Reading African art's impact on modernism as an international
phenomenon, The "Black Art" Renaissance tracks a series of
twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by
European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and
theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial
period, the Paris avant-garde "discovery" of African sculpture--known
then as art nègre, or "black art"--eventually came to affect nascent
Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and
rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within
this trajectory, "black art" evolved as a framework for asserting
control over appropriative practices introduced by Europeans, and it
helped forge alliances by redefining concepts of humanism, race, and
civilization. From the Fauves and Picasso to the Harlem Renaissance, and
from the work of South African artist Ernest Mancoba to the imagery of
Negritude and the École de Dakar, African sculpture's influence proved
transcontinental in scope and significance. Through this extensively
researched study, Joshua I. Cohen argues that art history's alleged
centers and margins must be conceived as interconnected and mutually
informing. The "Black Art" Renaissance reveals just how much modern
art has owed to African art on a global scale.