DRAFT ARTICLE
White Western art history starts before the 1st century with the Greeks who carved statues, laid mosaics, and constructed monuments and temples with a high degree of artistic skill. Hellenic art has a character of balance and symmetry, often following the golden ratio and realistic portraits of humans. Greek art and ideas about beauty set the standards for what white philosophers and scholars would call the rules of aesthetics. Art for the Greeks celebrated gods and goddesses, public figures, and the good life. However, poor people and the enslaved could only interact with public works; the wealthy collected art to decorate their homes and give them status. The Romans copied Greek forms, myths and art and spread them throughout Europe as they moved their Empire north.
The next movement we see in white western art is Celtic and Norse art in the early 1st century. This artwork is highly stylised and figurative, incorporates language elements and does have realistic figures. As with much of the Greek and Roman art, Celtic art often had ritual significance and reflected the cosmology of the people. Not much changes in white western art until then end of the medieval period in the 1400s. The 1400s are the beginning of the European Renaissance, Enlightenment, industrialisation and the formation of ideas about art and aesthetics. This is also the start of the white European colonisation of Black Africa.
At the start of the European Renaissance artwork imitated nature and as closely as possible. The Renaissance is an era when painting became a popular artistic medium when sculpture and 3-d objects held primacy before. The Belgium Jan van Eyck popularized realistic oil painting in Northern Europe, which the southern Italians like Benini picked up. The subject matter of white European art at the time of colonization consisted of Christian stories and portraits of wealthy nobles who could afford to hire a painter. Art had been used by the Catholic church previous to this to illustrate the bible for the illiterate masses; the church-sponsored various skilled artists to create monuments to god, Jesus and the saints, so artists painted what the Catholic church desired. White western art from this time still relies on Hellenic notions of beauty and proportion but is focused on capturing life in the artwork. We see the first concerns for accuracy of representation which is influenced by science, during this period, as illustrations were used by scientists Enlightenment classification project before photography existed.
If it is plausible to hypothesize that the under- lying task of the philosophy of art historically has been to supply the means by which innovative mutations-especially avant-garde mutation-in artistic practices are to be counted as art, it is even less historically adventurous to note that the most popular approach to discharging this task has been to propose definitions of art. That is, the dominant presumption has been that what are called real definitions of art- definitions in terms of necessary conditions that are jointly sufficient-provide us with the means to identify objects and performances (whether they be strikingly innovative or traditional) as artwork (Carroll Summer,1993, 314).
Artistic realism aligned with scientific in terms of detailed illustrations of nature. Artists aimed for accuracy in capturing the subject as it exists in a single point in time from a single point in space. This thinking appears in philosophy as well with Descartes search for the ultimate truth through a precise and detailed breakdown of reality.
The late 1400s are the time of Leonardo Davinci, Raphael, Albrecht Durer. Raphael exemplified white western aesthetics with his clean and simple compositions which followed Hellenic ideals. All these artists were simultaneously interested in science. Raphael revolutionized western art with his work with perspective which created the illusion of depth on painted flat surfaces in his famous painting of Plato and Aristotle arguing over Aristotle’s’ Ethics on the steps of Plato’s Academy. “School of Athens” 1509-1511. Raphael, like Davinci, was interested in maths and geometry and perfect proportions.
Medieval Black African representation
Images of Black humans exist in Europe since the at least early Christian Era painted as Saints. In the 9th century, when there was much contact with southern Europe, North Africa and the Ottomans, we continue to see Biblical imagery with Black people. Southern Europe had many inhabitants that had Black Africa features. Images of the Magi who visited Jesus of Nazareth at his birth have a Black Africa king as a gift bearer. Images of Black Madonnas are circulating starting around the 10th century with most in France.
Black Madonna images, dating mostly from the medieval period, appear in the form of paintings and sculptures carved out of wood and stone. The oldest examples, and the great majority of them, are found in European countries (Vaso 2018).
Although many argue that the Black Madonnas’ are only Black by accident of ageing and exposure to soot, this is curious as there are no other statues and paintings that did not “turn” Black, and only skin turned but not the other colours (Vaso 2018). Some scholars also say that it was intentional and meant to represent a biblical verse that describes the Virgin Mary as Black (Vaso 2018). More likely, the Black Madonnas originated in non-Christian cultures African cultures that blended into Catholicism as it spread (Vaso 2018).
“In the last decades of the 1400s, Africa became a focus of European attention as it had not been since the Roman Empire. (Spicer 2013, 9)” The Netherlands is one of the first to bring in objects from the colonies back to the metropole. The exposure to Incan objects influenced some of his work (Francis April, 1935). Durer left behind sketches he made of Black Africans in 1508 that dressed in contemporary European clothes. Suggesting that in addition to seeing objects and sketches of Black Africa that Durer used Black Dutch people as models who were living in The Netherlands.
Most people associate Black enslaved people with the united states, but Europeans brought back Black Africans as slaves to work for them. As the exploration of Black Africa, advanced Black Africans replaced the Slavic and Circassians in places like the Netherlands.
The result was a growing African presence in Europe, some of the evidence for which is found exclusively in the visual arts. For example, the distinctly individualized portraits of two black men incorporated by Gerard David into his Adoration of the kings (no. 1, cover), establish their presence in Antwerp around 1515, probably initially as slaves of Portuguese merchants… (Spicer 2013, 10)
In addition to enslaved and formerly enslaved Black African, there were contacts with Black African rulers who visited Europe that white European artists memorialized in sculptures and paintings (Spicer 2013, 104).
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Medieval white European paintings, drawing, cameos and intaglios (Spicer 2013, 49), and statues incorporate images of Black Africa and Black Africans. Italian Piero di Cosimo (1462-1522) depicts Black people in his oil painting. In his work Perseus Freeing Andromeda (c1510, c1513)there is a Black African female in the front with a stringed banjo type instrument, another Black Man in the front on the left is wearing a turban. Hans Holbein the Younger, who painted many portraits of Kind Henry the VIII of England painted Black African noble magi into The Oberried Altarpiece (1521-22) left wing. What is interesting is that early encounters with Black African people imagery in Europe were not examples of “primitive” savages, but the Virgin Mary, Saints and Black African royalty. The depiction of Black Africans in artworks suggest that at the start of the enslavement of Black Africans, there was not a uniform depiction of frightening or backwards humanoids with Black skin in Europe.
