compared to his assistant.

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While he was beginning to consider revising his thesis of the complete acculturation of African Americans as he observed Hurston’s conduct and temperament, she was busy writing stories set in hoodoo milieux and theatre pieces censuring Blacks ‘who envy whites biologically or intellectually’.31 She set out in this way to combat a widespread feeling of inferiority, even among engaged artists and activists, through positive references to ‘the greatest cultural wealth of the continent’32 – the cultural, religious, and communicative forms of expression of the Black communities in the South – which she would dedicate herself to inventorying from 1927 onwards. How, then, are we to grasp Hurston’s role in Herskovits’s scholarly reorientation? I am less concerned here with substantiating the thesis that the about-face in academic research on African American culture exemplified by the work of Herskovits owed a significant amount to the transdisciplinary contact between anthropology and art in the context of the Harlem Renaissance. Nor do I aim at illuminating the matter on a personal level, in the sense that the famous white anthropologist was directly influenced by his Black colleague. Although both assumptions seem quite plausible to me, I would like to shift the focus here to the problem of knowledge production under various broader institutional and economic conditions. The Herskovits/Hurston constellation would seem ideal for this purpose, since the careers of the two crossed at an early stage on the occasion of the American Negro study but subsequently took very different courses. Writing about Howard University,33 the distinguished Black university in Washington, DC, in Alain Locke’s anthology, the sociologist Kelly Miller notes: ‘An enslaved people had not been permitted to taste of the tree of knowledge, which is the tree of good and evil.’34 The fact that Zora Neale Hurston was the only Black student at Barnard College, a liberal arts college for women, when she began studying anthropology with Boas in 1925 attests to the marginal position of the once ‘enslaved people’ in the institutionalised knowledge landscape of the time. However, if we consider Hurston’s relatively late arrival in academe compared to Herskovits’s straightforward academic career in relation to their field of research, it is evident that Hurston was able to base her anthropological studies on a rich trove of experience that Herskovits was lacking. What she undertook with her anthropological research in her home state, initially supervised by Boas, has been described as a process of applying a scientific method ‘that turns what she always knew into knowledge’.35 Hurston herself speaks in the introduction to her 1935 book Mules and Men, in which she summarised the research she had been conducting since 1927, of the need ‘to have the spy-glass of Anthropology’, in order to use its methodological objectivity to examine cultural phenomena that were familiar to her ‘from the earliest rocking of my cradle’.36 And yet Hurston’s pursuit of

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the objectivity of empirical knowledge is of an entirely different order from the scientific detachment and pursuit of objectivity that Herskovits advocates. For Herskovits, the value and credibility of scholarly conclusions are questionable when their producers are involved in political activities or could even appear to be pursuing interests other than ‘purely scientific’ ones. ‘The more detached I am in my work, the more effective my results will be and the more they will be trusted by all persons concerned,’ he wrote in 1928.37 This position was by all means justified in the interwar period, when the results of anthropological research that contradicted the racist academic mainstream had to be as unassailable as possible. Furthermore, Franz Boas had already spoken out vehemently against the questionable weaponisation of anthropology by politics, especially foreign policy in the USA.38 Nevertheless, Herskovits relied in his research on the support of representatives of Black interest politics. Without the help of Du Bois and Locke, the American Negro study would hardly have been possible. Du Bois also provided him with important contacts for his field research in West Africa, and Herskovits had already written most of his dissertation in Du Bois’s private library. As much as the anthropologist benefited from rubbing shoulders with these politically engaged intellectuals – with the discussions about Black American culture in the ambit of the New Negro movement pointing his research in a whole new direction – this did not prevent him, in his reverence for a ‘coldly analytical approach’, from later going so far as to thwart projects by Black scholars that did not seem objective enough to him. Through a letter-writing campaign addressing influential figures in the 1930s, Herskovits thus derailed a project planned by Du Bois for a multi-volume Encyclopedia of the Negro: ‘Although he respected Du Bois as an intellectual and a political figure, he felt that Du Bois had been “much too close to the firing-line to have the necessary detachment for the job”.’39 Interventions like this one were directed not only against the group whose situation Herskovits’s own publications sought to improve but also against people who had supported him in his younger years. Kevin Yelvington lists several instances of academic policy decisions made by the well-established anthropologist that could have the effect of undermining a colleague’s entire career: ‘What was really at stake in all of this was the creation and defense of a particular scholarly preserve, the closing of ranks, and the struggle over meaning. In short, the imposition of orthodoxy.’40 The form of ‘objectivity’ Herskovits so liked to emphasise was lacking any ‘self-objectivation’ (Pierre Bourdieu) of the subject position of the scholar and his or her position in the academic field and political landscape.41 This failure on the part of the academic researcher to fully take into account the imperative of objectivity and his own involvement stands in contrast, as we shall see, to the remarkably sensitive reflections on the research process on

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the part of the writer-cum-anthropologist Hurston and her self-positioning vis-à-vis the researcher-subject, albeit not in the form of a conventional academic theory. Institutionalised and situated research: working on the borderlines between science and art

As Herskovits’s research projects demonstrate, each of them funded over several years, access to the material fruits of the ‘tree of knowledge’ was quite different for the academically established anthropologist, an assistant professor at Northwestern University since 1927 who enjoyed a wide network of contacts, than for a Black woman writer from the South who enthusiastically recognised in the anthropological recording of the cultural practices of her society of origin the possibility of forever changing the notion of Black folk culture.42 Robert Hemenway describes Hurston’s turning to anthropology as an attempt to solve a problem that lay in the clash of different concepts of culture. Among the guiding ideas embraced by the aesthetic lineage of the New Negro movement was the notion that the modern, urban, educated artist should draw on the reservoir of Black folk art, on the ‘unconscious’ creativity of Black preachers and church singers, and interpret it in a way that would elevate it to the ‘higher’ level of a ‘conscious’ art. This programmatic endeavour reveals how distant the New Negro concept was from the vernacular and popular cultures of the South, which it virtually consigned to a premodern era. Hurston, on the other hand, who drew her strength from her first-hand knowledge and experience of this cultural milieu, was searching for ways to lend greater recognition to forms of expression and imagination commonly classified as ‘low’ without them having to be transformed into high art in the sense intended by Alain Locke and James Weldon Johnson. The scientific approach of recording and collecting folklore ‘accurately’ and preserving it for posterity offered an alternative practice that could solve Hurston’s artistic problem. What is remarkable and momentous here is the way her turning to an academic discipline as a way out of an artistic dilemma was linked to the writer’s own nonconformist ‘lack of discipline’. As early as the mid-1920s, Hurston was already manoeuvring in her work between fiction and folklore as well as the aesthetic, political, and moral ambitions of the New Negro renaissance. She took issue with the bourgeois ‘valorisation’ of popular art by high art as well as the idea that a Black writer was obligated to put her work at the service of identity politics. When Hurston joined forces with Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, Wallace Thurman, Bruce Nugent, and other colleagues to found the magazine Fire!! – of which only one issue was published – the periodical was meant to be, according to Thurman, ‘purely artistic in intent and conception’

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and therefore ‘unconcerned with sociological problems or propaganda’.43 In their contributions to Fire!!, the young ‘Niggerati’, as the circle called itself in distinction to the older ‘Literati’ (the circle around Alain Locke),44 aimed at transgressing their supposed moral duty and describing only the presentable sides of the New Negro in an attempt to avoid feeding the negative stereotypes of Blacks in the majority society.45 With stories on themes such as prostitution and homosexuality, Fire!! provocatively responded to the new boundaries that had been drawn by some of the movement’s leaders with respect to sexuality, gender roles, and middle-class morality in the course of the project of overcoming ‘racial barriers’. ‘Hurston, Thurman, and the Fire!! Group became esthetic freedom fighters,’ writes Hemenway in this connection.46 The aura of artistic freedom and moral autonomy thus propagated stands in sharp contrast to the restrictions Hurston was forced to accept when, at the end of 1927, through the mediation of Alain Locke, she signed a contract with the white patron Mrs R. Osgood Mason for the private financing of her folklore research. Hurston had to grant her ‘godmother’ ownership and publication rights to her research materials and results. Osgood Mason, while sponsoring her work relatively generously, forbade Hurston from talking about the progress of her research. While the academically independent Melville Herskovits was able to regularly publish the results of his field research on African ‘survivals’ or ‘remnants’ in the Americas, and to correspond with his international colleagues, Hurston, although she would mutate during these years from the object of her colleague’s observations into a pioneering researcher in the field of African American popular culture, was contractually prevented from publicising her discoveries and sharing her enthusiasm with others. It was not until 1935 that Osgood Mason agreed to publish Mules and Men – with the proviso that she could edit the material. Although Hurston suffered under the constraints of privately financed knowledge production, especially because the ban on speaking limited her scholarly collaboration with her revered colleague Franz Boas (for Hurston the ‘king of kings’) to a minimum,47 putting her in ‘a terrible nervous state’,48 she was ultimately able to deftly translate these limitations into her characteristic transdisciplinary form of representing transcultural practices, while also managing to reflect on some of the difficult framework conditions for her own practice in the text itself. During these years Hurston found herself caught up in multiple loyalty conflicts – between the romantic-primitivist expectations of her patron, who saw all that was authentically Black or African as an idealised antithesis to modern Western civilisation;49 her awe of the scientific authority of her teacher Franz Boas, which gave her, as a member of the social and cultural milieu she was researching, access to insights necessarily denied to any white researcher; and, finally, her own plan, developed with Langston Hughes, to

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Aaron Douglas, cover for Fire!!, 1926. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021.

create an authentic revolutionary Black theatre. Her solution to these conflicts consisted in a tactic of partially satisfying the varied expectations while also circumventing some of the agreements she had made. Hurston took advantage of the methodological rigour of anthropology without submitting to the restrictions of the discipline. She was very exacting in her inventory

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of stories, songs, dances, rituals, and recipes, but largely eschewed any systematic ordering of her recordings. As she wrote to Boas, she strove to be ‘as accurate as possible’, to have the stories told word for word, and to render them in authentic dialect. She acted here as a participant observer, and yet she treated her ‘informants’ as personalities in a way that went far beyond what is customary in ethnological texts. In Mules and Men, Hurston drafts a narrative of her return to Eatonville and her reception in her hometown in order to position herself as a researcher for whom the ‘field’ equals ‘home’, but also to indicate the distance that results from her urban experiences and the assumption of a scholarly perspective. She fictionalises the activities of the field researcher, omnipresent in her text, by turning her report into a story.50 Leigh Ann Duck has pointed out that Hurston succeeds here in bridging the different time consciousness of the modern educated New Negro and the ‘premodern’ rural South, a difference that posed a major problem for much of contemporary writing. Hurston proved that this world and its sense of its place in time were still accessible to a modern city dweller by integrating herself into people’s stories, games, and jokes, and even more so when she underwent the hoodoo initiation ritual in New Orleans. ‘In Mules and Men, both the region and “folk” consciousness are shown to be accessible to modern subjects.’51 In this way Hurston avoided what Johannes Fabian calls the ‘ethnographic present’ in ethnographic writing, in which generalisations are made about the characteristics of the culture under study as if it were frozen in time. ‘The present tense “freezes” a society at the time of observation,’ Fabian writes, with the effect of removing the researched culture from the dynamics of historical change and construing it instead as a given object of anthropological observation.52 Contrary to Fabian’s criticism of the tendency to locate the anthropological referent in a different temporality from that of the researcher, that referent is very much present in Hurston’s texts in her interaction and intersubjective exchanges with the representatives of a group that is not subject to any ‘othering’ here. Hurston thus also succeeds at liberating the image of the social community from the grip of the primitivist expectations of her patron and of many readers of her accounts. Considering how Melville Herskovits abandoned his support for the anthropologist, choreographer, and dancer Katherine Dunham when she was initiated into Voudou, we can gauge just how far apart Herskovits’s dogma of objectivity was from Hurston’s reconciliation of cultural participation and instrumentally applied scientific procedure. ‘The native-anthropologist, instead of adopting a professional subject-position, chooses a communitybased role,’53 writes Benigno Sánchez-Eppler. The precondition for such a positioning lies in the personal affiliations of this particular researcher. And its necessity lies in the difficulty of accessing the shared knowledge of a group. ‘Folklore is not as easy to collect as it sounds,’54 Hurston writes in

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the introduction to Mules and Men, describing people’s general shyness and resistance to being interviewed by her. Already in her account of her very first encounter with the people of her homeland, her initially methodological reflections subtly segue into a questioning of the very process of ethnological/ or anthropological knowledge production under the conditions of racialised power relations. In her book, Hurston frequently alternates between ‘they’ (e.g. ‘under-privileged people’), ‘we’ (‘Negroes’), and ‘I’, and addresses the reader directly: ‘You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, “Get out of here!” We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing.’55 From this point on, clever tactics of resistance are a recurring theme – ‘the Negro offers a feather-bed resistance’56 – which with evident relish and skill she localises ambiguously among various levels: The theory behind our tactics: ‘The white man is always trying to know into somebody else’s business. All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind. I’ll put this play toy in his hand, and he will seize it and go away. Then I’ll say my say and sing my song.’57

In this ‘trickster-style introduction’,58 Hurston behaves towards her white readership, towards the authority of academe, and towards her possessive patron59 like some of the heroes of the stories she collects – the Devil, who tricks God every time, or John, who tricks ‘Ole Massa’ and even the Devil himself. Transculturality and the originality of mimicry

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Melville Herskovits was conducting his fieldwork in West Africa, Suriname, and Haiti, in the course of which he would arrive at his first hypotheses on the translation of African cultural elements to South America and the Caribbean (not yet the USA), Zora Neale Hurston, in addition to her literary texts and folklore collections, also wrote a few theoretical essays which compensate for the ‘lack’ of analytical acuity of publications such as Mules and Men. Nancy Cunard included in the monumental anthology she edited in 1934, Negro, a few texts by Hurston, including ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’, in which she combines observations from linguistic, aesthetic, sociological, and cultural studies to forge a theory of Black expression.60 A central point in these reflections, which were based on the material she had collected in her field research, is the complex relationship between originality and imitation, authenticity and interpretation. Here Hurston goes far beyond the assumptions found in mainstream scholarship and popular opinion of an imperfect adaptation of African American

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Alan Lomax, Zora Neale Hurston, Rochelle French, and Gabriel Brown in Eatonville, Florida, 1935, photograph. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

language and cultural expression to the Euro-American norm. At the same time, she also distances herself from the efforts of many Black intellectuals and artists to impose a high-culture interpretation on popular Black culture in the South in order to elevate it to a level ostensibly more worthy of recognition. She defends the social vitality of popular languages (dialects, African American vernacular English) and the creativity of authentic artistic and vernacular cultural practices against both parodies in white and Black genre art as well as their exaltation in high art. The decisive step she takes in the process is to overcome the hierarchical opposition between authenticity and imitation. She achieves this by applying the concept of mimicry. ‘The Negro, the world over, is famous as a mimic. But this in no way damages his standing as an original. Mimicry is an art in itself.’61 Hurston is referring here to a commonplace idea: ‘It has been said so often,’ she writes, ‘that the Negro is lacking originality that it has almost become a gospel’.62 She then goes on to say, however, that upon closer inspection this notion immediately turns out to be a misconception, and then advances her own understanding of originality, one that anticipates postcolonial or postmodernist concepts:

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What we really mean by originality is the modification of ideas. [...] So if we look at it squarely, the Negro is a very original being. While he lives and moves in the midst of a white civilisation, everything he touches is re-interpreted for his own use.63

With this validation of cultural appropriation and modification, Hurston describes the genuine creativity of African Americans under conditions of enslavement and cultural oppression. In her notion of reinterpretation, she thus succeeded at proposing a viable explanatory model of transculturality that Melville Herskovits would not elaborate until his research in Trinidad in 1939.64 While Herskovits had to supply abundant material to empirically back up his heuristic concepts in order to comply with the demands of the anthropological discipline, Hurston permitted herself to make cultural-theoretical generalisations on the basis of her own studies, without even citing them extensively: ‘Thus has arisen a new art in the civilised world, and thus has our so-called civilisation come. The exchange and re-exchange of ideas between groups.’65 Against the backdrop of her own life and work, straddling as they did the rural culture of the Black South and the Black cultural milieu of New York and furthermore caught up between the Black world of the Harlem Renaissance and the white world of academic scholarship – Columbia University is immediately adjacent to Harlem – Hurston’s experiments with genres and writing conventions can be understood as a kind of ‘border thinking’.66 The radicalism and energy of her work owe much to its production at the boundaries between disciplines as well as between the different milieux in which she moved (modern art, folklore, anthropology). What she describes in ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’ as a ‘new art’ that emerged through Black reinterpretation of existing motifs and forms of expression67 is also a fitting description for Hurston’s own practice of semi-fictionalising ethnological research. Both the research practice and its results can thus take literary form. Hurston’s commitment to a true representation of the Black South – as opposed to both the white distortions in minstrel culture and its falsifying ennoblement in Black high culture, which she disdained as ‘bleaching’ – makes use of storytelling, or even the stage, to enact knowledge acquired through academic means. While writing the aforementioned essay on Black expression, Hurston was busy at work on the dance-theatre piece The Great Day, which depicts a day in the life of Florida railroad workers based on her research in Florida and the Bahamas. The piece can be seen as a performance of the ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’, with the author exploring here her interest in the interrelationships between hard physical labour and cultural expression in music and dance.68 Anthea Kraut emphasises that, despite Hurston’s endeavours to present folk culture in an authentic and

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unadulterated fashion, this did not entail essentialising or homogenising a group but rather carefully taking into account their internal differences. Hurston thus addresses tensions between community versus individuality, tradition versus innovation, between the forms of expression of native-born African Americans and of those who migrated from the Caribbean islands. ‘For Hurston, who maintained an abiding interest in the “blending and contending” cultures of areas like south Florida, the question of intragroup difference was of the utmost importance.’69 The railroad workers’ camp in rural Florida was for Hurston a place where diverse Black cultures collided – ‘converge, contend, and coalesce, and, in the process, generate cultural forms that influence American culture at large’.70 It will hardly be possible to clarify definitively all the ways in which (white) scientific research and (Black) artistic-academic research, personified here respectively by Herskovits and Hurston, cross-fertilised each other in the era of the Harlem Renaissance. But it does seem important to situate the contact and also the conflict between the respective methods and interests, as well as their epistemological and in part also political proximity despite the evident divergence of their conclusions, in the institutional conditions and social power constellations of the time, in order to emphasise the transdisciplinary dimension of this early phase of transcultural thought. Notes 1 The New Negro movement, which later became known as the Harlem Renaissance, was the first broad manifestation of African American culture and emancipation politics in the USA during the interwar period. 2 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London and New York: Verso 1993). The term is already used in Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and African-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). 3 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 5. 4 Arthur Ramos, The Negro in Brazil (Washington, DC: The Associated Publishers, Inc., 1939). 5 Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), chapter IV, pp. 86–109. 6 Ibid., p. xxxv. 7 Ibid., p. 32. 8 W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘Review of The Myth of the Negro Past, by Melville J. Herskovits’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 222 (July 1942), 226–7, quoted in Sidney W. Mintz, ‘Introduction’, in Herskovits, Myth of the Negro Past, p. xviii.

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9 Llewellyn Smith (producer, director), Christine Herbes-Sommers (producer), and Vincent Brown (producer, director of research), Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, Vital Pictures, 2009. 10 Melville J. Herskovits, ‘The Negro’s Americanism’, in Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance [1925] (New York: Touchstone, 1997), p. 360. 11 Ibid., p. 353. 12 Ibid. 13 ‘But, whether in Negro or in Jew, the protest avails nothing, apparently.’ Ibid., pp. 359–60. 14 Ibid., p. 359. 15 Melville J. Herskovits, ‘When Is a Jew a Jew?’, Modern Quarterly, 4 (June– September 1927), 114–15, quoted in Jerry Gershenhorn, Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), p. 11. 16 While acculturation is later conceived by Herskovits as a complex rather than a unilateral process (Gershenhorn, Melville J. Herskovits, pp. 82–92), in his early writings the term is still understood in terms of the adaptation of the minority to the majority culture. 17 Alain Locke was not at all pleased with Herskovits’s ascertainment of an almost total assimilation of the Black community to the dominant culture of white America. He suggested changes to the author and for a time entertained the idea of dispensing altogether with the anthropologist’s article, which he had originally commissioned for the Harlem special issue of the journal Survey Graphic. For more on this subject, see Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 469–72. 18 The historian Carter Woodson for one, founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, explicitly did not raise any objections to the results of Herskovits’s study, but he did object to the method of measuring Black people. Cf. Gershenhorn, Melville J. Herskovits, p. 44. 19 Ibid., p. 39. 20 At Du Bois’s invitation, Franz Boas gave a lecture to African American students at Atlanta University in 1906 on the cultural achievements of the ‘black race’ in its ‘own natural environment’, that is, Africa. Du Bois was extremely impressed, and the encounter would launch a lifelong friendship. Du Bois wrote in 1939 in Black Folk Then and Now: ‘Franz Boas came to Atlanta University where I was teaching History in 1906 and said to the graduating class: You need not be ashamed of your African past; and then he recounted the history of black kingdoms south of the Sahara for a thousand years. I was too astonished to speak. All of this I had never heard and I came then and afterwards to realize how the silence and neglect of science can let truth utterly disappear or even be unconsciously distorted.’ W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Folk: Then and Now (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2007), p. xxxi. For Boas’s ‘Commencement Address at Atlanta University, May 31, 1906’, see W.E.B. Du Bois.org. www.webdubois.org/BoasAtlantaCommencement. html (accessed 12 August 2021).

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21 Lee D. Baker, ‘The Location of Franz Boas within the African-American Struggle’, in Friedrich Pöhl and Bernhard Tilg (eds), Franz Boas – Kultur, Sprache, Rasse. Wege einer antirassistischen Anthropologie (Vienna and Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2009), pp. 111–29. 22 Cf. Walter Jackson, ‘Melville Herskovits and the Search for Afro-American Culture’, in George W. Stocking, Jr (ed.), Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others: Essays on Culture and Personality (History of Anthropology, vol. 4) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), pp. 95–127; and Mintz, ‘Introduction’, pp. 14–15. 23 Melville J. Herskovits, Letter to Erich M. Hornbostel, 10 June 1927, quoted in Gershenhorn, Melville J. Herskovits, p. 69. 24 Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977), p. 23. 25 Arnold Rampersad, ‘Foreword’, in Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (New York, London, Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2008), p. xvii. 26 Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, p. 61. 27 Founded in 1887, Eatonville, near Orlando, is considered the first self-governing all-Black municipality in the USA. 28 Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, p. 162. 29 ‘She must have been a folklore collector even before coming to NY,’ recalls the writer Arna Bontemps. Cf. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, p. 64. 30 Alice Walker, ‘Foreword: Zora Neale Hurston – A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View’, in Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, p. xiii. 31 Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, p. 47. 32 Hurston in a letter to Langston Hughes dated 12 April 1928, quoted in: Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, p. 113. 33 Howard University was founded in 1867, shortly after the American Civil War, by General O.O. Howard as a private institution of higher learning for African American students in Washington, DC. Together with Fisk University in Nashville and Atlanta University, which were established at around the same time, Howard is one of the most important historically Black universities in the USA. ‘The fundamental aim of the founders was to build up an enlightened leadership within the race,’ Miller wrote in the 1925 text cited below. 34 Kelly Miller, ‘Howard: The National Negro University’, in Locke (ed.), The New Negro, p. 314. 35 Benigno Sánchez-Eppler, ‘Telling Anthropology: Zora Neale Hurston and Gilberto Freyre Disciplined in Their Field-Home-Work’, American Literary History, 4:3 (1992), 472. 36 Hurston, Mules and Men, p. 1. 37 Letter to Herbert Seligmann, 10 August 1928, quoted in: Jackson, ‘Melville Herskovits’, p. 105. 38 On Boas’s critique of American foreign policy and the FBI files on him, see Bernhard Tilg, ‘Gegen den Strom der Zeit: Franz Boas, ein Anti-Rassist und politischer Aktivist’, in Pöhl and Tilg (eds), Franz Boas – Kultur, Sprache, Rasse, pp. 99–110. 39 Jackson, Melville Herskovits, p. 116.

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40 Kevin A. Yelvington, ‘Melville J. Herskovits and the Institutionalization of AfroAmerican Studies’, presentation for the International Colloquium on Brazil, 12–14 January 2004, UNESCO, https://docuri.com/download/melville-j-herskovitsand-the-institutionalization-of-afro-american-studies_59c1e05cf581710b2869 86a7_pdf (accessed 12 August 2021). 41 ‘By “participant objectivation”, I mean the objectivation of the subject of objectivation, of the analyzing subject – in short, of the researcher herself.’ Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Participant Objectivation’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 9:2 (June 2003), 282. 42 Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, p. 114. 43 Ibid., pp. 43–4. 44 ‘Thurman invented a name for them – The Niggeratti. They loved it. The word fit their concept of themselves: clever, cultured, talented, perhaps a bit pretentious, but urbane enough to recognize that fact and to find their own pretense amusing.’ Thomas H. Wirth, ‘FIRE!! In Retrospect’, in FIRE!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists, facsimile reprint (New York: Fire Press, 1985), n.p. 45 Steve Pinkerton, ‘“New Negro” v. “Niggeratti”: Defining and Defiling the Black Messiah’, Modernism/Modernity, 20:3 (September 2013), 539–55. 46 Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, p. 49. See also the digitally accessible version of FIRE!!: https://issuu.com/poczineproject/docs/poczp_fire_1926_readview (accessed 12 August 2021). 47 Carla Kaplan, ‘“De Talkin’ Game”: The Twenties (and Before)’, in Kaplan (ed.), Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), p. 49. 48 Hurston in a letter to Franz Boas, October 1929, in Kaplan (ed.), Zora Neale Hurston, p. 152. 49 How Hurston played the role assigned to her by her patron is evident, for example, from a letter to Osgood Mason dated 25 July 1928, shortly before the latter’s trip to Europe: ‘Dearest Godmother, This is to wish you a perfect crossing. I am enclosing something for you to read, so that you can have a Zora hour at sea [...] Dearest, little mother of the primitive world, take good care not to overtire yourself abroad.’ Quoted in: Kaplan (ed.), Zora Neale Hurston, p. 123. Very telling in comparison is a letter Hurston wrote to Franz Boas on 27 December 1928: ‘My dear Dr. Boas, I was very proud to hear from you. I have wanted to write you but a promise was exacted of me [by Mason] that I would write no one. Of course I have intended from the very beginning to show you what I have, but after I returned. Thus I could keep my word and at the same time have your guidance.’ Ibid., p. 135. Hurston however had no compunction about writing extensively and passionately about her current research in letters to Langston Hughes, though repeatedly mentioning the ban on speaking she was under. 50 Sánchez-Eppler, ‘Telling Anthropology’, p. 484. 51 Leigh Ann Duck, ‘“Go there tuh know there”: Zora Neale Hurston and the Chronotope of the Folk’, American Literary History, 13:2 (2001), 265–94. 52 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 80–7. 53 Sánchez-Eppler, ‘Telling Anthropology’, p. 477.

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54 Hurston, Mules and Men, p. 2. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., p. 3. 58 Edward M. Pavlić, Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in AfricanAmerican Literary Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 182. 59 ‘Mason demanded that her protégés resemble the image she had of them – that is to say, she wanted them to be like “real” primitive people.’ Hurston ‘once called Mason the guard-mother who sits in the twelfth heaven and shapes the destinies of the primitives.’ Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 130. 60 In a letter to Langston Hughes dated 12 April 1928, Hurston already noted ‘5 general laws’ of Black culture that would later be published in her contributions to Nancy Cunard’s Negro. Kaplan (ed.), Zora Neale Hurston, p. 115. 61 Zora Neale Hurston, ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’, in Nancy Cunard (ed.), Negro: An Anthology (New York and London: Continuum, 2002), p. 28. 62 Ibid., p. 27. 63 Ibid., p. 28. 64 ‘To explain the development of Trinidadian culture, Herskovits offered two new concepts: reinterpretation and cultural focus. Over hundreds of years, Trinidadians had created a culture by reinterpreting or adapting European and African traditions according to their needs at the time.’ Gershenhorn, Melville J. Herskovits, p. 85. 65 Hurston, ‘Characteristics’, p. 28. Cf. also the analysis of this text in Michael North, ‘“Characteristics of Negro Expression”: Zora Neale Hurston and the Negro Anthology’, in North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language & TwentiethCentury Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 175–95. 66 On ‘border thinking’ cf. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987); and also Walter Mignolo, Local Histories / Global Designs: Essays on the Coloniality of Power, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 67 Taking Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God as example, Henry Louis Gates describes her habit of taking up and reshaping literary motifs from novels by Jean Toomer and W.E.B. Du Bois as one of the first manifestations of the technique of ‘signifyin(g)’ in African American literature. Henry Louis Gates, Jr, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 170–95. 68 Anthea Kraut, Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 69 Ibid., p. 22. 70 Ibid., p. 144.

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The migrant as catalyst: Winold Reiss and the Harlem Renaissance

The German artist Winold Reiss played an unlikely role in African American modernism in the USA in the 1920s. His career exemplifies the different effects that national perspectives had on the actions and output of the mobile artists of modernism. If one considers the German modernist artists who travelled to the colonies – the orientalism of Paul Klee and August Macke, the primitivism of Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein, or even an exceptional phenomenon such as Hannah Höch, whose art displayed an early critical reflection on the colonial desire for difference and its racist implications1 – a change of perspective is required to come across the other type of travelling artist embodied by Winold Reiss. He was a party to the same discursive and imaginative preoccupations in early twentieth-century Germany as his famous colleagues, and yet he would develop in a completely different direction in the course of his migration. The painter and designer from Karlsruhe, who trained at the Academy of Art in Munich, appears hardly at all in the literature on German art history.2 But from the point of view of the formative phase of African American modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century, Reiss, who helped shape the aesthetics of the New Negro movement both through his own work and as Aaron Douglas’s teacher, can be seen as an artistic catalyst earning a place in most histories of Black modernism in the USA. The discrepancy between his non-existence in German art history writing and his relative prominence in American and African American art historiography not only makes him a prime example of the divergence of various national perspectives on migrating artists. Reiss’s case is all the more remarkable when one considers his extraordinary career in the context of the cultural influences that many of the canonised protagonists of German painting in the early twentieth century were likewise exposed to. Winold Reiss emigrated to the USA in 1913 at the age of twenty-seven, the same year Emil Nolde went on a painting expedition to the South Seas as a member of the German Imperial Colonial Office’s ‘MedicalDemographic German New Guinea Expedition’. At the time, Nolde was a fervent German nationalist painter who saw in the South Seas voyage a

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Winold Reiss, cover for Survey Graphic, 6:6 (March 1925). Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, New York. The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

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unique opportunity  –  although in fact it was quite an ordinary privilege under the colonial exercise of power – to be confronted in a new way with the ‘primeval’ in a ‘primitive’ culture, which Expressionist artists styled as the polar opposite of the feared deracination inherent in modern Western societies. Nolde and Pechstein in the South Seas, and Klee and Macke in North Africa, were transient visitors in search of the Other, which they believed they had found in archaic forms of expression or in the architecture, light, and colour of the ‘Orient’, and which they wanted to present to viewers back home in their paintings upon their return.3 Reiss, by contrast, was a migrant who returned to Germany only once after his departure, and only for a short time. At the beginning of his career, Reiss was no less influenced than his contemporaries by colonial fantasies of the exotic Other. His starting point was perhaps even more stereotypical than those of his orientalist and primitivist painter colleagues: He wanted to paint ‘Indians’ in America. Today, it is hard to imagine anything more clichéd than the idea of the domesticated noble savage spread by Karl May, and the desire to transform it into art through studies on the ground. This naive artistic imagination, conditioned by colonial culture (in Nolde as in Reiss), resulted from a longing for individual and cultural self-discovery by way of the encounter with the radically different Other. This longing established itself from the eighteenth century onwards through progressive colonial expansion and Enlightenment ideas of civilisation versus primitive societies. What distinguishes Reiss from many of his contemporaries is the way in which he conveyed the encounter with the supposed Other in his art. Their trajectories start from similar projections, but then take quite different paths. Nolde’s and Pechstein’s acting out of exoticism and primitivism was functionally integrated into the collective German colonialism project – as made clear by the ‘medical-demographic expedition’ to the Pacific territories of the German empire. Under these conditions, the artists’ colonial journeys ultimately confirmed the basic patterns of perception and representation of the foreign that they had acquired at home. It was different for Reiss: he had to deal with the personal insecurities of being an immigrant trying to settle in his new place of residence and organising his life as an artist. What’s more, Reiss chose to make his home in the big city of New York, while the typical destinations of primitivist and exoticist artists were in the periphery, as far from civilisation as possible. Reiss would not realise his original wish to paint Native Americans in the USA until a trip to Montana in 1919. By that time, he had long since been integrated into New York’s cultural life as an artist, interior decorator, graphic designer, and art teacher, and social and professional relationships with clients, students, and  colleagues had become more important than ­fantasies of the noble savage.

