Description
Book SynopsisFrom the 1880s to 1940, French colonial officials, businessmen and soldiers, returning from overseas postings, brought home wooden masks and figures from Africa. This imperial and cultural power-play is the jumping-off point for a story that travels from sub-Saharan Africa to Parisian art galleries; from the pages of fashion magazines, through the doors of the Louvre, to world fairs and international auction rooms; into the apartments of avant-garde critics and poets; to the streets of Harlem, and then full-circle back to colonial museums and schools in Dakar, Bamako, and Abidjan.
John Warne Monroe guides us on this journey, one that goes far beyond the world of Picasso, Matisse, and Braque, to show how the Modernist avant-garde and the European colonial project influenced each other in profound and unexpected ways. Metropolitan Fetish reveals the complex trajectory of African material culture in the West and provides a map of that passage, tracing the interaction of c
Trade Review
This well-written study will be valuable for art scholars at all levels.
-- M. Miller, Louisiana State University * Choice *
John Warne Monroe's book on the reception of African art in France (1910s-1930s) comes out at a critical moment when French President Emmanuel Macron's decision to return African heritage has transformed into a polemic opposing those in favor to those against.
* Journal of Modern History *
Table of ContentsPreface
Introduction: The French Paradox of Primitive Art
1. The Making of a Metropolitcan Fetish: A Fang Mask Transformed
2. Inventing Antiquity: Henri Clouzot, André Level, and the Universal History of Primitive Art
3. The Wings of Snobbery: Paul Guillaume and the Launch of Art Nègre, 1911–29
4. From Art Négre to Art Primitif: Black Deco, Ethnology, and Surrealism in the Late 1920s
5. Selling the "Arts of the Ancestors": Charles Ratton, the Art Market, and the Transatlantic Black Diaspora
6. Authenticity Wars: Primitive Art between Metropole and Colony
Conclusion: With an Archival Prophecy
Acknowledgments
List of Archival Abbreviations
Notes
Index