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was a Dutch master printer who added a new element to art production in the late 1400s with woodcut block prints, drawing and paintings. “Durer revolutionized printmaking, elevating it to the level of an independent art form. He expanded its tonal and dramatic range, and provided the imagery with a new conceptual foundation.” (Wisse 2002) Durer was well known in his lifetime and was the court artist to two Hold Roman Emperors. (Wisse 2002) His work is extremely technical and detailed in a highly realistic perspectival style and was popular and profitable. Durer made detailed studies of different types of human bodies included Black Africans and thought that Black Africans could be handsome (Spicer 2013, 46).
With printmaking mass production allowed for multiple cheap prints which could be sold the public. Moreover, made much money, capitalism enters the art world, Individual artists geniuses who profit off the consumption of their work which spreads from the monarchy and elite to the middle and upper lower classes because of ability to buy cheap prints. Durer cultivates art as a vehicle for fame and is one of the first western artists to think like this (Jones 2002).
Durer’s Dutch contemporary Hieronymus Bosch’s (1450ish to 1516) painted The Adoration of the Magi 1486-97 which includes a Black African prince bearing gifts for Jesus of Nazareth, and the Garden of Earthly Delights c 1480-1505, The Garden is actually three panels that can be folded together to cover the centre panel. The left panel represents the Garden of Eden, the centre the Garden of Earthly Delights and the right panel represents hell. The imagery of heaven and hell were not new to art, but Bosch’s painting was vastly different from the realistic style popular at the time. In the Garden of Eden, Bosch depicts an array of exotic creatures. There is an elephant, porcupine, antelope, monkey and a giraffe all representing Black African wildlife along with cats, birds and a rabbit, a peacock, a unicorn and a kangaroo. In the bright background, there is a green world of animals in front of round dwelling structures that look like red clay. Adam and Eve are in the darker foreground. They are on either side of god and a large water hole, presumably linked to hell from which odd-looking birds and lizards with three heads emerge.
The centre panel is the garden of earthly delights itself, but this is not a garden located on earth. The painting is full of figures of people (Black and even Sikh), and animals like owls, cranes, horses, camels, giant scorpions, strange mermaid creatures. The scene appears chaotic with figures in many positions some inside, or partially inside large mushrooms and floating transparent bubbles, with giant birds and fruit scattered. Naked humans have sex, frolic and enjoy the world of the senses. Near the centre of the painting, there is a pool with naked women, a few who are Black, and some appear to be Black mermaids.
The right panel representing hell is much darker in colour than the other panels. This panel is by far the strangest of all the panels. Giant ears are holding a knife. Odd humanoid creatures move around the buildings composed of a human head with a plate of top and a stomach like creature on top of that which seems to be vacuuming creatures around the plate. In front of that is what looks like an open eggshell in tree branches. Another giant knife appears on the right. In the middle we see humans impaled upon giant musical instruments as a strange creature looks on perched in a tall chair eating a human leg with an overturned round pot on his head., if front of this is an overturned table with people flailing about, while a pig wearing a nun’s habit molests a man. The distant background looks like an industrial hell space of fire and smoke and large buildings which look like factories into which hundreds of figures move towards.
The Dutch began exploring Black Africa in the early 1400s so Bosch would have been able to see drawings and descriptions of the animals of Black Africa and Black African people in addition to there being Black Africans in the Netherlands at this time. Bosch included it seems, exotic representations of humans as well. The Black African figures appear to represent a hybrid of human and animal, the mermaid, but they also resemble
“wild women,” a popular subject of the period, standing in for the freedoms represented by the forest, idealized as untainted by the culture of the city, living in a state something like that of Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden. (Mittman 2019)
Bosch was a highly religious man, and it is telling that his work, created before the colonization of Black African had exploded, depicts Black Africans as residing in an Eden of delight. Bosch’s painting reflects the ideas at the time that romanticized Black African primitiveness. White Europeans thought Black Africans lived like wild animals, which is why they were naked and had “developed” less. This is a somewhat sympathetic view, in the earliest ideology saw Black African as innocent children rather than savage adults.
In the middle panel we can also see dark skin people and exotic fruits what could suggest Bosch was acquainted with the stories about Africa or newly discovered world of America and its native people, who lived in harmony with nature, wore no clothes and knew no sin (Loza 2017).
Other scholars, like Nils Buttner (Buttner 2014) believe the centre panel is supposed to represent both the good and bad of existence on earth. Bosch had many hideous monsters in his paintings that represented evil, but the Black Africans here appear to be no less attractive than the white people in the painting. They could represent the beauty of nature, but they also could represent sin that is unleashed upon the earth after the Fall of Adam and Eve from gods good graces. Evil disguised as innocent wildness yet still marked by blackness which is clearly in Bosch’s mind associated with hell.
Bosch’s narrative is not drawn from life but there some realism in his renderings. As strange as Bosch’s figures are, the painting is still centred on Christianity. Europe was at war in the 1400s, the bubonic plague, lack of sanitation meant lots of death around all the time, lots Europeans thought they were living in end days. So perhaps Bosch’s supernatural images are understandable. Because he lives at the very beginning of Black African colonization, Bosch does not see to have acquired a view of Black Africans that was utterly derogatory. While many people place the modernist movement in the early 1900s as the start of Black Africa in white western art, we see even in the 1400s artists are using images and people from Black Africa in their work to represent undeveloped humans who lived like wild animals on the land with no language, religion or culture.
A substantial number of enslaved people existed in Europe at the beginning of the Renaissance. White Europeans, as well as Black Africans, were enslaved on the continent even when more Black Africans came in larger numbers, and could work together for a household. Race was not the significant factor in enslavement, and this was not chattel enslavement and was primarily an urban affair so the enslaved would be estate servants and workers rather than field labourers (Spicer 2013, 18). One could work out their allotted time and then be freed or ones “owner” could die, which means some free Black Africans were living in Europe (Spicer 2013, 13).