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At a migration crossroads

A special constellation in the case of Reiss is of particular interest for the art history of contact. This constellation can be described as the intersection of two types of migration: on the one hand, migratory movements that led to major geographical and social changes among entire populations, and on the other hand the individual migration of a single artist. This intersection generated new cultural mixtures in a specific political context. As the first major manifestation of Black modernism in the USA, the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s is a product of what became known as the Great Migration: the relocation between about 1910 and 1930 of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South, dominated by brutal racism, to the urban centres of the industrialised North. The New York district of Harlem became the most important centre of cultural expression for the upsurge in Black self-confidence reflected in the New Negro movement – at a time when artists who had immigrated from Europe, such as Reiss, were also settling in New York. The German artist’s encounter with the Black cultural scene in Harlem, which was to be so momentous for the formation of African American painting in the interwar period, marks one of the crossroads of these different migration histories. For a contemporary reader of the modern edition of the anthology The New Negro, originally edited by the philosopher Alain Locke in 1925, it comes as a surprise that it was Winold Reiss who illustrated this ‘Bible of the Harlem Renaissance’.4 The 1997 edition of the book is illustrated – alongside photographs of African masks and statuettes – with graphics and vignettes, some of which have their ‘logical’ place here, such as the illustrations by Aaron Douglas, the leading representative of African American modernism in the interwar period. At first, one pays almost no attention to the other graphics of a seemingly decorative nature. Only by looking in the book’s appendix or list of illustrations does Reiss’s name then resurface from historical oblivion. There are two paragraphs by Locke in the appendix in which the editor expresses his appreciation to Reiss as the congenial visual artist for his compilation of literary and scientific texts. Modern editorial policy has resulted in the absurd situation that the editor’s historical text in appreciation of his illustrator now seems to have been written in a visual void, as it were. For in a demonstration of editorial textual fidelity, Locke’s text on Reiss has been retained from the original edition of the book, in which his portraits of representatives of the New Negro movement – in addition to scenic motifs and the cover design – were prominently featured in several full-page illustrations, while the modern reprint contains only his decorative works. In contrast to the image policy of the new edition, which literally marginalises Reiss’s contribution, Locke praises his art as a visual expression of the New

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Negro movement – ‘a graphic interpretation of Negro life, freshly conceived after its own patterns’5 – and especially highlights the extraordinarily sensitive way in which Reiss depicts Black people, which Locke describes as free of stereotypes: By the simple but rare process of not forcing an alien idiom upon nature, or a foreign convention upon a racial tradition, he has succeeded in revealing some of the rich and promising resources of Negro types, which await only upon serious artistic recognition to become both for the Negro artist and American art at large one of the rich sources of novel material both for decorative and representative art.6

It is astonishing that a German migrant who had only arrived a few years before would be chosen as the central illustrator of the standard book of the Harlem Renaissance, rather than a Black artist. This raises the question of what conditions had to be in place – both for the artist and for the African American community – for this fruitful collaboration to become possible. Richard Powell notes precisely the outsider role of the artist as a decisive factor – ‘Reiss’ cultural distance from the assorted forms of American racism’7 meant that his perception was not conditioned by the visual racism of American culture. The removal of Reiss’s most important artistic contributions to The New Negro from the later editions of the book seems almost like retrospective confirmation of the improbability of such a constellation. It is somewhat understandable that the new editions of the book, through their misleading editorial image policy, retroactively make Douglas the illustrator of the 1925 anthology, given his later role as an artist who shaped the aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance like no other. However, reprinting Locke’s appreciation of Reiss’s art, despite the disappearance of his images from the newer editions, also highlights the unease that identity politics historiography feels in the face of such unlikely transcultural collaborations. ‘Key works like The New Negro (1925) declared themselves deliberately biracial, whereas later reprints airbrushed out that hybridity,’ writes George Bornstein.8 And Leesa Rittelmann criticises the distortion created by such reprint policies to the overall character of a publication originally based on text and image: ‘The removal of all but Reiss’ graphic border designs from the current edition of The New Negro fundamentally altered Locke’s original vision of the interaction between text and image.’9 Behind the question of what conditions would allow such an ‘improbable’ contact situation to exist lies a more general question. It concerns our approach as historians to the scope of action granted early modern artists and how much they were bound to the worldviews, ideologies, and collectively shared imagery prevailing at the time.10 If we view the story of Winold Reiss and the Harlem Renaissance against the foil of the primitivist mainstream

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Winold Reiss, Langston Hughes, c. 1925, pastel on illustration board, 76.3 × 54.9 cm. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of W. Tjark Reiss, in memory of his father, Winold Reiss. © Estate of Winold Reiss.

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of the early twentieth century, we can see this as an example of a historical perspective that increasingly looks at the preconditions and motivations that enabled certain figures at certain times to break free of the strictures placed on their thoughts and actions. Reiss’s role in the formation of African American modern art was marked by the intersection of migrant movements mentioned above, an intersection that provides the historical framework for Reiss’s function as an artistic catalyst. Other German artists of his generation such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, and Franz Marc went to war in 1914/15, initially with enthusiasm, then later with deep regrets or even having paid with their lives. Reiss came from a pacifist family and, when confronted with growing German nationalism and militarism, decided to emigrate as early as autumn 1913.11 But nationalism and antisemitism had also gained momentum in the USA by this time. The great tide of immigration around the turn of the century was stemmed and finally drastically reduced with the Immigration Act of 1917 and the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921, which were mainly directed against Asian and Southern and Eastern European immigrants and were thus racially inspired. The Great Migration from the Southern states to the industrial centres of the North was largely due to the need to compensate for the reduction in the labour force resulting from this restrictive immigration policy. The New Negro movement of the 1920s cannot be separated from this migration of the African American population.12 The concept of the ‘New Negro’ is the strongest manifestation of Black empowerment on an economic, cultural, and political level until the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It marks a new African American self-confidence, with a resolute turning away from the old racist notions of backward, uneducated, and culturally ignorant Blacks that had been spread by the dominant white culture since the era of slavery. Without going into the cultural politics and diverging strategies within this movement, it is important to recall the urgency of contemporary debates about the appropriate scientific, literary, and artistic portrayal of the ‘New Negro’. One example is a questionnaire titled ‘The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed’, which the journal The Crisis, the organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People directed by W.E.B. Du Bois, sent out to numerous authors and artists in 1926.13 To answer the question of how a white outsider and immigrant could come to provide the main visual contribution to the central text of the New Negro movement, we have to refer to precisely this representation-critical question that was considered so explosive in the intellectual Black community in the mid-1920s. Moreover, we have to consider the circumstances that made it possible for a ‘greenhorn’ like Reiss to be one of the first painters to accomplish this historical task and, in addition, to become a teacher to Aaron Douglas, later dubbed the ‘father’ of African American modern art.

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The modern image of Blacks

In his text ‘Negro Youth Speaks’, Locke discusses the aesthetic politics of the emancipation movement and the need to develop new artistic languages and design principles that should be both Black and modern: ‘In music such transfusions of racial idioms with the modernistic styles of expression has already taken place; in the other arts it is just as possible and likely.’14 This analysis shows that at the time of this statement the successful combination of ‘racial idioms’ and modern means of expression had not yet taken place in  ­painting  – at least not for the editor of The New Negro. In fact, Locke calls on young African American artists to engage intensively with both old African art and the achievements of the European avant-garde. Locke, who had good contacts both with the political and artistic representatives of the Black scene in Paris and with important American collectors of European modernism such as Albert C. Barnes, saw the ‘new internationalism’ of American Blacks as an active attempt to constructively re-establish exchanges between the cultures of the African diaspora scattered across three continents: ‘With the American Negro, his new internationalism is primarily an effort to recapture contact with the scattered peoples of African derivation.’15 According to Locke, such diasporic internationalism had to be linked to a commitment to modern aesthetics. Soon after the publication of The New Negro, Douglas was to realise Locke’s demand for ‘transfusions of racial idioms with the modernistic styles of expression’16 at the highest level in painting and graphic art. The fact that Douglas moved from an American backwater to Harlem in 1925 and not, like many of his artist colleagues, to Paris as originally planned, was due to a publication that appeared six months before The New Negro: a special issue of the popular magazine Survey Graphic titled ‘Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro’, edited by Locke and illustrated by Reiss.17 Douglas, who at the time was working in artistic isolation in Kansas City, Missouri, subsequently professed on several occasions that he had been attracted to the subtle and extraordinarily dignified depiction of Black people in Reiss’s portraits of the Harlem scene.18 On Locke’s referral, Douglas landed in Reiss’s studio soon after his arrival in New York, where he would take painting lessons for about two years.19 When Reiss was commissioned to illustrate The New Negro in 1925, he suggested to Locke that he also include some of his student’s graphics. These illustrations by Douglas were still strongly influenced by his teacher’s aesthetic and, as Richard Powell notes, some of them had design features that were more closely tied than his teacher’s images to the widespread stereotypical representations of Black people.20 Over the course of the next year, however, Douglas developed his own distinctive style with which, better than any other artist of his time, he gave visual expression to

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The migrant as catalyst

the cultural dynamics of the Harlem Renaissance and the problems of its new Black consciousness. Without going into detail here about the relationship between Reiss and Douglas, this study of artistic contact should none the less examine what the German artist brought with him from Europe and how he brought these European influences to bear on the formative phase of African American modern art. At the same time, care must be taken not to present the European artist as someone who single-handedly brought about the birth of African American art.21 If we look at Reiss’s oeuvre as a whole, we can see that his best work emerged from his confrontation with the culture of the Harlem Renaissance. As the illustrator of The New Negro and other Black publications, and as Douglas’s teacher, Reiss not only contributed the artistic and design skills he had acquired in Germany to this cultural movement. He obviously also benefied personally as an artist from his artistic commissions and personal relationships with important representatives of the movement. The immigrant’s initial naivety about the cultural Other gave way to a more realistic perspective in the face of a politically organised, culturally ambitious and, especially in music and literature, artistically radical urban Black community. By engaging with the prolific cultural scene in Harlem and coming to understand Black culture as eminently modern, Reiss exchanged the notion he had brought with him from Germany of the potential of the ‘primitive’ for a relationship with a real situation and an appreciation of the aesthetic innovations of modern artists. Locke described the images that emerged from this process as an ‘iconoclastic break’ with the conventions for representing Black people in American art, and called on young African American artists to continue breaking down stereotypes in order to create a new style.22 After arriving in New York in 1913, Reiss found success not only as a painter but also as an interior designer for shops, clubs, and restaurants, and as an illustrator for magazines such as Modern Art Collector.23 Working in various media, Reiss was thus able to convey to New York the aesthetic views of the German Werkbund and the Wiener Werkstätte, and of German and Austrian graphic design. His works of applied art still reflect his conception of the importance of African art to modern art in a rather decorative way, influenced by his familiarity with German Expressionism, especially the Blauer Reiter group. Reiss personally experienced forms of exclusion as the World War progressed, and his commissions declined drastically due to antiGerman feeling in the USA. This may have been one of the key reasons for the transformation of his abiding and romantic interest in ‘simple people’ – from the rural German population to Native Americans – into a collaboration with another group subject to discrimination, African Americans, that was much more rooted in social realities.24

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The artist’s brief return to his homeland in the spring of 1922 certainly provided important inspiration for the role he would play in the Harlem Renaissance and especially for Aaron Douglas in the mid-1920s. In the Black Forest, in Oberammergau in Bavaria, but also in Sweden, Reiss produced ethnographic-type studies of the rural inhabitants. At the same time he also familiarised himself with the latest developments in German painting, such as the New Objectivity trend and in particular the crowded pictorial spaces of Max Beckmann. After his return to the USA, Reiss transposed this explicitly modern, metropolitan, and socially conflicted attitude in German interwar painting to the vibrant Harlem scene of the 1920s, albeit in a moderate form. Even though he usually remained faithful to the basic decorative style of his earlier works, in cityscapes such as Mask Over City (c. 1924) and dance scenes such as Interpretation of Harlem Jazz (c. 1924), Reiss combined the silhouettelike flatness of his design works with his thematic interest in the Other. He focused on such motifs in his paintings of Native Americans and Mexicans during his travels in the American West and Mexico in 1920. Agreeing with Richard Powell,25 Sydelle Rubin characterises Reiss’s style in the mid-1920s as ‘Afro-Deco’: ‘Merging an Art Deco vocabulary of flat, stylized, geometric motifs and hard-edged silhouettes with West African and Egyptian forms, Reiss created an “Afro-Deco” language that visually articulated Locke’s call for an African-American identity in modern art.’26 The direct confrontation with the Black culture of Harlem and his personal encounters with its central protagonists (among others, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Paul Robeson), whose portraits he painted for Survey Graphic and The New Negro, obviously modified Reiss’s exotic-romantic interest in the ethnographic, which had drawn him to America ten years earlier. Some of his German painter colleagues sought ‘primal nature’ in colonial encounters with ‘natives’ in the South Seas, or staged such encounters in their home studios, as the painters of the artists’ group Die Brücke (The Bridge) did with the help of Black circus artistes and performers from the then wildly popular Völkerschauen (exhibitions of ‘exotic’ people), with the intention of rejecting civilisation and becoming ‘primitive’ themselves. Reiss was himself not far removed from such fantasies when he emigrated to the USA, but they ceased to have any meaning when they came up against the reality of the culturally and ‘racially’ Other in the form of its intellectual and artistic elite arriving at his studio door.27 Few, if any, other German artists of his time were confronted with such a reality check on their primitivist preconceptions. And yet, it must be noted that, if Reiss had not shared a naive or romantic interest in non-European cultures and their aesthetics with his more famous colleagues, he would never have arrived, after various detours, at his own unique form of co-operation with the Black community in New York. Had he not painted portraits of Blackfoot

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Winold Reiss, Elise Johnson McDougald, 1924, pastel on board, 76.4 × 54.8 cm. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Lawrence A. Fleischman and Howard Garfinkle with a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (CCO).

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5.4

Winold Reiss, W.E.B. Du Bois, 1925, pastel on paper, 76 × 55 cm. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Lawrence S. Fleischman and Howard Garfinkle with a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (CCO).

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Indians in Montana in 1919 and urban scenes and portraits of revolutionaries on his trip to Mexico in 1920, it is unlikely Reiss would have been commissioned by Paul Kellogg, the editor of Survey Graphic, to illustrate a special issue of the magazine on Mexico in 1924.28 And that work was ultimately what prompted Kellogg to put Locke, the guest editor of the Harlem issue, in touch with Reiss.29 The outsider Winold Reiss thus happened upon an intense discussion on the image of the ‘New Negro’ in the mid-1920s. The Black community was by no means united on this issue. Although they closed ranks against the racist representation of Black people in American visual culture, different groups had different views on the ‘correct’ way to depict African Americans in times when they were struggling for recognition and equality. Thus some of Reiss’s portraits became the subject of debate between different factions with divergent attitudes towards race pride and cultural assimilation.30 As well as these differences of opinion on the ‘right’ images of the minority, there were also different views on the critical role of an outsider as chronicler. However, looking at the question of artistic productivity resulting from the white immigrant’s contact with the Black minority, it is clear that Reiss, with his folkloristic and ethnographic artistic interest, was lucky in a way to be in the right place at the right time – to be in contact with the socio-cultural milieu of a newly self-defining minority with an immense need for new images.31 Before he was superseded by Black artists like Douglas, who were aesthetically more advanced and culturally and politically better embedded, various factors put Reiss in a key position to meet this need for images. In addition to his technical skills, his knowledge of the European avant-garde gave him an appreciation of African culture as a corrective to Western civilisation and as a source of renewal of its forms of expression.32 It seems at least as significant for his historical role, however, that Reiss did not represent the type of egomaniacal modern artist who sought the ‘primitive’ and appropriated it in order to position himself as an outsider against social norms and cultural conventions. As an applied artist, Reiss was accustomed to collaborations and commissions. The need to adapt to clients, spaces, and media, and to succeed as an immigrant in a foreign environment – not least financially – may have made an artist like Reiss more flexible and open to new challenges than the avant-garde self-image of the ‘great’ European artists of his time would have allowed. After his relatively short ‘African American’ phase (c. 1923–29), Reiss continued to paint pictures of Native Americans for a quarter of a century. They were popular with viewers and buyers, catering as they do to the sentimental view of a minority by white majority society, in a very different way from the Harlem pictures. The portraits of American Indians by all means had ethnographic value, for they brought images of people of other ethnicities

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5.5

Aaron Douglas, cover for Opportunity, June 1926. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021.

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in remote rural areas to a metropolitan white audience, whereas the Harlem scenes and the portraits of emancipation activists could instead claim political currency. I therefore do not share the depoliticising view embraced by Frank Mehring, according to which Reiss’s pictures of various American minorities are fundamentally equivalent. Writing about Reiss’s American Indian pictures, Mehring points to ‘the beauty of those people’, whose ‘simplicity and joyful existence outside the modern American way of life’ would have been overlooked by the American public.33 But Reiss’s portraits of Native Americans and the Harlem images do not differ solely in their proximity to or distance from the prevailing clichés about the particular minority. Only those images resulting from contacts with Black editors and authors had an additional function in terms of the political agenda of the discriminated group, frequently being used in their publications and, as Locke noted, serving as inspiration and encouragement to young Black artists.34 Despite the brief duration of his Harlem period, Winold Reiss created a number of great works during these years. He struck a chord at a decisive moment, when his artistic capabilities coincided with the aesthetic ambitions of a minority struggling for social recognition. Notes 1 Particularly in her collage series Aus einem ethnographischen Museum from the 1920s. On Höch as an exceptional phenomenon in the context of European primitivism as well as among artists travelling in colonial space, see Christian Kravagna, ‘The Artist as Traveller: From the Travelogues of the (Post-) Modernists’, in Matthias Michalka (ed.), The Artist as ..., Vienna: MUMOK(Nuremberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2006), pp. 101–24; Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, ‘Hannah Höch, “Aus einem ethnographischen Museum”, 1924–1967’, in Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Ästhetik der Differenz: Postkoloniale Perspektiven vom 16. bis 20. Jahrhundert (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 2010), pp. 196–218; and Denise Toussaint, Dem kolonialen Blick begegnen: Identität, Alterität und Postkolonialität in den Fotomontagen von Hannah Höch (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015). 2 An important step towards linking the American and German perspectives on Reiss and his environment was taken in December 2011 by the symposium Cultural Mobility and Transcultural Confrontations: Winold Reiss as a Paradigm of Transnational Studies, organised by Frank Mehring and hosted by the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. Two new books on Reiss were scheduled for publication in 2021: Frank Mehring (ed.), The Multicultural Modernism of Winold Reiss (1886–1953): (Trans)National Approaches to His Work (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2021); and Marilyn Satin Kushner, The Art of Winold Reiss: An Immigrant Modernist (London: Giles, 2021). 3 Cf. Ralph Melcher (ed.), Die Brücke in der Südsee – Exotik der Farbe, exh. cat. Saarlandmuseum Saarbrücken (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2005); Ernst-Gerhard Güse (ed.), Die Tunisreise – Klee, Macke, Moilliet, exh. cat. Westfälisches

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Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1982); Jill Lloyd, ‘Emil Nolde’s “ethnographic” Still Lifes: Primitivism, Tradition, and Modernity’, in Susan Hiller (ed.), The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 90–112. 4 Arnold Rampersad, ‘Introduction’, in Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Touchstone, 1997), p. ix. 5 Alain Locke, ‘Notes to the Illustrations’, in Locke (ed.), The New Negro, p. 419. 6 Ibid. 7 Richard J. Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), p. 43. 8 George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 4. 9 Leesa Rittelmann, ‘Winold Reiss to Kara Walker: The Silhouette in Black American Art’, in Maria I. Diedrich and Jürgen Heinrichs (eds), From Black to Schwarz: Cultural Crossovers between African America and Germany (East Lansing and Münster: Michigan State University Press, LIT Verlag, 2011), pp. 305–6. 10 In the previous chapter I made reference to what Pierre Bourdieu termed the ‘unthinkable of an epoch’: ‘In what is unthinkable at a given time, there is not only everything that cannot be thought for lack of the ethical or political dispositions which tend to bring it into consideration, but also everything that cannot be thought for lack of instruments of thought such as problematics, concepts, methods and techniques (which explains why good intentions so often make bad sociology).’ Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 5. 11 Jeffrey C. Stewart, To Color America: Portraits by Winold Reiss (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), p. 25. 12 The most important pictorial representation of the Great Migration is Jacob Lawrence’s sixty-part series The Migration of the Negro. The series, now known as the Migration Series, was painted in 1941. Cf. Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series (New York: Museum of Modern Art; Washington, DC: Phillips Collection, 2015). 13 The questionnaire is documented in Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and Gene Andrew Jarrett (eds), The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 190–204. 14 Alain Locke, ‘Negro Youth Speaks’, in Locke (ed.), The New Negro, p. 51. 15 Alain Locke, ‘The New Negro’, in Locke (ed.), The New Negro, pp. 14–5. 16 Locke, ‘Negro Youth Speaks’, p. 51. 17 ‘Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro’, special issue of Survey Graphic, March 1925. It was on the basis of this special issue that Locke conceived the greatly expanded book version The New Negro. A facsimile reprint of the issue was published in 1980 by Black Classic Press in Baltimore. For a detailed account of the genesis of Survey Graphic’s Harlem issue, see Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 434–76. 18 Amy Helene Kirschke, Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), p. 15.

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19 Richard J. Powell, ‘The Aaron Douglas Effect’, in Susan Earle (ed.), Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 54. 20 Ibid, p. 55. 21 In one of the few publications written from a German perspective, Frank Mehring attempts to compensate for the art-historical marginalisation of Reiss by stylising the German painter as a kind of messiah of American democracy. Mehring sees in Reiss’s paintings ‘a critical socio-political commentary adding a German visionary component to the “American dream”’. Frank Mehring, ‘“Unfinished Business of Democracy”: Transcultural Confrontations in the Portraits of the GermanAmerican Artist Winold Reiss’, in Christian Fuhrmeister, Hubertus Kohle, and Veerle Thielemans (eds), American Artists in Munich: Artistic Migration and Cultural Exchange Processes (Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009), p. 198. 22 Alain Locke, ‘The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts’, in Locke (ed.), The New Negro, pp. 266–7. 23 Stewart, To Color America, pp. 28–32. 24 In my opinion, however, it is overstated, if not even inappropriate, to describe, as Mehring does, the at times difficult situation of the German migrant and his artistic sympathy for minorities in American society with the term ‘double consciousness’, which W.E.B. Du Bois had coined in Souls of Black Folk (1903) for Black subjectivity in a racist society. Mehring, ‘Unfinished Business’, pp. 194–6. 25 Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century, p. 44. 26 Sydelle Rubin, ‘Folklorist of Brush and Palette: Winold Reiss and the Harlem Renaissance’, Rutgers Art Review, 20 (2003), 63–4. 27 It should be noted that Reiss’s sensitive portraiture was not limited to the artists and intellectuals of the New Negro movement but also extended to likenesses of women and men from Harlem as well as immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia. 28 Stewart, To Color America, pp. 47–9. 29 Reiss’s background as a German immigrant was certainly not a disadvantage in his personal contact with Alain Locke or W.E.B. Du Bois, since both leading intellectuals had studied in Berlin and had repeatedly in various statements reported very positively about their personal experiences as Blacks in Germany, where they felt far less burdened by racist prejudices than in the USA. Locke had visited Germany several times shortly before meeting Reiss, establishing close relations with Germans, and he regularly had German publications sent to him. Cf. A.B. Christa Schwarz, ‘New Negro Renaissance – “Neger-Renaissance”: Crossovers between African America and Germany during the Era of the Harlem Renaissance’, in Diedrich and Heinrichs (eds), From Black to Schwarz, pp. 49–74. 30 Stewart, To Color America, pp. 50–4. 31 Locke had initiated an art contest during the preparation of Survey Graphic’s special issue on Harlem to find suitable artists to illustrate the magazine, but was not satisfied with the results. ‘The art contest he had organized the previous spring had failed to produce much quality work from African American artists.’ Stewart, The Life of Alain Locke, p. 460.

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32 For instance, Reiss brought Carl Einstein’s book Negerplastik back to New York with him after his 1922 visit to Germany and, a few years later, encouraged Aaron Douglas to study the design principles of African art. For another important function of Carl Einstein’s publications on African art in African American modernism, see Chapter 8 below. 33 Mehring, ‘Unfinished Business’, p. 200. Another difference between the African American pictures and the portraits of Native Americans is that the latter sold very well, while the pastels shown in 1925 in an exhibition at the Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library (today the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture), which served as models for the illustrations in Survey Graphic and The New Negro, were not as successful. Few galleries were even willing to exhibit portraits of African Americans. See Stewart, To Color America, p. 62. 34 Locke writes: ‘The work of Winold Reiss [...] which has supplied the main illustrative material for this volume has been deliberately conceived and executed as a path-breaking guide and encouragement to this new foray of the younger Negro artists.’ Locke, ‘The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts’, p. 266.

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Encounters with masks: counter-primitivisms in Black modernism

In the spring of 2010, Tate Liverpool presented the exhibition Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, which attempted to reconstruct Paul Gilroy’s argument that the ‘Black Atlantic’ represented a ‘counter-culture to Modernity’ in the field of visual arts. Whereas Gilroy had described the ‘Black Atlantic’ in terms of the transatlantic journeys and contacts of protagonists of the political, literary, and musical African diaspora cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Afro Modern succeeded in giving an impressive account of the visual modernisms in the transcontinental space of Black modernity from the early twentieth century to the present.1 In one corner of the first exhibition gallery, one could see two small-format works mounted side by side on the wall – a black-and-white photograph of a West African Dan mask and a pastel drawing that clearly depicted the same mask. Both works were dated 1935. The photograph was by the US photographer Walker Evans, the colour drawing by the African American artist Norman Lewis. Although the curators (Tanya Barson and Peter Gorschlüter) did not comment further on their fascinating constellation of works, this particular set did raise some questions. What meaning could one derive from this juxtaposition? Obviously, both works had been created on the occasion of the exhibition African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where the Dan mask in question was exhibited. But how did these two artists with very different backgrounds react to the objects in one and the same exhibition? What did they each see in these African artworks? With what expectations did they visit MoMA in the spring of 1935? How did they interpret the figurative sculptures and masks on display? What was the nature of their respective encounters with the Dan mask, for example, which both Evans and Lewis captured, and how were these reactions reflected in the work of two artists who were roughly the same age and at an early stage in their careers? Such questions, raised by an unpretentious juxtaposition of two images, point us to a blind spot in the historiography of modern art. In the last three decades, much has been written from various perspectives about Western practices of collecting and exhibiting, of scholarly description and the artistic

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6.1

Walker Evans, Mask, 1935, gelatin silver print, 24.1 × 16.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Gift of Robert Goldwater, 1961 and 1962 (1978.412.1937). © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / bpk / Walker Evans.

appropriation of non-Western artworks. Half a century after African Negro Art, another major exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art in the 1980s, Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinities of the Tribal and the Modern, contributed further references with regard to the ‘kinship’ of ‘primitive’ and modern art to this debate, which continues to this day, now increasingly focusing on manifestations of Eurocentric colonial worldviews against the backdrop of a multicultural society, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. Art historians, artists, and anthropologists have since questioned the role of the museums in which these objects are kept, displayed, and charged with certain meanings. They have argued about which place is appropriate for these objects (art museum, ethnological museum, restitution to the countries of origin) as well as about how to describe them accurately from an aesthetic or cultural-anthropological point of view. Finally, today there is a rich literature on the relationship of modern Western art to the material testimonies of nonEuropean cultures, which in the twentieth century were summarised under terms such as ‘primitive art’, ‘tribal art’, or ‘art nègre’.2 What has received little attention in art-historical studies to date, however, is the significance of these objects of ‘traditional’ African art for the formation of a Black modernism. While we usually assume that African art was exhibited in Western museums for a white audience, the questions about the

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Encounters with masks

Norman Lewis, Dan Mask, 1935, pastel on sandpaper, 46 × 31.8 cm, signed. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

object–viewer relationship raised by the example of the Dan mask seen on display by Lewis and Evans reveal the need to take a closer look at the art-historical relevance of Black modern artists’ encounters with African ­ sculptures in institutions. This chapter will therefore attempt to illustrate the importance of the reception of and engagement with African artworks for the work of twentieth-century Black artists in Europe, Africa, and America based on a few notable examples from the 1920s to the 1990s. Among them are

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Norman Lewis and Aaron Douglas who are discussed from different points of view in further chapters of this book. The reanimation of objects

The constellation of the two images of the Dan mask in Afro Modern will have triggered in some viewers the memory of the encounter between a Black museum visitor and an African mask in a display case that was staged in one of the first critical films on the problem of collecting and presenting African art in Western museums, Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die). This militant, anti-colonialist film essay by the French filmmakers Chris Marker and Alain Resnais dates from the early 1950s. The very first sentences of the film’s voiceover refer to the relationship between life and art, art and death: ‘When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.’3 But how do the filmmakers describe the transformation of ‘living’ statues and masks into dead objects, preserved in museums? They note: ‘An object dies when the living glance trained upon it disappears.’ In their poetic language, Marker and Resnais describe the death of African art as a loss of contact with the people who were closely related to it, an alienation of the material object from the imagination that was part of its original cultural context. Indeed, the authors comment here on the problematic perception of African art objects by European viewers – ‘we look at it as if it had its reason for being in the pleasure it gives us’ – and remind us of the limitations of a primarily aesthetic perspective like that favoured by modern artists and critics in the first half of the twentieth century. ‘We find the picturesque there,’ they confirm, at the same time addressing the ignorance associated with our aesthetic gaze: ‘The intentions of the black who created it, escape us.’ The great achievement of this film, though, is that its authors are not satisfied with a mere critique of the mortification of African art objects through their decontextualisation in the European museum. They go a decisive step further when they consider the thoughts and feelings of a Black person who encounters such artworks in the museum. A key scene in this regard is the shot in which a young Black woman strolls through the rooms of a museum, finally stopping in front of a display case labelled ‘Masques de l’Afrique’. We see the woman in thoughtful contemplation of a mask presented behind glass. The changing camera angles on the woman’s pensive face and the mask emerging from the darkness prompt us to reflect on the woman’s thoughts and feelings when looking at this object, while the spoken commentary assists us in understanding the significance of this encounter of a modern Black subject with an object of art nègre. In contrast to a white viewer’s focus on form, on the ‘painterly’ as the filmmakers call it, a member of the Black community would see the face of a culture. For her or him, the mask would be ‘the sign

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Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Les Statues meurent aussi, 1953, film stills.

of a lost unity where art was the guarantee of an agreement between man and the world’. In Les Statues meurent aussi, this confrontation of a contemporary Black person with ‘traditional’ African art becomes the starting point for a far-reaching critical reflection on the history of slavery, colonialism, and anti-colonial struggles. And therein lies the revolutionary dynamic of the film – in the dense interweaving of colonial violence with the appropriation and proud display of non-European artefacts, and in the linking of liberation struggles with the Black visitor’s gaze. Although the filmmakers are not able to restore to the uprooted objects the ‘original’ contextual meaning of their cultures of origin, they do situate the statues in the historical-political context of subjugation, racism, and dispossession as well as the colonised people’s efforts to (symbolically) reclaim the objects. In order to properly assess the political agenda behind the project of reviving African masks in the film by Marker and Resnais, it is important to remember that it was commissioned by the Paris-based Pan-African publishing house Présence Africaine. I will come back to the film by Marker and Resnais in the context of postwar artistic practices. The reflections in the film on the reanimation of museum-mortified

