African Sculpture and the French Invention of Primitive Art

FAIN: FA-58235-15

John Monroe
Iowa State University of Science and Technology (Ames, IA 50011-2000)

The book manuscript I propose to complete during the tenure of an NEH Fellowship is a history of the reception of African sculpture in France from 1900 until World War II. During this period, Paris was at the leading edge of a transformation in taste in which objects once dismissed as curios or ethnographic specimens came to be recognized as works of "primitive art." Wood sculptures from Africa touched off this process, and Paris played a crucial role in it, because it was both the West's cultural capital and the metropolis of an empire with vast African colonies. This book, which bridges the disciplines of history and art history, brings these two strands together in an innovative way, casting new light on the relation between aesthetic Modernism and colonialism. The published text will be of use not only to historians and art historians, but also to anyone interested in problems of culture-crossing and cultural appropriation in a colonial or post-colonial context.

Associated Products

Metropolitan Fetish: African Sculpture and the Imperial French Invention of Primitive Art (Book)
Title: Metropolitan Fetish: African Sculpture and the Imperial French Invention of Primitive Art
Author: John Warne Monroe
Abstract: From the 1880s to 1940, French colonial officials, businessmen and soldiers, returning from overseas postings, brought home wooden masks and figures from Africa. This imperial and cultural power-play is the jumping-off point for a story that travels from sub-Saharan Africa to Parisian art galleries; from the pages of fashion magazines, through the doors of the Louvre, to world fairs and international auction rooms; into the apartments of avant-garde critics and poets; to the streets of Harlem, and then full-circle back to colonial museums and schools in Dakar, Bamako, and Abidjan. John Warne Monroe guides us on this journey, one that goes far beyond the world of Picasso, Matisse, and Braque, to show how the Modernist avant-garde and the European colonial project influenced each other in profound and unexpected ways. Metropolitan Fetish reveals the complex trajectory of African material culture in the West and provides a map of that passage, tracing the interaction of cultural and imperial power. A broad and far-reaching history of the French reception of African art, it brings to life an era in which the aesthetic category of "primitive art" was invented.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501736353/metropolitan-fetish/#bookTabs=4
Primary URL Description: Publisher Website
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781501736353
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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