The Baroque Imagines Black Africa
As time moved forward into the 17th century and Europeans stole more people and objects from Black Africa concepts of race begin to emerge that are based not on geography or language – the French or Spanish race – but based on skin colour which was the most obvious way to differentiate Black Africans from others (Spicer 2013, 36). When we look at paintings from the early 17th century, we see a lot of Black Africans who are painted from life and looking as modern and European in dress as contemporaries.
Black Africans were significantly darker than North Africans, and white Europeans often described them as being sunburnt. Most Europeans, pre-Darwin assumed that the closer to the equator and sun the darker you were because the sun had burned your skin (Spicer 2013, 36). The miscegenation between Black Africans and lighter Europeans meant that lines of heredity were being noticed where the Black skin did not need to be burnt by the sun but was something about the parents’ heritage. In the 1500s, we start to see Black African origins as being biblical.
In the 1500s, perhaps influenced by explorers’ repost of Africans of the sub-Sahara as savage and godless, idol worshippers, or Muslim, momentum developed in the field of biblical exegesis to rethink the story of Noah’s son Ham. In Genesis, Noah’s three sons are said to be the progenitors of the different peoples of the earth, Ham begetting those of Africa. Because of Ham’s offences (unspecified but sexual and the subject of ongoing debate), his descendants were cursed with a destiny of enslavement (Spicer 2013, 37).
Christianity had long used the metaphors of black and white to separate good from the bad. Black is the colour of sin, decay, death which opposes white, purity, goodness, vigour, life in many biblical passages. Black became a personification of evil which was influenced by the Crusades in which white Christians encounter Black Muslims (Spicer 2013, 38).
Black Africans were part of theatrical performances as well, and if productions did not use Black actors, then blackface was a “common solution” (Spicer 2013, 40). So Black Africans were seen and represented, but as the Enlightenment progressed shifts in ideas of Black Africa occurred.
[I]n an age glavanized by a sense of historical destiny, preoccupation with pinpointing cultural developments in the march of civilization, defining progress, analyzing the role of the city, the incredible developments in science and technology, and then contact with the Mayan empire in the New World, the black inhabitant of sub-Sahara, often reported to be dressed only in skins or nearly naked, represented the absence of this, in a word “savage”. We are back at the “natural” polarity of light and dark, with “enlightened” represented by white (Spicer 2013, 40).
Though we see Black Africans in white art, their role is often to highlight the white skin of the other people in the painting. “Indeed, the most common circumstance of darker complexions playing up the luminosity of white female skin is in paintings of gatherings of Olympian gods and goddesses (Spicer 2013, 42).” Critics present this as one theory of why enslaved Black Africans appear in portraits of their “owners'” to show the “masters'” whiteness. Meaning that as the enslavement of Black Africans increased, enslaved white Europeans saw Black Africans as status symbols of luxury and wealth (Spicer 2013, 43). This theory may account for the well-groomed and dressed Black Africans in the paintings as having servants who dressed well would be a symbol of having no cares about money.
In the 1600s there is a continued concentration of art coming out of the Netherlands that portrays Black Africans. Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) has several paintings of with Black Africans or of Black Africans that depict regal authoritative Black men (Spicer 2013, 108). Because of the Dutch trade in Black Africa and the ability to leave bondage, free Black Africans were living in the Netherlands, and they appear as normal humans or nobility, not degraded.
The black Community in Rembrandt’s time were mostly sailors, soldiers, and servants, and were concentrated around the Jodenbreestraat, where the museum – Rembrandt’s form home – stands today. (Nicholls-Lee 2020)
Despite the positive images of real Black Africans in painting, this is still a time in which enslavement meant Black Africans were considered less than white Europeans.
Tropes such as the man-eating savage or the eager, smiling slave appear widely on illustrated maps and books of the period and were used to sell exotic commodities such as tobacco and cocoa (Nicholls-Lee 2020).
So that while there are Black Africans who are painted from life and not in complete degradation, they mainly appear in the background as biblical figures or anonymous enslaved people with their “owners”. There were also portraits of Black Africans painted at this time, but scholars, collectors and curators did not document who they were. Also, in the popular culture at large many negative images of Black Africans existed.
Pieterse notes that the ideas presented in images of Black Africans were not monolithic, but also shifted over the centuries from positive to negative or from negative to positive. As Christianity rose and spread through Europe, black became a colour of evil and the evil enemy the Muslims.
In the late Middle Ages, however, there was another turn-around in European images of black Africans, a revaluation which leaves a salient trail in European iconography from the twelfth century onward. This reappraisal coincided with the spread of the legend of Prester John (John the Presbyter, Preure Jean, Pape Jan) (Pieterse 1992, 24).
As the 1600s progressed ideas about white western art changed as well, from an art world that produced images of Christianity, mythology and some wealthy portraiture to an art world that also created images of everyday life and heroic humans. The Baroque softened medieval realism and produced works of epic proportions full of dynamic movement. Europe had been in contact with the North of Africa since the Hellenic era at least. The white European adventures in sub-Saharan Africa increased in the 17th century at the same time, negative stereotypes being to circulate particular to Black Africans (Pieterse 1992, 114). The Black African represented terror and cannibalism, and all things opposite of white European. The orientalist fantasy of the Black Moor who is castrated to serve the kings concubines and wives played out in the seventeenth century Europe as Europeans imagined Black Africans as emasculated servants who knew their proper place in the social order and happy to serve the superior white person (Pieterse 1992, 129). Conversely, the seventeenth century is also the period in which white English authors begin to write about the overlarge size of the Black Africans’ penis, which they correlated with their alleged constant sexual activity (Pieterse 1992, 175).