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objects of African art through their contemporary reinterpretation from a historical and political perspective can be taken as a starting point for looking at some examples from Black modernist art. To do so, let us first go back to 1935, to the case of the Dan mask in the MoMA exhibition. Conceived by Alfred H. Barr, director and co-founder of MoMA and an apologist for modern art in the USA, in close collaboration with the exhibition curator James Sweeney, African Negro Art followed the modernist approach to ‘primitive art’. More than six hundred objects of African art from European and American collections were shown in an exhibition that claimed to be the most comprehensive of its kind to date. Comparing the display techniques employed in African Negro Art with the almost identical forms of presentation in the exhibition Modern Works of Art shown at MoMA immediately before it, it becomes evident that African Negro Art represents a culmination of the tendency in the early twentieth century to view African artefacts no longer from an anthropological perspective but to understand them as works of art, to emphasise their sculptural design and aesthetic expressive qualities and thus detach them from all functional and symbolic contexts of their cultures of origin.4 Walker Evans was commissioned by the museum to document the exhibits in African Negro Art. His work resulted in an eponymous edition of seventeen portfolios, comprising 477 photographs. Evans photographed the evenly lit objects against a neutral background, giving no indication of their size or surroundings. The sculptures are rendered in close-up and framed very tightly. As Virginia-Lee Webb notes, Evans used a very deliberate procedure, ‘editing out any elements that might distract the viewer from the subject or be irrelevant to its form, both literally in the print and initially through the lens and by fitting the objects snugly into the frame’.5 His photographs were regarded by contemporary critics as ‘perfect documents’ – a view repeated by a recent publication of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art on this work by Evans, from which Webb’s quote is taken. What made these photographs perfect documents of the objects on display? The procedures Evans employed seem to take even further the principle of decontextualising the African sculptures that the exhibition itself followed. The radical removal of the objects both from their historical-cultural contexts and from their presentation setting in the modern exhibition context is hardly compatible with MoMA’s intentions not only to address a white audience with the portfolios but also to reach an African American audience. Thus, Evans’s portfolio was donated to Black educational institutions such as Fisk University in Nashville and the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, while it was sold to museums such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Musée de Trocadéro in Paris.6 What is most remarkable about this distribution policy is that it conveyed a decontextualising modernist view of African art to African American institutions. Thomas Mabry, at the time Executive Director of MoMA and a

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former lecturer at Fisk University, already proposed in his application to the Rockefeller Foundation for funding for the portfolio project that it be given ‘gratis to 3 leading Negro colleges’.7 The idea for this gesture probably came from an exchange with the African American writer James Weldon Johnson, who had invited Mabry to Fisk University: Mabry’s intention for the show reached beyond the museum’s walls. Two years earlier he had been teaching creative writing to black students at Fisk University in Nashville, at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson, one of the prime movers in Negro education at the time. Mabry had become keenly aware of the American Negro’s lack of a tangible history, and he felt strongly that African sculpture should not be limited to a privileged urban museum audience.8

When Norman Lewis viewed the exhibition African Negro Art at the age of twenty-five, he was a young painter at a critical point in his early career.9 A student at Columbia University, he was painting in a social realist style with a focus on scenes of everyday life in Harlem. In the 1940s he then became part of the Abstract Expressionist movement and exhibited alongside artists such as Willem de Kooning and Ad Reinhardt. In 1950, he was the only Black artist to participate in the legendary Artists’ Sessions at Studio 35 in New York. In the next chapter, I will discuss in more detail how Lewis’s Abstract Expressionist painting took up a significant stance between abstract art and political activism. Lewis’s encounter with the African masks at MoMA took place at a crucial time in the formation of his identity as an artist, a period when he joined artist groups such as the 306 Group (1934) and co-founded organisations including the Harlem Artists Guild (1935), which, among other things, advocated for greater consideration of Black artists in the Federal Arts Project, part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. In these contexts, Lewis met fellow painters such as Hale Woodruff, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock, and moved in the same circles as writers like Claude McKay and Ralph Ellison. These were years in which the segregation of the artistic fields in New York allowed for greater permeability than had been the case before – and would be again as the Second World War progressed.10 Although we have no evidence of contact between the two artists, Lewis and Evans at least had mutual friends like Mark Tobey, and they shared a workspace at MoMA for some time. Evans, however, worked on the photographic documentation after the exhibition’s opening hours, over a period of many weeks, while Lewis visited the museum so often during the day that the guards got to know him.11 The works of Lewis and Evans show some obvious differences in their treatment of the Dan mask. In Evans’s work, the mask is shot frontally and fitted tightly into the frame. It is impossible to say whether the mask in the

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picture is hanging, standing, lying, or floating. In this contract project, Evans generally avoided making the source of light identifiable. The object thus casts no shadow; it is not set in a discernible space and it appears extremely flat in the radical frontal shot.12 Sculptural qualities are clearly suppressed in favour of emphasising the lines of the face (brows, eye slits, mouth, and the vertical line from the forehead to the nose). The extreme manner in which Evans makes the physicality of the sculpture disappear becomes even more apparent through comparison with Lewis’s drawing, which is borne by an almost contradictory conception. Lewis depicts the mask in semi-profile and from below. In addition, the motif of the mask is moved from dead centre and shifted slightly to the upper left. The light comes from the left and the mask casts a shadow on the wall to the right. Unlike with Evans’s photograph, we can actually speak of a wall here, since Lewis’s perspective undoubtedly suggests an object hanging on the wall. The mouth, nose, chin, and cheek areas of the mask stand out vividly through their modelling in black, blue, and brown tones and their bright highlights; the eye sockets, on the other hand, are clearly recessed. To describe in greater detail what is obvious here: Lewis gives the mask fleshly qualities; he humanises and brings it to life by depicting the eyes and mouth as slightly open (the pale sandpaper background shines through) and interpreting the nostrils as round and soft, whereas Evans depicts the nose geometrically as an equilateral triangle. Evans follows here the tendency in European modernism to reduce African masks to geometric shapes, as we are familiar with from Picasso, Lipschitz, and Modigliani. With his anthropomorphic interpretation, Lewis displays a different level of interest in the mask that stands in clear contrast to Evans’s approach. Lewis sees the mask more as a human face, characterised by a relatively high degree of ‘animation’. The mask is interpreted not only as human, though, but also as African. His mask is clearly Black, in colouring and in terms of its African facial features. At the same time, Lewis reproduces in his drawing an essential functional property of the mask that is not visible at all in Evans’s photograph. By clearly depicting the holes on the sides of the mask that served to attach it to the wearer’s head, and without which the mask could not be performed, Lewis complements the anthropomorphic revival of the object – in which one might see a gesture of identification – with a reference to the cultural use of an object that was conveyed in the exhibition as well as in Walker Evans’s ‘perfect documents’ as detached from any context of action.13 The ambiguity of the mask

The emergence of African American modernism was tied to the formation of a new race consciousness in the early twentieth century. An important component of this new self-awareness and the efforts to strengthen it were

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the various forms of reference to Africa and the African heritage of Black Americans. ‘What is Africa to me?’ is the recurring question asked in Countee Cullen’s 1925 poem Heritage.14 As part of this movement towards selfempowerment through the reconceptualisation of Black identity, an engagement with African art was integral to the artistic search for modern forms of Black expression. This engagement reached its first peak within the scope of the New Negro movement after the First World War with its rich productivity in all cultural fields. An early example of this interest in African art is the bronze sculpture Ethiopia Awakening by Meta Warrick Fuller (1921), which has been described as being ‘among the earliest examples of American art to reflect the formal exigencies of an aesthetics based on African sculpture’.15 This allegorical figure of resurrection, inspired by Egyptian sculpture and referring in its title to Ethiopia as the only non-colonised country in Africa, shows a Black woman with the artist’s features freeing herself from mummy-like bandaging. She is about to throw off her shackles and spring into action, and she thus became an iconic figure of the New Negro movement, which sought to liberate African Americans from the social and cultural restrictions they were subjected to in a post-slavery era marked by segregation and racist stereotypes. Fuller’s approximately life-size sculpture was commissioned by W.E.B. Du Bois for the African American contribution to the America’s Making Exposition in New York, for which he was co-organiser. Du Bois was thus continuing his collaboration with an artist who had already created the sculpture Emancipation in 1913 for the National Emancipation Exposition in Philadelphia (on the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863), which Du Bois also co-organised. The blending of Egyptian and Ethiopian references in Fuller’s work reflects the intersection of different discourses of Black liberation at the time. The African American recourse to cultural origins, the recovery of ancient Egyptian civilisation as an African culture, and the double meaning of ‘Ethiopia’ both in terms of the ancient Nubian kingdoms (or pre-colonial Africa in general) and as a contemporary African empire that successfully resisted colonialism are also recurrent themes in Du Bois’s work of these years.16 The same year Fuller made Ethiopia, Du Bois emphasised at the PanAfrican Congress in London the central importance of Ethiopian independence for the liberation and development of Black people all over the world and described it as a disgrace that England and France had practically invited Italy to attack Abyssinia in the Treaty of London (1915)17 – aggression that would then actually take place in 1935 with the Abyssinian War under Mussolini. As early as 1914, Du Bois had published an obituary of Emperor Menelik II in The Crisis; for the Emancipation Exposition in 1913, he staged the theatrical pageant Star of Ethiopia as a way to familiarise African American visitors with their African history in an accessible fashion; and in The Negro, his attempt at

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Meta Warrick Fuller, Ethiopia Awakening, 1921, bronze, 170 × 40.6 × 73.6 cm. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, New York. The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

a history of Africa from a Black perspective published in 1915, the reintegration of Egyptian culture and history into Black history was a major concern: ‘Egyptian civilization seems to have been African in its beginnings and its main line of development, despite strong influences from all parts of Asia [...] Egyptian monuments show distinctly Negro and mulatto faces.’18 As in the case of the Ethiopian references, the references to Egypt by Du Bois, The Crisis and wider circles of African American culture and media audiences, concern both the country’s historical greatness and the current anti-colonial struggles for independence.19 Meta Warrick Fuller’s Ethiopia Awakening is undoubtedly more modern and open in its meaning than the symbolically overloaded idea for such an allegory that Du Bois formulated when he commissioned the artist. The sculpture condenses some of the manifold references to Ethiopia, Egypt, and Africa into a figure of liberation. René Ater writes:

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Encounters with masks

‘Fuller’s ­decision to reference Egypt and Ethiopia in her form and to racialize Ethiopia’s features operates within these constellations of ideas related to the scientific debate over the racial identity of Egyptians and African American scholars’ claim of racial linkage to Egypt and Ethiopia.’20 Fuller’s solution to Ethiopia perhaps also represents the liberation of the artistic imagination from the paternalism of the influential male intellectuals of the time with their views on art.21 Ethiopian and Egyptian symbolism lost its importance somewhat in the course of the 1920s and 1930s compared to references to sub-Saharan African art. While the Ethiopian frame of reference continued to have its place, especially in Rastafarian culture, and Egypt occupied a central position in the mythology and iconography of Afrofuturism, especially in the work of Sun Ra, references to African art, which as ‘art nègre’ or ‘primitive art’ also served as inspiration and projection surface for white modern artists, become predominant in the visual arts of the New Negro movement. Many works, such as Sargent Claude Johnson’s bronze masks from the 1930s, are clearly based on West and Central African models. Malvin Gray Johnson’s painting Negro Masks (1932) featured Yuruba and Bwa masks from the Blondiau-Theatre Arts Collection of Primitive African Art exhibition organised by Alain Locke at the New Art Circle in New York.22 Johnson’s Self-Portrait (1934), painted shortly afterwards, shows the painter in a Cubist-style fractured studio space in a selfreflexive pose in front of his painting Negro Masks. The painter’s identification with his African heritage is obvious. ‘Nothing is more galvanizing than the sense of a cultural past. This at least the intelligent presentation of African Art will supply to us,’ wrote Alain Locke in the magazine Opportunity in 1924.23 In his preface to the catalogue for the aforementioned exhibition, Alain Locke writes, following a general description of the works of art on view and their significance for European modernism: ‘it is curious to note that the American descendants of these African craftsmen have a strange deficiency in the arts of their ancestors.’24 Locke argues that the African art that contributed so significantly to  the European avant-garde of the early twentieth century should hence all the more legitimately be taken up by the artists of the African diaspora and translated into an aesthetic expression of the new self-confidence of the New Negro movement. He speaks unequivocally of the necessity of recapturing the ‘creative originality’ of African arts. This recovery of cultural heritage could not be limited to individual artistic acts alone, however, as can be traced in the paintings of Malvin Gray Johnson, for example. Rather, the reconnection of contemporary African American art to a transatlantic Black cultural history also demanded an institutional reclamation of African arts for the artistic and educational ambitions of the African diaspora. Whereas Locke had initially advised the young artists he promoted (such as Aaron Douglas)

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Malvin Gray Johnson, Negro Masks, 1932, oil on canvas, 50.8 × 45.7 cm. Hampton University Museum Collection, Hampton University, Hampton, VA.

to visit the collection of Albert C. Barnes for a combined study of European modernists and African art, in 1927 he became involved in the purchase of the Belgian Blondiau collection for a planned Harlem Museum of African Art.25 Although this museum could not be realised, the collection initially found a home in the Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and thus became an important resource for Black studies on the art and cultural history of Africa and the diaspora. Locke’s private African collection was exhibited in the newly established art gallery at Howard University in Washington, DC, in 1928 to

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Malvin Gray Johnson, Self-portrait, 1934, oil on canvas, 97.2 × 76.2 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Gift of the Harmon Foundation (1967.57.30). © 2021. Photo Smithsonian American Art Museum / Art Resource / Scala, Florence.

provide a source of inspiration for students and faculty at the Black university where the philosopher taught for three decades. When discussing the mask in the context of the emergence of Black modernism, one must consider at least two meanings of the term. The first is the

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mask as a physical object, as an African artefact studied by artists as a source of inspiration for formal invention and in terms of remembering the cultural heritage of the African diaspora. However, as Frantz Fanon made clear in Black Skin, White Masks, the mask has another connotation that is central to the discourse on Black identity. It has to do with racist stereotypes, socially enforced role-playing, and strategic masking. ‘A Negro is forever in combat with his own image,’ Fanon wrote in the 1950s, referring to the challenge faced by the Black subject to respond to the image of himself produced in white culture.26 Although he presented the most substantial theoretical analysis of this problem, Fanon was not the first to discuss it. In a society like that of the USA, which has been shaped by racism for centuries, any effort to create new self-images has to contend with established stereotypes of the representation of Black Americans. Langston Hughes addresses the issue in his 1925 poem Minstrel Man: Because my mouth Is wide with laughter And my throat Is deep with song, You do not think I suffer after I have held my pain So long? Because my mouth Is wide with laughter You do not hear My inner cry? Because my feet Are gay with dancing, You do not know I die?27

Perhaps even more directly, Paul Laurence Dunbar articulated in a poem from 1896 the social compulsion to wear a mask in a post-slavery US society marked by segregation and stereotyping: We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, – This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. [...] We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

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To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask!28

In Locke’s anthology The New Negro, the two forms of the mask motif – the physical and the metaphorical – meet. Some articles, including Locke’s own contributions, are illustrated with reproductions of African masks from the collection of Albert C. Barnes. Locke calls on African American artists to form ‘a school of Negro art’ and to found such a movement on the basis of an in-depth study of the ‘art of the ancestors’. At the same time, he speaks of the urgent need to tear down the disfiguring masks that white America had placed on the image of Black Americans. When he praises the sensitive portraits of Black personalities that Winold Reiss contributed to his book, he interprets the German painter’s achievement as having captured the spirit and soul of a group in society without having imposed any preconceived ‘racial’ schemes. According to Locke, it was the duty of art to ‘discover and reveal the beauty which prejudice and caricature have overlaid’.29 At one point, he reconciles the contradictory aspects of the mask – the disfiguring stereotype and the empowering relationship to African art: There is in the mere knowledge of the skill and the unique mastery of the arts of the ancestors the valuable and stimulating realization that the Negro is not a cultural foundling without his own inheritance. Our timid and apologetic imitativeness and overburdening sense of cultural indebtedness have, let us hope, their natural end in such knowledge and realization.30

In this plea for a new African American art, the positive reference to the meaning of the mask associated with African culture is an important tool in the struggle against the negative meaning of the mask as a racist stereotype and caricature in American culture. Aaron Douglas, in his mature style, lent this dual dynamic its definitive form. When he began working for magazines such as The Crisis and Opportunity, Douglas developed a distinctive style of sharply cut silhouetted forms and dynamic spaces based on the specific mixture of Art Deco, Expressionism, and African motifs that he owed to his teacher Winold Reiss, expanding it with Cubist and Orphist design elements. On a thematic level, in cycles such as Aspects of Negro Life (1934), he succeeded in linking the (imagined) African past and the history of slavery with the liberation toward a modern urban life and the anticipation of a successful future for African Americans. While still studying with Reiss, Douglas was already aware of the differences between his teacher’s style and his own work as an African American artist. In a letter to his girlfriend, he describes a

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moment of excitement that gripped him as he continued working at home on a drawing of a Black man that he had begun in Reiss’s class. ‘I took my work home and completed it in crayon without the model. Oh babe, I wish you could see it. It looks exactly as if it had been carved out of wood.’31 According to Amy Kirschke, when Douglas characterises the head ‘as if carved out of wood’, he is referring to his efforts to link his work more closely to African sculpture.32 It is not clear today which drawing Douglas was referring to with these thoughts, but his illustration for the cover of The Crisis (November 1926), which depicts the head of a Black man, fits Douglas’s words in the letter. This drawing is certainly not one of his more advanced works, but it demonstrates a keen interest in sculpting a head using concave and convex forms, translated into the two dimensions of the picture plane. In contrast to the rather schematic paraphrasing of African masks in his teacher’s work, Douglas is obviously interested in uniting the (African) mask as a physical object with the living (Black) face, in the spirit of Alain Locke’s programme of an African American revival of traditional African art. This comes close to the formulation of the ‘living glance trained upon the object’ later used by Resnais and Marker in the sense of updating the African artefact by way of identity politics, even if Douglas’s art of the 1920s is not consistent with the decidedly anti-colonial and institution-critical agenda of Les statues meurent aussi. A somewhat differently situated example of the study of African art in exhibition contexts at the time of Norman Lewis’s drawings of African masks in the MoMA exhibition is the 1938 painting Les Fétiches by Loïs Mailou Jones. Jones was painting landscapes, still lifes, and urban scenes in a late Impressionist style when she came across African masks in Paris museums and galleries: ‘I went into the Paris galleries, where fetiches and masks were displayed, and I made many sketches.’33 From these sketches she developed the oil painting Les Fétiches, which marks a radical stylistic break in her work. The painting depicts five masks and a statuette from different African cultures, which are arranged in dynamic relations to each other in an undefined space. The geometric forms and the Cubist treatment of the volumes make it clear that Jones was already looking at African art through the eyes of the Parisian avant-garde. What is remarkable, however, is the dynamic movement in which the masks seem to find themselves, which is atypical of the European view of African art. European primitivism did not embrace African art, despite its origins in performative practices, as a dynamic art. Modern artists in Europe instead encountered the masks in museums and on the market as objects whose design principles and expressive qualities could teach them something. They had little idea of the cultural integration of these artefacts into integrative practices (dance, music, art). Loïs Mailou Jones was coming from a very different background when she encountered the African masks in the Paris galleries, not only as a Black artist but also as an artist

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Aaron Douglas, cover for The Crisis, November 1926. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021.

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Loïs Mailou Jones, Les Fétiches, 1938, oil on linen, 64.7 × 54.0 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Museum purchase made possible by N.H. Green, R. Harlan, and F. Musgrave. © 2021. Photo Smithsonian American Art Museum / Art Resource / Scala, Florence.

with professional experience in the performing arts. After her art training in Boston, Jones worked as a young woman in the 1920s in fabric design with the costume designer Grace Ripley, making masks for the dance company run by Ruth Saint Denis and Ted Shawn. ‘Jones cited the Ripley Studios internship as one of her first encounters with non-Western art, specifically

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African masking traditions,’ writes Rebecca VanDiver.34 In the summer of 1934, the artist took a course with Franz Boas at Columbia University in New York, which she completed with a project on ‘Mask Making’, studying masks from different cultures.35 She was working during the same period with the musician and choreographer Asadata Dafora from Sierra Leone, who brought African music and dance to the USA, and designed masks for some of his productions. As Cheryl Finley notes: ‘The mask as a moving form – as danced – or, to borrow a phrase from art historian Robert Farris Thompson, as “African art in motion,” came to life for Jones in the revolutionary choreography and percussive drumming of Dafora’s “dance drama”.’36 Looking at the extraordinary dynamics of the masks in Les Fétiches, it seems that Jones, drawing on her experience of the mask as a prop in theatrical or musical performances, has set the African artefacts in motion, staging a kind of dance of the masks, graphically supported by the sweeping white brushstrokes around the central Dan mask. The mobilisation of the masks in Les Fétiches becomes even more interesting if one follows the convincing argument of Wendy Grossman, which demonstrates that Jones painted the masks on the basis of the photographs in Walker Evans’s portfolio African Negro Art.37 A copy of the portfolio was donated to the art department of Howard University, where Jones had taught since 1930. Grossman shows that, while Jones’s impressions of African art in the Paris galleries would have provided an impetus to paint this picture, the individual motifs of the Dan, Lega, Kete, and Kifwebe masks and the Baule statuette would have been modelled on Evans’s photographs. I referred at the beginning of this chapter to the irony inherent in the fact that MoMA conveyed through Evans’s portfolio a distinctly Western modernist and decontextualising view of African art to Black colleges and universities. When Loïs Mailou Jones used these photos of isolated artefacts for Les Fétiches in order to place them in a ‘kaleidoscopic swirl of African objects’,38 she was of course not aiming to reintegrate the masks into their original cultural contexts. What she was undoubtedly concerned with, however, was transforming the masks back from exhibited and collected static pieces into dynamic objects that recall their original performative functions. Unlike Norman Lewis, who drew the Dan mask on site at the African Negro Art exhibition and – in contrast to Evans’s photograph – gave it a fleshly quality and lively features, Jones took the photographed mask as her point of departure, not anthropomorphising it but radically enhancing its expressive power and energy. It is certainly no coincidence that she pursued this re-Africanisation of objects locked up in Western collections at the time of the Négritude movement, whose representatives, such as Louis Thomas Achille and Jeanne (Jane) Nardal, the artist was in contact with in Paris.39

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The hostage rescue

In contrast to the counter-primitivist approaches of the first half of the twentieth century, for which aesthetic dimensions were at least as important as political references, with the more radical decolonisation movement of the postwar period the aesthetic aspect was no longer the first priority. In the wake of the anti-colonial emancipation efforts after the Second World War, the focus shifted towards a political interpretation of African art in Western collections and the concept of liberation or (symbolic) re-conquest of these objects. Fred Wilson later described the status of these colonially appropriated sculptures hidden away in museums in his work The Colonial Collection (1990) as akin to that of ‘hostages’ and interpreted their aestheticisation as a kind of anaesthetic function in relation to their history and the history of the imperial museum.40 The rescue and repatriation of these hostages of colonialism is the subject of a few African films produced in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, the current debate on the restitution of colonial looted art, which has gained widespread political and media attention in the last ten years, has a long history that reaches back at least to the decolonisation movements of the mid-twentieth century. A prominent case in which political demands for restitution of African objects in Western museums were conjoined with an artistic project of symbolic recovery was set in the context of the second World Festival of Black Culture (FESTAC 77), which took place in Lagos in 1977. The organisers of FESTAC 77 had chosen the image of a sixteenth-century Benin ivory mask depicting Queen Idia iyoba, mother of Oba Esigie of the Kingdom of Benin, as the emblem of the festival. After a request for a loan of this mask for the duration of the festival was refused by the British Museum, the debate about the rightful place of African artworks in the postcolonial age intensified. The apparent hopelessness of repatriating even temporarily one of the countless objects looted by the British colonisers in the course of a military expedition in 1897 motivated the Nigerian filmmaker Eddie Ugbomah to make a film about the recapture of a Benin mask from the British Museum. The Mask, released in 1979, tells of the secret mission of a James Bond-like hero, played by Ugbomah himself, who is tasked by a fictitious Nigerian president to break into the British Museum to free the mask from its captivity in the imperial institution and bring it home to its country of origin.41 As early as 1966, on the occasion of the Prémier festival mondial des arts nègres in Dakar, organised by Léopold Sédar Senghor, the organisers of the Nigerian contribution had published various printed material featuring the ivory mask, including a special issue of Nigeria Today entitled ‘Our Cultural Heritage’. As Dominique Malaquais and Cédric Vincent note, the intention behind this was twofold: ‘At the same time as it celebrated the glory of Nigeria’s past, it highlighted

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Poster of Festac ’77, Lagos 1977.

colonial thefts of artwork embodying this past.’42 Senghor’s large-scale exhibition Art nègre: sources, evolution, expansion at the Dakar festival was made up of loans from Western museums. As early as 1965, the poet and journalist Paulin Joachim called for ‘Rendez-nous l’art nègre’ (Give us back Black art) in an article in the Senegalese magazine Bingo, and on the occasion of the First

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Ousmane Sembène, La Noire de ..., 1966, film stills.

Pan-African Festival in Algiers in 1969, a manifesto was published calling for measures ‘to retrieve the objects and archives pillaged by colonial forces’.43 In the run-up to and during the FESTAC 77 festival in Lagos, the Benin mask from the British Museum was omnipresent – on printed matter, T-shirts, LP covers, postage stamps, banners, etc. Eddie Ugbomah responded to the evident hopelessness of political efforts to return or temporarily loan looted African artworks with his fictional narrative of a secret task force enlisted to liberate the Idia iyoba mask. Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike criticises the quality of this film, but also cites Ugbomah’s political intentions: ‘The British stole our treasures, they felt the impact of the film’s message, and hence the BBC

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was forced to make “Whose Treasure, Ours or Theirs?” as a counter response. I was flown to London to discuss the topic when it aired on BBC.’44 While The Mask can be understood as an artist’s direct intervention in the debate on the restitution of African art, other artists have proposed in their works more symbolic but no less critical readings of African sculptures in postcolonial scenarios. At the Prémier festival mondial des arts nègres in 1966 in Dakar, Ousmane Sembène’s film La Noire de … was awarded the festival’s Grand Prix. The film tells the story of the return of an African mask from Europe to Africa in a very different way. Shot just a few years after Senegal’s independence from French colonial rule, La Noire de … tells the tragic story of a young woman who works as a nanny for a French family in Dakar before later working in the family’s household in Antibes. Hired as a nanny, she comes to the Côte d’Azur full of expectations of the elegant life in France. Very soon, however, she finds herself forced into menial household tasks and bound to the family home, receiving no pay for a long time and being humiliated by her employers and their guests. Finally, Diouana sees suicide as the only way to regain her self-determination. Sembène’s film, based on a newspaper report about such a case, is to be understood as a critical analysis of the seamless transition from colonialism to neocolonial relations of exploitation. The colonisers, in this case the French family, have left the colony after independence, but they continue to uphold the colonial power structures back in their home country. As the film title suggests, La Noire de is about the reification of the African subject in these power relations. The subtext of the film, however, has an object as its protagonist. The mask hanging in the French flat, which Diouana recognises when she arrives there, is – as a flashback makes clear – a gift she herself had given to her employers in Dakar, where the mask immediately found its place in the small collection of African objects in the French family’s home. Towards the end of the film, as Diouana prepares her escape from the captivity of the French household and packs her suitcase with her few belongings, she takes the mask from the living room wall, whereupon a fierce fight breaks out with the lady of the house. Finally, she puts the mask on her packed suitcase. After Diouana’s suicide, her French employer travels to Dakar to hand over her personal belongings to her family, including the mask. He offers her mother money, which she rejects without a word. As the Frenchman leaves the simple residential neighbourhood, Diouana’s little brother, who has meanwhile grabbed the mask and holds it in front of his face, begins to follow him. The final scene stages the coloniser’s retreat from the terrain of the locals, disturbed and haunted by the mask that is once again in African possession and use. While the 1979 Nigerian film can be understood as an artistic contribution to the restitution debate, Ousmane Sembène’s film from the 1960s tells an

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allegorical story of power relations after African independence and criticises the attempts of former colonisers to buy their way out of their historical debt. The Nigerian version of James Bond in The Mask is interested in a particular object of cultural significance to his community and its return from enforced diaspora in the British Museum. Eddie Ugbomah offers an imaginary compensation for the real return of the postcolonial hostage mask that is denied. In contrast, Sembène’s mask does not have the status of cultural heritage at all. It was not even stolen by its Western owners but given to Europeans as a gift from the recently liberated Africans. The journey of the mask from Senegal to France and back to Senegal is described by Sembène not only as a journey through space and time but above all as a series of transformations of meaning. The mask makes its first appearance as a simple child’s toy before Diouana buys it from her little brother to give to her French employers. In the living room of the whites in Dakar, where it is placed among other objects, it mutates into a work of art with primarily aesthetic value. Sembène also includes here a commentary on the question of authenticity, which is central to the discourse of tribal art. When the Frenchman compares the new piece with other objects in the modest collection, he remarks to his wife, ‘It looks like the real thing.’ When the mask is later repossessed by the African woman, it again changes status, this time from an object of exotic contemplation to a symbol of home and identity. Back in Africa and now worn on her brother’s face, the mask takes on magical powers that haunt the fleeing white man. In the historical context of post-independence Senegal in the mid-1960s – which the film repeatedly addresses – the mask, freed from its bondage as an aesthetic accoutrement of neocolonial power relations, is used as a symbolic force powerful enough to drive the coloniser away. La Noire de … casts a sharp light on the postcolonial labour migration to Europe in the 1960s and criticises the economic dependence of the newly decolonised African states.45 Sembène’s demand for the liberation of African societies from the neocolonial grip, which he articulates more explicitly in later films such as Xala (1975) and Guelwaar (1993), finds its cultural equivalent in La Noire de … in the reappropriation and repatriation of the African mask. In between the Senegalese film by Sembène (1966) and the Nigerian film by Ugbomah (1979), the Ghanaian director Nii Kwate Owoo made You Hide Me (1970), probably the first African film to directly address the question of the storage of African art in European museums and to vehemently advocate the restitution of objects looted from the former colonies. The sixteenminute short film begins with a shot of the British Museum in London, accompanied by an African (chanting) song. As Owoo explains during a discussion fifty years later, this is an ancient war chant used to prepare warriors for the coming battle.46 The protagonists introduced in the next scene, a young woman with an afro hairstyle and the filmmaker himself, represent in

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Encounters with masks

their appearance the image of Black Power activists ready for battle that was current in the late 1960s. Owoo’s father was involved in Kwame Nkrumah’s party during the fight against British colonialism, and Owoo’s own politicisation was mainly shaped by reading Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver while making the film in the course of graduating from the London Film School.47 In You Hide Me, Owoo brings together the political struggles against colonialism in Africa and the anti-racist struggles of the 1960s in Europe and the USA. Owoo and his companion enter the storage rooms in the basement of the museum and start taking African sculptures from the shelves and out of their packaging for a closer look. ‘We are going to look at what they have in their collections,’ says the spoken commentary, which talks about the origin and violent theft of the objects, including in the context of the British looting of Benin in 1897, as the two protagonists cautiously approach the artworks: ‘We came across an enormous collection ... thousands of important works of art that have never been exhibited. Deep underground, in the basement. We spent a lot of time examining the artefacts we came across. Half of the time was spent filming, and half just satisfying our curiosity.’48 The tactile nature of this approach to expropriated cultural heritage can be compared to the scene from Les Statues meurent aussi by Marker and Resnais discussed above, in which the young Black woman ponders the African mask in the display case. Owoo takes things a step further by no longer focusing solely on observation as a starting point for critical reflection but instead showing the protagonists actually taking the artefacts into their hands and literally grasping them as an act of at least momentary disposal over the heritage hidden in the cellars of Western institutions. This may also be a critique of the primacy of the visual perception of art in European modernism, as represented by its staging in museums. Owoo and his small team were allowed only one day of filming in the museum, under the watchful eye of fifteen security guards.49 The film criticises not only the theft but also the devaluation of these objects that exist in a cultural vacuum in museums. It describes the role of ethnology and the corresponding collections in the creation of a colonial worldview shaped by racist hierarchies, denounces the Western power to define African art, which also has an effect on Africans, and finally ends with a plea for the return of the artefacts to Africa: ‘We, the people of Africa and of African descent, demand that our works of art which embody our history, our civilization, our religion and culture should immediately and unconditionally be returned to us.’50 After the first, highly successful screening at the Africa Centre of the University of London and a showing in Ghana, where the film was perceived by the authorities as too hostile to Britain, it would reach only a very limited audience in the decades to come. Today, against the backdrop of the ­reignited

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Nii Kwate Owoo, You Hide Me, 1970, film stills.

discussion on the restitution of looted colonial art, not least through the report by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy commissioned by the French President Emmanuel Macron, many would consider it highly topical.51 Passing on the key

My final example of a symbolic reappropriation of African art comes from the context of global migration at the end of the twentieth century. It brings together two strands of Black reflection on African cultural heritage – the Ethiopian-Egyptian references I addressed in connection with Meta Warrick

