Homme Blanc/Homme Noir. Impressions d'Afrique

Fascination, repulsion, desire, and even mockery have long characterized the ways in which Africans and Westerners have perceived one another. The second exhibition devoted to African art at the Pierre Arnaud Foundation, Homme Blanc/Homme Noir, Impressions d’Afrique (White Man/Black Man, Impressions of Africa), on view until October 25, 2015, examines several centuries of exchange and misunderstanding through a selection of works created between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries by both African and European artists. The visions of Westerners such as Géricault, Vallotton, and even Man Ray are juxtaposed with those of anonymous Igbo, Baule, or Kongo sculptors. The works displayed are from public collections (the Musée du Louvre and the Musée Royal d’Afrique Central in Tervuren), as well as from private ones, most notably that of Alain Weill.

For an in-depth look at the exhibition, visit the Fondation Pierre Arnaud website.

L'Atlantique Noir de Nancy Cunard

Eighty years ago, on February 15, 1934, Englishwoman Nancy Cunard (1896-1965), a symbol of the Anglo-Saxon and French avant-garde of the early 20th century, published Negro Anthology. Lavishly illustrated, this 858-page book, resembling a major documentary enquiry, blended popular culture, sociology, politics, history, art history in the form of articles, archives, photographs, extracts from the press, musical scores, eye-witness accounts etc. Through the great themes examined in Negro Anthology, the Musee du Quai Branly will present the transnational artistic, literary and political networks constructed by Nancy Cunard in the years between 1910 and 1930, which have made this anthology a monument to black history.

View the exhibition's official website.

Portrait of Nancy Cunard  -  Man Ray, 1925

Image courtesy of the Centre Georges Pompidou/Musée du Quai Branly

International Tribal Art Book Prize awarded on November 29th

The second annual International Tribal Art Book Prize was delivered on November 29th at Sotheby's Paris. The awards went to Congo River by Francois Neyt (Published by Fonds Mercator Branly) and Man Ray, African Art, & the Modernist Lens by Wendy A. Grossman (Published by International Arts & Artists). 

An international jury of magazine editors, tribal art scholars and collectors chose the winners based on strict criteria, including the quality of evidence presented, the interest of the topic at hand, iconography, the quality of printing, and accessibility to a wide audience. This year's candidates must have been published between October 2009 and September 2010. The prize is awarded to one French book and one English book each year. 

The books shortlisted include Teotihuacan: City of Gods, Exhibition at the Musee du Quai Branly, edited by Felipe Solis; Benin: Collection Visions of Africa by Barbara Plakensteiner; The Arts of Africa by Dr. Roslyn Adele Walker; and White Gold, Black Hands: Ivory Sculpture in Congo Vol. 1 by Marc Leo Felix et al. 

Last year's winners were Quai Branly Museum - The Collection, edited by Yves Le Fur and published by Skira Flammarion (French title) and James Cook & the Exploration of the Pacific, edited by Adrienne L. Kaeppler and Robert Fleck and published by Thames & Hudson (English title). 

Source: www.prixelivretribal.com

Art Exhibit examines photography's role in the changing perception of African items from artifacts to art

The University of Virginia Art Museum will present "Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens," a groundbreaking exhibition exploring the pivotal role of photography in changing the perception of African objects from artifacts to fine art, from August 5 through Oct. 10.

The exhibition brings to light photographs of African objects by American artist Man Ray (1890-1976) produced over a period of almost 20 years. In addition to providing fresh insight into his photographic practice, the exhibition raises questions concerning the representation, reception and perception of African art as mediated by the camera lens.

Featured are more than 50 of Man Ray's photographs from the 1920s and 1930s alongside approximately 50 photographs by his international avant-garde contemporaries such as Charles Sheeler, Walker Evans, Alfred Stieglitz and André Kertész.

For the first time, a number of these photographs are presented alongside the original African objects they feature. The juxtaposition offers a rare opportunity to encounter first-hand how various photographic techniques of framing, lighting, camera angle and cropping evoke radically different interpretations of these objects. Books, avant-garde journals and popular magazines also on display illustrate how these photographs circulated and promoted ideas about African art and culture to an international audience.

Curated by photo historian and author Wendy Grossman and organized into four sections, the exhibition frames the objects and images within diverse contexts, including the Harlem Renaissance, Surrealism and the worlds of high fashion and popular culture.

African Art, American-Style

The first section presents an overview of the embrace of African art in the United States in the first decades of the 20th century. Images of African objects by American photographers, ranging from the New York avant-garde to artists of the Harlem Renaissance, reveal different understandings of African art and culture. The photographs shed light on issues of identity, gender and colonialism influenced by the country's history of slavery, segregation and disenfranchisement.

African Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Examining different print contexts in which photographs of African objects were reproduced, this section demonstrates how advances in print technologies in the first decades of the 20th century and the burgeoning of mass media played a critical role in transmitting the vogue for African art. At the crossroads of art and documentation, the works in this section reveal how the camera lens served as a prism though which a large audience first experienced African art.