In Foucault’s The Order of Things (Foucault 1970), remarks on Velasques painting of the Spanish princess: the paintings’ lines of sight put the viewer into the place of the king and queen of Spain which places the viewer in a strange place as the subject of the painting since even though they are unseen, the king and queen are the real subjects of the painting. The composition is complex. Order of things – the painting represents the new epistemology of the age mid-1600s which moved away from looking at the signs given through resemblance to known things. so things are things by comparison to other things. (Foucault 1970, 30) “From the seventeenth century,…, the arrangement of signs was to become binary, since it was to be defined, with Post-Royal, as the connection of a significant and a signified.” (Foucault 1970, 42)
As white European culture changed in the seventeenth century, with more and more immigrants (forced through enslavement or by choice), it became more pressing for white Europeans to distinguish themselves from the influx of new workers. We see images which portray Black Africans not as normal humans but as primitive wild proto-humans.
Images of otherness as the furthest boundary of normality exert a disciplinary influence, as reverse reflections, warning signals. The savage is indispensable in establishing the place of civilization in the universe (Pieterse 1992, 233).
Art with Aesthetics
There have been artworks, decoration and ideas about beauty throughout the world and since humans started making records. It is not until the middle of the eighteenth century, however, that philosophers use the term aesthetics in discourse concerning artworks and beauty. The new interest in aesthetics in white western philosophy emerged at a time in which Europe was undergoing democratization and people were relocating from the country to the city and from country to country. The focus on white supremacy and the dangers of “the other” shows up in white western ideas about beauty.
The white western art world moves into a Neoclassical phase c1750 and crisp geometric linear styles echoing Hellenic art become popular. Artwork tended to harken back to the foundation of the white western world in Greek and Roman Antiquity. Black Africans appear in some paintings, but white artists give them the same styles and treatment they used in the previous century.
The end of the 1700s sees the start of a new period in white western art. The new style of Romanticism occurs while several notable revolutions are occurring in what will become the United States and in France. The classical Hellenic theory did not explain to white westerns why things like revolutions and wars occurred amongst humans because of a focus of the sociopolitical and so we see the turn towards the individual as the most critical subject. The Romantics reacted to the rise in industry and science with an exploration of the beauty and harmony in nature and the evocation of emotions to counter the sterility of the Classical manner. As the authority of god and monarchs was questioned, the Romantics were against institutional training as the individual artist’s style and expression became an essential part of the criticism of artworks.
The Romantics thought that art should be about the reality of the present moment and not just a mimicry of the past. Although there was violence in paintings before, mostly in the form of the narrative of the life of Jesus and other mythic stories, artists now portrayed war, and death and sex in more extreme ways. Beauty was not the primary focus, but all the states of humanity. The poor, disfigured, abused, and deviants became subjects of artworks. The Romantic movement is also the beginnings of horror as a genre of art. Hellenic themes and mythology are still present in Romantic artworks, but there is a great deal of torture, rape, murder, suicide and deformed bodies. Fransico Goya paintings such as Saturn Devouring His Son c1819-23 is an excellent example of the new levels of horror in art. Goya painted the death of the revolutionary in The Third of May 1808 and the inside of a mental asylum in El Manicomio 1812-1814 in addition to images of witches and magical rites.
Eugene Delacroix painted orientalist subjects, exotic Arab Africa, lions and tigers, which showed the threat the African continent posed for white western civilizations. North Africans dominate his depictions of the Arab war against Christians where they are mostly background figures.
Two of Delacroix’s paintings of Black subjects stand out from these depictions. First his painting of the Greek Aspasia 1824, consort of Pericles and most likely a prostitute whom scholars described as from outside of Greece. In Delacroix’s painting, she is depicted as someone with both European and Black African heritage and made sexually available with her naked breasts. His Painting Piratas Africans Sequestrando uma jovem mulher 1852 depicts very dark Africans stealing a young white woman. Thus Black Africans start to be imagined in negative depictions in white western artworks.
In his study of British attitudes vis-a-vis blacks at the time of the slave trade, Anthony Barker argues that before 1770 blacks were regarded as inferior more on grounds of cultural traits, and the traditional association in Christian culture of blackness with evil, than on those of any theory of in-bred racial inferiority. In the 1770s several works were published in England which gate a different turn to the discussion. In 1772 two pamphlets appeared which voiced a racial argument (Pieterse 1992, 40).
The number of negative depictions grew the more Black Africans became free citizens and intensified with the arguments over the enslavement of Black Africans. Much in the same way racism in the United States grew out of the end of the civil war and the emancipation of Black Africans, white people, feared the freedom of Black Africans in Europe which fueled the degradation of Black Africans. In the years leading up to the 19th century, Black Africans appeared in white artworks. However, Black Africans were simultaneously portrayed by white advertisement as negative stereotypes, and Black African objects only appeared in public in curiosity cabinets, lumped together in antiquities markets and in anthropological contexts. White westerners used Black African objects to demonstrate white supremacy. “The imagery of Eurocentrism succeeded the imagery of Christendom and passed over into the imagery of European colonialism. (Pieterse 1992, 20)” In the 19th century, racism became dominate in white western culture.
The 1800s see a new art movement arise in white western art—Impressionism abandoned photorealism. In 1826 the first photographs were made and will spread quickly, replacing the need for certain types of art like oil portraits and documenting buildings and cities or news stories. If you had a comparatively cheap and highly portable photograph, you would not need to make artwork that tried to reproduce the world perfectly. As industrialization, capitalism and pursuit of leisure activities expanded art began to concentrate on the individual artists perspective of the world. Impressionist used pointillism and short brush strokes to give life to their paintings and express their inner-selves. Paintings of this era appear out of focus though particular objects in the painting might have more definition. The Black subject is still in white European paintings in their usual roles, although the women become more sexualized.
Object or Art
Arguments over the classification of Black African objects white westerners collected from the continent began when white westerners decided to show them in fine art galleries and museums. In 1996 anthropologist Alfred Gell wrote about the problem of defining a human-made crafted object as either artefact or art.
A good deal of discussion in the philosophy of art, visual art particularly, at the present time, has to do with the problem of defining the idea of an ‘artwork’. When is a fabricated object a ‘work of art’ and when is it something less dignified, a mere ‘artefact’? (Howard Morphy 2006, 219).