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Fuller and the encounter with African masks in the museum as exemplified in the artworks of Norman Lewis, Malvin Gray Johnson, and Loïs Mailou Jones, and the films of Marker and Resnais, Ugbomah, and Owoo. The song Tam-Tam de l’Afrique from the first album (... De la Planète Mars, 1991) by the French rap group IAM, founded in Marseille in 1989,52 samples passages from Stevie Wonder’s song Pastime Paradise (1976).53 The music video shows a group of young second-generation immigrants invading a European private collection of African art in order to revive the objects stored there. This act of reanimation then becomes the springboard for a historical narrative related to the social experiences of young migrants in French cities. At the beginning, we see young men emerging from a forest, evoking associations with a guerrilla group. One of the men presents an old key that gives access to an aristocratic villa containing a collection of African sculptures. While the video starts out in black-and-white, it switches to colour with the first gentle touch of a sculpture by one of the protagonists. Colour is used here as a formal means to indicate a different relationship to the objects than is assumed in museum presentations. This relationship focuses in subsequent images on a critical examination of history that begins with violence in colonial fi ­ rst-contact situations, continues with images of enslavement, the ‘middle passage’, and plantation labour in the Americas, and finally invokes the undying hope of return to the African homeland. The song directly addresses the plundering of African culture by the ­colonisers – ‘pillé leur culture, brulé leurs racines’ – but at the same time emphasises the formation of a new culture in the diaspora – ‘ma musique est née dans un champs de cotton’. The African drums (Les Tam-Tam de l’Afrique) function as a continuous motif for a never-quite-severed bond with the homeland. IAM revives artefacts reified by colonial appropriation and museum keeping, transforming them into living objects capable of telling suppressed stories and, through them, illuminating the historical background behind contemporary racism and the post- and neo-colonial division of the world. The structure of the IAM clip recalls the early cinematic consideration of institutionally reified artworks as trigger for an anti-colonial agenda in Marker’s and Resnais’s 1953 Les Statues meurent aussi mentioned above. In the older film, it is a Black woman who evokes images of slavery, colonial violence, and anti-colonial struggles in her encounter with a mask in a museum. Here, as in Tam-Tam de l’Afrique, the sculpture represents the connecting link between present and past. Yet a crucial difference can be discerned in the way the two films speak about power, culture, and identity. In Les statues meurent aussi, the conflict is clearly oriented towards the opposition of Black versus white or African versus European culture. Since white culture has caused the soul of the statues to die through their transformation into aesthetic objects, the filmmakers see their true place as being not in the museum

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IAM, Tam Tam de l’Afrique, 1991, video stills.

but in their cultures of origin. Ousmane Sembène had taken a similar view with his portrayal in La Noire de …. What distinguishes IAM’s more recent position in Tam-Tam de l’Afrique is a different politics of localisation, characterised by a link between a diversified collective identity, as embodied by the group itself, and references to African history and the history of the African diaspora. French rap has its origins in French musicians’ contacts with American rap music during the 1980s. In the late 1980s, when the group IAM was formed, one of its central concerns was resistance to the increasing antimigrant racism embodied in the rise of the Front National and its attacks against Marseille as a migrant city par excellence. The group name IAM stands for ‘Invasion Arrivé de Mars’ or ‘Imperial Asiatic Men’, among other things. The composition of the group is ethnically diverse. Most members were born in France in the late 1960s, with family roots in Italy, Spain, Algeria, Senegal, Madagascar, and Réunion. The African or Afrocentric element in IAM’s complex conception of identity comes, remarkably, not from one of the group’s Black members but from Akhenaton, a.k.a. Philippe Fragione, who studied the Afrocentric writings of Cheikh Anta Diop when he became involved with African American hip-hop during a visit to Italian relatives in the USA. In the spirit of reclaiming ideologically occupied

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t­ erritory, the Senegalese anthropologist Diop had been interpreting ancient Egyptian civilisation as Black African culture in his writings since the 1950s, elaborating a point of view articulated half a century earlier by W.E.B Du Bois.54 On the basis of this reading, the members of IAM adopted names such as Kheops, Imhotep, and Akhenaton to create a kind of pharaohism, which becomes very clear in another video (Pharaon revient), in which the group stage themselves as resurrected pharaohs. At the same time, the musicians (none of whom has Asian roots) call themselves ‘Imperial Asiatic Men’ to attack the narrow understanding of cultural belonging in French society. The mythical identity-political cosmos of the group cannot be elaborated here, but it should be clear that it cannot be described in conventional terms of national, ethnic, or ‘racial’ belonging. The transcultural identity as expressed in the collective first-person voice of the song, for example in the line ‘My music was born in the cotton fields’, underlines the shared social and political situation of heterogeneous migrant youth in a city like Marseille, who find their inspiration for musical expression in diverse crossover forms of rap, raï, and other genres. The symbolic recapture of African art in Tam-Tam de l’Afrique therefore points to a significant shift in the notion of cultural heritage and rightful ownership. To illustrate this shift, we can recall the aforementioned BBC programme ‘Whose Treasure Is It? Ours or Theirs?’ from the 1970s – a question that resurfaced a few years ago in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s much discussed essay ‘Whose Culture Is It?’ on the question of restitution.55 The answer proposed by IAM is significant. At the beginning of the video, the symbolic key to the imprisoned African artworks is shown by Shurik’n, an African group member. At the end of the video, after the sculptures have been freed and the stories of colonialism and slavery have been told, emphasising music as ad ­ riving force for the will to survive, the final image shows us Akhenaton, a non-Black member of the group, in possession of the key to colonial h ­ istory: the stolen masks now also belong to the others excluded in neocolonial society. Notes 1 Tania Barson and Peter Gorschlüter (eds), Afro Modern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic (Liverpool: Tate Liverpool, 2010). Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). 2 The literature on this subject is too extensive to be cited here. For an anthology of original texts on primitivism, see Jack Flam with Miriam Deutsch (eds), Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2003). 3 All quotations are taken from the English subtitles for Les statues meurent aussi by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, France, 1953.

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4 In the USA, African Negro Art continued the line of enquiry that had begun in 1914 with the exhibition Statuary in Wood by African Savages: The Root of Modern Art at Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 in New York. In contrast to this aesthetic perspective on African art, the Brooklyn Museum showed an exhibition titled Primitive Negro Art, Chiefly from the Belgian Congo in 1923 that was in keeping with the presentation traditions of European ethnological museums. 5 Virginia-Lee Webb, ‘Perfect Documents’, in Perfect Documents: Walker Evans and African Art, 1935, exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2000, p. 44. 6 Ibid., pp. 29 and 38. 7 Ibid., p. 28. Mabry and Evans had already met in 1931. 8 Belinda Rathbone, Walker Evans: A Biography (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), pp. 99–100. 9 Among the African American artists who emphasised the importance of the African Negro Art exhibition for their development was Romare Bearden, who was the same age as Lewis and produced several reports on his impressions of the exhibition, as did other artists from Harlem. Romare Bearden, ‘The 1930s: An Art Reminiscence’, in Robert G. O’Meally (ed.), The Romare Bearden Reader (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2019), pp. 156–61; and Bearden, ‘Encounters with African Art’, in ibid., pp. 164–72. 10 Ann Eden Gibson, ‘Black Is a Color: Norman Lewis and Modernism in New York’, in Norman Lewis: Black Paintings, 1946–1977, exh. cat. The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, 1998, p. 15. 11 ‘Lewis visited [the exhibition] so often to make drawings that the guards came to know him by sight.’ Ann Gibson, ‘Recasting the Canon: Norman Lewis and Jackson Pollock’, Artforum, 30:7 (March 1992), 70. 12 Evans photographed most of the exhibition objects either from the front only, or in two to three shots (frontal, side, back). Oblique views occur, but are the exception. 13 These functional holes in the masks are visible in very few of Evans’s photographs from the African Negro Art portfolio. Cf. Perfect Documents. 14 Countee Cullen, ‘Heritage’, in Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Touchstone, 1997), pp. 250–3. 15 Stacey Williams, ‘Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller and Pan-Africanist Feminism in Ethiopia Awakening’, PART Journal of the CUNY PhD Program in Art History, PART 6 (2000), http://part-archive.finitude.org/part6/articles/swilli.html (acces­ sed 9 September 2014). 16 In the Battle of Adua in 1896, the Ethiopian Empire had been able to fend off the first Italian attempt at colonisation. 17 W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘To the World (Manifesto of the Second Pan-African Congress)’, The Crisis, 23:1 (November 1921), 8. 18 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro (New York: Holt, 1915) (Project Gutenberg eBook, 2015), p. 24. Du Bois thus turns Hegel’s Eurocentric argumentation on its head. Since Hegel placed Africa at the lowest rung of his conception of the development of history, he could not consider Egypt to be part of the ‘true’ Africa and therefore proposed that this part of the continent be attached to Europe: ‘This

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Encounters with masks

part was to be – must be attached to Europe: the French have lately made a successful effort in this direction.’ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001), p. 110. Just as Hegel links his concept of the philosophy of history to the affirmation of colonial aggression (in Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign), Du Bois links the anti-colonial politics of Pan-Africanism to his characterisation of a Black Egypt. On the various Ethiopian references in Du Bois, see James Quirin, ‘W.E.B. Du Bois, Ethiopianism and Ethiopia, 1890–1955’, International Journal of Ethiopian Studies, 5:2 (2010–11), 1–26; and Wilson J. Moses, ‘The Poetics of Ethiopianism: W.E.B. Du Bois and Literary Black Nationalism’, American Literature, 47:3 (1975), 411–26. 19 Rachel Farebrother, ‘“Thinking in hieroglyphics”: Representations of Egypt in the New Negro Renaissance’, in Fionnghuala Sweeney and Kate Marsh (eds), Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem and the Avant-Garde (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 204–31. 20 Renée Ater, Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2011), p. 112. The artist herself characterised her allegorical figure as follows: ‘Here was a group (Negro) who had once made history and now after a long sleep was awakening, gradually unwinding the bandage of its mummied past and looking out on life again, expectant but unafraid and with at least a graceful gesture. Why you may ask the Egyptian motif? The answer, the most brilliant period, perhaps of Egyptian history was the period of the Negro kings.’ Meta Warrick Fuller in a letter to Mrs W.P. Hedden, dated 5 October 1921, quoted in Ater, Remaking Race and History, p. 163. 21 Du Bois’s proposal for the sculpture is quoted in Ater, Remaking Race and History, p. 103. Ater also remarks that Du Bois was not satisfied with Fuller’s solution to emancipation and therefore probably tried to influence the execution of Ethiopia in terms of motif and style. 22 Yaëlle Biro, ‘Exhibition Preview: African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde’, African Arts, 46:2 (Summer 2013), 96. 23 Alain Locke, ‘A Note on African Art’, Opportunity, 2 (May 1924), 134–8. 24 Alain Locke, ‘The Blondiau – Theatre Arts Collection’, in Blondiau – Theatre Arts Collection of Primitive African Art, exh. cat. The New Art Circle (New York: Theatre Arts Monthly, 1927), n.p. 25 The Barnes collection was the first in the USA to present African art in the art context. On the competing enterprises of Barnes and Locke regarding the ‘proper’ exhibition of African art, see Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 55–60). The dispute dates back to the time of Locke’s 1925 Harlem issue of Survey Graphic and the book The New Negro, in which contributions by Barnes and Locke represent radically different views of the relationship between African and African American cultures. 26 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Classics, 1986), p. 194. 27 Langston Hughes, ‘Minstrel Man’, in Locke (ed.), The New Negro, p. 144. 28 Paul Laurence Dunbar, ‘We Wear the Mask’, quoted in: Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Gutenberg eBook, 2006), p. 208. www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18338 (accessed 12 August 2021).

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29 Alain Locke, ‘The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts’, in Locke (ed.), The New Negro, p. 264. 30 Ibid., p. 256. 31 Aaron Douglas in a letter to Alta Sawyer, quoted in Amy Helene Kirschke, Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaisssance (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), p. 63. 32 ‘In describing the work as almost “carved out of wood”, Douglas was referring to his effort to make his works more purely primitive and based on African sculpture.’ Kirschke, Aaron Douglas, p. 64. 33 Loïs Mailou Jones in Charles Rowell, ‘An Interview with Loïs Mailou Jones’, Callaloo, 12:2 (1989), http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug01/westkaemper/callaloo/ mailoujones.html (accessed 12 August 2021). 34 Rebecca Keegan VanDiver, Loïs Mailou Jones, Diasporic Art Practice, and Africa in the 20th Century (PhD dissertation, Duke University, 2013), pp. 66–7. 35 Ibid., p. 76. 36 Cheryl Finley, ‘Loïs Mailou Jones in the World’, in Deborah Willis, Ellyn Toscano, and Kalia Brooks Nelson (eds), Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2019), p. 458. 37 Wendy Grossman, ‘A Tale in Two Mediums: Loïs Mailou Jones’ Les Fetiches and Walker Evans’ Photographs of African Art’, in Grossman, Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens, exh. cat. The Philips Collection, Washington, DC (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), pp. 46–8. 38 Ibid, p. 46. 39 VanDiver, Loïs Mailou Jones, pp. 88–93. Jones’s portrait Jeanne, Martiniquaise, which like Les Fétiches was painted in 1938, probably depicts Jeanne Nardal. 40 Fred Wilson, ‘Constructing the Spectacle of Culture in Museums’, in Christian Kravagna (ed.), The Museum as Arena: Artists on Institutional Critique (Cologne: Walther König, 2001), pp. 97–102. 41 Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, ‘We Can’t Wait for Oliver Stone: Interview with Chief Eddie Ugbomah’, in Ukadike (ed.), Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014), pp. 258–9. 42 Dominique Malaquais and Cédric Vincent, ‘Three Takes and a Mask’, in Festac ’77, decomposed, an-arranged, and reproduced by Chimurenga, Published by Chimurenga and Afterall Books, in association with Asia Art Archive, the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and RAW Material Company (Annandaleon-Hudson and Dakar, 2019), p. 53. The essay by Malaquais and Vincent gives a detailed and fascinating account of the Nigerian recovery efforts and the British Museum’s persistent refusal, but does not mention the film by Eddie Ugbomah. 43 Ibid. 44 Eddie Ugbomah, quoted in Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Black African Cinema (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 163–4. 45 In light of recent research, such as that cited by Malaquais and Vincent, on the debates about restitution in the run-up to and the orbit of the Premier festival

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mondial des arts nègres in Dakar, one would have to ask to what extent Sembène’s film was already informed by them. 46 Nii Kwate Owoo in the webinar panel ‘You Hide Me: 50 Years On (Part 1)’, 7 October 2020, hosted by the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive and SOAS/African Screen Worlds. www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0Cw3bwmCKE (accessed 12 August 2021). 47 Ibid. 48 Nii Kwate Owoo in conversation with James Leahy in Vertigo, 1:2 (1993), www.clo seupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/volume-1-issue-2-summer-autumn-1993/ you-hide-me/ (accessed 12 August 2021). 49 Ibid. 50 Spoken text in Nii Kwate Owoo, You Hide Me, 16 min, 1970. 51 Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics, http://restitutionreport2018.com/sarr_savoy_ en.pdf (accessed 12 August 2021). 52 Cf. Daniel Tödt, Vom Planeten Mars: Rap in Marseille und das Imaginäre der Stadt (Vienna and Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011). 53 The video is available on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EIXKpLMgjY (accessed 12 August 2021). 54 Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1974). 55 Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Whose Culture Is It?’, in James Cuno (ed.), Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate over Antiquities (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 71–86.

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7

Purity of art in a transcultural age: modernist art theory and the culture of decolonisation

This chapter posits some (impossible) encounters between transcultural thinking and modernist art theory in the mid-twentieth century. The regional context of the discussion, which also constitutes a study of contacts between white and Black modernism, is America, with a focus on the United States. During the era in question, modernist art theory and early transcultural studies represented opposing concepts of cultural production, and these contradictory viewpoints have not yet been sufficiently compared and contrasted. The conceptual fronts – marked by what was at the time an influential theory of modern art versus a theoretical approach to culture and society that would not be widely recognised until decades later in the context of theories of the multicultural society and the postcolonial critique of modernity – indicate that a cultural battle was being waged that can also be understood as a political struggle for social privileges; in other words, a battle for rights and recognition. Using Norman Lewis as an example, the chapter discusses the meaning that a concept like ‘pure opticality’ (Clement Greenberg) could have for Black artists, whose position within the racial matrix of power and America’s visual culture has never been on the side of the beholder. The study traces the subtle shifts with which an African American artist, whose painterly means come close to those of his white colleagues, introduced social problems such as racist terror, but also elements of Black culture, into the universalised ­aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism. Purity, identity, and modernism

Modernist art theory in the mid-twentieth century, the prime exponent of which was Clement Greenberg, saw the ‘essence’ of every artistic genre as consisting in a reflection of what is ‘unique and irreducible’ in each particular art.1 The central task of the individual arts was declared to be their self-­definition, i.e., the determination of what was intrinsic to them and the fullest possible exclusion of anything alien to that essence. For painting, as the supreme medium in modernist art theory, this meant reducing it to its

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Purity of art in a transcultural age

Norman Lewis, Shapes, 1947, oil on masonite, 36.8 × 45 cm, signed. Private Collection. © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

‘essential’ properties of flatness and purely optical experience, while excluding figurative, plastic, and narrative elements. Greenberg assumed the existence of fundamental laws governing the various arts. The achievement of modern art thus consisted, for him, first and foremost in recognising and acknowledging the respective essential characteristics of sculpture, painting, and so on. The increasing awareness and acceptance of ‘the pristine flatness of the stretched canvas’2 and the pure visuality of painting must then necessarily result in excluding everything not in keeping with those qualities, anything alien to the medium thus understood. ‘The avant-garde arts,’ wrote Greenberg in 1940 in his text ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, ‘have in the last fifty years achieved a purity and a radical delimitation of their fields of activity for which there is no previous example in the history of culture. The arts lie safe now, each within its “legitimate” boundaries, and free trade has been replaced by autarchy.’3 Anything not innate to the various art genres, not in line with their innermost essence, had to be excluded and subjugated in order for the arts to achieve full identity with themselves. ‘A great deal of purism,’ Greenberg writes at the beginning of the Laocoon essay, ‘is the translation of an extreme solicitude, an anxiousness as to the fate of art, a concern for its identity.’4 This

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threat to art occurs in the form of a commingling with other arts. The concept of identity as absolute purity means that, for music and painting – conceived as ‘pure forms’ – any mixing with other art forms, above all with literature and its corrupting influence, can only lead to decay, falsification, and distortion. For Greenberg, the avant-garde, which was in his day staking out its territory with increasingly well-defined boundaries, embodied ‘art’s instinct of self-preservation’.5 In his critical text on minimalism from 1967, Michael Fried takes this rhetoric of demarcation to militant extremes. In view of the ‘theatrical’ qualities and the hidden anthropomorphism that he discerns in minimalist art objects, Fried postulates that ‘there is a war going on between theatre and modernist painting, between the theatrical and the pictorial’. He extends this thesis to posit a more fundamental battle between theatre and ‘art as such’, which must triumph in order to prevent its sensibility from being ‘corrupted or perverted’. As Fried emphasises in the first of his three theses on ‘theatricality’, at stake in this struggle is nothing less than the survival of the arts, while the second thesis invokes the degeneration of the arts through ‘the illusion that the barriers between the arts are in the process of crumbling’.6 This interpretation of modern art, represented in exemplary fashion by Greenberg and Fried, has been critically examined on many occasions since the late 1970s. And yet the modernist aesthetic of purity, which is also an aesthetic of exclusion and segregation, has not been sufficiently analysed to date in the context of the contemporary discourses on race politics in the USA. It is obvious, however, that the lines of argument in this art theory are in structural agreement with the thought patterns and concepts elaborated earlier in political discourses on race. In both cases, the cult of purity is upheld as a defence against the horrors of intermixing; identity is defined based on an apparently natural essence of the artistic genre, or race, which must be preserved and protected from degeneration by foreign elements. Boundaries thus conceived of as natural or intrinsic are reinforced, and territories defended. Even though a tendency to give primacy to painting is evident in modernist art theory, the discourse none the less differs from the old paragone – the hierarchical competition between the arts in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The aim of the modernist art critics was not so much to demonstrate the superiority of one genre over another as to justify the superiority of modernist art on the basis of its radical separation of the arts and acceptance of each art form’s essential characteristics. Segregation, not subordination, is at the heart of the project. At least rhetorically, this agenda closely resembles the political concept of ‘separate but equal’, which formed the ideological and legal ordering principle for race relations in the USA from the end of the nineteenth century until the 1960s. The eminent hybridity phobia demonstrated by such art theory can thus be understood as an example of the characteristic ‘purification work’ of Western modernity, as described by Bruno Latour. This work

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involves the categorical separation of nature from society, of the world of things from the world of people; ‘being modern’ is thus a culture of separation of these spheres, whereas ‘premodern’ beliefs are seen as a commixture or confusion of them. ‘Those who think the most about hybrids circumscribe them as much as possible,’ Latour writes.7 The discourse of purity, coupled with the existential fear of adulteration, contamination, and intermingling, has its historical foundations in the colonial practices of drawing political and moral boundaries between the white and non-white identities they construct. The normative invocation of purity and the discursive affirmation of its supremacy over the impure cannot be conceived of without this history. In the colonial discourse – and in the discourse on race since the Enlightenment – white identity is constituted quite fundamentally via the motif of purity. While in the course of colonial contact, various processes of intermixing proceed continuously, producing hybrids, colonial and racial discourses react by doing their best to prevent such transgressions and ‘contaminations’, condemning them as monstrous or threatening.8 During the period when the art criticism quoted above was written, the social order in the USA was organised through a series of political measures and legal regulations aimed at the segregation of the races and the avoidance of mixed marriages and hence miscegenation. The Jim Crow laws, introduced soon after the abolition of slavery, remained in effect until 1965. Under the ideological doctrine of ‘separate but equal’, they imposed a discriminatory practice of separating whites and Blacks in the public space, on public transport, in educational and recreational facilities, in the army, at elections, and in many other areas of social life. The fight against these laws, which de jure allowed segregation but de facto led to far-reaching unequal treatment, was the primary motivation behind the Civil Rights movement until well into the 1960s. Until 1952, the ‘whites only’ principle applied in naturalisation procedures in the USA. Laws on marriage also had the aim of preserving ‘purity’: ‘By 1940, thirty-one states had laws against interracial marriage, but only six had laws prohibiting interracial sex. But both laws and social sanctions against interracial sex and marriage were racist social constructions, formulated largely by white men to protect the “purity” of the white race and prevent racial mixture.’9 In a 1958 Gallup Poll, 96 per cent of white Americans said they opposed mixed marriages.10 To enable clear distinctions to be made between white and Black in legal matters, the ‘one-drop rule’ had been introduced at the turn of the twentieth century, according to which only someone whose ancestry did not include a single drop of ‘Black’ blood could be considered ‘white’. It was not until 1967 that a Supreme Court decision declared laws prohibiting intermarriage unconstitutional.11 As for urban segregation, Douglas S. Massey and

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Nancy A. Denton point out, in a chapter entitled ‘The Construction of the Ghetto’ in their book American Apartheid, a dramatic increase in the segregation of white and Black population groups in the cities of the North between 1910 and 1940: ‘At the [apartment] block level, the degree of black–white segregation in northern cities reached an average value of 89 by 1940.’ At the city district level, by 1940 at least 70 per cent of the Black inhabitants of northern cities would have had to move to generate a racial balance. In Chicago, the isolation index rose from 10 per cent to 70 per cent between 1900 and 1940. In New York, it jumped from 5 per cent to 42 per cent.12 These are only a few indications of the political and social ‘purification work’ undertaken by US society with its racist laws around the mid-twentieth century. They will have to suffice at this point to make it amply clear, in the words of the US philosopher Dana Berthold, that ‘to invoke purity ideals in the US is to mobilise this genealogy of racialized associations’.13 In her essay on the genealogy of race, purity, and hygiene, Berthold illustrates how physical purity is equated with moral purity and both are linked with white identity to distinguish it, initially explicitly and later implicitly, from the ‘impurity’ of non-white groups; the exclusion of what is deemed ‘impure’ is always accompanied by excluding ‘impure’ others or subjugating them to the power of the group that imagines itself as pure. ‘Unjustifiable hybrids’

Given how, historically, the discourse on purity in Western societies is inextricably linked to the exercise of colonial power and to annihilation, with racism as its basis of legitimacy, we must now ask how to connect the drawing of boundaries in art theory and the related modernist claim to purity with this political and discursive context. For Amy M. Mooney, appeals to purity and policies of discrimination are inseparable. Indeed, she finds it difficult to ignore the ‘elitism and racism inherent in Greenberg’s aesthetic philosophy’, pointing out that ‘Viewing modern art as a process of self-purification perpetuates the politics of essentialism’.14 My aim here is not to defame Greenberg’s art theory as racist, even though some of its central descriptive categories are based on a tradition of racist discourses whose normative precepts in many cases have the effect of excluding Black artists. None the less, it does not suffice to establish a mere rhetorical effect of these political discourses on the comparatively harmless realm of art criticism. Against the backdrop of the institutionalised racism in American society at the time, we must instead keep in mind the inevitably political function of this normative criticism in the context of mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in the art field. For segregation was also of great significance in the institutionalised art business of the era – a subject I will return to later.

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How, then, does the fight against practices of intermixing that pervaded Western art criticism from the 1940s to the 1960s relate to the racist organisation of American society at the time, as well as to the processes of decolonisation, to the Civil Rights movement, and to contemporary transcultural practices and theories endeavouring to dismantle political and social boundaries built on the category of race and the ethnically and nationally defined cultural concepts based on that category? In Greenberg’s early text of 1939, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’,15 the enemy of art is still clearly named as the capitalist cultural industry, kitsch being a second-hand experience, a form of mass culture with a fascist tenor. As Greenberg’s attitude became increasingly formalist and the avant-garde was largely depoliticised, the enemy also became more abstract: decay through hybridisation.16 As early as 1910, a name was found by Irving Babbitt for this threat. In his book The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts, which was one of the central influences on Greenberg’s art theory, Babbitt maintains that the confusion of the arts leads to ‘unjustifiable hybrids’: ‘What he calls for, in conclusion, is a “clear-cut type of person” who would “incline toward the clear-cut type of art” and “be guided in deciding what is sufficiently clear-cut and what is an unjustifiable hybrid, by tact and a sense of measure”.’17 As Michael Leja has demonstrated, the demand for sharply defined boundaries between the arts in Babbitt’s ‘New Humanism’ movement serves the aims of a more far-reaching struggle against the irrational forces of the unconscious and the ‘primitive’, which threaten the modern rational subject. The fight against the ‘confusion’ of the art genres was part of a broader polemic calling for the assertion of self-control and reason, and the suppression of emotions, passions, and instincts.18 ‘In page after page in The New Laokoon,’ writes Caroline Jones, ‘Babbitt inveighs against the promiscuous miscegenation of senses, feelings, and inordinate emotions, and begs for reason, form, and design to erect their protective screens.’19 In order to save the threatened white male body, Jones states, the aesthetic regulation of the emotions requires a clear demarcation to be made by the legislative power of critique – in Babbitt’s words, the ‘firm and masculine distinction’ between the genres.20 Jones is undoubtedly emphasising a gendered perspective on separation and control here. However, in the first half of the twentieth century, a lack of selfcontrol, coupled with impulsiveness and licentiousness, was attributed – to at least the same extent – to the non-white population groups in the USA. Jones comes closer to the race perspective I have proposed when she links Greenberg’s theory of purity to his ‘hard-won hygienic modernism’,21 which stems from his hierarchical rating of the senses, for example, when he associates the sense of smell with ‘primitive’ stages of development. Leja notes that ‘Greenberg’s aesthetics matched Babbitt’s in designating control, balance,

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measure, and discipline as the marks of greatness in art’.22 The fight against hybrids in art, waged by insisting on firm boundaries, is hence connected with the repression of the inner Other as a threat to an established order of modern Western high culture. As I have pointed out in Chapters 3 and 4, new models for describing culture, cultural contacts, and mutual cultural transformations emerged in the interwar period in the realm of the ‘Black Atlantic’.23 These models attempted to do justice to the complex composition of societies founded on colonialism, slavery, and migration. Concepts of syncretism, hybridisation, and creolisation gradually replaced notions of pure and self-contained cultures. In Cuba in 1940 – the same year that Greenberg’s ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ came out – Fernando Ortiz published the book Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, which was available in English translation in 1947. Using the antagonistic interplay of the colonial products tobacco and sugar – which become allegorical figures in his text and contradict each other in every respect – Ortiz tells the ‘true history of Cuba’ as the history of its highly intricate transculturations. The sugar economy has been bound up with capitalism from the onset (investments, machines, credits, banks ...), unlike tobacco, which is described by Ortiz as a product of the Natives and the soil. The difference between tobacco and sugar is intensive versus extensive cultivation, quality versus quantity, individuality versus uniformity. Ortiz was the first to introduce the term ‘transculturation’ to replace the concept of ‘acculturation’, the use of which was just becoming widespread in anthropology: Acculturation is used to describe the process of transition from one culture to another, and its manifold social repercussions. But transculturation is a more fitting term. I have chosen the word transculturation to express the highly varied phenomena that have come about in Cuba as a result of the extremely complex transmutations of culture that have taken place here, and without a knowledge of which it is impossible to understand the evolution of the Cuban folk, either in the economic or in the institutional, legal, ethical, religious, artistic, linguistic, psychological, sexual, or other aspects of its life.24

In the USA, it was mainly the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits who, beginning in the late 1920s, undertook research that – against the political background of American race relations – traced the transcontinental migrations of cultural elements in the realm of the ‘Black Atlantic’ and investigated processes of appropriation, translation, and reinterpretation of cultural forms of expression under the conditions and power relations specific to slavery and white supremacism. The findings summarised in his book The Myth of the Negro Past (1941) were widely and controversially discussed in the USA, among other things because Herskovits rejected the connection between

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race and culture in a segregation-oriented racist society and emphasised the syncretistic connections between Euro-American and African American cultural elements.25 The writings of Ortiz and Herskovits – to mention but two important examples of transcultural thinking at the time – examine precisely those border crossings, cultural ‘impurities’, and mutual transformations in the contact zones between languages, religions, and artistic forms of expression which modernist art theory had established as a threat to the survival of (white) culture. Both authors situate their scholarly work in the context of anti-colonial and anti-racist policies of emancipation. In the analysis of contemporary definitions of culture and modernity, this transcultural research in the mid-twentieth century forms the counterpole to the purity fundamentalism and hybridity phobia in modernist art theory. One might protest at this point that the two fields of discourse are too far apart to regard them as voices engaging in a confrontation. At least two arguments speak against this objection. On the one hand, there are connections between the people involved in these two different fields. On the other hand, critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg took part in debates on nationalism, particularism, and universalism in art and culture under the historical conditions of the political and ideological fronts represented by fascism, Stalinism, and liberal capitalism during and after the Second World War. On the basis of an initially anti-nationalist attitude, these critics finally came to the remarkable solution of theorising an American universalism for the work of the Abstract Expressionist artists they supported. As Lisa Bloom has shown, this presupposes that these artists were working in a state of cultural isolation and alienation: ‘Despite the disagreements between the two critics, what linked their work was the way each made the claim that great aesthetic experiences occur most profoundly in a cultural vacuum.’26 Greenberg thus writes in 1948: ‘Isolation is, so to speak, the natural condition of high art in America.’ He sees in this ‘the condition under which the true reality of our age is experienced’.27 Writing around the same time, Rosenberg identifies the loneliness and estrangement experienced by the artists of this group working in New York. Having come to the city from all corners of the country, they were decisive for the development of a new anti-provincialism of global validity: ‘Attached neither to a community nor to one another, these painters experience a unique loneliness of a depth that is reached perhaps nowhere else in the world.’28 The new cosmopolitanism of American art is, according to this view, based on an apparently advantageous state of isolation. Given the above-mentioned formation of urban ghettos and institutional segregation along the category of race, the voluntary self-isolation of these painters, viewed as so heroic by these two art critics, suddenly appears in a different light. Isolation and loneliness would feel different to a Black artist in this group of white painters.