Surrealism and Beyond

Photography's controversial status as an art form and its ability to blur boundaries between dream and reality enhanced its appeal for Man Ray and his fellow Surrealists. Several of Man Ray's photographs and works by artists active in Germany, England and Czechoslovakia reflect the Surrealists' preoccupation with myth, ritual and the unconscious. This section explores how African and other non-Western objects functioned within the Surrealist world view.

Fashioning a Popular Reception

The intersection of vanguard taste, fashion and interest in African art is epitomized by the works in this section: Man Ray's now-iconic photograph "Noire et blanche"; his series of fashion photographs "Mode au Congo," featuring models in Congolese headdresses; and images of writer, shipping heiress and collector of African objects Nancy Cunard. As the works in this section illustrate, Man Ray created images representing the intersection of African art, photography and high fashion.

Exhibition Catalog

A fully illustrated, 184-page catalog accompanies the exhibition. Written by Grossman and edited by Martha Bari, with contributions by Ian Walker, Yaëlle Biro, Poul Mørk, Rainer Stamm, Thomáš Winter and a number of prominent African art scholars, the catalog is published by International Arts & Artists and distributed by University of Minnesota Press.

"Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens" was organized by International Arts & Artists of Washington, D.C. The exhibition was funded in part by grants from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Dedalus Foundation.

International Arts & Artists is a non-profit arts service organization dedicated to increasing cross-cultural understanding and exposure to the arts internationally through exhibitions, programs and services to artists, arts institutions and the public.

Source: newsleader.com

Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens

BY: Deborah Dietsch, Washington Post

Twenty-five years ago, New York's Museum of Modern Art mounted a controversial exhibit examining the relationship between modern art and "primitive" tribal cultures. The show was criticized for relegating non-Western art to a supporting role in the development of Western abstraction.

"Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens" tries hard to avoid this imbalance in presenting mostly straightforward, commercial photographs of African artifacts next to the real thing, but it runs into the same trouble. The touring show, organized by curator Wendy Goodman for D.C.-based International Arts and Artists, reduces the carved figures, masks and hats from West Africa to mere reference points for the photos.

Even worse, this exhibit is as dryly academic as the footnotes to a doctoral dissertation. Many of the 100 black-and-white photos by Ray and his contemporaries are more descriptive than interpretative, offering no new understanding of African artifacts.

Some of these 1920s and '30s images were taken by well-known artists Charles Sheeler and Walker Evans to record the African objects collected by Western patrons and museums, but they might as well have been shot by anonymous archivists.

Ray gets top billing, but the expatriate surrealist is also reduced to a documentarian. A chunk of his photos in the exhibit merely record the tribal art collected by Danish lawyer Carl Kjersmeier, who by the 1930s had amassed some of the largest holdings of African objects in the world.

Such Western interest in tribal artifacts grew from the colonization of Africa by Europeans, whose takeover of the continent is documented through a colored map. By 1900, few major artists were untouched by the fascination with African and Oceanic "primitive" art. Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and others were drawn to the styles and motifs from these non-Western cultures as a way to challenge traditional aesthetic ideas, which they saw as stagnant and irrelevant to modern society.

While Europeans understood African objects through the lens of colonialism, Americans viewed them as representing the legacy of slavery and segregation. Racial biases resulted in the negative perception of African art that persists to this day.

However, for black American artists, African art served as an affirmation of their heritage and identity. The most intriguing portion of the show — it would make a worthwhile exhibit on its own — is devoted to this embrace by members of the New Negro movement, as blossoming 1920s black culture was called.

Harlem photographer James Allen's portrait of graphic artist James Lesesne Wells shows his subject intensely engaged with a drinking cup from Central Africa. Wells gazes down on the face carved on the vessel as if communing with an ancestor.

One of the few paintings in the exhibit is by Lois Mailou Jones, a Harlem Renaissance artist who invigorated her art with African and Caribbean influences. "Les Fetiches" (the fetishes), painted while Jones was living in Paris, pictures a group of open-mouthed African masks like a human chorus around a cubist face.

Surrounding the lively canvas are Evans' photographs of masks from a 1935 exhibition of African art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibit suggests Jones based her painting on these images rather than actual objects, although the artist insisted her inspiration came from masks seen in Parisian galleries and museums. Certainly there was no scarcity of African objects in Paris, and modernist artists emulated both mediocre and first-rate sculptures.

In the last section of the show, high-minded art yields to popular taste in fashion photography incorporating African objects. The best of these is Ray's "Noire et blanche" ("Black and White") depicting a female head turned at a right angle to a mask from the Ivory Coast. Shot for Paris Vogue in 1926, Ray's carefully composed photo of opposites suggests the woman and the African object reflect the same modern beauty.

Following this stunner are repetitive images of tribal hats worn by Ray's dancer companion, plus view after view of the ivory bracelets collected by British heiress Nancy Cunard. Here, African art is reduced to trinkets of "l'art negre" worn by the fashionable and the rich, a trivialization the exhibit fails to condemn.

WHAT: Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens
WHERE: Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. NW
WHEN: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday but to 8:30 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday; through Jan. 10
ADMISSION: $12 adults, $10 students and seniors
PHONE: 202/387-2436
WEB SITE: www.phillipscollection.org