'Encounters with the image of the Black: the German and French avant-garde (1905–1920)' and 'Afrophilia and Afrophobia in Switzerland and Germany (1916-1938)'

Research output: Other contribution

Abstract

'Encounters with the image of the Black' challenges earlier studies on ‘Primitivism’ by calling into question previous claims that have interpreted the 'discovery' of African art by the European avant-garde as a Paris-based phenomenon, a phenomenon which then migrated to other European and North American cities. This view was initiated by the statements of French artists, then MoMA’s important 1936 exhibition, Cubism and Abstract Art, and much later reinforced by MoMA’s major exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art (1985). Weikop contests that a process of creative interaction with African and Oceanic art was independently initiated by German artists, preceding the French avant-garde. He argues that the German Brücke group’s interest in direct carving in their woodcuts and wood sculptures was a means of conveying their group cultural identity, demonstrating a kinship to both an indigenous carving tradition going back to and before Tilman Riemenschneider, and to the direct carving craft cultures of Africa and Oceania, which the Brücke understood as a form of instinctual Urmensch expression that accorded with their own artistic objectives. Weikop goes beyond a discussion of avant-garde responses to African masks, sculptures, and caryatid objects to also consider the direct response of artists to ‘flesh-and-blood’ black models, a response that was particularly evident in the art of the Brücke and far less present in the French avant-garde circles. Weikop demonstrates that encounters and interactions with the ‘image of the black’ had far more profound implications for the art of German figurative Expressionism than for French Fauvism or Cubism. The essay also investigates how collectors, gallerists, art historians, and supportive critics of the vanguard artists in France and Germany, who had begun to respond to African and Oceanic art, were mostly German and frequently German Jewish figures. This would later have important implications when it came to the National Socialist understanding of what constituted ‘Degenerate Art’.

Chronologically, 'Afrophilia and Afrophobia in Switzerland and Germany (1916-1938)' picks up where Weikop’s last Image of the Black essay left off, and for the first time in the scholarship on the German avant-garde throughly explores Dadaist responses to African tribal art. Weikop argues that while some of their ethnographic sources may have been the same, the ‘Negrophilia’ of the Dadaists was of a different nature to that of Expressionism, and manifested itself through performance and new media rather than through more traditional art forms, often with the intention of shocking audiences out their bourgeois complacency. The essay explores how the Dadaists seemed to syncretize tribal mask forms with the grotesque masks used in Swiss carnival parades, as well as those seen in Greek tragedy, and considers the motivations for this ‘masking’. Weikop moves his analysis from Zurich to Berlin Dada, and he especially focuses on Hannah Höch’s critique of the vogue nègre of the European avant-garde. The very title of her photomontage series, ‘From an ethnographic museum’, reveals a reflexive understanding that ‘primitivism’ as a guiding principle for avant-garde artists had become a cliché by the mid-1920s. Weikop closely investigates the deconstructive nature of her photomontages, which anticipate by many decades some of the central tenets of postcolonial theory. Weikop’s essay also considers the work of George Grosz, Otto Dix, Irma Stern, Kees van Dongen, Josephine Baker, August Sander, Christian Schad, Ernst Neuschul, and others working in the Weimar era, in relation to prevalent discourses on Africa, and especially colonialist ideas of ‘primitive’ hypersexuality. Additionally, the essay explores the National Socialist purging of the Afrocentric avant-garde art of the Weimar period. Weikop argues that the Nazis objected not so much to African culture per se, but to the assimilation of what they saw as inferior non-Western cultures by German artists, in a way that they considered to be a contamination of German tradition.
Original languageEnglish
TypeTwo chapters in 'The Image of the Black in Western Art: Vol. V: : The Twentieth Century, Part 1: The Impact of Africa
Media of outputBook
PublisherShort items
ISBN (Print)9780674052673
Publication statusPublished - 24 Feb 2014

Publication series

NameImage of the Black in Western Art
VolumeV

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