Popular conceptions of Black African objects, like masks and metalwork, place them in the category of art today. However, Black African objects would not be classified, by white western curators, as art until the end of the nineteenth century. We can see from previous chapters, that white western concepts about aesthetics excluded Black African objects through definitions based on white supremacist ideology, theology and nationalism. At a time when industrialization and capitalism are dramatically changing the world and increasing contact between cultures, the white western ideas about art requiring genius and integration into the history of white western art meant that Black African objects could not be art.
“During the first half of the eighteenth century, the interest of amateurs, writers and philosophers in the visual arts and in music increased. (Kristeller 1952, 17)” As developments in science and industrialisation brought intense and rapid change to white western society, the artworld lagged behind. Paintings had the same types of subject, used similar styles and colours, but art had not undergone any significant changes (Kristeller 1952, 25-26). The white western ideas about aesthetics and art had solidified by the middle of the 1800s so that scholars had little to debate.
During the second half of the eighteenth century, English writers continued to discuss the various arts. But they were not so much interested in expounding and developing a system of the fine arts, which they took pretty much for granted, as in discussing general concepts and principles concerning the arts; (Kristeller 1952, 30)
In the late 1800s, Worlds Fairs became popular public attractions in the United States and Europe. At the fairs, exhibitions showed the latest technology and what participating countries saw as their culture. Organizers planned the fairs as learning opportunities for the public ( (R. W. Rydell 1984). Black Africans and Black African objects were also on display at various fairs. Along with indigenous peoples from other continents, Black Africas appeared as a lesson in the superiority of whiteness and the west (R. W. Rydell 1999). The end of the 1800s is the scramble for Africa when white westerners descended upon Black Africa in order to document and study as well as convert and steal. Emile Torday and Leo Frobenius, very well known in their day, were collecting. Frobeinus’s studies became a primary source for those white westerns interested in learning about Black Africa and its’ culture.
White western artists used Black African subjects in their work for millennia, but it is not until the late 1800s that Black African objects are appropriated in white western artworks. At the end of the 1800s, the influence of Black African objects spawned white western artists to adopt “primitive” styles. white western artists painted “jungle” scenes, used geometric patterns and went against the soft Impressionist style with contrasting colour and line. “African sculpture encouraged a whole generation of young artists in the early 1900s to seek out and define new and alternative forms of realism. (Brown 2019)”
One of the earliest popular painters to use Black African objects as inspiration was Amedeo Modigliani 1884-1920. Modigliani was persuaded by his art dealer to try sculpture what he produced was modelled after a face covering from a Fang mask with elements of Ancient Greek and Baule design.
Made between 1911 and 1912, Tête boasts every feature one has come to expect from a Modigliani head: the elongated face; blank eyes; sword-like nose; engraved, curlicued hair; tiny, pursed mouth; and pointed chin (Christie’s 2019).
Black African objects being used by white artists was not a recognition of Black African art, but a way to draw people into the work with novel shapes and colours. The public was excited to consume horror, and Black African objects represented cannibals, witches and demons and so were alluring.
White western artists believed the myths about Black African and thought that Black African objects were some of the oldest types of human artistry. In an attempt to reconnect to the most original and “primitive” creative forces, white western artists used Black African designs and shapes. White western artists thought that in order to find the most basic and pure form of beauty, artists should look at “primitive art”. “At the basis of Modigliani’s sculptural vision was the articulation of an innate concept the artist had of a sublime, timeless and all-encompassing beauty. (Brown 2019)”
The arousal of interest in traditional African sculpture was a dramatic as their emergence in the world art scene. Grottanelli (1975: 4) reports how Maurice de Vlaminck took “a sudden fancy of certain figures found on the shelves of an Argenteuil wineshop or bistro and bought them.” According to Grottanelli, Vlaminck gave Derain one of these figures which later became instrumental to the “conversion of Appolonaire and Picasso.” (Diakparomre 2010, 30)
“Derain was reported to have been ‘speechless’ and ‘stunned’ when he
was shown a Fang mask. (Diakparomre 2010, 31)”
The immense variety and quantity of African sculptures arriving in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century appear to have compounded the problem of a full understanding and appreciation of the objects. It was in an effort to simplify the process for understanding and appreciating the sculptures that their classification was embarked upon. Unfortunately, the outcome of these efforts seems to have thrown up even more problems. This is because the parameters (form/aesthetics and function/ethnology) deployed for the classifications presented the objects in hermitic strait-jackets, and thus made them visible but inaudible. (Diakparomre 2010, 31)
The plunder of Black African objects led to the entry of these object into the white western popular culture at the end of the 1800s. White westers used to objects to make money off a curious public. The exhibition of Black Africa objects started before the white European artists had begun to appropriate them in their own work. The exhibitions also led to white wester scholars arguing over the capacity of Black Africans to create art.
Arthur de Gobineua, the founder of race science, writing on race and art proclaims that Black African art is the origin of all art, not northern African cultures like Egypt of Assyria
Although de Gobineau also stated that the white race had emerged from northern Asia… – he was also convinced that ‘[…] the source where the arts sprout up is unknown to the instincts of the civilisers. It is hidden in the blood of the blacks.’ According to de Gobineau, the ‘power of the imagination’ was linked to the ‘melanic principle’. (Couttenier 2015) p 4
Despite his idea that Black Africa originated art in humans, Gobineau firmly believed that Black Africans had no civilization, and the white people were superior because Black African were too emotional and lacked reason.
De Gobineau also stated that African civilisation was a ‘nullity’ and that whites were superior to the ‘branches of Cham’. The African was easily overwhelmed by artistic emotions, but he was slow to understand and unable to elevate himself above a humble level from the moment he needed to think, understand, compare and draw conclusions. Hence, the great artistic sensitivity remained limited to the most miserable practices: (Couttenier 2015, 5) p 5
A fellow supporter of racist ideology Leon Vanderkindere did not think that de Gobineau, a proponent of white Aryan supremacy, was correct in asserting that Black Africans made art.
Vanderkindere clearly disagreed and stated that only Aryan races, with sufficient logical capabilities, ‘finesse de coeur’ and ‘aspiration towards the ideal’, were capable of true art and great literature. (Couttenier 2015) p 6
In 1885 Antwerp Belgium staged its first world’s fair. The exhibition included an ethnographic section and was going to have a model of Congolese villages when planned. This plan was scrapped, and instead, there was a decision to use objects from Black Africa to give people an idea of the culture. The problem was that there were not enough objects to fill a display, so objects were borrowed from around Northern Europe and expanded to included Central Africa as well as the Belgian Congo.
