Charles de Gaulle was frequently heard to wonder aloud if, without black Africa from which he mounted the resistance to the Nazi regime, modern France would even exist. One might also wonder whether or not, without black African art, modernism as it assumed its various forms in European and American art, literature, music and dance in the first three decades of the 20^th century could possibly have existed as well. Especially is this the case in the visual arts, where dramatic departures in the ways of seeing, particularly in representing the human figure, would seem to be directly related to the influence of sub-Saharan African art. In this sense, it is not too much to argue that European modernity manifested itself as a mirrored reflection of the mask of blackness.

European encounters with visual arts in Africa have long been fraught with a certain anxiety, often calling to mind Freud’s account of the anxieties accompanying encounters with the uncanny, encounters that elicit a feeling of ‘dread and creeping horror’. In the second edition of an essay entitled ‘Of National Characters’, David Hume, writing in the middle of the 18^th century at the height of the European Enlightenment, maintained that one could survey the entire area of Africa below the Sahara and find not even one work of visual or written art worthy of the name. In a survey of the world’s major cultures, civilizations and races, which in its first edition excluded completely any reference to Africans, Hume concluded in a footnote added to the second edition that all of black Africa contained ‘no arts, no sciences’. Beauty, as perceived in all its sublimity in European cultures, at least since the time of the Ancient Greeks, is not to be found in black human or plastic forms.

Writing just a decade later, Immanuel Kant, in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), meditated on Hume’s conclusions about Africa, ratifying and extending them without qualification. In Section IV of his essay entitled ‘Of National Character’, Kant cites Hume’s opinion favorably, then makes the startling claim that ‘blackness’ denotes not only ugliness, but stupidity as well:

In the lands of the black, what better can one expect than what is found prevailing, namely the feminine sex in the deepest slavery? A despairing man is always a strict master over anyone weaker, just as with us that man is always a tyrant in the kitchen who outside his own house hardly dares to look anyone in the face. Of course, Father Labat reports that a Negro carpenter, whom he reproached for haughty treatment toward his wives, answered: ‘You whites are indeed fools, for first you make great concessions to your wives, and afterward you complain when they drive you mad.’ And it might be that there were something in this which perhaps deserved to be considered; but in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.

Here we see the bold conflation of ‘character’—that is, the foundational ‘essence’ of a culture and the people who manifest it—with their observable ‘characteristics’, both physical and, as it were, metaphysical.

Three decades later a more liberal, or cosmopolitan, Kant would allow in The Critique of Judgement (1790) that black Africans no doubt had standards of beauty among themselves, even if they did not correspond to European standards of beauty a bold speculation given the revolutionary transforming role that the cotton gin had begun to play in the nature of New World slavery and the increased traffic in African human beings that this major technological innovation engendered. (Hegel, however, was not persuaded by Kant’s new generosity of spirit; in the Philosophy of History, written around the same time, he reaffirmed implicitly Hume’s claim about the absence of civilization in black Africa, and added that because Africans had not developed an indigenous script or form of writing, they also lacked a history.)

If Europe’s traffic in black human beings needed a philosophical justification, Enlightenment philosophy, by and large, obliged sublimely. European aesthetic judgement of African art and culture, in the 18^th and l9th centuries at least, was itself encapsulated in, and became an integral part of, the justification of an economic order largely dependent upon the exploitation of cheap labor available to an unprecedented degree on the west coast of Africa, from Senegambia to Angola and the Congo. Never could the European encounter with the African sublime be free of the prison of slavery and economics, at the expense of African civilization and art themselves. The prison-house of slavery engendered a prison-house of seeing, both African peoples and their attendant cultural artifacts.

This curiously tortured interrelation between ethics and aesthetics, between an economic order and its philosophical underpinnings, remained largely undisturbed until the turn of the century. For a variety of reasons, too numerous and subtle to be argued here, reevaluations of African art gathered momentum at the turn of the century. Dvorak’s admiration, and formal uses, of African American sacred music as a basis for a bold, new approach to orchestral music is only the high-culture equivalent of Europe’s and America’s obsession with black-faced minstrelsy as a popular mode of debased theatre and dance. The role of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in this process of revaluation, performing spirituals on worldwide tours during these decades, cannot be gainsaid. But it would be in the visual arts where the role of African ways of seeing would become pivotal, in a manner unprecedented in the history of European aesthetics. The experience of African art profoundly shaped the forms that modernity assumed early in the 20^th century.

Modern art is often considered to have taken its impetus from the day in 1907 when Pablo Picasso visited the Musee d’Ethnographie in the Palais du Trocadero, Paris. Indeed, Sieglinde Lemke has argued that there could have been no modernism without ‘primitivism’—a term, I confess, that I detest - and no ‘primitivism’ without modernism. They are the ego and the id of modern art. How uncanny that encounter was for Picasso—and, by extension, for European art, its critics and historians - can be gleaned not only from his own account of the discomfort he felt at that moment, but also from the curious pattern of denial and affirmation propagated both by Picasso himself and later critics in relation to that great moment of transition in the history of European and African aesthetics, Les Dernoiselles d’Avignon.