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American universalism and the ‘colour line’

The question of where to situate the policy of purity and segregation put forth in Greenberg’s art theory within the socio-political context of American society, divided as it was along racist ‘colour lines’, as well as with regard to the concurrent research into transculturalism, must be further differentiated: Does Greenberg’s essentialism coincide with the actual practice of the artistic avant-garde and its self-image, or does this theory ignore the reality of the art? There are various answers to this question. In 1983, Serge Guilbaut pointed out that Abstract Expressionism (with which Greenberg’s theory is primarily concerned) cannot be understood solely from a formalist, mediareflexive perspective, but that the free expression of the individual, which was one of the qualities Greenberg so admired in this painting, also had politicalideological significance in connection with US Cold War policy.29 In the 1990s, David Craven referred to the leftist political leanings of many Abstract Expressionists during the McCarthy era and to the hostile attitudes of rightwing politicians towards abstract art.30 Craven and others have shown how Greenberg, initially Marxist-oriented, switched to the anti-communist camp in the late 1940s, considering McCarthy to be a lesser danger to freedom than the Soviet Union and declaring Abstract Expressionism apolitical and truly American. Leja has dealt in depth with the differences between the self-image of the New York School painters and the formalist reading of their art by Greenberg. While Greenberg, with his optimistic logic of progress, pursues an utterly rationalist perspective in which, as we have seen, reason prevails over chaos and pure form acts as a defensive wall against undifferentiated emotions, Leja connects the painters’ ideas to the contemporary popular discourse on ‘modern man’. Artists whom Leja calls the ‘mythmakers’ (Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still) oriented their work on concepts of the mythical, primitive, and tragic, and saw their artistic selves as being caught up in an inner struggle of opposites, between the rational forces of civilisation and the dark, irrational sides of human nature. Craven’s analysis of the engagement of many Abstract Expressionists with the art and culture of Native Americans is likewise of importance in our context of purity in art versus transculturality. He argues that the high esteem in which Barnett Newman held Northwest Coast Native American art, as well as the inspiration Jackson Pollock derived for his painting processes from ritual Navajo sand painting, is an expression of these artists’ anti-Eurocentrism.31 I would like to put this argument into perspective through the question of the scope for action opened for, and the obstacles put in the way of, nonwhite artists of the period, specifically in regard to the concept of an American universal modernism. After taking another look at the ‘intercultural’ dimension of Abstract Expressionism, especially on the basis of Newman’s writings,

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I examine this question using the example of the African American painter Norman Lewis, who in the immediate postwar period moved amidst, and at the same time at the margins of, the group of white fellow-painters that would later be canonised. Three main motifs in the concept of mid-century American modernism will be the focal point here: the universalism of the New York School, the privileging of seeing by stressing painting’s pure opticality, and the metaphor of terror. During the Second World War and in the immediate postwar period, the creation of a ‘truly American art’ (Newman) was linked to a search for corresponding points of reference beyond the European modernist tradition. Newman, the theorist among the Abstract Expressionists, was initially concerned with distinguishing the new American art from the banal Americanism of the regionalists. In 1942, he criticised their provincial exploitation of a deep-seated need for an American contribution to world art. Newman referred to this school, which included painters such as Grant Wood and Reginald Marsh and was also known as the ‘American Scene’, as ‘isolationist art’, based on the political term. Without developing a new form of artistic expression, this nationalist school had contented itself, according to Newman, with the small-minded pursuit of painting typical American scenes.32 In his preface to the catalogue for the first exhibition of American Modern Artists in 1943 in New York, Newman writes that it is ‘high time we cleared the cultural atmosphere of America’.33 The USA now had the chance to become the artistic centre of the world, if it would only abandon its cultural isolationism, which Newman equates with the country’s renunciation of political isolationism since Pearl Harbor. Newman sees the true new American art as a synthesis of Parisian modernism and the ‘great art traditions of our American aborigines’.34 Adolph Gottlieb in the USA and Rufino Tamayo in Mexico had succeeded at such a synthesis, which Newman attributes to deep roots in the art of the Northwest Coast Native Americans on Gottlieb’s part and in pre-Columbian art in the case of Tamayo. In these early, and later, texts, Newman sees the motivation for the modern artist’s recourse to these roots in the arts of the (American) ‘primitive peoples’ as lying in the tragic state of humanity. In a modern world shaped by science and technology, man (the whole discourse is very malecentred) is exposed to incomprehensible and menacing horrors – of which Hiroshima would become the most powerful symbol – in a way that compels him to turn to ‘primitive art’ as an expression of a ritual striving for metaphysical understanding.35 Contrary to Greenberg’s concept of pure form, Newman insists on art as a realm of ‘pure thought’. For the ‘primitive artist’, form is not an end in itself (he attributes such a ‘meaningless materialism of design’ instead to ‘women basket weavers’) but rather the vehicle for an ‘abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the

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terror of the unknowable’.36 Newman sees the new trend in American painting that emerged during the war as a ‘modern counterpart of the primitive art impulse’.37 These artists had a deep understanding of indigenous art, he surmised, as both were on a quest for the fundamental truths to which art as a metaphysical practice could lend a symbolic form. On the separation of art and politics, Newman’s position is close to that of Greenberg with respect to art’s purity: ‘Art is a realm of pure thought. As such, it, like all other realms of pure thought, must be concerned with its own problems. Art is self-contained. Politics is not only unnecessary, it is irrelevant.’38 Applied to the artists’ connection with Native American art, this attitude implies a lack of interest on their part in the actual present-day reality of these peoples. For Newman, not only politics but also people are unimportant for the fundamental problems of art: ‘To be close to one’s country one must be close to its art rather than to the contemporary people who surround one.’39 This supplanting of people by an admiration for their art is noteworthy, since an avid interest in the authenticity of Native American art arose at a time when the Indian Termination Policy (in effect from 1943 to the 1960s) called for the forced assimilation of Native Americans by revoking both the autonomous status of the reservations and their special rights to self-government – leading to the confiscation of land and resources, the dissolution of many ‘tribes’, and the resettlement of their members to cities. In the numerous statements made by members of the New York School on their understanding of Native arts, there is not a single reference to the contemporary political and cultural reality of Native Americans. This appropriation of Indian culture without a care for its endangered status or its contemporary significance for its own people or artists is certainly closer to the appropriation practice of the first phase of primitivist art in Europe in the early twentieth century than to the anti-Eurocentrism Craven asserts in the relationship of the Abstract Expressionists to indigenous arts.40 The demonstratively apolitical borrowing of ‘Indian’ elements is one symptom of the cultural nationalism that prevailed during the Second World War, promoted not only by the painters in question but also by institutions such as MoMA in New York, patrons such as the Rockefellers, and critics such as Greenberg.41 In contrast to the provincial Americanism of ‘American Scene’ painting, which Newman and Greenberg were so quick to disparage, the modern Americanism of the New York School was characterised by a transcendence of particularisms in favour of a close interweaving of American and universalist claims. With regard to ‘primitive art’, the project of constructing an American universalism meant separating the imputed qualities of this art from its cultural contexts. The spiritual, mythical, and tragic elements sought in indigenous art had to be abstracted to the extent that they could be translated into the aesthetic expression of a ‘general’ tragic

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condition of modern ‘man’ in the face of the ‘horror’. Although Newman does touch on fascism and the atomic bomb in his writings, the art and theory of the New York School in general address neither these nor other concrete threats, or their political dimensions, but instead bespeak a timeless subjectivity of the tragic encounter with overwhelming and incomprehensible forces. ‘Aggressively asserting the apoliticality of their art,’ they pursue, according to Leja, a ‘dehistoricisation of modern experience’.42 The universalised experience of modern ‘man’, culturally underpinned by a transhistorical relationship with the ‘primitive’, is articulated in an American idiom; the ‘apolitical’ appropriation of the driving forces behind indigenous art is seen as a prerequisite for levelling out differences in social and cultural experience in American society around the mid-twentieth century. Particularity is negated, because these aesthetic practices and symbolic forms take on their modern universal significance only when adopted and used by the white male artist subject. Against the contemporary backdrop of the Indian Termination Policy,43 with its efforts to eradicate cultural difference and abolish the partial political autonomy of the Native Americans, the American primitivism of the New York School manifests itself as an aesthetic version of political assimilation pressure. White terror and the problem of the visual

Abstract Expressionism has gone down in art history as a white American movement. Therefore, it is important to highlight art-historical perspectives that point to the parallel presence of non-white artists in the milieu of the formative phase of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s; i.e., before the great breakthrough in the reception of this movement around 1950.44 In view of the contacts between white artists and their Black colleagues, who, with the success of Abstract Expressionism as ‘American-type painting’, fell into oblivion and were not recalled until the debates on multiculturalism and cultural diversity in the late 1980s, the question arises as to the relationship between African American artists and the claim of Abstract Expressionism to be a ‘transcendental world-style’45 or an embodiment of the universal.46 At the risk of oversimplification, it can be said that, at the time of this encounter, white and Black artists in the USA could each look back on, or were in the process of constructing, their own lines of tradition. I look at this subject in more detail in the last chapter of his book in connection with Hale Woodruff’s painted history of transcultural art. We have seen above how, in the 1940s, white American art placed itself on a certain developmental timeline of European modernism, in which abstraction enjoys a high standing, while at the same time drawing on indigenous arts as part of crystallising out a distinctly ‘American’ identity. African American painting, for its part, had

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been occupied since the early decades of the twentieth century with elaborating artistic idioms expressing the specific experiences of a discriminated group. In addition to social realist styles, the most advanced artists of this era are distinguished by how they are able to conjoin European modernism with elements of (African) ‘ancestral arts’ and of the art of America’s Black cultures. These elements can, in some cases, manifest a relatively high degree of abstraction.47 ‘Pure’ abstract painting, however, was only an option in exceptional cases, given the status of the political emancipation efforts of the New Negro movement, which often considered artistic expression from a viewpoint of ‘art as propaganda’.48 While modernist art theory draws clear boundaries between the genres, praising pure optical experience and elevating both principles to universal values, most of African American modernism, which since the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s produced important artists such as Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Elizabeth Catlett, is ‘impure’ in many respects. Less oriented towards subjectivity, transcendence, and timelessness than towards history, community, and social criticism, African American painting often pursued synaesthetic approaches in relation to literature and music and was in many cases closely related to popular culture (jazz) and applied arts (graphic design). In the writings of the ‘mythmakers’ and the titles of some of their works, terror is the central experience of the modern subject. Coming to terms with this terror aesthetically is then the tragic task of the modern artist. It is only the tendency to naturalise the overwhelming forces with which the ‘primitive’ artist, just as the modern artist, is confronted that allows for the appropriation of distinct cultural forms of expression – such as those of Native Americans – and their incorporation in the American universalist concept of advanced art. Yet what might the concept of terror mean instead for Americans who, because of their ethnicity, are not in a social position to universalise their modern experience? As far as I can see, the regular evocation of terror in the art and theory of Abstract Expressionism up to this point has not been put in relation to the concept of terror as an instrument of the violent affirmation of white supremacy so frequently encountered in African American literature. After the abolition of slavery at the end of the US Civil War, various organisations (of which the Ku Klux Klan is only the most widely known) were formed with the aim of preventing political equality and social mobility for African Americans through terrorist activities. Along with the legal measures of segregation and discrimination enforced until well into the 1960s, intimidation and violence against Blacks were tools used ‘to keep the Negro in his place’, as a hackneyed phrase used by US white supremacists puts it. Until the midtwentieth century, the political fight against the practice of lynching Blacks on the pretext of their alleged transgressions was one of the central fields of

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action of Civil Rights organisations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In the (cultural) imagination of African Americans – for example in literature ranging from George Schuyler to Richard Wright to James Baldwin – the concept of white terror looms large.49 Terror is described here neither in metaphysical nor universal terms but as a real and constant physical and psychological threat on a racist basis. How, if at all, is this ‘particular’ Black experience of terror compatible with the aesthetic standards of Abstract Expressionism and its universalistic evocation of the terror of modernity? As I pursue this question, using Norman Lewis as an example, it will become apparent that it ties in closely with the issue of how the privileged status of the visual in mid-century white American modernism was handled from an African American perspective. What significance might a concept like ‘pure opticality’ have for a Black subject, whose position within the racist matrix of culture and power is not that of the beholder? From the plantation during the age of slavery with its white overseer to the racist popular cultures of minstrel shows, films, and product commercials, and on to the micropolitics of the Jim Crow laws, the Black person is located on the object side of the visual order. He or she is not only the object of a symbolic economics of sexual desire and social contempt; the way the Black person sees is also sanctioned through white power. In the extreme case, which occurs not infrequently, the Black gaze, especially when directed toward a white woman, is punishable by death. For the Black man looking at a white woman, the defence of her ostensible ‘purity’ within the framework of racist gender politics results in a death that is itself then staged as a spectacle for white viewers. The visual culture of lynching, which manifested itself in the popular medium of picture postcards of such events,50 is the extreme expression of the violent entrenchment of the scopic regime of white supremacy.51 Terror and the question of seeing are therefore intimately intertwined. In the formative years of Abstract Expressionism and Greenberg’s theory, no one addressed the other side of the visual order more compellingly than Ralph Ellison in his novel The Invisible Man (1952). As the story opens, the first-person narrator is sitting in a cellar lit by 1,369 lamps, the energy for which he has diverted from municipal power plants, reasoning about his invisibility as a Black subject: I am an invisible man [...] simply because people refuse to see me. [...] When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything and anything except me. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.52

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Ellison’s description of the ‘peculiar disposition of the eyes’ of white beholders gets to the core of how the stereotype functions by coupling excessive visibility (of the cliché) and invisibility (of the individual). It is no coincidence that Ellison contrasts this vivid evocation of the visual within social power structures with a reference to the other senses: I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing ‘What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue’ all at the same time. Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible.53

Michelle Wallace took up Ellison’s literary articulation of the issue in her analysis of ‘the real problem of the visual in Afro-American cultures’. For her, the struggle with ‘the problem of being viewed as an object whose subjectivity is considered as superfluous as that of the dancing, grinning Sambo doll’ represents one of the prime characteristics of African American modernism.54 Wallace, too, who reflects on the marginality of African American visual art in comparison to music (in general American perception), cannot omit mentioning ‘white terror’. She cites the ‘sexual victimisation of black women (rape etc.)’, as well as the persecution of ‘black men (lynchings, etc.) in the South in the ’20s’, as evidence of ‘how the dread of such scenarios fed into the literary and visual production and the modernist aspirations of the artists, writers and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance’.55 In her essay ‘Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination’, the writer bell hooks recalls the ‘racial apartheid’ of the urban spaces of her childhood, ‘where black folks associated whiteness with the terrible, the terrifying, the terrorising. White people were regarded as terrorists, especially those who dared to enter that segregated space of blackness.’56 hooks is convinced that, for a theoretical analysis of the Black experience, it is necessary to ‘examine the way the concept of “terror” is linked to representations of whiteness’.57 Blackstream or mainstream?

When considering the position of Black artists in relation to the ‘universal values’ of white American modernism in the mid-twentieth century – with its ideal of purity, the primacy of the visual, and the articulation of ‘terror’ – the painter Norman Lewis is of exemplary importance. How can a politically engaged Black painter operate within the norms of a white avant-garde concerned with producing works whose universal validity is based upon an apparently logical succession of European painting since Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, and Cubism? Lewis’s art and career are particularly illuminating with respect to this dilemma, since he kept company, at least for several years, with the representatives of Abstract Expressionism who would later be canonised, sharing their artistic intentions like few Black artists of the time.

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Norman Lewis, The Wanderer (Johnny), 1933, oil on canvas, 91.4 × 76.2 cm, signed. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

The son of immigrants from Bermuda, Norman Lewis grew up in Harlem. After working odd jobs, including as a tailor and sailor, he took up painting at the studio of the sculptor and influential teacher Augusta Savage. In the 1930s, Lewis had contact with major artists of the New Negro movement including Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence, and was co-founder of Black artist associations such as the Harlem Artists Guild. However, he increasingly

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moved between the Black and white worlds of the institutionally segregated art scene and was also a committed trade unionist and Civil Rights activist for decades.58 Starting in the mid-1930s, Lewis met regularly with painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, and Adolph Gottlieb in bars and private settings. At the same time, he was also in touch with people from other social realms, such as the 306 Group of Black artists including Hale Woodruff and Romare Bearden and writers including Wright and Ellison. On the occasion of the exhibition African Negro Art at MoMA in 1935, Lewis delved intensively into African art.59 Until the early 1940s, he addressed the challenges faced by African Americans in a social realist style, but – in part through his acquaintance with his white colleagues – also increasingly reflected on the limitations of the ‘Negro Idiom’ expected of Black artists. Convinced that the ‘excellence’ of the artwork would ultimately serve as art’s strongest weapon against racist stereotypes, Lewis increasingly downplayed the social themes of his images and focused instead on the formal problems of painting. In some of the texts he wrote from the mid-1940s onwards, usually for fellowship applications for his artistic work, Lewis describes this shift in his artistic intentions. In 1946, he addresses the ‘limitations which come under the names “African Idiom”, “Negro Idiom” or “Social Painting”’. He expresses a need for greater personal freedom – ‘to be publicly first an artist (assuming merit) and incidentally, a Negro’ – and speaks of the ‘universal knowledge of aesthetics and the creative faculty’.60 Lewis repeated similar arguments in 1949, contrasting his early practice of expressing or ‘merely illustrating’ social conflicts with a tendency to grapple more with ‘inherently aesthetic’ problems. ‘I realised that my own greatest effectiveness would not come by painting racial differences but by excelling as an artist first of all.’61 In 1951, Lewis even identifies with the striving for an authentic American art that figured prominently in the statements of many of his white colleagues: ‘For the first time, artists in America are seeking, more or less consciously, an aesthetic unique and indigenous to their culture.’62 Lewis refers to unnamed critics and their description of a ‘growing trend towards “subjectivity”, that is towards something highly personal, from which may be emerging a kind of indigenous symbolism’.63 These written testimonies undoubtedly speak for Lewis’s familiarity with the writings and discussions of the circle of white artists in which he was then active. Nevertheless, one should not overlook the fact that the overtones of universal questions of form and a genuine American aesthetic are repeatedly interspersed with references to a struggle against racist stereotypes that is now pursued by means other than ‘illustration’. For example, Lewis cites outstanding artistic achievement as the ‘most irrefutable proof of the artificiality of stereotype in general’.64 Since Lewis made the decision in the mid-1940s to draw a clear line between his political activism and artistic practice, it is revealing that, with

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Norman Lewis, Untitled (Police Beating), 1943, watercolour, ink and graphite on paper, 50.8 × 35.2 cm, signed. Rodney M. Miller Collection. © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

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the success of Abstract Expressionism, he ended up being excluded from its canonised history.65 One factor that surely played a role here is the banal political fact of institutionalised racism in the art world. Indications of this are supplied by retrospective statements made by Lewis (confirmed by his gallerist Marian Willard) on a phenomenon that could be described as a division of the social sphere. Although Lewis frequented both white and Black artists’ milieux on a personal level, and exhibited at important galleries, he was hardly present at all on the social occasions relevant for an artist’s commercial and critical success, for example events with collectors.66 At a time when Black artists were generally presented in exhibitions of ‘Negro Art’, Lewis enjoyed an exceptional status, but one that only partially allowed him to overcome the prevailing institutional segregation.67 In an interview in 1968, Lewis describes in detail his experiences with racism and the problem of isolation as a Black artist in the midst of the white art world: ‘It was something lacking in promotion or my physical presence to certain environments, you know, rather than being an artist, I am an oddity.’68 In 1950, Lewis was the only Black artist to take part in the famous Artists’ Sessions at Studio 35, where artists spent three days privately discussing among themselves the state of modern art in the USA. Despite efforts made by Lewis to integrate his work into the ‘mainstream’ of artistic issues, these conversations, too, brought to light clear discrepancies on the question of which problems of advanced art were considered relevant and what the artist’s position was in society. As the Studio 35 discussions addressed at length questions such as the criteria according to which a painting should be regarded as finished or not, and whether works should be given titles, Lewis resolutely brought up the relationship between artists and the public, linking this issue to his trade-union work: ‘But how are you going to get that to the public?’ Referring to exhibitions by the Impressionists in cafés, to former ‘open air shows in the [Greenwich] Village’, and to the public artworks produced under the Federal Arts Project as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, Lewis remarked: People no longer have this intimacy with the artists, so that the public does not know actually what is going on, what is being done by the painter. I remember organizing for a union at the waterfront. People then didn’t know the function of a union, or what was good about it, but gradually they were made aware of it. They saw the need for it. The same is true of our relationship with the people; in making them aware of what we are doing.69

Ad Reinhardt was the only colleague who took up Lewis’s problem: ‘Exactly what is our involvement, our relation to the outside world?’70 Reinhardt asked the others to comment on the subject, but moderator Alfred H. Barr did not discern much interest among the other artists present: ‘Apparently many people don’t want to answer the question.’71 And yet, on the first day of the

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discussions, several participants had pointed out the artist’s need for solitude, and position ‘beyond or ahead of his society’,72 describing art as an expression of the individual personality. Newman’s question: ‘Do we artists really have a community?’ was answered in the negative.73 In agreement with the critics cited above – in regard to the ‘unique loneliness’ described by Rosenberg and Greenberg’s emphasis on isolation as ‘the condition under which the true reality of our age is experienced’ – the artists who met regularly at The Club at 39 East Eighth Street and who took part in the discussions at Studio 35 stressed their loneliness, their alienation from society, and their maverick status within the art world. Lewis’s interest in connecting with the public, grounded furthermore in a comparison with political organisational work, was out of place in this company. Can the blocking out of a painter like Norman Lewis from the historical image of Abstract Expressionism also be considered ‘intrinsic’ to this art? To put it another way, is it only the artist himself who, as a Black man, does not fit into the construct of an American art of universal validity or into the milieu of the art field that spawned this construct? Or are his paintings also marked by a difference that runs counter to the prevailing concept of American modernism around 1950? I’m not asking these questions in order to find a more convincing explanation for Lewis’s exclusion from the art-historical canon than those put forward thus far. The general racism in America and specifically in the art scene of the period was the decisive factor in the ‘forgetting’ of Lewis’s work, yet the ‘discrepant abstraction’74 of his painting, permeated as it was with Black cultural and political references, is certainly also a factor in its marginalisation. Paradoxically, the problem with Lewis’s painting lies in its unique achievement. Lewis worked at the highest level with the painterly means of all-over structures, calligraphic lines, and forcefully positioned colour bars, which we are familiar with from works by Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey, and Franz Kline. Though most of Lewis’s paintings after 1945 correspond to the aesthetic principles of Abstract Expressionism, on closer inspection many are ‘holed through’ with cultural and political references to the African American experience.75 His first abstract paintings (Composition 1, 1945; Fantasy, 1946; and Metropolitan Crowd, 1946) were created from images of jazz bands or their musical practice (Untitled/Jazz Club, 1945; Street Musicians, 1945; Untitled, 1945; and Untitled, 1946). The motif of the group, as manifested here in the band, would remain present in numerous works of his over the next decades, in parallel with the completely abstract works. While Metropolitan Crowd (1946), Shapes (1947), Every Atom Glows: Electrons in Luminous Vibration (1951), Untitled (1958–60), Playtime (1966), and No. 2 (1973), along with other images produced after the mid-1940s, seem to focus exclusively on formal issues – meaning that the picture is regarded as its own reality with its own

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inherent problems, as Lewis describes in his writings of the time – in the majority of the paintings, the pure visuality of forms and colours is breached by real-world signifiers of social and political issues. Despite his avowed identification with the need to prioritise the ‘inherent’ problems of painting, Lewis does not seem able or willing to implement the doctrine of pure abstraction fully. In many of his abstract paintings – Magenta Haze (1947), Twilight Sounds (1947), Crossing (1948), Cantata (1948), Untitled (1949), and Harlem Courtyard (1954) – the Black musical world of Harlem shines through, the painterly translation of which had enabled Lewis to free himself from the realism of the ‘Negro Idiom’. The group motif is detached in some cases from its musical context (the jazz band), referring to gatherings in general instead, and interfering, in works such as Ring Around the Rosie (1948), Green Mist (1948), Congregation (1950), and Boccio (1957), more or less emphatically with the surface structures of the (almost) abstract images. Along with the ‘particularism’ of Black cultural references and interferences through the genre of music, the third way in which these pictures break with the principles of the New York School is their depiction of the group as a motif connoting sociability. This theme is surely impossible to separate from the trade-union work in which Lewis was involved and his participation in gatherings of the Civil Rights movement. These discrepancies from the ideals of the avant-garde mainstream (universalism, pure opticality, and the primacy of the subject), with which he had identified verbally and aspired to artistically, represent a subtle reintegration of three central fields of reference (Black experience, music, and community) from African American art in the first half of the century. Apparently, in these paintings, Lewis was trying to resolve an inner conflict that coincides with what W.E.B. Du Bois at the beginning of the twentieth century termed ‘double consciousness’. As a Black man and an American, the African American is in a state of constant tension, says Du Bois: ‘One ever feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.’76 This inner conflict is addressed by Richard Powell in his description of how Lewis moved between the white and Black art worlds of New York: Lewis was a product of a divided, contradictory world view: painting abstractly and participating in the mainstream art scene of the 1950s, yet also maintaining close ties with the Harlem scene and its mid-century mood of social separateness and cultural bravado [...]. Because Lewis based his paintings on more social and, by extension, culturally informed themes, his works were frequently in conflict with the more enigmatic, private mythologies of much American abstract art.77

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Norman Lewis, Street Musicians, 1945, oil on canvas, 65.4 × 50.2 cm, signed. Private Collection. © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

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Norman Lewis, Untitled, c. 1947, oil on canvas, 76.2 × 90.2 cm, signed. Private Collection. © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

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Norman Lewis, Metropolitan Crowd, 1946, oil on canvas, 43.5 × 100.6 cm, signed. Delaware Art Museum, Louisa du Pont Copeland Memorial Fund and partial gift of Ouida B. Lewis in memory of Harvey W. Singleton (1994–48). © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

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Other exponents of Abstract Expressionism also sometimes related their paintings to commentaries on political events. One need only think of Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic (1948–67). These ‘purely’ abstract pictures could however be read independently of their titles as contrasts between light and dark – even, in a metaphorical sense, between life and death  – and thus as painterly reflections on general problems, without the materiality of paint and canvas being ‘holed through’ in any way by illusionistic references to specific situations. Lewis, by contrast, violated the modernist precept of purity when he repeatedly let the reality of US race relations intrude into his pictures. It almost seems as though, in Lewis’s painting, the racial subconscious of ‘pure’ white modernism in the mid-century pushed its way to the surface. The themes of totem and ritual that were so important to Lewis (cf. works like Procession, Ritual, Carnivale, American Totem, America the Beautiful) were also the springboards for images created by the ‘mythmakers’ of the New York School, and yet the corresponding references remained non-specific and timeless in their paintings. ‘Gottlieb, Rothko, and Newman portrayed brutality, terror, and danger principally as facts of the natural world or the cosmic order,’ Leja writes.78 From a mid-century Black perspective in the USA, however, brutality, terror, and danger were actual problems relevant to their daily

Norman Lewis, Alabama, 1960, oil on canvas, 122.2 × 184.5 cm, signed. Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund (2017.1). © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

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experience of the political order, as argued above on the basis of the writings of Wallace and hooks. Despite the importance Lewis attached to abstract pictorial design, in the late 1950s he began to allude both to concrete practices of terror, such as the racist rituals of the Ku Klux Klan, and to the gatherings and marches taking place as part of the Civil Rights Movement (Processional, 1964). From a historical distance, an image such as Alabama (1960) can easily be regarded as a typical example of Abstract Expressionist painting without seeing the rhythmic agglomeration of short, comma-shaped black and white brushstrokes as a reference to the hoods worn by KKK members. From a contemporary perspective, though, the title clearly suggested a different way of looking at the painting, influenced by the numerous attacks by the Ku Klux Klan and other groups perpetrating ‘white supremacist terror’ on African Americans, Freedom Riders, and Civil Rights activists in the state of Alabama.79 The triangular white forms of Post Mortem (1960), a painting that is stylistically closely related to Alabama, make the figurative aspect, only hinted at in the other painting (a KKK meeting), stand out more clearly. In Ku Klux (1963), Lewis, who was active in several Civil Rights organisations at the time, makes the subject matter more explicit in the title as well, while abstract images such as Alabama II (1969) do not necessarily evoke any political associations for viewers without knowledge of these allusions in other works.80 Among these paintings from Lewis’s Civil Rights phase – which occupy a state of limbo between treating issues inherent to painting and the political problems of the day – American Totem (1960) is perhaps the most interesting example of an answer to the ‘totemism’ of the New York School. In the centre of the picture, a sculptural form emerges from the black ground that is made up of partly semicircular, partly angular white areas and is reminiscent of the totem poles of the Northwest Coast Native Americans so often alluded to by Newman. In Newman’s art, totem poles are presented as evidence of the ‘ritualistic will toward metaphysical understanding’ shared by the primitive and the modern artist.81 With the simultaneous evocation of a totem pole and the Ku Klux Klan (the latter suggested by the hood-shaped triangular tip of the ‘figure’), Lewis’s American Totem stands simultaneously for the contemporary racist terror as a ritual of white America and for the relationship of the Black painter to the timeless tragic mode summoned by the primitivism of the ‘mythmakers’. For Lewis, integration into the mainstream of avant-garde American art meant liberation from the artistic limitations of ‘Protest Art’ and the ‘Negro Idiom’ in painting. In the end, however, he cannot avoid disrupting the radical separation of art and politics by incorporating references to a divided society.82 While Abstract Expressionism was celebrated after the Second World War as an expression of (American) freedom and liberalism, Lewis ­produced  – with images such as America the Beautiful (c. 1960), American

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Norman Lewis, American Totem, 1960, oil on canvas, 188 × 114.3 cm, signed. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, purchase, with funds from the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund in memory of Preston Robert and Joan Tisch, the Painting and Sculpture Committee, Director’s Discretionary Fund, Adolph Gottlieb, by exchange, and Sami and Hala Mnaymneh (2018.141). © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

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Totem, and Post Mortem – a brand of Abstract Expressionism in which the abysmally racist conditions of American society force themselves to the surface of this aesthetic of freedom as an eerie return of what has been repressed. Impurity and resistance

When reflecting on the relationship between the modernist discourse on art in the USA and contemporary transcultural thinking, the question arises as to how the painter of transculturalism in the mid-twentieth century, namely Wifredo Lam of Cuba, was perceived by the New York art scene of his day. Lam, who was of African and Chinese descent and was exposed in his youth to the practices of the Afro-Cuban Santería cult, went to Spain in 1923 to study art, and also to distance himself from this spiritual socialisation at home by living in Europe. In 1938 in Paris, he met Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, in whose works he found reflected the ‘African spirit’ which had surrounded him as a child in his home environment.83 On the run from the Nazis, he kept company with the Surrealists in Marseille and illustrated a poem by André Breton, who in turn wrote an essay on Lam’s art. In 1941, Lam travelled back to Cuba on the same ship as Breton and Claude Lévi-Strauss. The ship made a stop in Martinique, where he met Aimé Césaire, co-founder of the Négritude movement and poet of anti-colonialism, with whom he would collaborate on publications in the years to come. ‘The whole colonial drama of my youth seemed to be reborn in me,’84 he said later, recalling the disillusioning experience of returning to Cuba, where the authoritarian Battista regime ruled under the thumb of the USA. Lam’s painting during these years conveys his efforts to mediate between the formal principles of European modernism and elements of the Afro-Cuban culture he had rediscovered in his homeland. Hybrid figures made up of human, animal, and plant forms populate densely packed pictorial spaces bursting with lush vegetation. The plants Lam depicts surrounding his Afro-Cuban deities and symbols are primarily sugar and tobacco – the same natural and cultural products that Ortiz was concurrently analysing in his book Cuban Counterpoint as emblems of slavery and (neo) colonialism on the one hand, and of freedom and self-determination on the other. Typical of Lam’s imagery is, for example, the syncretic fusion of male orishas and female mythological beings, so that the transculturality of this painting – which transfers elements of Cubism and Surrealism complete with their Africanisms into the mythological world and symbolism of Cuba – is often accompanied by a transgendering of motifs.85 Lam clearly positions himself on the side of the Cuban Black cultures and against neocolonialism, racism, and tourist advertising that casts Cuban culture in an exotic light. Lam enjoyed a relatively high degree of recognition in New York in the 1940s and sometimes critics even referred to him as an American painter,

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Norman Lewis, Rednecks, 1960, oil on canvas, 128.3 × 177.8 cm, signed. Private Collection. © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

because they discerned affinities in his works with themes (totem, myth, and the occult) in the paintings of the early Abstract Expressionists. He did in fact consort with Arshile Gorky and exhibit with Gottlieb and Motherwell. ‘Within four years, Lam had progressed from being viewed in association with the exiled Surrealists to being considered part of the new art emerging in New York,’ writes Lowery Stokes Sims.86 But as a Black Cuban, Lam was also subject to a primitivist interpretation of his art by the critics. He purportedly painted ‘under a spell’, and his pictures were full of the ‘dark mysteries of voodoo’.87 This reading may be due in part to the titles of the works he exhibited in New York in 1944 (including Anamu, Ogue Orisa, Mofumbe, and Malembo), which owed their motifs to his collaboration with the Cuban anthropologist Lydia Cabrera, while the ‘Surrealist’ titles of the works in his first New York exhibition had been proposed by André Breton. Greenberg’s writings include a brief review of an exhibition by Lam at Pierre Matisse’s gallery in 1942, a critique that deserves to be quoted in detail here, as it is quite informative about the communication problems between modernist art theory and transcultural art: With gouache this Cuban painter achieves the boldness of oil. He has an idiom all his own, when he manages to escape Picasso – an abstract treatment of floral and animal motifs against dun and light-gray backgrounds, derived apparently from Amerindian art. Lam draws with a great deal of flair. But all is ruined – in

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Wifredo Lam, Altar for Yemaya, 1944, oil on paper mounted on canvas, 148 × 94.5 cm. Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’art moderne, Paris. Inventory no. AM 1985–99. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021.