The exhibition was immensely popular and attracted up to 15,000 (!) visitors a day. The police could hardly keep order. Unfortunately, due to lack of photographs of the interior, the design of the exhibition is unknown, but written documents reveal that the public was attracted by pottery, basketwork, musical instruments, clothing, ivory and copper jewellery, furniture, bellows, etc. A necklace made out of human teeth fuelled the imagination on supposed cannibalism. About thirty ‘fetishes’ ‘revealed a talent for sculpture’. (Couttenier 2015, 20) p 20
The exhibition was so popular that a second exhibition changed its ethnographical exhibit to include the best Congolese objects that could be found. (Couttenier 2015, 23) Yet a third exhibit showed the Congolese objects in 1897 at Brussels-Tervuren. (Couttenier 2015, 26)
In the centre of the honorary salon, Congolese art objects in metal, wood and ivory were exhibited next to chryselephantine sculptures, luxury furniture made out of Congolese wood, and metal cups made by Wolfers, based on African models.158 Some of the chryselephantine sculptures were put on pedestals that showed stylised elephant ears and tusks, marking the influence of Congolese fauna on Belgian Art Nouveau, also called ‘style Congo’ at the end of the nineteenth century. (Couttenier 2015) p 28
These exhibits are a prelude to Negriphillia.”With over one million visitors, the impact of the exhibition can hardly be overrated (Couttenier 2015, 31). ” Black African objects were still displayed as artefacts at the Brussels-Tervuren exhibit.
However, thanks to both the ‘artistic and almost sumptuous décor’, and the nature of the exhibited items themselves, Congolese ‘artefacts’ were also seen and described as ‘art’. (Couttenier 2015) p 32
While white western scholars had painted a negative picture of Black Africa, not everyone who saw the exhibited Black African objects thought they were evidence of irredeemable backward primitiveness.
A journalist working for Bruxelles Exposition noted that the exhibited items showed marks of ‘a vivacious and sure intelligence’ and ‘very brisk feelings’ indicative of a ‘great susceptibility to civilisation’.194 He was even ‘tempted to give the name art to all the products of the Negro industry such as we see them represented here.’ 195 (Couttenier 2015, 35)
Despite the Enlightenment ideology of white supremacy which places Black Africa as the farthest point away from humanity and civilization compared to the white west, when curated to show off the best pieces white, European audiences could not help but admired Black African objects. Nevertheless, white westerners were keen to emphasize the lack of reason and logic amongst Black Africans and ideas about innate natures are still at work.
The objects with harmonious lines showed good taste and a feeling for proportions. ‘Elegance seems instinctive, and in fact, it is, because blacks don’t have any guide other than personal and natural inspiration. This great notion of elegance is innate to them.’196 (Couttenier 2015, 35)
Interestingly that critics at the time also praised the simplicity of Black African objects and modest taste in decoration which provided a stark contrast with the highly stylised and ornate tastes that characterized commercially popular white European objects.
In the end, Congolese art served as a means to criticize European decadence. Firstly, African objects still had a clear purpose, while European competition led to ‘the deformation of products’.197 A European vase for example, overloaded with haphazardly applied decorations, had become a piece of furniture instead of a utensil with a clear purpose. (Couttenier 2015, 35)
Further Black African objects provided a respite from the dehumanization of mechanically produced goods and art. Black African objects were created by hand, and so there was a hint of artistry about them compared with factory-produced objects. Note that this is not a comparison of Black African art to white western art, but of Black African artistry compared to industrial products like ceramics. Black Africa represented to some the good old days before industrialization, not an advanced civilization.
As one might predict, the objects were not universally praised.
The journalist also witnessed that the ethnographic exhibition had a profound effect on the visitors. Although they seemed a bit disorientated at first, the feelings of astonishment, accompanied by hilarity and irony, soon calmed down and everyone left enthusiastically. ‘It is a habit of people of the Aryan race, they smile if the signification is not immediately unveiled in front of their eyes. Progress that daily surrounds them has given their mind such a high opinion of themselves, that evidently they place all they can’t immediately penetrate into the absurd.’199 (Couttenier 2015, 35)
We can see from the various reactions that even in the 1890s Black Africa does not represent complete horror and degradation to all white Europeans and that the display of Black African objects could be wildly profitable. The arguments over civilization and primitiveness generated press and educated white westerners in the superiority of their culture while wars were being wages and the nations of Europe and the United States were fighting to find stability and national cohesion. In 1897 the exhibition in Tervuren was converted into a museum (Couttenier 2015, 36)
French painter Maurice de Vlaminck is credited with introducing Black African sculpture to his artist friends Modigliani, Andre Derian, Ferdinald Leger and Picasso.
The arousal of interest in traditional African sculpture was as dramatic as their emergence in the world art scene. Grottanelli (1975: 4) reports how Maurice de Vlaminck took “a sudden fancy of certain figures found on the shelves of an Argenteuil wineshop or bistro and bought them.” According to Grottanelli, Vlaminck gave Derain one of these figures which later became instrumental to the “conversion of Appolonaire and Picasso.” (Diakparomre 2010, 30)
However, these artists would have been well aware of Black African objects given the publicity around exhibitions and the scholarship and novels circulating. White western artists ceased upon the moment and turned towards Black Africa to shake up the stagnant white western art world and artworks.
[T]he Western interest in African art was supposedly linked to the need among European artists for ‘new sources of inspiration outside the continent to rejuvenate its old civilisation. Disgusted by the modern world, its steel machines and its pitiless brutality, the period after the 1914–1918 war turned passionately towards the primitive, and especially the “Negro” ’. (Couttenier 2015, 1)
Capitalism and industrialization gave some working class and the entire middle class a new life which included time for leisure. People were eager to ease their boredom with dreams of faraway places and could now travel to distant lands to explore. The economic trade network of capital brought the world closer together and distributed goods and people across continents and oceans. Artists also sought new experiences to fuel their work and collected objects from foreign cultures as well as travelled to places like Egypt, the Congo and Tahiti. Events like World’s Fairs allowed artists to expose their work to an eager public and gain patronage. Artists in the Modernist era focused on everyday life, especially outside events and gatherings with little or no social commentary.
The end of the 1800s was a period of remarkable economic expansion in Europe and the United States. The period leading up to the first world war in 1914 was marked by new technology, scientific discovery and the interconnection of the world through trade and travel. The common human became a subject of art and science as the fields of medicine and psychiatry were being developed along with anthropology and social science. White western philosophy was entering the post-modern era, and thinkers like Frederich Nietzsche began to revolt against western tradition. Nietzsche’s early work Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (Nietzsche 2012) laments the Enlightenment ideology that followed the Apollonian rather than the Dionysian early Greeks. Apollo is the god of order and progress and light, and he became the symbol for the search for knowledge using logic and reason and the rejection of sensation. Dionysus for Nietzsche represents an essential aspect of humans that the Enlightenment tried to extinguish. Dionysus is the god of pleasure, wine, art, sex. Nietzsche believes that to be fully human, you need both the sensual and the rational and that the Enlightenment push towards to Apollonian is really about power and wealth rather than a moral principle.
In Nietzsche’s exposition of white western ethics in The Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche and trans. 2006) he traces the history of ethics to the Ancient Greeks and the desire of those with money and power to maintain their status. Nietzsche is highly critical of Kant’s morality. For Kant, a person could only act morally if their action followed the Categorical Imperative and was utterly detached – meaning ultimately without self-motivation. Nietzsche points out that the people who have the most money and the most power are often the ones that are telling those who have less than them that they should only act in unselfish ways.
Nietsche looks at the words good and evil to find their origins. In addition to finding the claim for unselfishness dubious Nietsche also critiques the new theories of utility in that good is equated with usefulness or practicalness which Nietzche see as a circular argument as then the good is defined by being good. We are reminded that all the words that western culture has used for good trace back to wealthy aristocrats. Good is equated with, nobility, intellect, manners, taste.
The pathos of nobility and distance, as I said, the continuing and predominant feeling of complete and fundamental superiority of a higher ruling kind in relation to a lower kind, to those ‘below’ – that is the origin of the antithesis ‘good’ and ‘bad’. (The seigneurial privilege of giving names even allows us to conceive of the origin of language itself as a manifestation of the power of the rulers: they say ‘this is so and so’, they set their seal on everything and every occurrence with a sound and thereby take possession of it, as it were). (Nietzsche and trans. 2006, 11)
Thus, we are left with the foundations of white western morality being seated in wealthy men’s discretion. Conveniently the white aristocrats created the idea of bad to counter their goodness so that things that were cheap, common, stupid, emotional were bad. We can see how this lines up with the way in which racism is shaping the discourse of differences between white westerners and Black Africans. Black Africans were stupid, emotional, and poor, so they were bad. Wealthy white Europeans were smart, and reserved and were good (Nietzsche and trans. 2006, 13) For Nietzsche and the middle to upper-class artistic circles he travelled in the late 1800s (like Ranier Rilke) the polite and heavily rules-based upper-class society was considered something that individuals needed to reject in search of freedom of expression. Rules benefit the wealthy as do ideas about morality tied to obedience and loyalty.
Young artists at this time also felt constrained by the tradition of white western art practices and subject matter. One can see how Black Africa tempted young curious intellectuals and artists as a way to rebel against the predominant tastes and morals. While there is unarguably beauty to be found in Black African objects that were circulating in the west at the turn of the 19th century, a great deal of the attraction of Black Africa and its objects was that white western culture considered frightening. Black African objects also represented the authentic aura that Benjamin critiques as lost because of industrial mechanical production.
A group of artists living in Paris in the first decade of the 1900s, Andre Derain, Henri Matisse and Maurice de Vlaminck were some of the earliest white western artists to co-opt Black African objects in their work. The three men started the Fauve movement. The acquisition of a Black African object by Vlamick pushed white western art firmly into the 20th century. A Fauve is a wild beast that one critic called the artworks which used primary colours and did not render objects to look like they took up or resided in space., instead of natural colours and perspective and shadows to make objects look realistic. These styles were ones primarily used to stir the viewers’ emotions. The colour palate was shocking to audiences that were accustomed to seeing the muted tones of impressionism and realist art.
Fauvism was the first of the avant-garde movements that flourished in France in the early years of the twentieth century. The Fauve painters were the first to break with Impressionism as well as with older, traditional methods of perception. Their spontaneous, often subjective response to nature was expressed in bold, undisguised brushstrokes and high-keyed, vibrant colours directly from the tube (Rewald 2004).
Fauvism provided a transition between Impressionism and Cubism in white western art history.
In Italy, Futurism started in 1909 following the Italian colonization of East Africa as the Italians scrambled in the 1890s to catch up to other European colonials and unite the country in common cause. The Futurist artists were also exposed to Black Africa and its objects through publication in magazines, newspapers, and school books (McKever 2010, 98). Futurists had different motivations for the inclusion of Black African styles. Some, like Flippo Tommaso Marinetti, was actually from the continent (McKever 2010, 99). Marinetti thought of Africa as the literal motherland “where the metamorphosis of man and his environment unfolds in the institution of a new era. The theme of rebirth is associated with the feminine, Africa as mother (McKever 2010, 100).
The Futurist imagined the future as re-birthed through contact with Black African culture. The problem was that this ideation focused on the myths of Black Africa. In the white west, Black Africa was portrayed as free from industry, technology, and the burdens of the modern era of capitalism. White European exerts mythologized Black Africa as the primitive backdrop in which the most remote human ancestors of white Europeans lived in nature. In reality, the Black African had for thousands of years had advanced culture, languages, art and cities like the city of Benin in now Nigeria and by the late 1800s, Black Africans of means dressed and sounded like white Europeans. The futurists went so far as to call themselves “primitivist”. (McKever 2010, 101)
Futurism’s relationship with Africa is usually described with the term primitivism, as this is an established art historical term with regards to modern art’s interest in the non-Wester, but it can also be discussed in terms of barbarism. (McKever 2010, 102)
Futurists, and other movements that took up Black African objects for inspiration, played with the ambiguity and liminality of the ideas about Black Africa. Many prevalent contradictory stereotypes were being bantered around at the turn of the century. White scholarship described Black Africans as both child-like and innocent, and sexual predators who worshipped demons, as well as being happy and docile in their bondage they were man-eating killers. The stereotype employed was chosen to maximize whatever argument white Europeans thought suited the narrative to excuse enslavement and colonialism as enlightening Black Africa and to save it from itself.