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some pictures by a straining after bravura effects, by showy motions, in others by obsessive rhythms and the inability to be more than decorative. And in two instances the artist’s reliance upon Picasso for ideas is so great as to be parody. Yet something may come out of it. Lam has a gift but doesn’t seem to know what to do with it.88

While, for Greenberg, Lam’s ‘obsessive rhythms’ diminish the quality of his pictures, and his kinship with Picasso curdles into a ‘parody’, the fact is that the contribution made by Lam’s painting to proto-postmodern and proto-postcolonial art consists precisely in this new enrichment of European primitivism with the self-same cultural elements whose reception and formalisation had underpinned its development at the beginning of the twentieth century. ‘Lam’s adaptations of European modernist styles already informed by African elements engage notions of originality and authenticity,’ writes Sims in this regard.89 Lam’s localised cultural particularism thus does not correspond to the principle of universalising the ‘primitive’. The prerequisite for the ostensibly ‘legitimate’ primitivism of white modernism is the cultural distance of the artist from the culture whose fragments he appropriates (Picasso and Africa, Newman and the Northwest Coast Native Americans, Pollock and the Navajo, etc.). The respective culture acts as a springboard and source of inspiration, while the further artistic development leads to the divorcing of formal elements from their erstwhile functional significance. Only through extensive abstraction of the particular source can the Western artist lay claim to the universal validity of an art in which ‘only timeless and tragic subjects carry any value’, as Gottlieb, Rothko, and Newman put it in their famous 1943 statement.90 But Lam himself is a member of a ‘primitive’ culture, the AfroCuban Santería, an ‘insider’, as opposed to Picasso’s engagement with African and Oceanic art as an ‘outsider’.91 Let us compare the review by Greenberg quoted above with the comments made by David Siqueiros about Lam’s art in his 1943 ‘Open Letter to the Modern Painters and Sculptors of Cuba’: I had been told he was simply a student of Picasso and he was more or less talented. I do not agree with this judgement. Lam doubtless learned from Picasso, and he did well to do so. But his current works display elements of the Black race that would gain enormous importance in the Cuban visual art of the future [...] Such a non-Greek-Latin contribution will play the same stimulating role in Cuba as the Indian influence in Mexico.92

While Greenberg misunderstands the elements in Lam’s motifs as being ‘Indian’ – possibly because many Abstract Expressionists drew upon Native American art – the Mexican painter Siqueiros, who had spent several months

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Wifredo Lam, Oya, 1944, oil on canvas, 160 × 127 cm. María Graciela and Luis Alfonso Oberto Collection. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021.

in Cuba in 1943, sees the African element in Lam’s paintings as part of an aesthetic revolution within the framework of decolonisation. I bring Siqueiros into play here because he was very active in the USA in the 1930s, and the young Pollock took part in his Experimental Workshop in New York in 1936. Siqueiros was part of the transcultural and transmedia movement that was diametrically opposed both politically and artistically to the modernist cult

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Wifredo Lam, The Sombre Malembo, God of the Crossroads, 1943, oil on canvas, 153 × 126.4 cm. The Rudman Trust. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021.

of purity. ‘It is my opinion that those who have maintained in this twentieth century that the various manifestations of the plastic arts have become d ­ efinitely liberated by becoming autonomous, are mistaken,’ wrote Siqueiros in 1948, making a resolute counter-argument to Greenberg.93 In a talk in 1947, he demanded ‘systematic criticism of Pure Art tendencies’,94 harking back to a statement he had made in 1934:

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We must develop a polygraphic art which will combine both plastic and graphic art and provide a great potential for artistic expression. Art must no longer be separated into units, either pure painting or pure sculpture, it must find a new, more powerful, more modern language which will give it much greater repercussion and validity as an art expression.95

In Siqueiros’s revolutionary and decolonial art theory, which ‘directs itself to the native races humiliated for centuries’,96 a litany of exclusions comes into play, but from a completely different, anti-bourgeois perspective: We shall exclude everything which cannot be reproduced, we shall exclude exhibitions in ‘distinguished’ galleries for the benefit of amateurs and critics, expensive limited editions, in fact everything which can be considered art for the private collector and for a privileged élite.97

From the late 1940s onwards, the purification work in art took its course in parallel and in connection with the political purges of the McCarthy era. With growing anti-communist sentiment and an increasing fixation on an original American art, the myth increasingly took hold of the artist whose personal expression was tantamount to that of universal humanity and its relationship to the absolute. The critical reconsideration of Abstract Expressionism and the accompanying art theory since the late 1970s, by contrast, may have focused too much on art’s role in US Cold War politics. In the process, another line of conflict sank from view: namely, the initial proximity and later forming of opposing fronts between, on the one side, white American modernism and, on the other, artistic and cultural-theoretical projects in the context of African American and Third World policies of decolonisation, whose linking of transculturality and transmediality prepared the ground for a discourse that is topical again today. Notes 1 Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ [1960], in Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (eds), Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), p. 5. 2 Clement Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ [1940], in Francis Frascina (ed.), Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 68. 3 Ibid., p. 66. 4 Ibid., p. 60. 5 Ibid., p. 63. 6 Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 116–47.

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7 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 41. 8 See, among others: Richard Dyer, White (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). 9 Anonymous, ‘Black-White Intermarriage: The Early History of Miscegenation in America, Defining Racial Categories, Demonising Asian Immigrants’, www.ency clopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/ black-white-intermarriage (accessed 12 August 2021). 10 David A. Hollinger, ‘Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States’, The American Historical Review, 108:5 (2003), 1364. 11 Ibid., 1365. 12 Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 17–32. 13 Dana Berthold, ‘Tidy Whiteness: A Genealogy of Race, Purity, and Hygiene’, Ethics & the Environment, 15:1 (2010), 1. 14 Amy M. Mooney, ‘“Empty Shells and Hollow Forms”: The High Politics of an African American Abstract Paradigm’, in Ellie Tweedy (ed.), Romare Bearden in the Modern Tradition: Essays from the Romare Bearden Symposium (New York: Romare Bearden Foundation, 2007), pp. 52–3. 15 Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, Partisan Review, 6:1 (1939), 34–49. This development coincides with the author’s political about-face from Marxism to anti-communism in the McCarthy era. 16 Sheila Christofides, ‘The Intransigent Critic: Reconsidering the reasons for Clement Greenberg’s Formalist Stance from the Early 1930s to the Early 1970s’ (PhD dissertation Sydney: University of New South Wales, 2004), p. 119. 17 Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 222–5. 18 Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 58. 19 Ibid., p. 58. 20 Ibid., p. 59. 21 Ibid., p. 393. 22 Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, p. 224. 23 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). 24 Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar [1947] (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 98.

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25 Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past [1941] (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005). For more on early concepts of the transcultural in Ortiz and Herskovits, cf. Chapters 3 and 4 above. 26 Lisa Bloom, ‘Ghosts of Ethnicity: Rethinking Art Discourses of the 1940s and 1980s’, in Lisa Bloom (ed.), With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 23. 27 Clement Greenberg, ‘The Situation at the Moment’, Partisan Review, 15:1 (January 1948), quoted in Bloom, ‘Ghosts of Ethnicity’, p. 22. 28 Harold Rosenberg in Introduction à la Peinture Moderne, exh. cat. Galerie Maeght, Paris, 1947, quoted in Bloom, ‘Ghosts of Ethnicity’, p. 23. 29 Serge Guilbault, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 30 David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 31 David Craven, ‘Abstract Expressionism and Third World Art: A Postcolonial Approach to ‘American Art’, Oxford Art Journal, 14:1 (1991), 44–66. 32 Barnett Newman, ‘What About Isolationist Art?’ [1942], in John P. O’Neill (ed.), Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), pp. 20–9. 33 Barnett Newman, ‘American Modern Artists’ [1943], in O’Neill (ed.), Selected Writings, p. 29. 34 Barnett Newman, ‘The Painting of Tamayo and Gottlieb’ [1945], in O’Neill (ed.), Selected Writings, p. 72. 35 Barnett Newman, ‘The Ideographic Picture’ [1947], in O’Neill (ed.), Selected Writings, p. 108. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Newman, ‘Tamayo and Gottlieb’, p. 72. 39 Ibid., p. 74. 40 Ann Eden Gibson noted that, in the 1940s, artists of Native American descent often concealed this fact to avoid being associated with the clichés of ‘primitive art’. Cf. Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 58–66. This, in turn, recalls the ‘negrophilia’ phenomenon in 1920s Paris described by Petrine Archer-Straw, marked by a craze among white bohemian types for Black culture at a time when many Blacks were simultaneously at pains to minimise the appearance of Blackness in order to be recognised as part of ‘civilised’ Parisian society. Cf. Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), pp. 90–105. 41 MoMA organised the exhibition Indian Art of the United States in 1941. Cf. Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, pp. 84–93. 42 Ibid., pp. 118–19. 43 ‘Congress called its policy toward American Indians from the 1940s to the 1960s “termination”. The goal was to end U.S. treaty obligations, dissolve reservations,

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and end federal recognition of Native Nations. Termination meant loss of land and the end of tribal governance.’ Wall text in the exhibition Nation to Nation: Treaties between the United States and American Indian Nations at the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC, 21 September 2014 – Autumn 2018. 44 See, among others: Gibson, Abstract Expressionism; and Craven, ‘Abstract Expressionism’. Gibson’s book was furthermore among the first to point out the increasing exclusion of women artists from the canon on Abstract Expressionism. More recent publications on women in Abstract Expressionism include Joan Marter (ed.), Women of Abstract Expressionism, exh. cat. Denver Art Museum (New Haven: Yale University Press 2016), and Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art (New York, Boston, London: Little, Brown and Company, 2018). 45 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Introduction to Six American Artists’, Possibilities (Winter 1947–48), 75, quoted in Gibson, Abstract Expressionism, p. 44. 46 Thomas Hess, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase (New York: Viking, 1951), p. 158, quoted in Gibson, Abstract Expressionism, p. 44. 47 The significance of ‘ancestral arts’ for African American modernism was argued primarily by the philosopher Alain Locke, who emphasised in his writings starting in the mid-1920s, and in his support for Black artists, the importance of aesthetically reclaiming African arts for the cultural identity of American Blacks. Cf. among others Alain Locke, ‘The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts’, in Locke (ed.), The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Touchstone, 1997), pp. 254–67. 48 Cf. the section ‘Art or Propaganda?’ in Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and Gene Andrew Jarrett (eds), The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 253–74. 49 Examples of this literature include the novels Black No More (1931) by George Schuyler and Black Boy (1945) by Richard Wright as well as the short story Going to Meet the Man (1965) by James Baldwin. The most familiar piece of music on the subject is probably Billie Holiday’s song ‘Strange Fruit’ of 1939. ‘White terror’ motifs also frequently appear in the visual arts between the wars, for example in the works of Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence. In 1935, the exhibition An Art Commentary on Lynching at the Arthur U. Newton Galleries in New York took up the theme. 50 Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith, Lynching Photographs (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2007). 51 ‘In the North American context, “reckless eyeballing”, a simple looking at a white person in authority, was forbidden those classified as “colored” under Jim Crow. Such looking was held to be both violent and sexualized in and of itself, a further intensification of the policing of visuality. As late as 1951, a farmer named Matt Ingram was convicted of the assault of a white woman in North Carolina because she had not liked the way he looked at her from a distance of sixty-five feet.’ See Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 8.

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52 Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), p. 7. Ellison began the novel in 1945, published excerpts appeared in 1947, and the full version came out in 1952. 53 Ibid., pp. 12–13. 54 Michelle Wallace, ‘Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American Culture’, in Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (eds), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. 44. 55 Ibid., p. 47. 56 Bell hooks, ‘Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination’, in bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), p. 170. 57 Ibid., p. 175. 58 David Craven (ed.), Norman Lewis: Black Paintings 1946–1977, exh. cat. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1998. 59 Cf. Chapter 6 above. 60 Norman Lewis, ‘Thesis’, in Lewis, From the Harlem Renaissance to Abstraction, exh. cat. New York: Kenkeleba Gallery, 1989, p. 63. 61 Norman Lewis, ‘Application for Guggenheim Fellowship’, in ibid., p. 65. 62 Norman Lewis, ‘Plan for Work’, in From the Harlem Renaissance to Abstraction, p. 65. 63 Ibid. Here, Lewis is obviously repeating certain formulations used by Greenberg, who in a review of an exhibition of works by Hedda Sterne and Adolph Gottlieb remarked on ‘a new indigenous school of symbolism’. Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of Exhibitions of Hedda Sterne and Adolph Gottlieb’, The Nation, 6 December 1947, quoted in Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 188. 64 Lewis, ‘Thesis’, p. 63. 65 In 1942, in an application for a Rosenwald fellowship, Lewis had expressed an utterly different artistic interest: ‘I should like to paint the Negro in Harlem and throughout the South, giving special attention to different forms of labor in different locations. Also depicting the Negro doing his part in the National defense.’ Quoted in Ann Eden Gibson, ‘Norman Lewis in the Forties’, from Lewis, From the Harlem Renaissance, p. 13. 66 Mia L. Bagneris, ‘Loner in the Dark: The Singular Vision of Norman Lewis and the Evidence of Things Unseen’, in Norman L. Kleeblatt, Stephen Brown, Lisa Saltzman, and Mia L. Bagneris (eds), From the Margins: Lee Krasner, Norman Lewis 1945–1952, exh. cat. New York: The Jewish Museum, 2014, pp. 78–91. 67 The painter Hale Woodruff, a friend of Lewis, was the impetus among the African American artists in the late 1940s when it came to desegregation in exhibition policies. He agitated in his immediate sphere of influence, Atlanta University, where he taught, and also appealed to diverse foundations engaged in promoting ‘Negro artists’ to end separate competitions and grant awards. Cf. Chapter 8 below. In 1934 and 1946, Romare Bearden criticised the negative impact of segregation on the art field and on the development of Black artists. Cf. Romare Bearden, ‘The Negro Artist and Modern Art’, Opportunity (December 1934), reprinted in Gates

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and Jarrett (eds), The New Negro, pp. 554–7, and Romare Bearden, ‘The Negro Artist’s Dilemma’, Critique: A Review of Contemporary Art, 1:2 (1946), 16–22. 68 Henri Ghent, ‘Oral History Interview with Norman Lewis, 1968 July 14’, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, www.aaa.si.edu/ collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-norman-lewis-11465 (accessed 12 August 2021). 69 Norman Lewis, in Robert Goodnough (ed.), Artists’ Sessions at Studio 35 (1950) (Chicago: Soberscove Press / Wittenborn Art Books, 2009), pp. 32–3. 70 Ad Reinhardt, in ibid., p. 33. 71 Alfred H. Barr, in ibid. A critical analysis of this part of the discussion can be found in Ann Gibson, ‘Recasting the Canon: Norman Lewis and Jackson Pollock’, Artforum, 30:7 (1992), 71–2. 72 David Hare, in Artists’ Sessions, p. 13. 73 Barnett Newman, in ibid. 74 I borrowed this expression from the title of a book edited by Kobena Mercer, Discrepant Abstraction (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2006). 75 Greenberg speaks of the resistance of the flat picture plane to attempts to ‘hole through’ it to obtain realistic perspectival space. Clement Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ [1940], in Francis Frascina (ed.), Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 68. 76 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk [1903] (Seattle: Amazon Classics, 2017), p. 5. 77 Richard J. Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997), p. 103. 78 Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, p. 75. 79 For a detailed inventory of white racist attacks in the USA, see Christopher Hewitt, Political Violence and Terrorism in Modern America: A Chronology (London and Westport: Praeger Security International, 2005). 80 A more detailed discussion of the ambivalent meanings of pictures from this group by Lewis is provided by Ann Eden Gibson in ‘Norman Lewis: “How to Get Black”’, in Kobena Mercer (ed.), Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 102–23. 81 Barnett Newman, ‘Ideographic Picture’, p. 108. 82 Ad Reinhardt, who was Lewis’s closest friend among the white painters and who described Lewis as the best American painter, strictly separated his art from his political engagement. Like Lewis, he was active in the Artists’ Committee for Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and he also published anti-racist caricatures, including a brochure for US soldiers in the Second World War, produced under the direction of Ruth Benedict – who had studied with Franz Boas at Columbia University alongside Melville J. Herskovits. Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, The Races of Mankind (New York: Public Affairs Committee, Pamphlet no. 85, 1943). 83 ‘What made me feel such empathy with his painting, more than anything else, was the presence of African art and the African spirit that I discovered in it. When I was a little boy, I had seen African figures in Mantonica Wilson’s house [Lam’s

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godmother, who left a deep impression on him in his youth]. And in Pablo’s work I seemed to find a kind of continuum.’ Wifredo Lam, quoted in Max-Pol Fouchet, Wifredo Lam (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafica, 1983), p. 23. 84 Ibid., p. 30. 85 It is no coincidence that Elegguá, the Santería deity of crossroads, is the most frequent motif in Lam’s iconography. Cf. Roberto S. Goizueta, ‘Mysterium tremendum et fascinans: The Pre-theistic Art of Wifredo Lam’, in Elizabeth T. Goizueta (ed.), Wifredo Lam: Imagining New Worlds, exh. cat. Boston: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2014, p. 85. 86 Lowery Stokes Sims, ‘Myth and Primitivism: The Work of Wifredo Lam in the Context of the New York School and the School of Paris, 1942–1952’, in Maria R. Balderrama (ed.), Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries 1938–1952, exh. cat. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1992, p. 75. 87 Lowery Stokes Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923–1982 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), p. 75. 88 Clement Greenberg, ‘Wilfredo [sic] Lam. Gouaches. At Pierre Matisse’, The Nation, 12 December 1942. Quoted in Greenberg, Collected Essays, vol. 1, p. 131. 89 Sims, Wifredo Lam, p. 62. 90 Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, ‘Statement’, in Edward Alden Jewell, ‘“Globalism” Pops into View’, New York Times, 13 June 1943, X9. 91 Lowery Stokes Sims, ‘Wifredo Lam: From Spain Back to Cuba’, in Balderrama (ed.), Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries, p. 20. 92 David Alfaro Siqueiros, ‘Offener Brief an die modernen Maler und Bildhauer Kubas’, in Siqueiros, Der neue mexikanische Realismus (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1975), p. 101. 93 David Alfaro Siqueiros, ‘Towards a New Integral Art’ [1948], in Art and Revolution (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), pp. 95–6. 94 David Alfaro Siqueiros, ‘The Historical Process of Modern Mexican Painting’ [1947], in Siqueiros, Art and Revolution, p. 17. 95 David Alfaro Siqueiros, ‘Towards a Transformation of the Plastic Arts’ [1934], in Siqueiros, Art and Revolution, p. 46. 96 David Alfaro Siqueiros (drafted by Siqueiros and signed by all the members of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors), ‘A Declaration of Social, Political and Aesthetic Principles’, in Siqueiros, Art and Revolution, p. 24. 97 David Alfaro Siqueiros, ‘Towards a Transformation of the Plastic Arts’, p. 47.

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Painting the global history of art: Hale Woodruff’s The Art of the Negro

The concluding chapter of this book is dedicated to a single work of art: Hale Woodruff’s 1950–51 mural cycle The Art of the Negro. The discussion focuses on how Woodruff depicts here a transcultural art history that embeds the genealogy of modern art within the history of humankind, colonial violence, and the politics of liberation. In addition, the specific ways are examined in which Woodruff used the murals to negotiate the divergent requirements of Abstract Expressionism and Black historiography on the eve of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. It was against the backdrop of the racially segregated art world of the early 1950s (as outlined in the previous chapter) that the Illinois-born African American painter Hale Woodruff produced his pictorial account of the arts of the world in his six-mural cycle The Art of the Negro. Woodruff worked on the murals for the Trevor Arnett Library at Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia, between 1950 and 1951. The canvases were mounted in the library in six arched niches above the card catalogue.1 With this project Woodruff aimed to depict the genealogy of modern art in the wider context of the history of humankind, colonial power, and the policies for emancipation from slavery and colonial oppression. Although the cycle is titled The Art of the Negro, it encompasses more than just a painted history of African and African American art, offering a vision of world art from the point of view of an African American painter in the mid-twentieth century. Executed for one of America’s most prominent Black universities,2 Woodruff’s mural cycle is not limited to the area of the ‘Black Atlantic’, as Paul Gilroy defined the transatlantic space of Black history and culture made up initially by the slave trade;3 the cycle also incorporates the arts and cultures of the Middle East, Central and South America, and the Pacific in its panorama of violent and culturally fertile encounters in the colonial contact zones. The Art of the Negro can be understood as an early attempt to represent the history of art from a transcultural perspective, one that emphasises cultural contact and processes of exchange and translation. Long before the attempts made by twenty-first-century scholars to compile a global art

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8.1

Hale Woodruff, The Art of the Negro (Native Forms), 1950–51, oil on canvas, 365.7 × 365.7 cm. Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta, GA. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021.

history, Woodruff’s work brought this broader scope to the debate about post-Eurocentric art history writing, and did so from an artist’s point of view. As this chapter will show, the mural cycle reveals a Black artist’s perspective on contemporary American debates about the genealogy of modernism, and can illuminate the position of African and African American modernism in the context of mid-twentieth-century institutional politics and art history writing in the West. Black history and genealogies of modernism

The decade before Woodruff began working on the Atlanta murals saw the rise of the New York School of Abstract Expressionist painting, which came to be characterised as the first genuinely American modern art movement. Painters such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, and critics like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, were busy elaborating on what was distinctive about ‘American-type painting’, as Greenberg would come to refer to the paintings of Newman, Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, and others.4 These artists and critics regarded the abstract paintings of the New York School – with their flat planes of colour, lack of

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Painting the global history of art

discernible subject matter, and emphasis on form and medium rather than representation or depth – as the universal art of the time and an expression of the tragic condition of ‘modern man’.5 The enterprise of bringing forth an American brand of modernism that was also universal was predicated not only on a specific interpretation of modern European art – one that stressed its linear progress towards greater abstraction and truth to the medium – but also on the influence of myth and ritual both in European antiquity and in Native American art. Of special relevance here is the appropriation of Native American art by the Abstract Expressionists, who took up what they regarded to be features of indigenous arts without concerning themselves with the historical experience or social status of the groups that produced them. Midcentury white American modernism thus claimed a transhistorical affinity with the artistic expression of other cultures, while also rejecting any form of regional, social, or ethnic specificity in the production of art. It was necessary for African American artists of this era to come to terms in one way or another with the universalism of white American modernism. The art world of the 1940s was, like American society as a whole, marked by racial segregation. With few exceptions, Black artists showed their work mainly in exhibitions devoted to ‘negro artists’ that were mounted by specific organisations and funded by special foundations.6 In addition to the institutional racism of the art system, which tried to relegate Black artists to the places assigned to them, these artists were also confronted with an artistic problem: how to reconcile the Black experience in a racist society with the dogma of abstraction and the formal focus of the avant-garde. How could the emphasis on formalism in art be taken seriously by a politically oppressed and socially marginalised group, and turned to productive use? Ever since the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s many African American artists had dedicated their talents to evoking the Black experience, both to support the struggles of their own people and to show the general public the cultural achievements of the oppressed group. How could these artists, now facing new parameters for what was considered artistically progressive, continue to imbue their art with this socially critical and emancipatory function? Hale Woodruff seemed to address these questions when planning and executing his cycle The Art of the Negro. During the 1930s, which he spent mostly as an art teacher at Atlanta University, Woodruff worked in a social realist style in order to either convey the adversities faced by African Americans or to create an empowering image of historical Black struggles. The former type of work is exemplified by two linocuts from Woodruff’s Atlanta period, Giddap and By Parties Unknown, both from 1935, which address with explicit imagery the ‘white terror’ perpetrated in the segregated South and the brutal practice of lynching in particular. The second group of works is best represented by his murals for Talladega College in Alabama, executed from 1938 to 1939. They marked the

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hundredth anniversary of the revolt of the Mende slaves on the Spanish ship Amistad and were designed to instruct Black students about their ancestors’ struggle for liberation.7 In this cycle, painted in a monumental and energetic figural style, Woodruff was able to translate his experiences as assistant to the muralist Diego Rivera in Mexico two years earlier into his own portrayal of a revolutionary moment in Black history. During his six-week stay in Mexico, Woodruff had assisted Rivera in the execution of murals for the Hotel Reforma in Mexico City. He reflected in 1968 that ‘My going to Mexico was really inspired by an effort to get into the mural painting swing. I wanted to paint great significant murals in fresco and I went down there to work with Rivera to learn his technique.’8 In the 1940s Woodruff moved relatively freely between the white and Black art scenes in New York. He met with New York School artists and in 1946 was one of the first African American art teachers to be hired by New York University, where he mostly taught white art students. During these years immediately preceding his work on the Atlanta University murals, Woodruff’s painting style was very close to that of some of the better-known Abstract Expressionists, in particular Adolph Gottlieb. His abstract works, however, often included allusions to Black culture, as is made plain in the title and forms of the painting Afro Emblems 1950. Woodruff identified with the main concerns of the New York School, including the search for what is universal in art, but with one important difference: instead of taking pains to avoid any specific cultural references like his white colleagues had, Woodruff expanded what could be understood as ‘universal’ by highlighting the universality of African art. In a 1968 interview he formulated in precise terms his understanding of the universal in art, which for him always depended on location and situation: I think all art if it’s worth its salt has got to be universal. But it comes from a local source, you see. That’s it. It can be as local as all get-out, but it has to have this transcendental quality in order for it to be universal. Now it can be black art; it can be yellow art; white art; anything. But it comes from a local source.9

With this universalism based on difference, Woodruff’s reasoning is similar to concepts put forward by contemporary thinkers like Aimé Césaire, whose ‘idea of the universal is that of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all particulars, the deepening and coexistence of all particulars’.10 Woodruff stated further: You see, any black artist who claims that he is creating black art must begin with some black image. The black image can be the environment, it can be the problems that one faces, it can be the look on a man’s face. It can be anything. It’s got to have this kind of pin-pointed point of departure. But if it’s worth its while, it’s also got to be universal in its broader impact and its presence.11

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Hale Woodruff, By Parties Unknown, 1935, linocut, 48.9 × 38.3 cm. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, 2012.235. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021.

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8.3

Hale Woodruff, Afro Emblems, 1950, oil on linen, 45.7 × 55.9 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr and Mrs Alfred T. Morris, Jr. 1984.149.2. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021.

Woodruff’s lifelong interest in the art of Africa was sparked in the early 1920s when the German artist Hermann Lieber gave him the 1921 book Afrikanische Plastik (African Sculpture) by Carl Einstein.12 His engagement then deepened further in conversations with the philosopher Alain Locke, the most influential promoter in the days of the Harlem Renaissance of Black artists studying the art of their African ancestors.13 It was also enhanced during a four-year stay in Paris in the late 1920s, when Woodruff began to collect African art. In a later interview from around 1972, Woodruff recalled his first encounter with African art through Einstein’s book: I had never heard of the significance of the impact of African art. Yet here it was! And all written up in German, a language I didn’t understand! Yet published with beautiful photographs and treated with great seriousness and respect! Plainly, sculptures of black people, my people, they were considered very beautiful by these German art experts! The whole idea that this could be so was like an explosion. It was a real turning point for me. I was just astonished by this enormous discovery.14

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Painting the global history of art

Before his relocation to New York in the 1940s, Woodruff had organised numerous exhibitions of African and Mexican art as well as contemporary art. By the time he began work on the murals for the library in Atlanta in the 1950s, he had further deepened his knowledge of African, European, and American art and had found his own way to meld abstraction and Africanism in his painting. Although the programme Woodruff chose for the Atlanta murals is unique in taking the history of art as its focus, The Art of the Negro can undoubtedly be seen in the context of the then still young tradition of African American artists creating mural paintings for Black educational institutions. Also exemplary of this new form of Black history painting is Aaron Douglas’s 1930 mural scheme for a series of rooms at the Fisk University Library in Nashville, Tennessee. Here Douglas depicted Black history spanning the African past to the enslavement of Africans and their subsequent emancipation, as well as the achievements of his people in the arts and sciences. His artistic work thus corresponded to an important historiographic project of the time, which the Puerto Rican historian Arthur Schomburg described in the mid-1920s as ‘The Negro Digs Up His Past’ in an essay of the same name. The aim was to point to the need to rewrite Black history, which had been misrepresented during centuries of colonialism and slavery by the predominant white culture.15 Woodruff had first proposed the execution of a mural for the Trevor Arnett Library to Rufus E. Clement, Atlanta University’s president, in 1938, but his submission was not accepted. If the artist had been commissioned to paint the mural cycle at that time, its subject matter would likely have been more in line with that of other African American mural paintings of the 1930s and 1940s, which depicted Black history and education. Woodruff explained that he changed to representing Black art history in the cycle because he ‘wanted it to be something of an inspiration to the students who go to that library, to see something about the art of their ancestors’.16 Despite its singular concept, Woodruff’s cycle in Atlanta was part of the push to write about Black history in new ways, in this case with a focus on Black art. Before turning to analyse the mural paintings in more detail, there is another form of contemporary history writing to consider, one that directly relates to the history of art and the position of the Black artist within it. During the 1930s and 1940s, art and art history in the USA were preoccupied with the question of the genealogy of modernism. In his famous diagram that was featured on the cover of the catalogue for the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1936, the curator Alfred H. Barr delineated a schematic, exclusively European history of modern art movements, from Post-Impressionism to the art of his day. Barr’s genealogical chart presents a clear separation between artistic movements,

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which are shown in black, and non-artistic influences, shown in red. Very telling for his understanding of non-European art is the fact that he put ‘Japanese Prints’ and ‘Negro Sculpture’ in the non-artistic category along with ‘Machine Esthetic’. The 1933 illustration The Tree of Modern Art, created for Vanity Fair’s art print portfolio by the New York-based Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, shows only the names of white artists, from Eugène Delacroix to Joan Miró. These are marked on the roots, branches, and leaves of the tree, while an African sculpture in the lower left corner of the composition is depicted more in the position of a spectator than a source.17 A classical marble head is seen next to the African statuette and, on the other side of the tree trunk, an art lover is shown holding a gold frame. A later version, The Tree of Modern Art, Planted 60 Years Ago from 1940, depicts only the African sculpture in an observer’s stance. The way Covarrubias positions African art in relation to modern European art in both versions brings to mind Pablo Picasso’s statement in 1923 that the African artworks he kept in his studio were more witnesses to his development of Cubism than influences on it.18 A more complex political and semi-ironic response to the need for a genealogy of American modernism is Ad Reinhardt’s famous drawing How to Look at Modern Art in America, which was published in 1946 in the magazine PM.19 Reinhardt included some Latin American artists like Roberto Matta and Wifredo Lam, and African American artists such as Norman Lewis and Romare Bearden, in his representation of the tree of contemporary art. Since Woodruff moved for a time in the same New York artist circles as Reinhardt, it is likely that he was familiar with this type of historiography of art in the form of charts and genealogical trees. Even if the history of ‘negro art’ was Woodruff’s main concern, the murals in Atlanta can none the less also be understood as his response to this graphic way of telling art history. Yet considering Woodruff’s cycle from the perspective of a global art history, it differs from the above-mentioned genealogies in one essential way. Whereas Barr, Covarrubias, and Reinhardt all speak of modern art in general but present its history as a white European one, Woodruff speaks of ‘negro art’ specifically and places its history in the context of its manifold connections with the art of other peoples and regions. Woodruff’s African American response to the white genealogies of modern art was made in the spirit of a critique of American art that the artist formulated as early as 1934 in a short article for the Spelman Messenger, the magazine published by Spelman College in Atlanta. In ‘The Negro and Art’, he comments on the American search for a national identity in art. According to Woodruff, there could be no such thing because of ethnic diversity, and even more so due to the ‘failure to blend all types of experience and all types of individuals and weld them into America’s

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Alfred H. Barr, cover of the exhibition catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art, MoMA 1936. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Offset, printed in colour, 19.7 × 26 cm. The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. MA143 © 2021. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art / Scala, Florence.