While it might seem that the Futurists choose Black African objects out of respect for their aesthetics, what we see is problematic caricatures they choose to rebel against white European civilization:
if we consider Africa’s lack of written historical records to render it ahistorical in the Western sense, we can see Futurist interest in Africa as an escape from history and from a rational temporality. The futurists aspired to the supposedly negative primitive tropes of irrationality, uncivilizedness and intuition in rebellion against a continual reliance of Ital’s past as the birthplace of civilization and the Roman Empire and the Renaissance as the embodiments of rationality, history and intelligence. (McKever 2010, 107)
Though not the first artists in Europe to incorporate Black African styles into their art, the Cubist are the most well know of the artists who did so. Cubist borrowed elements from objects without knowing anything about the Black Africans who created them, or their use or value in Black African culture. The cubists found Black African sculpture alluring and thought that they were spiritually significant, going back to an original organic understanding of nature untainted by technology and industrialization.
While these artists knew nothing of the original meaning and function of the West and Central African sculptures they encountered, they instantly recognized the spiritual aspect of the composition and adapted these qualities to their own efforts to move beyond the naturalism that had defined Western art since the Renaissance (Murrell 2008).
Cubist, like other artists in the modernist era, were rebelling against the white European artworld which upheld white supremacist ideas about aesthetics and art. Scholars described Black Africa objects as examples of the work of backward children so Modernist artists taunted the critics by stealing Black African styles, foreshadowing the work of Marcel Duchamp who would taunt them with a urinal. Contemporary scholars tend to see the Cubists and their ilk as celebrating the Black African objects they encountered. “Modernist artists were drawn to African sculpture because of its sophisticated approach to the abstraction of the human figure, shown, for example, by a sculpted head from a Fang reliquary ensemble. (Murrell 2008)”
Nevertheless, the artists themselves did not seem drawn to Black African objects in admiration of their beauty of the design. Instead, it was the horror of Black Africa that the objects invoked that the white western artists were eager to tap. The Parisian phenomena of Negriphillia was the end stage of the colonization of Black Africa in which the cultures of Black Africa become commodified and sold to white westerners.
Vlaminck thus boasted that it was he who really started the craze for African art in Europe. However, although he saw only barbarous fetishism in the Argenteuil figures, didn’t he write soon afterward, that the white mask was fascinating and disturbing, the same black art that had appeared to him in all its primitivism and in all of its grandeur. (Murrell 2008)
White Europeans found Black African sculptures and masks frightening more than they thought them sophisticated forms of artwork. The myths attached to the objects were based on white supremacist ideology. Looking at the masks, white European viewers saw objects that people who lived like they were in the stone-age nearly naked, ate other people and worshipped demons had created. The myths of Black Africa were what white westerns were reacting too, and sex and violence were powerful marketing tools that white western artists used to lure in audiences and secure patronage.
In France, particularly, the modern human sciences have not lost contact with the world of literature and art. And in the hothouse milieu of Parisian cultural life, no field of social or artistic research can long remain indifferent to influences or provocations from beyond its disciplinary boundaries (Clifford 1981, 539).
The western world in the years before were prosperous ones for those not in the lowest classes. All fields of knowledge were flourishing in terms of new discoveries and volumes of studies scholars conducted meant that the college-educated had access to more ideas and cultures across the globe.
Artists and thinkers in the early 1900s engaged in what James Clifford describes of Ethnographic Surrealism. Ethnographic for Clifford meant that society and its beliefs were really based on artifice and could be examined in ways that challenged the norms of reality. “To see culture and its norms-beauty, truth, reality – as artificial arrangements, susceptible to detached analysis and comparison with other possible dispositions. (Clifford 1981, 541)”
Artistic Surrealism in the west begins after the first world war. The was exposed horrors and brutality that shocked the world, as photographs now captured the devastation of rockets and chemical agents. The scale of death was unprecedented, with around twenty million killed and another twenty million injured. Artists sought to capture the experience of war, yet how can one accurately depict horror, chaos and death that mechanical war brought. How does one represent the ugliness, and the terror at once? Black African objects were symbols of horror, ugliness and death since they entered the white western world. ” The ‘primitive’ societies of the planet were increasingly available as aesthetic, cosmological, and scientific resources. (Clifford 1981, 542)”
White experts described Black African objects as creations of the unconscious free from civilization that revealed the lack of cohesive meaning behind the world, which artists presented as dreamlike images which were distorted and hallucinatory. Carl Einstein, a prominent Black African art historian in the early 1920s, bolstered the linking of Black Africa and the negative primitive connotations.
Einstein describes this mythic psychology as ‘totemic.” To grasp the significance of Masson’s metamorphoses, unexpected animal-human combinations, ‘it is enough to recall the primitive mask-costumes that incite identification with animals, ancestors, etc.” Einstein’s casual allusion, en passant, to masks= African? Oceanian? Alaskan? His audience will know what he means- suggests a context in which exotic or archaic possibilities are never far from the surface of consciousness, ever ready to offer confirmation for any and all breaks opened in the Western order of things (Clifford 1981, 549).
We see in the early 1900s the entry of Black African objects into the white western art world but through the appropriation of forms and designs in Modernist art, not the objects themselves. Further, the white western artistic appropriation of Black African culture was an expansion of the Enlightenment quest for order. Through invoking death and horror, artists could exercise a sense of control over their fears and allow the audience to do the same. The museum or gallery spaces reinforced a sense of viewing dangerous images in a controlled and safe environment.
melungeon mullins 