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Miguel Covarrubias, The Tree of Modern Art, Planted 60 Years Ago, 1933, illustration for Vanity Fair, May 1933. Estate of Miguel Covarrubias. María Elena Rico Covarrubias.

crucibles’. Society’s failure to integrate the diverse experiences of different social groups resulted in ‘a three-fold or hydra-headed thing that masquerades under the name of American Art. The American Indian, the whites, the Negro make up this hydroid.’20 Against this backdrop, Woodruff’s Atlanta cycle, which is decidedly not an exclusively Black history of art, seems like an attempt to take an integrative view of white, Black, and indigenous traditions

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Ad Reinhardt, How to Look at Modern Art in America, illustration in PM, July 1946. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021.

and modernisms. This art history is not purely Black, and nor is it neutral. Woodruff celebrates the achievements of African and African American arts and situates them in the context of both fruitful and destructive exchanges with other regions and peoples.

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Black art in global perspective

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Let us now turn to the style and content of the six panels in the cycle The Art of the Negro. Panel 1 is titled Native Forms and presents the African origins of Black art in rock paintings, masks, sculpture, and dance. The scene shows African painters and woodcarvers at work under the supervision of a central figure representing the Yoruba deity Shango, along with groups of people carrying out performances, such that art appears to be part of people’s lives. Panel 2, titled Interchange, deals with contact, communication, and cultural exchange between the ancient civilisations of sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt, the Middle East, and Greece. Small groups of representatives from different cultures congregate in an allegorical setting which, with its plethora of antique artworks of varied origin, is reminiscent of a museum. People are

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Hale Woodruff, The Art of the Negro (Interchange), 1950–51, oil on canvas, 365.7 × 365.7 cm. Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta, GA. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021.

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depicted listening to one another and to a musical instrument at the left of the composition, conversing at the right, and carrying out scientific calculations in the foreground.21 Following this harmonious depiction of intercultural exchange in ancient times, panel 3, bearing the title Dissipation, illustrates a drastic rupture in the history of Black art. It portrays the violent invasion of the colonial powers and the resulting destruction and plundering of the artworks of various African cultures, for example Benin bronzes, Songye masks, and the architecture of the West African Songhai people. In panel 4, Parallels, Woodruff then resumes with another approach to representing the arts of the world. In contrast to panels 1–3, the artworks are no longer embedded in the life of the societies producing them. Rather, they are shown isolated, each in a separate field of colour, divided by painted lines from their neighbours from

Hale Woodruff, The Art of the Negro (Dissipation), 1950–51, oil on canvas, 365.7 × 365.7 cm. Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta, GA. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021.

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Hale Woodruff, The Art of the Negro (Parallels), 1950–51, oil on canvas, 365.7 × 365.7 cm. Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta, GA. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021.

other cultures. Here Woodruff includes objects not usually associated with the history of Black art, namely Aztec and Polynesian art and totem poles from the Native American cultures of the Pacific Northwest, which were for the New York School of painters a favoured reference point for their notions of myth, horror, and ritual.22 Parallels does not display any spatial or narrative coherence, as is the case to varying degrees in the first three panels. Without a sense of pictorial space or depth, the paintings and sculptures from all over the world are seen side by side, not unlike a museum presentation. Panel 5, titled Influences, echoes the composition of the previous mural, placing the depicted artworks in separate fields. The theme of this panel is the influence of non-Western art on modernism. It features the characteristic styles of artists such as Amedeo Modigliani in the centre, Joan Miró

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on the left, Henry Moore at the bottom, and possibly Paul Klee at the upper right. In addition to these masters of European modernism, we also see here Haitian Vévé ground drawings (on the left above the Henry Moore) and African sculpture (on the right). Along with the white modernists and the representatives of non-European sources of influence, pride of place is also given to the Afro-Cuban painter Wifredo Lam. At this time Lam was the youngest artist of all those in the panel, as well as the least well known in the USA. Lam is now considered to be one of the first artists to subject European primitivism to a Black reappropriation. Primitivism was the practice of Western artists borrowing aesthetic elements from the so-called ‘primitive’ cultures of the colonised world and incorporating them into their modernist visual experimentation. As the art historian Lowery Stokes Sims has

Hale Woodruff, The Art of the Negro (Influences), 1950–51, oil on canvas, 365.7 × 365.7 cm. Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta, GA. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021.

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noted, ‘Lam’s adaptations of European modernist styles already informed by African (as well as Pacific and Amerindian) elements engage notions of originality and authenticity’.23 Lam’s Afro-Cuban recontextualisation of primitivist elements of modernist art was part of an explicit decolonising agenda in his work. He regarded himself as ‘a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters’.24 With the prominent position accorded to Lam, this panel illustrating Black influences on white modernism takes a striking turn in the direction of a network of global modernisms. Lam was arguably the transcultural artist par excellence, one who travelled back and forth between the art worlds of France, the Caribbean, and New York and maintained close contacts with Picasso, the Surrealists, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire in Martinique, and the Cuban and Mexican art scenes.25 In this mural, Woodruff’s decision to position Lam’s amalgamation of cultural and aesthetic influences, based on Cuban Santéria and Haitian voodoo, beside the Haitian Vévé drawings is especially significant. Woodruff chose for his reference to Lam a motif central to Lam’s painting, namely the Santéria deity called Elegguá, a trickster figure and messenger who connects earthly life with the supernatural world. In Haitian voodoo the crossroads is also a central symbol – as indicated here by the Vévé drawing – which makes contact with higher beings possible. The prominent placement given to Lam’s transculturalism in this composition, along with the other symbols of contact and communication between different worlds, marks Woodruff’s work as a powerful commentary on art and cultures in motion.26 More conventional, both in style and subject matter, is panel 6, titled Muses. Here the artist concludes the cycle with a figurative, allegorical depiction of a community of Black artists. Under the watchful eye of both Greek antiquity and African tradition – each represented as sculptures – is assembled a group of Black artists from across the ages from Africa, Europe, Latin America, and North America. Among them are contemporaries and friends of Woodruff, such as Jacob Lawrence and Charles Alston, but also historical figures including, from the seventeenth-century, Juan de Pareja (c. 1606–70), assistant to Diego Velázquez, and Sebastián Gómez (1646–82), a student of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. Also depicted are the African-Brazilian sculptor and architect Antônio Francisco Lisboa (1730 or 1738–1814), known as Aleijadinho, and an ancient African rock painter. As their attributes show, they all work in different styles but maintain contact and dialogue with each other. This panel can possibly be understood as Woodruff’s answer to The Club, the name given to the group of Abstract Expressionists on the New York scene, which Woodruff would have known from his New York years.27 It is also reminiscent of famous photographic group portraits of the New

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Hale Woodruff, The Art of the Negro (Muses), 1950–51, oil on canvas, 365.7 × 365.7 cm. Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta, GA. © Bildrecht, Wien 2021.

York School, such as the one by Nina Leen titled Irascible Group of Advanced Artists, which appeared in Life magazine in January 1951.28 In its references to the diversity of artistic modes of expression, Muses also seems to reflect Woodruff’s own movement between different styles. The art historian Ann Eden Gibson remarked on ‘Woodruff’s alternation between abstraction and more mimetic representation from painting to painting’, noting that ‘he saw abstraction, expressionism, and realism as codes, as tools, rather than values in themselves’.29 Woodruff’s entire cycle revolves around the subject of the historical and current connection or fusion of forms, ideas, and motifs from various cultural sources. This dynamic cultural model based on the overcoming of difference is politically significant given the activism against racial segregation that was taking place in the southern states of the USA at the time.

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Abstraction, universalism, and race consciousness

As is evident from the descriptions of Woodruff’s panels, the artist switched modes of representation from one scene to the next, depending on the subject matter and the statement he wanted to make with each picture. All six panels are dominated by a figurative style, while spatial, temporal, and narrative coherence are conceived differently in each, and abstract or symbolic forms have varying degrees of prominence. This variation across the panels may be partly attributed to the length of time between the cycle being proposed, accepted, and executed. As mentioned above, Woodruff put forward his proposal in the late 1930s, while teaching in Atlanta and during the execution of his murals for Talladega College in 1938–39. The Atlanta commission was not granted until after he had taken the job at New York University in 1946, and Woodruff first began designing the compositions for the murals on canvases in his New York studio in the mid-1940s. If we compare the designs for the cycle that Woodruff produced at this time, still marked by a rather harsh realism, with the final paintings of 1950–51, his stylistic shift within the milieu of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s becomes obvious. As the curator Edmund Barry Gaither has noted, Woodruff’s murals for Atlanta University ‘bring together his long interest in African art and his growing association with abstract expressionism’.30 This coalescence is likely the reason for the aesthetic variety evident in The Art of the Negro, but what is the effect of this integration of abstraction and historical narrative? What solution does the artist find to meet the specific need of conveying a message to library users at a Black university? The variety of forms of artistic expression adopted by Black artists is one of the themes of the final panel, Muses, which, as outlined above, shows artists in conversation alongside decorative floral and abstract geometric images, as well as figurative sculptures. Woodruff was clearly aware of the problem of style. For an African American painter who identified with the f­ormalist qualities of the Abstract Expressionists, being commissioned to paint a set of murals for a prestigious Black university in the segregated South was a challenge that called for a decision to be made. The library of a university for African American students and professors is not a museum, a collector’s home, or a corporate lobby, where the purely aesthetic qualities of abstract art can be appreciated. Here, a story with a message was desired, an iconography that would support the educational mission of the institution. This included raising the racial consciousness of the student body, as was the aim, for example, of Douglas’s mural at Fisk University and Woodruff’s own cycle for Talladega College. Atlanta University perhaps viewed this mission as even more vital, as it was for many years home to the writer and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, who endorsed an understanding of art as propaganda for

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the Black cause. Du Bois had also promoted Woodruff’s work when he was a young artist in the 1920s, giving him commissions that included designing covers for The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.31 Nevertheless, taking recourse to the more conventional realist style of his early years was out of the question for Woodruff. In a statement on the considerations that went into his ideas for the project, the artist began by expressing his high regard for the African art of ‘my ancestors’ and then went on to say: These murals would deal with a subject about which little was known – art, and also among Negroes, there was little concern about our ancestry. Then I took the idea that art, being a little known subject, would attract the curiosity and attention of young people, as well as older people, toward further study and in that way the murals would have educational value.32

The choice of art history as a theme was unusual for the mission at hand. Instead of telling a general or regional history of African Americans, as the murals at many Black institutions had done since the 1930s, Woodruff decided instead to recount the history of Black art and its global and transcultural dimensions. He hoped in this way to elicit curiosity and interest in a more in-depth engagement with art and cultural heritage, as he maintains in his statement. Furthermore, as unconventional as the theme of art history is in the genre of mural paintings at Black universities, it can none the less be explained with respect to the activities Woodruff pursued for many years in Atlanta. He was a leading force in the establishment of an art college at the university, while also starting a university art collection. In addition, he organised a series of exhibitions of African and Mexican art at Atlanta University, and established an annual Exhibition of Paintings, Prints and Sculpture by Negro Artists of America starting in 1942, usually referred to in short as the Atlanta Annual, which soon became the foremost regular event in this field.33 Another head of the hydra of American art

In his history of Black art, Woodruff makes do without women. The last picture in the cycle depicts no fewer than seventeen artistic personalities from history as well as the period when the murals were created, and yet not one of them is a woman artist.34 It is certainly not the case that there were no worthy female contemporary painters or sculptors. At Atlanta University, for example, one of Woodruff’s colleagues, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, was undoubtedly one of the best American sculptors of her day. Prophet had been hired by the university in 1934, three years after Woodruff, to teach sculpture, alongside the painting classes Woodruff was already giving at Spelman College. She

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would stay on until 1944. Woodruff and Prophet knew each other from their Paris years.35 Although Prophet is described in most sources as solitary and aloof, and she did not participate in the Atlanta University Annual exhibitions,36 she is said to have owed her hiring to Woodruff’s recommendation, and the two artists shared many students.37 Augusta Savage, who was part of Woodruff’s Paris inner circle, would have been another candidate for consideration in Muses, especially as her teaching had an immense influence on some of the foremost African American artists (Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, etc.), as did the work of her highly acclaimed fellow sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller. Loïs Mailou Jones or Selma Burke, who won multiple awards at the Atlanta Annual, can likewise be pictured in Muses. It is not our task as art historians to reproach a work of art from the distance of many decades for its omissions. More interesting is to point out that Woodruff had indeed integrated female artists into his image of modern art in an earlier work. For the August 1928 cover of The Crisis, he provided an illustration depicting ‘the fields of artistic endeavour in which the Negro is engaged today’.38 In addition to the male figures representing painting, literature, and architecture, women embody here music (with a violin) and sculpture (with a torso). ‘Woodruff had possibly associated sculpture with women because of Prophet and Savage,’ Theresa Leininger-Miller notes.39 This rendering of Black artists at work or with the attributes of their artistic genres can certainly be regarded as a precursor to the group of artists in Muses. There is one essential difference, however: the early work was conceived allegorically, while the later one depicts real-life artists. It is precisely this difference between an allegorical representation of Blacks in art in the Crisis illustration and the portraits in Muses based on research into the biographies of historical and modern Black artists that calls to mind another ‘art-historical’ painting that was executed between Woodruff’s two artist paintings. In April 1939, an illustration by Loïs Mailou Jones for the article ‘Distinguished Painters Inspire Those of African Blood’ appeared on the cover of the Negro History Bulletin. At the centre of the image, which bears the title Under the Influence of the Masters, a female painter is shown frontally holding brushes and a palette. In the background, Jones refers to central figures in European art history – from Michelangelo to Velázquez and Cézanne to Picasso – in the form of image quotations and names. The lower half of the picture shows African rock paintings of hunting scenes as well as ancient Egyptian paintings. On either side of this main image are smaller panels showing the names of thirty African American artists, beginning with Edward Bannister and Robert Duncanson from the nineteenth century and continuing through Henry Ossawa Tanner and Laura Wheeler Waring and onward to contemporary artists including Aaron Douglas, Hale Woodruff, Charles Alston, and the artist herself. We can assume that the androgynous

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Loïs Mailou Jones, Under the Influence of the Masters, The Negro History Bulletin, 2:7 (April 1939), 57. The Black History Bulletin / Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Howard University. Courtesy of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

main figure is Jones, partly because she portrayed herself in a similar manner in the 1940 oil painting Self-Portrait. Beginning in 1937, Loïs Mailou Jones would create a number of illustrations for the Negro History Bulletin, which was published by Carter Woodson and aimed primarily at a young audience.

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Loïs Mailou Jones, Expressing Thought Through Sculpture, The Negro History Bulletin, 2:6 (March 1939), 49. The Black History Bulletin/Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Howard University. Courtesy of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

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Among these were illustrations for additional articles on African art and the diaspora that appeared in various 1939 issues of the Bulletin, of which the artist was a member of the editorial board. These texts on art and art history are not attributed but were most likely written by Carter Woodson.40 For the article ‘The Negro in Art from Africa to America’, Jones contributed a drawing titled Expressing Thought through Sculpture.41 Six sculptors are depicted, some of them with well-known examples of their work, gathered around a figurative sculpture by Richmond Barthé in the centre of the picture. Joining Barthé and Sargent Johnson (with Chester, 1931), who also appear in Woodruff’s Muses, are May Howard Jackson, Meta Warrick Fuller (with Ethiopia Awakening, 1921), Augusta Savage (with Boy with Rabbit, 1938), and Nancy Elizabeth Prophet. We thus encounter here an imaginary group of artists that includes many of the women who are missing from Woodruff’s selection. The two articles in the Negro History Bulletin and the illustrations by Jones date from the same year Woodruff executed the Amistad murals for Talladega College and also first considered a cycle of murals for the Atlanta University Library. What’s more, Jones’s illustrations were published during the same period (between 1933 and 1946) as the genealogies of modern art drafted by Miguel Covarrubias, Alfred J. Barr, and Ad Reinhardt discussed above. Jones’s art-historical illustrations are undoubtedly to be understood as early contributions to putting Black art history into context, showing how African American artists of the interwar period located themselves within the white and Black histories of art. They predate the first books on Black art history in America – Modern Negro Art by James A. Porter (1943) and The Negro in Art (1940) by Alain Locke – to which African American artists would later be able to refer. Along with Woodson, Porter, and Locke (and also James Herring as head of the Art Department), who were, like Jones, all closely associated with Howard University, the artist was operating here at the centre of African American art historiography in the 1930s.42 Her artistic work benefited from the historical knowledge of her colleagues, and with her illustrations she herself contributed to the dissemination of knowledge about art in Africa and the diaspora. We can assume that Woodruff would have been aware of these publications in which he himself is repeatedly mentioned. It is also likely that they provided inspiration for his cycle The Art of the Negro.43 As for the historical artists Woodruff includes among his Muses, Woodson discusses in his articles the artists Juan de Pareja and Sebastián Gómez (to whom a separate article was devoted in the December 1940 issue), in the process quoting extensively from James Porter.44 Black Brazilian artists (but not Aleijadinho) are also mentioned, as well as Edward M. Bannister, Robert S. Duncanson, and Henry Ossawa Tanner. Of the contemporary artists in Woodruff’s mural, only Jacob Lawrence and Horace Pippin are not portrayed in either

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Jones’s ­illustrations or Woodson’s articles. Among the many similarities is Richmond Barthé’s sculpture Blackberry Woman (1932), which is pictured in the article together with Jones’s Expressing Thought Through Sculpture and reappears in Woodruff’s Muses. If Woodruff's allegorical depiction of Black art on the Crisis cover in 1928 can be seen as an early precursor of Black art history as depicted in Art of the Negro, Loïs Mailou Jones’s genealogical images from 1939, which refer to specific artists, further developed the artistic exploration of the reconstruction and positioning of Black art. With his Atlanta cycle, Woodruff then opens up a new dimension in artistic reflection on the history of art by considering Black art from its beginnings to the present day in all its inter- and transcultural relations and integrating it into the world history of colonial violence and anti-colonial liberation. Painting across the colour line and transcultural art history

With his cycle on the history of Black art from its beginnings to the present, Woodruff offered the students, faculty, and guests of the university a historical framework for their current exhibitions and art education. But the fact that he chose to focus so heavily on transcultural contacts, influences, and exchanges is the most intriguing aspect of this work in terms of its subject matter.45 One of the reasons for this choice may lie in Woodruff’s own stylistic development during his New York years. This was shaped significantly by his experience of interchanges with artist colleagues from various backgrounds and the knowledge he thus gained of non-European influences on white modernist art – in other words, the fusion of Euro-American and African design elements and motifs in works by artists such as Wifredo Lam. The explicitly transcultural perspective of the Atlanta cycle may also be due to Woodruff’s simultaneous struggle against ethnic segregation in art exhibitions. During the 1940s the artist advocated for a move away from the model established since the Harlem Renaissance of mounting separate exhibitions of the work of ‘negro artists’. This also applied to the annual exhibition he himself had initiated at Atlanta University, which after a few years he tried to open up to all artists, regardless of ethnicity. Woodruff was concerned here not just about the political aspects of separating exhibitions of white and Black artists; of special importance to him was creating a productive atmosphere of artistic exchange and reciprocal fertilisation. As for the Atlanta Annual, Woodruff failed in his attempt to present an integrated show due to the resistance of the university president Rufus Clement, who argued the opposite view, citing the already limited possibilities for Black artists to exhibit.46 Woodruff reflected on this dilemma in an interview in 1968:

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In the early Forties we had developed to the point where we put on a national show. We invited artists from all over the country to show at Atlanta University. This was for Black artists alone. Incidentally, this exhibit is still held every year in Atlanta. I had some discussion about it with the President of the University in later years. I felt that the Black, exclusively Black, show had served its purpose by the early Forties and I proposed that they expand the scope and include artists of all races. But this was not approved and it was never done, so even to this day I think it is still a segregated show.47

The art historian Morgan Sumrell has described Woodruff’s deliberations about desegregating exhibitions in words that could also be applied to the tenor of his wall paintings: ‘He wanted to create a somewhat aesthetic conversation between artists of all different calibers, levels, and races in order to expound upon a multitude of styles, ideas, and creative thinking.’48 This motif of the ‘aesthetic conversation’ that reached beyond ethnic and cultural boundaries, which Woodruff was unable to realise with the Atlanta Annual, seems to be presented in panels 2 (Interchange), 5 (Influences), and 6 (Muses) of The Art of the Negro, where it is characterised as an engine for artistic creativity from antiquity to modernism. Woodruff managed to integrate the figurative narrative required by the Atlanta commission into his newer abstract approach using two strategies. One was to subject the human figures, larger objects, and in some cases the background to a stylisation of forms and fracturing of surfaces, in keeping with techniques used both in African and in modernist art. The figure on the left in Interchange, for example, has elongated limbs that suggest a kinship with sculptures by Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Richmond Barthé. Barthé is portrayed in the right foreground of the panel Muses. In the panel Native Forms, the stylisation of the figures and the prismatic fracturing of figures and objects – in a late Cubist manner that perhaps recalls most strongly the paintings of Lyonel Feininger – result in a blurring of the distinctions between the individuals depicted and the images created by them.49 The stylised drawing of masks and the geometric shapes that make up the shields carried by the group at the upper right reduce the physicality of the humans portrayed, so that the group bears a greater resemblance to the imaginary beings that appear on the opposite side of the panel. The geometric rendering of objects, backgrounds, and costumes in panels 1–3 gives the impression of figures fusing with their surroundings. Along with this gradual abstraction of the figural elements, the second technique Woodruff used was to highlight abstract or nearly abstract zones in a predominantly representational image. In the first two panels, Native Forms and Interchange, the viewer’s attention is drawn to the artist’s interest in historical styles of painting and writing that can be associated with modernist

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abstraction. This applies, for example, to the scriptural and symbolic zones in both murals, which recall paintings that Willi Baumeister and Paul Klee developed based on foreign systems of writing, such as Arabic and Egyptian hieroglyphs. With its irregular geometric shapes, the area on the left above the rock painter in Native Forms is related closely to abstract images Woodruff himself was producing at the time he executed this commission. The fact that these more abstract fields are framed, like the works of modern art depicted in panels 5 and 6, makes the shapes within them look like autonomous pictures set among a scenic narrative environment. Woodruff first developed the method of dividing pictures into several smaller fields in some of his abstract paintings on canvas, including Afro Emblems and Carnival, both from 1950.50 Here in the murals, these fields form what the curator Mary Schmidt Campbell has described as ‘self-contained zones’51 in the context of a painted history. In the murals, the interaction of these two artistic approaches – the stylisation and fracturing of figures, and the integration of abstract zones – has the effect of making the picture surface of each panel and the structure of its composition much more visible and present than in Woodruff’s earlier works. It also lends the mostly figurative cycle a quasi-abstract look that supports the part of the narrative that emphasises the importance of African art as a source for modernist abstraction.52 In this way, Woodruff, who did not include himself in the pantheon of Black artists shown in panel 6, could manifest himself as an abstract painter operating within a narrative programme. Thus the artist, in the specific context of producing a library cycle, found a solution to the problem of manoeuvring between ‘Blackstream’ and mainstream. The task of fusing abstraction and history painting was arguably part of the same problem as the task of reconciling primarily aesthetic issues with the articulation of Black experience, with the aim of transcending the boundaries of the largely segregated art worlds. Woodruff’s commitment to this desegregation is reflected artistically in The Art of the Negro in a programme that illustrates the fruitful interchanges between ancient civilisations as well as the influences of African, Oceanic, and Pre-Columbian art on modernism, and which also gives a prominent place to a key transcultural artist in the figure of Wifredo Lam.53 Woodruff did not, however, pursue any naive notion of transculturalism. He by no means glossed over the dramatic caesura that Black art suffered as a result of colonialism. The colonial violence that is vividly portrayed in Dissipation destroyed African art or else wrested these art objects from their social and spiritual contexts. In the background of this panel, African buildings burst into flames, and in the foreground white men are seen smashing or carting away sculptures. In addition to this cultural devastation, the other effect of colonial intervention is the geographic dispersal of artworks and their transformation into museum objects. In this sense, this scene corresponds

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to the motif of enslavement and shipment of Africans in the more common representations of African and African American history in the murals of the period. But while these usually focus on the origins of the African diaspora by showing the commodification of humans, who are turned into goods to be dispatched across the Atlantic via the ‘Middle Passage’ of the transatlantic slave trade, Woodruff recasts this motif by showing how culturally meaningful works of art that once had a social function are transformed into objects that inspire greed and trade, finally ending up tucked away in museums. The Benin bronzes to the left of the centre in Dissipation are a clear reference to the so-called ‘punitive expedition’ of the British in 1897 to the Kingdom of Benin, a much-discussed case of the intermingling of cultural destruction and acquisitiveness. Colonial violence leads to a collection of dead objects, as Woodruff’s mural shows by way of the masks lying around in the foreground near the edge of the frame. One result of this ‘dissipation’ of Black art is the culturally isolated presentation of works of non-European art in Western museums, to which the panel Parallels seems to refer.54 Judging by the logic of the image sequence, which is continued in the panel Influences with a representation of the impact of non-European arts on modernism, Parallels depicts the sources of primitivism as seen in the art of Modigliani and Miró, among others. As noted above, extending the history of ‘negro art’ to that of the Pacific and Pre-Columbian cultures constitutes a decisive step towards a non-essentialist conception of Black art, with which Woodruff crosses the boundaries of the more narrow idea of the ‘Black Atlantic’.55 Furthermore, although this cycle remains a history of Black art, the concept of what that comprises is extended beyond Africa and Afro-America and, starting with the panel Interchange, which makes reference to antiquity, is always viewed in its relations with other cultures. If Parallels represents the reservoir of forms that modernist artists drew on for their innovations, then Woodruff also transcends in Influences the usual frames of reference of the time by including Wifredo Lam as the spearhead of these artistic developments; he was, as the art historian María Clara Bernal Bermúdez observes, ‘an agent of transculturation in the visual arts’.56 Woodruff puts Lam – a Black modernist who only a few years earlier had subjected the primitivism embraced by the Western artists to an Afro-Cuban reinterpretation – directly adjacent to his European colleagues. Their formal borrowings from ‘primitive’ art are thereby contrasted with the cultural syncretisms or fusions in Lam’s painting. Without constructing an obvious antagonism, Woodruff thus demonstrates to the viewers of his cycle the possibility of a further development of modernist primitivism, one that has a decolonising perspective. This was undoubtedly a stimulating prospect for the African American art ­students of Atlanta University.

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At a time when critics like Clement Greenberg and curators such as Alfred H. Barr were drafting Eurocentric genealogies for white American modernism and its claims to universalism, the politically charged transculturalism of Woodruff’s The Art of the Negro was of vital importance in offering an alternative history of global art from the Black perspective. Executed on the eve of the Civil Rights movement and within the context of a largely segregated art world, Woodruff’s cycle taught his predominantly African American audience not only a different global history of art but also a history of race relations, their power structures, and the earlier battles for the cultural survival of the colonised peoples. From the perspective of today’s discussions on global art historiography, Woodruff’s cycle can challenge art historians to pay attention to artists’ contributions to the transcultural turn in the history of art. Notes 1 The institution is now named Clark Atlanta University. The library has in the meantime been relocated and the hall with the murals today forms part of the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum. 2 Atlanta University was founded in 1865 by the American Missionary Association with the support of the Freedmen’s Bureau – an organisation set up by Congress to help Black slaves and poor white people following the Civil War. As the first university to award degrees to Black students, it is one of the oldest ‘historically Black universities’, as they are formally known today. Clark College was established in 1869 as the nation’s first four-year art college for African American students. In 1988 the two institutions merged to form Clark Atlanta University. 3 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London and New York: Verso, 1993). The term had already been used a decade earlier by Robert Farris Thompson in his book Flash of the Spirit: African and AfroAmerican Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). 4 See Clement Greenberg, ‘“American-Type” Painting’ [1955], in Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (eds), Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (London: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 93–104. 5 See Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993). 6 Examples are the Harmon Foundation and the Rosenwald Fund, which supported social, educational, and cultural projects for African Americans from the 1920s onwards. 7 The Amistad Rebellion in 1839, which took place off Cuba, led to the trial United States v. The Amistad, heard before the US Supreme Court. The Mende rebels were acquitted and repatriated to Sierra Leone, making the case a significant precedent for the anti-slavery movement. 8 Hale Woodruff in Al Murray, ‘Oral History Interview with Hale Woodruff, 1968 November 18’, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington,

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DC, 1968), www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-halewoodruff-11463 (accessed 12 August 2021). 9 Ibid. (accessed 12 August 2021). 10 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism [1950], quoted in Ramon Grosfoguel, ‘Decolonizing Western Uni-versalisms: Pluri-versalism from Aimé Césaire to the Zapatistas’, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the LusoHispanic World, 1:3 (2012), 88–104, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/01w7163v (accessed 12 August 2021). 11 Woodruff quoted in Murray, ‘Oral History Interview’ (accessed 12 August 2021). 12 Lieber ran an art and photography studio in Indianapolis where Woodruff was able to exhibit some of his earliest works. See Morgan Sumrell, ‘Hale Woodruff: The Harlem Renaissance in Atlanta’, Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, 37:2 (July 2013), 115–53, www.thefreelibrary.com/Hale+Woodruff%3A+the+ Harlem+Renaissance+in+Atlanta.-a0339255273 (accessed 12 August 2021). 13 See Alain Locke, ‘The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts’, in Locke (ed.), The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance [1925] (New York: Touchstone, 1997), pp. 254–67. 14 Quoted in Sumrell, ‘Hale Woodruff’ (accessed 12 August 2021). 15 See Arthur Schomburg, ‘The Negro Digs Up His Past’, in Locke, The New Negro, pp. 231–7. 16 Woodruff in Murray, ‘Oral History Interview’ (accessed 12 August 2021). 17 Covarrubias consorted with the artistic circles of the Harlem Renaissance and illustrated books by authors including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. The fact that his tree of modern art exclusively consists of white artists is thus particularly remarkable. 18 ‘The African sculptures that hang around almost everywhere in my studios are more witnesses than models.’ Picasso in conversation with the writer and publisher Florent Fels, quoted in William Rubin (ed.), ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1984, p. 17. 19 Several details in Ad Reinhardt’s drawing, for example the birds in the tree that he associates with particular artists, reveal his knowledge of Covarrubias’s genealogy. Ad Reinhardt, ‘How to Look at Modern Art in America’, PM (2 June 1946), 13. 20 Hale Woodruff, ‘The Negro and Art’, Spelman Messenger, 50:2 (February 1934), 1. 21 This transcultural view of antiquity brings to mind the position later embraced by Martin Bernal in his book Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (London: Vintage, 1991). Earlier sources for such a perspective can be found for example in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Negro, where he talks about ‘the intercourse of Africa with Arabia and other parts of Asia’ and states that ‘from the earliest times the Greeks have been in contact with Africa as visitors, traders, and colonists’. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro (New York: Holt, 1915), quoted from the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Negro, by W.E.B. Du Bois, 2005, pp. 14–15. The main text on the Afrocentric perspective on ancient cultural transfer from Africa to Europe that is contemporary with Woodruff’s cycle is Cheikh Anta Diop, Nations Nègre et Culture (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1954), which first came out in English in 1974, translated by Woodruff’s colleague Mercer Cook.

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22 See Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, pp. 18–120. See also Chapter 7 above. 23 Lowery Stokes Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923–1982 (Austin: University of Texas Pess, 2002), p. 62. 24 Lam, quoted in ibid. 25 See Sims, Wifredo Lam. 26 It is not known whether Woodruff knew Lam personally. However, Lam had five solo exhibitions at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York between 1942 and 1950 and also participated in several group exhibitions. 27 During the years Woodruff was working on the Atlanta cycle, two of the main hangouts for artists in New York existed directly adjacent to each other – The Club and Studio 35. Since Woodruff was one of the operators of Studio 35, we can assume he knew The Club well. The most detailed study of The Club is the art historian Valerie Hellstein’s ‘Grounding the Social Aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism: A New Intellectual History of The Club’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Stony Brook University, New York 2010), https://ir.stonybrook.edu/xmlui/handle/11401/70887 (accessed 12 August 2021). 28 ‘Irascible Group of Advanced Artists Led Fight Against Show’, Life (15 January 1951), 34. 29 Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 106. 30 Edmund Barry Gaither, ‘Hale Woodruff and the New Negro Initiative’, keynote address at the symposium ‘Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talladega College’, New York University, New York, 4 October 2013, https://facultyresource network.org/rising-up-hale-woodruffs-murals-at-talladega-college/ (accessed 12 August 2021). 31 See W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘Criteria of Negro Art’ [1926], in Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and Gene Andrew Jarrett (eds), The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 257–60. After teaching at Atlanta University from 1897 to 1910, Du Bois returned there from 1933 to 1944 and thus overlapped with Woodruff for a few years. 32 Hale Woodruff, tape-recorded oral interview, 13 November 1973, Hale Woodruff Collection (Box 2) Archives and Special Collections, Robert Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center, Atlanta, GA. Quoted from the descriptive texts for The Art of the Negro displayed directly under the paintings in the Trevor Arnett Library, Clark Atlanta University. 33 See Amalia K. Amaki, ‘Hale Woodruff in Atlanta: Art, Academics, Activism and Africa’, in Amaki and Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, Hale Woodruff, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, and the Academy (Seattle and London: Univerity of Washington Press, 2007), pp. 23–41. See also Tina Dunkley, ‘Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries’, in Richard J. Powell, Jock Reynolds, et al., To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 18–19. 34 The draft design from around 1945, which addressed the more general theme of leading Black personalities, included three women: Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, and Marian Anderson.

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35 Amalia K. Amaki, ‘Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: Carving a Niche at Spelman College and Beyond’, in Amaki and Brownlee, Hale Woodruff, p. 50; Theresa LeiningerMiller, New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922–1934 (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. 129. 36 Mary Parks Washington, ‘Hale Woodruff: Artist, Teacher and Mentor’, in Amaki and Brownlee, Hale Woodruff, pp. 90–1. 37 Amalia K. Amaki, ‘The Unfulfilled Promise of Elizabeth Prophet’, International Review of African American Art, 18:3 (2002), 27. 38 Hale Woodruff in a letter to W.E.B. Du Bois, 22 December 1927, quoted in Leininger-Miller, New Negro Artists, p. 114. 39 Leininger-Miller, New Negro Artists, p. 115. 40 This is confirmed by a comparison with Woodson’s report in the Congressional Record, 7 February 1940, pp. 627–9, which is worded similarly and cites many of the same examples. 41 ‘The Negro in Art from Africa to America’, Negro History Bulletin, 2:6 (March 1939), 49. 42 ‘Herring built a department that featured a faculty of African American visual artists trained in several disciplines. It included James Porter, painter, historian, and critic; James Lesesne Wells, painter and printmaker; Loïs Mailou Jones, painter and graphic designer; and May Howard Jackson, sculptor. Together, they became the first all-African American faculty of art in an American university.’ Howard Dodson, ‘Howard University, the New Negro Movement, and the Making of African American Visual Arts in Washington, DC, Part 2’, Callaloo, 39:5 (2016), 1149. See also Rebecca VanDiver, ‘Art Matters: Howard University’s Department of Art from 1921 to 1971’ in the same issue, 1199–218. On the rivalry between Locke and Porter, see Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 761–4. 43 ‘Porter, Wells, and Jones had their contacts at other HBCUs. Hale Woodruff was at Atlanta University and established the Atlanta University Annual Exhibition of Paintings, Sculptures, Prints, and Drawings by Negro Artists in 1942, which became the foremost competitive exhibition in the United States that encouraged submissions by black artists.’ Floyd Coleman, in Charles Henry Rowell, ‘Talking Howard University, DC-MD, and Visual Art: A Conversation with Floyd Coleman’, Callaloo, 39:5 (2016), 1160. 44 In his book, James A. Porter, Modern Negro Art (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1992), Porter called Woodruff ‘one of the true geniuses of American painting’ (pp. 108–9). Porter was also arguably the first North American art historian to incorporate into his writings the transcultural studies carried out by authors such as Fernando Ortiz, Arthur Ramos, and Melville Herskovits (at least since his visit to Cuba in 1945–46). See James A. Porter, review of ‘El Engano de las Razas’ by Fernando Ortiz, The Journal of Negro Education, 16:1 (1947), 68–9; and Porter, ‘The Trans-Cultural Affinities of African Art’, in Présence Africaine (ed.), Africa Seen by American Negroes (Dijon: Présence Africaine, 1958), pp. 119–30. See also Krista Thompson, ‘A Sidelong Glance: The Practice of

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African Diaspora Art History in the United States’, Art Journal, 70:3 (Fall 2011), 6–31. 45 It is interesting to note in this connection that the magazine Phylon, founded by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1940 and published by Atlanta University, not only illustrated Woodruff’s Amistad cycle but also published two texts on race issues by Fernando Ortiz, coiner of the term ‘transculturation’. The two texts by Ortiz in Phylon were translated by Woodruff’s colleague Mercer Cook, so it is likely that the painter was familiar with Ortiz’s work. Ortiz also published an essay on Lam in 1950. See Fernando Ortiz, ‘Cuba, Martí and the Race Problem’, Phylon, 3:3 (1942), 253–76; Fernando Ortiz, ‘The Relations between Blacks and Whites in Cuba’, Phylon, 5:1 (1944), 15–29; Fernando Ortiz, Wifredo Lam y su obra vista a través de significados criticos (Havana: Publicaciones del Ministerio de Educacion, 1950). For the English translation of the latter text, see Fernando Ortiz, ‘Wifredo Lam and His Work as Seen by Famous Critics’, in Catherine David (ed.), The EY Exhibition: Wifredo Lam, exh. cat. Tate Modern, London, 2016, pp. 180–5. Atlanta University and Phylon formed a focal point for exchanges between Afro-Cuban and African American intellectuals and Civil Rights activists in the 1940s. See Frank A. Guridy, ‘From Solidarity to Cross-Fertilization: Afro-Cuban / African American Interaction during the 1930s and 1940s’, Radical History Review, 87 (Fall 2003), 19–48. Phylon’s ‘Latin Number’ (3:3, 1942) refers to almost all of the early researchers on transculturality whom I discuss in Chapter 3: Arthur Ramos, Gilberto Freyre, Fernando Ortiz, and Melville Herskovits. 46 See Amaki, ‘Hale Woodruff in Atlanta’, pp. 34–7. 47 Woodruff in ‘Oral History Interview’ (accessed 23 August 2016). It must be added that in October 1948 the committee for the Atlanta Annual conducted a written survey of 212 participants on the question of whether the show should be open ‘to all artists, regardless of race or color’. In a letter dated 5 January 1949 to the artist Romare Bearden, Rufus Clement refers to this survey as one basis for the decision to continue the exhibition ‘for Negro artists alone’. Documents on this topic can be found in Tina Dunkley, Jerry Cullum, Cynthia Oliver-Ham, et al., In the Eye of the Muses: Selections from the Clark Atlanta University Art Collection (Atlanta: Clark Atlanta University Art Gallery, 2012), pp. 248–51. 48 Sumrell, ‘Hale Woodruff’ (accessed 12 August 2021). 49 Lyonel Feininger was well known to Woodruff’s circle. For example, he exhibited with Norman Lewis at the Willard Gallery in New York between 1946 and 1959. For more on this see Andrianna Campbell, ‘Cathedrals from Light to Space’, in Campbell (ed.), In Focus: Cathedral 1950 by Norman Lewis, Tate Research Publication, 2018, www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/in-focus/cathedral/ light-to-space (accessed 12 August 2021). 50 The principle of dividing an image into several areas displaying different motifs was developed in the 1940s by Adolph Gottlieb in his pictographs; see, for instance, Alphabet of Terror, 1945 (Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York) and Augury, 1945 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York). 51 Mary Schmidt Campbell, ‘Hale Woodruff: 50 Years of His Art’, in Hale Woodruff: 50 Years of His Art, exh. cat. Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, 1979, p. 36.

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These fields also call to mind the giornate or ‘day’s work’ areas found in real frescos, whose aesthetic appearance Woodruff arguably tried to emulate in his cycle, which was painted on canvas. 52 ‘The net effect of the murals is of a wall covered with colorful hieroglyphics. With enough figurative elements performing the descriptive actions to give the essential aspects of the history.’ Campbell, ‘Hale Woodruff’, p. 36. 53 Woodruff’s work to desegregate the white and Black art worlds ran parallel to the struggles of the early Civil Rights movement against the Jim Crow laws enforcing segregation in the South. The movement had its first major success two years after the completion of the Atlanta cycle, with the verdict by the Supreme Court on the illegitimacy of racial segregation of schools in the case Brown v. Board of Education. 54 Of the six panels in the cycle, Parallels is arguably the most difficult to interpret conclusively. It is not entirely clear which ‘parallels’ are meant. For instance, the word could refer to the shared fate of the non-European arts after colonial intervention, or perhaps to formal similarities between the arts of Africa, the Americas, and Oceania, as is suggested by the three pole-shaped sculptures at the centre of the picture. 55 With the strong indigenous Mexican and North American references in this picture, Woodruff brings in not only his own experiences in Mexico but also the main non-Western influences that inspired the New York School. 56 María Clara Bernal Bermúdez, Más allá de lo real maravilloso: El surrealismo y el Caribe (Bogotá: Universidad de Los Andes, 2006), p. 179, quoted in Maria Fierro, ‘Wifredo Lam: Negotiating Transcultural Modernism and Artistic Identity in Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States’ (unpublished MA thesis, Washington University, St Louis, 2011), Electronic Theses and Dissertations, Paper 481, 45, https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/481/ (accessed 12 August 2021).

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Note: ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page; page numbers in italic refer to illustrations 306 group 155, 198 Abstract Expressionism 4, 19, 182, 190, 193–6, 200–1, 205–6, 208, 214, 217n.44, 221, 238 abyssal thinking (Santos) 9, 16–17, 33n.36 Abyssinian War 157 acculturation 97–9, 109–10, 112, 117, 127n.16, 188 Achille, Louis Thomas 167 affective communities (L. Gandhi) 17 African American folk culture 114, 119, 125 African American modernism 3, 21, 29n.7, 108, 131, 134, 148n.32, 156, 194, 196, 217n.47, 222 African American studies 99, 114 African art 1, 49, 138–9, 148n.32, 150, 152–5, 157, 159–60, 163–4, 167–8, 171–5, 177, 178n.4, 179n.25, 189, 217n.47, 219n.83, 224, 226, 228, 238–9, 243, 246 African Blood Brotherhood 59 African diaspora 46, 48, 110, 138, 149, 159, 162, 176, 247 African film 168, 172 African Negro Art (exhibition) 149–50, 154–5, 167, 178n.4, 178n.9, 178n.13, 198 Afro-Brazilian culture 100–1 Afro-Cuban culture 45, 208 Afro-Deco 140 afro-latinité (Nardal) 53 Afro Modern (exhibition) 149, 152 America’s Making Exposition 157

Amistad Rebellion 248n.7 anthropology 11, 21, 37n.94, 49, 90, 100, 107–8, 111–14, 117–19, 121, 125, 188 anti-colonial movements 6, 8–9, 12, 15–17, 19, 21, 27, 32n.27, 40, 43, 45–9, 52, 57, 59n.19, 67, 72, 153, 158, 168, 175, 179n.18, 189, 208, 244 anti-racism 6, 8–9, 16, 21, 35n.65, 43, 45, 47, 49, 52, 56, 59n.19, 91, 96, 99, 113, 173, 189 antisemitism 87, 103n.14, 112, 137 Anzaldúa, Gloria 33n.39, 95 Appadurai, Arjun 90 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 11, 16, 177 Araeen, Rasheed 1, 37n.96, 54–5 art deco 140, 163 art education 2–3, 63–4, 72, 79, 85, 244 art nègre 150, 152, 159, 169 Art nègre: sources, evolution, expansion (exhibition) 169 Arts and Crafts movement 66–7, 71, 73, 76–7 Atlanta University 49, 127n.20, 128n.33, 218n.67, 221, 223–4, 227, 238–40, 243–5, 247–8, 250n.31, 251n.43, 252n.45 Atlanta University Annual (exhibition) 239–40, 244–5, 252n.47 Babbitt, Irving 187 Baker, Lee 113 Baldwin, James 60n.31, 195, 217n.49 Bandung Conference 48 Bardaouil, Sam 31n.18

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Barnard College 117 Barnes, Albert C. 138, 160, 163, 179n.25 Barr, Alfred H. 154, 200, 227–8, 243, 248 Barthé, Richmond 243–5 Battle of Adua 46, 178 Battle of Plassey 63 Bauhaus 19, 53, 76–7, 79–80, 84–5, 87n.35 Bearden, Romare 178n.9, 194, 198, 228, 252n.47 Beckmann, Max 140 Belting, Hans 39, 57n.2 Bengal School 72–3, 77, 80, 84 Besant, Annie 73 Bhabha, Homi K. 7, 37n.86, 63, 65, 71, 90 Biggers, John 2–3 Birdwood, George 66–7, 73 Black Atlantic 46, 91, 107, 149, 188, 221, 247 Black diaspora 28, 46 Black Phoenix 54 Blauer Reiter group 139 Blaut, James 54 Blavatsky, Helena 73, 77 Blondiau-Theatre Arts Collection of Primitive African Art (exhibition) 159 Boas, Franz 17, 49, 92, 99, 104n.44, 111, 113–14, 117–18, 120, 122, 127n.20, 129n.49, 167, 219n.82 Bois, Yve-Alain 18 Bose, Nandalal 84 Bourdieu, Pierre 108, 118, 146n.10 Breton, André 208–9 Briggs, Cyrill 59 Brown, Vincent 110, 127n.9 Brücke group 140 Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. 18–19 Cabrera, Lydia 209 Candomblé 92, 101 Catlett, Elizabeth 2–3, 30n.11, 194 Césaire, Aimé 8, 17, 26–7, 37n.94, 44, 47, 49, 208, 224, 236 Césaire, Suzanne 22, 27, 44, 236 Chicana feminism 33n.39, 95 Civil Rights movement 22, 43, 49, 93, 109, 137, 185, 187, 195, 198, 202, 206, 221, 248, 252n.45, 253n.53 Clark, Lygia 55

Index clash of civilisations (Huntington) 8, 26, 90 Clement, Rufus E. 227, 244, 252n.47 Clifford, James 22, 36n.73, 90 Cold War 39, 56, 91, 190, 214 colonialism 8, 11, 13, 16, 25–7, 33n.33, 40–1, 44–5, 55, 90–1, 97, 133, 153, 157, 168, 171, 173, 177, 188, 208, 227, 247 colour line 2–3, 17, 24, 53, 190, 244 Columbia University 125, 155, 167, 219n.82 Communist International 6, 32n.27 composite cultures (Glissant) 16, 48, 53, 94 contact zone (Pratt) 30n.13, 90, 98, 189, 221 Continents, Les 47–8 Coronil, Fernando 25 cosmopolitanism 21–2, 189 counterpoint 23–6, 45, 98 Covarrubias, Miguel 116, 228, 230, 243, 249n.17, 249n.19 Craven, David 190–2 creolisation (Glissant) 94, 188 Crisis, The 14, 15–16, 59n.19, 113, 137, 157–8, 163–4, 165, 239–40, 244 Cubism 82, 84, 196, 208, 227–8, 229 Cubism and Abstract Art (exhibition) 227, 229 Cullen, Countee 157 Cunard, Nancy 123 Dadi, Iftikhar 62n.59 Dafora, Asadata 167 Damas, Léon 26, 47 Dave-Mukherji, Parul 42, 56 decolonisation 6, 11, 14, 20–1, 23, 27–8, 32n.25, 43, 48, 56, 90, 107, 168, 182, 187, 212–13 Dempsey, Amy 35n.69 Devi, Sunayani 84 diffusionism (Blaut) 54 Diop, Cheikh Anta 176–7, 249n.21 double consciousness (Du Bois) 53, 147n.24, 202 Douglas, Aaron 17, 119, 121, 131, 134–5, 137–40, 143, 144, 148n.32, 152, 159, 163–4, 165, 194, 197, 217n.49, 227, 238, 240

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Index Du Bois, W.E.B. 15–17, 22, 35n.66, 46, 49, 59n.19, 109–10, 113, 118, 127n.20, 137, 140, 142, 147n.29, 157–8, 177, 179n.18, 179n.21, 202, 238–9, 250n.31, 252n.45 Dunbar, Paul Laurence 162 Dussel, Enrique 5, 6, 27, 32n.25 East India Company 63–4 Edwards, Brent Hayes 59n.20 Einstein, Carl 148n.32, 226 Elkins, James 40–2 Ellison, Ralph 105n.51, 155, 195–6, 198 Emergency Immigration Act 137 Enlightenment 11, 20, 64, 133, 185 Enwezor, Okwui 21, 61n.52 Ethiopianism 46, 179n.18 ethnographic present (Fabian) 122 Eurocentrism 5–6, 9, 19, 21–4, 28, 30n.10, 34n.47, 35n.69, 39, 42, 55, 57, 57n.4, 84, 150, 178n.18, 190, 248 Euromodernism 18–20, 23, 26, 28, 43–4, 53, 57 Evans, Walker 149, 150, 151, 154–6, 167, 178n.12, 178n.13 exoticism 1, 41, 108, 133, 140, 172, 208 Expressionism 2, 139, 163, 237 Fabian, Johannes 57, 122 Fanon, Frantz 8, 60n.31, 162 Federal Arts Project 19, 155, 200 Feininger, Lyonel 84, 245, 252n.49 feminism 55, 95 FESTAC 77 168, 169, 170 Fire!! 119–20, 121, 129n.44 Fisk University 128n.33, 154–5, 227, 238 Foster, Hal 18–19 Freyre, Gilberto 91–5, 98–9, 101–2 Fried, Michael 184 Fuller, Meta Warrick 157, 158–9, 158, 175, 179n.21, 240, 243 Gandhi, Leela 17, 25, 27, 37n.86 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 46, 66, 70, 76 Gangoly, Ordhendra Coomar 83–4 Garvey, Marcus 46, 109, 59n.19 Gates, Jr, Henry Louis 94, 130n.67

Gauguin, Paul 20, 44 German Expressionism 139 German Werkbund 139 Gibson, Ann Eden 216n.40, 217n.44, 237 Gikandi, Simon 1, 3, 29n.4 Gilroy, Paul 7, 91, 149, 221 Glissant, Édouard 16, 53, 94 Global Art History 7, 22–3, 40, 55–6, 221–2, 228, 248 global contemporary art 28, 40, 56–7 globalisation 4, 8–9, 28, 31n.18, 42–3, 56, 91 global modernism 3–4, 6, 16, 19, 21–2, 43–4, 52, 54, 236 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo 33n.39 Gottlieb, Adolph 30n.14, 155, 190–1, 198, 205, 209, 211, 218n.63, 222, 224, 252n.50 Grant, Catherine 23 Great Exhibition 66 Great Migration 59, 112, 134, 137, 146n.12 Green, Renée 37n.96 Greenberg, Clement 4, 30n.14, 182–4, 186–92, 201, 209, 211, 213, 218n.63, 219n.75, 222, 248 Grosfoguel, Ramón 5 Habermas, Jürgen 6 Haitian Vévé drawing 235–6 Harlem Artists Guild 155, 197 Harlem Renaissance 4, 18, 26, 60n.34, 108, 114, 117, 125–6, 131, 134–5, 139–40, 194, 196, 223, 226, 244, 249n.17 Harney, Elizabeth 34n.47 Havell, Ernest Binfield 17, 72–3, 75–6, 79, 85, 86n.21, 87n.29 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 178–9n.18 Hemenway, Robert 114, 119–20 Herskovits, Melville J. 16–18, 49, 91, 99–100, 102, 107–14, 111, 116–20, 123, 125–6, 127n.16, 127n.18, 130n.64, 188–9, 219n.82, 251n.44, 252n.45 Höch, Hannah 131, 145n.1 Hoodoo 117, 122 hooks, bell 196, 206 Hornbostel, Erich Moritz von 113–14 Howard University 117, 128n.33, 160, 167, 243, 251n.42

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Hughes, Langston 119–20, 129n.49, 137, 140, 162, 249n.17 Huiswoud, Otto 59 Hume, David 20–1 Huntington, Samuel 11, 90 Hurston, Zora Neale 4, 17–18, 49, 102, 108, 114–126, 115–16, 129n.49, 130n.59, 130n.60, 140, 249n.17 hybridity 7, 11, 45, 91–2, 95, 102, 187, 208 IAM, 175–7, 176 Immigration Act 137 Indian modernism 17, 21, 44, 67, 75–6, 80, 84 Indian Society of Oriental Art 44, 66, 76, 80, 84, 85 Indian Termination Policy 192–3 International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism 48 internationalisme noir (Nardal) 52 Institute of International Visual Art (InIVA) 54 Itten, Johannes 77, 79–80, 84 Jim Crow laws 17, 93, 185, 195, 217n.51, 253n.53 Johnson, James Weldon 119, 155 Johnson, Malvin Gray 159, 160, 161, 175 Johnson, Sargent Claude 159, 243 Jones, Amelia 35n.69 Jones, Caroline 187 Jones, Loïs Mailou 164, 165, 166–7, 175, 240–4, 241–2, 251n.42, 251n.43 Jones, Owen 66 Joselit, David 35n.69, 56 Juneja, Monica 21, 28, 61n.42 Kandinsky, Wassily 77, 79, 85 Kane, Cheikh Hamidou 34n.46 Kant, Immanuel 20–1 Kapur, Geeta 21, 55 Kellogg, Paul 143 Klee, Paul 44, 80, 84, 131, 133, 235, 246 Kline, Franz 201 knowledge production 107, 114, 117–20, 123 Kramrisch, Stella 17, 42, 79–85, 88n.50

Index Krauss, Rosalind 18–19, 35n.69 Ku Klux Klan 194, 206 Lam, Wifredo 4, 17, 19, 29n.4, 44–5, 49, 208–12, 210, 212, 213, 219n.83, 219n.85, 228, 235–6, 244, 246–7, 250n.26, 252n.45 Latour, Bruno 5, 184–5 Lawrence, Jacob 146n.12, 194, 197, 217n.49, 236, 240, 243 League against Imperialism and for National Independence 48–9 Leja, Michael 187, 190, 193, 205 Lenin, Wladimir Illitsch 17, 45 L’Étudiant Noir 47 Lewis, Norman 4, 19, 149, 151, 151–2, 155–6, 164, 167, 175, 178n.9, 178n.11, 182, 183, 191, 195–207, 197, 199, 203–5, 207, 209, 218n.63, 218n.65, 218n.67, 219n.80, 219n.82, 228, 240, 252n.49 Lewis, Samella 2 liberation movements 17 Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre 48 Linebaugh, Peter 33n.33 Locke, Alain 17, 44, 110, 113, 117–20, 127n.17, 134–5, 138–40, 143, 145, 146n.17, 147n.29, 147n.31, 148n.34, 159–60, 163–4, 179n.25, 217n.47, 226, 243–4 Lowenfeld, Viktor 2–3, 30n.11 lynching 194–5, 223 Macaulay, Thomas 64–5, 73 Macke, August 131, 133, 137 Magiciens de la Terre (exhibition) 40, 55, 57, 57n.2 Malinowski, Bronislaw 37n.94, 98 Maran, René 12–15, 14, 34n.58, 48 Marker, Chris 152–3, 153, 164, 173, 175 Martin, Jean-Hubert 57, 57n.2 mask 149–156, 159–175 Matisse, Henri 44, 85, 208 McKay, Claude 22, 47, 59n.19, 155 Medalla, David 55 Mehring, Frank 145, 145n.2, 147n.21, 147n.24 Ménil, René 44 Mercer, Kobena 21–2, 27–8, 54 mestiçagem 93, 95, 102

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Index mestizaje 94–5, 98 Mexican revolution 95 Mignolo, Walter D. 8, 32n.29 migration 9, 17–18, 22, 39–40, 42, 55, 90, 131, 134, 172, 174, 188 Miller, Kelly 117, 128n.33 mimicry 65, 71, 123–4 minoritarian alliances 17, 35n.65 minstrel culture 125, 162, 195 Minute on Indian Education (Macaulay) 64 miscegenation 92–3, 95, 185, 187 Mitter, Partha 53–4, 64, 84, 86n.21 modernist art theory 182–4, 189, 194, 209 modernity 4–8, 10, 16–17, 24–8, 34n.47, 42–3, 49, 57, 85, 90–1, 149, 184, 189, 195 Modigliani, Amedeo 156, 234, 247 Morris, William 65–7 Morrison, Toni 29–30n.10, 60n.31 Motherwell, Robert 205, 209 Mughal painting 64, 72, 75–6 museum 39, 62n.55, 68, 150–5, 160, 168–70, 172–5, 232, 234, 246 Myrdal, Gunnar 105n.51 Nardal, Jane 16, 22, 37n.94, 48, 52–3, 167 Nardal, Paulette 16, 22, 48, 52, 60n.34 Nascimento, Abdias do 93 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People 15, 59n.19, 109, 137, 195 National Emancipation Exposition 157 nationalism 16, 34n.49, 41, 53, 70, 72–3, 82, 93, 112, 137, 189, 192 Native Americans 133, 139–40, 143, 145, 148n.33, 190–4, 211, 223, 234 Négritude 26, 47–8, 60n.34, 167, 208 Negro History Bulletin 240, 241–2, 243 neocolonialism 4, 7, 96, 107, 171–2, 177, 208 Newman, Barnett 190–3, 198, 201, 205–6, 211, 222 New Negro movement 44, 107, 110, 118–22, 126n.1, 131, 134–45, 147n.27, 157, 159, 194, 197 New York School 30n.14, 190–3, 202, 205–6, 222, 224, 234, 253n.55 Nigerian modernism 20–1 Nkrumah, Kwame 48

noble savage 133 Nolde, Emil 44, 131, 133 Oiticica, Hélio 55 Okeke-Agulu, Chika 20–1 Opportunity 47, 113, 144, 159, 163 orientalism 65, 81, 131, 133 originality 18, 21, 54, 81, 124–5, 159, 211, 236 Ortiz, Fernando 4, 16, 25, 37n.94, 45, 91, 94–9, 103n.21, 104n.35, 188–9, 208, 251n.44, 252n.45 Osgood Mason, Charlotte 120, 129n.49 Other Story, The (exhibition) 55 Owoo, Nii Kwate 172–5, 174 Pan-African Congress 7, 15, 34n.58, 45–6, 52, 157 Pan-Africanism 15, 43, 45, 46, 48, 59n.19, 93, 153, 170, 179n.18 Parimoo, Ratan 41 partition of Bengal 70 Pechstein, Max 131, 133 Phylon 252n.45 Picasso, Pablo 1–2, 26, 29n.4, 43, 156, 208–9, 211, 236, 240, 249n.18 Piper, Adrian 37n.96 Pollock, Griselda 20, 36n.70 Pollock, Jackson 30n.14, 155, 190, 198, 201, 211–12, 222 Porter, James A. 19, 243, 251n.42–4 postcolonial art history 3, 21, 39, 56, 61n.52 postcolonialism 1, 4, 7, 18–22, 28–9, 36n.73, 39–40, 42, 54–7, 90, 108, 150, 182 postmodernism 6, 18, 31n.18, 150 Powell, Richard 135, 138, 140, 202 Pratt, Mary Louise 30n.13, 90 Premier festival mondial des arts nègres 19, 45, 168, 180n.45 Présence Africaine 153 Price, Dorothy 23 Price-Mars, Jean 52 primitivism 1, 3, 43, 131, 133, 145n.1, 149–50, 193, 206, 211, 235, 247 Primitivism in 20th Century Art (exhibition) 150

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Prophet, Nancy Elizabeth 239–40, 243 purity 12, 16, 28, 91, 93–5, 182–92, 195–6, 205, 208, 213 Querino, Manuel 100–2 racial segregation 3–4, 12, 17, 22, 93, 95, 155, 157, 162, 184–6, 189–90, 194, 200, 218n.67, 223, 237, 244, 253n.53 racism 4, 9, 16, 21, 28, 55, 95–6, 103n.21, 108, 111–14, 134–5, 153, 162, 175–6, 186, 200–1, 208, 223 Ramos, Arthur 92, 99, 103n.17, 109, 251n.44 Randeria, Shalini 8 rap music 175–7 raza cosmica (Vasconcelos) 94 Rediker, Marcus 33n.33 Reinhardt, Ad 155, 200, 219n.82, 228, 231, 243, 249n.19 Reiss, Winold 17–18, 107–8, 131–48, 132, 136, 141–2, 163–4 Resnais, Alain 152–3, 153, 164, 173, 175 restitution 150, 168, 171–4, 177, 180n.45 Revue du Monde Noir, La 48 Rivera, Diego 19, 224 Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María 31n.18 Rosenberg, Harold 189, 201, 222 Rothko, Mark 155, 190, 198, 205, 211, 222 Rupam 44, 80–2 Ruskin, John 65–7, 71, 73 Said, Edward W. 8, 25, 31n.18 Santería 208, 211, 220n.85, 236 Santiniketan 6, 34n.49, 44, 53, 67–71, 76–80, 87n.33, 88n.43 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 9–11, 16–17, 33n.36 Sarkar, Benoy Kumar 81, 87n.35 Sarr, Felwine 174 Savage, Augusta 197, 240, 243 Savoy, Bénédicte 174 Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Viktoria 55–6, 61n.52 Schomburg, Arthur 227 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture 148n.33, 160 Sembène, Ousmane 170, 171–2, 176, 181n.45 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 26, 47, 168

Index Signals Gallery 55 Sims, Lowery Stokes 209, 211, 235 Singh, Devika 36n.78 Siqueiros, David Alfaro 103n.23, 211–14 slavery 10, 45, 91–3, 97, 99, 101, 137, 153, 157, 163, 175, 177, 185, 188, 194–5, 208, 221, 227 social realism 155, 194, 198, 223 South Seas 44, 131, 133, 140 Soviet Union 6, 46, 59n.19, 190 Spelman College 228, 239 Spelman Messenger 228 spirituality 17, 72–7, 80–5 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 62n.59 Sriniketan 70–1 Stepan, Nancy Leys 95 stereotype 10, 56, 120, 135, 139, 157, 162–3, 196, 198 Strzygowski, Josef 79–80, 88n.43 Studio 35 155, 200–1, 250n.27 Sunderason, Sanjukta 80 Surrealism 27, 208 Survey Graphic 127n.17, 132, 138, 140, 143, 147n.31, 148n.33, 179n.25 Swadeshi movement 53, 67, 70–3, 76 Swaraj 15, 70 Sylvain, Benito 49, 52 syncretism 7, 98–9, 107, 109, 188 Tagore, Abanindranath 72–6, 74, 80, 84, 85 Tagore, Gaganendranath 76, 78, 80, 82, 83, 84 Tagore, Rabindranath 6, 12–16, 13, 22, 34n.49, 42, 44, 53, 67–73, 69, 75–9, 81 Talladega College 223, 238, 243 Tamayo, Rufino 191 Tenshin, Okakura 44 terror 191–2, 194, 205 Theosophy 73, 76–7 Third Text 54 Thompson, Robert Farris 1, 167 Thurman, Wallace 119–20, 129n.44 Tobey, Mark 155, 201 transculturality 7, 20–2, 28, 40, 49, 56, 91, 93, 95, 100, 102, 107, 110, 123, 125, 190, 208, 214, 252n.45

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Index transcultural modernism 3–4, 43–4, 54–6, 63, 72–3, 90 transculturation (Ortiz) 4, 27, 95–9, 104n.35, 107, 188, 247, 252n.45 transdisciplinarity 22, 47, 76, 107, 110, 117, 120, 126 transmodernity (Dussel) 5, 6, 17, 24, 31n.18 trickster 123, 236 Tropiques 27, 44 Tuskegee Institute 154 Ugbomah, Eddie 168–72, 175 universalism 7–8, 20, 22, 189–92, 202, 223–4, 238, 248 Universal Negro Improvement Association 46, 59n.19, 109 VanDiver, Rebecca 167 Vasconcelos, José 33n.39, 91, 94–5, 103n.23 Verité sur les Colonies, La (exhibition) 19, 48, 50–1 Visva-Bharati University 42, 53, 71, 76, 79, 87n.33

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 10–11 Voudou 122 Wallace, Michelle 196, 206 Washington, Booker T. 109 Weibel, Peter 39 White, Charles 2 whiteness 92, 196 white supremacy 95, 194–5 white terror 182, 193–6, 205–6, 217n.49, 223 Wiener Werkstätte 139 Williams, Aubrey 1–3, 29n.3 Williams, Henry Sylvester 46, 52 Wilson, Fred 168, 37n.96 Wilson, Woodrow 45 Woodruff, Hale 155, 198, 218n.67, 221–53, 222, 225–6, 232–5, 237 Woodson, Carter 127n.18, 241, 243 Young Negro Art (exhibition) 2 Zaria Art Society 20