Picasso’s discomfort—and the discomfort of critics even today—with the transforming presence of African art in painting underlines the irony of an encounter that led to the beginning of the end of centuries of European disapprobation of African art—art that is now taken to be neither ‘primitive’ nor ‘ugly’, but to embrace the sublime.

Picasso’s ambivalence about the significance of his chance encounter with the faces of Africa that day at the Trocadero manifested itself almost as soon as critics asserted its importance. As early as 1920 Picasso was quoted in Florent Fels’s Section as saying ‘African art? Never heard of it!’ The literature is full of Picasso’s denials, the energy of which seems only to emphasize Picasso’s own anxieties about his African influences. Eventually, in 1937, in a conversation with Andre Malraux not reported publicly until 1974, Picasso admitted the African presence in his work:

Everybody always talks about the influences that the Negroes had on me. What can I do? We all of us loved fetishes. Van Gogh once said, ‘Japanese art—we all had that in common.’ For us it’s the Negroes.... When I went to the old Trocadero, it was disgusting. The Flea Market. The smell. I was alone. I wanted to get away. But [ didn’t leave. I stayed. I stayed. I understood that it was very important: something was happening to me, right? The masks weren’t just like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things... The Negro pieces were intercesseurs, mediators.... I always looked at fetishes. I understood; I too am against everything. I too believe that everything is unknown, that everything is an enemy! Everything! Not the details—women, children, babies, tobacco, playing—the whole of it! I understood what the Negroes use their sculptures for Why sculpt like that and not some other way? After all, they weren’t Cubists! Since Cubism didn’t exist. It was clear that some guys had invented the models, and others had imitated them, right? Isn’t that what we call tradition? But all the fetishes were used for the same thing. They were weapons. To help people avoid coming under the influence of spirits again, to help them become independent. Spirits, the unconscious (people still weren’t talking about that very much), emotion—they’re all the same thing. I understood why I was a painter. All alone in that awful museum, with masks, dolls made by the redskins, dusty manikins. Les Demoiselles d ‘Avignon must have come to me that very day, but not at all because of the forms; because it was my first exorcism painting—yes absolutely.

Francoise Gilot had reported a similar comment a full decade before Malraux’s publication. It is even more dramatically open about his conscious indebtedness to African sources:

When I became interested, forty years ago, in Negro art and I made what they refer to as the Negro Period in my painting, it was because at the time I was against what was called beauty in the museum. At that time, for most people a Negro mask was an ethnographic object. When I went for the first time, at Derain’s urging, to the Trocadero museum, the smell of dampness and rot there stuck in my throat. It depressed me so much [ wanted to get out fast, but I stayed and studied. Men had made those masks and other objects for a sacred purpose, a magic purpose, as a kind of mediation between themselves and the unknown hostile forces that surround them, in order to overcome their fear and horror by giving it a form and image. At that moment I realized what painting was all about. Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic designed to be a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires. When I came to that realization, I knew I had found my way. Then people began looking at those objects in terms of aesthetics.

In these idiosyncratic and cryptic statements, Picasso reveals that his encounter with African art was a seminal encounter. Yet, he dismisses the primary influence that African art had upon his work, its formal influence, a new way of seeing, a new way of representing. But why would Picasso suddenly identify with modes of representation peculiar to African art, thereby breaking the long-held tradition of disparaging those same black traditions as ‘ugly’ or ‘inferior’?

What these passages reveal is Picasso’s aesthetic wrestling with his own revulsion at the forms of African art, and, by extension, the traditional revulsion of the West towards African aesthetic conventions generally. Picasso vividly describes his encounter in terms that Freud used to describe the uncanny. His description of the smell, followed by the realization that he was alone and his desire ‘to get out fast’, which he managed to resist, are all symbolic. The description serves as a metaphor for a visceral repulsion of the artist and, as it were, the visceral repulsion of Western aesthetics itself. What is also striking about Picasso’s recollections is his denial of the formal influence of African art—to which he was patently indebted - and the fact that 30 years later (when he made his confession to Malraux) he was still haunted by the memory of a tormenting odor. The unpleasant sensations are metaphors for Picasso’s anxiety and for the very sublimity of this encounter with the black uncanny.

Perhaps even more bizarre, Picasso substituted for his own obvious embrace of formal affinities with African art a cryptic and obviously bogus claim to be embracing African art’s affect, its supposed functionality, its supposedly ‘exorcist’ uses, about which he knew nothing. In a way that he did not intend, this curious dichotomy would come together in his use of the forms of African art to exorcise the demons of his artistic antecedents.

Picasso’s anxieties with his shaping influences are, in part, those of any artist wishing to be perceived as sui generis. But it is impossible to separate the anxiety about influence, here, from Europe’s larger anxiety about the mask of blackness itself, about an aesthetic relation to virtually an entire content that it represented as a prime site of all that Europe was not and did not wish to be, at least from the late Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Even in those rare instances early in the 20^th century when African art could be valued outside a Eurocentric filter, the deepest ambivalence about those who created the art still obtained. Thus Frobenius on his encounter with a classic work of Yoruba art, some time between 1910 and l9t2: ‘Before us stood a head of marvelous beauty, wonderfully cast in antique bronze, true to life, encrusted with a patina of glorious dark green. This was, indeed, the Olokun, Atlantic Africa’s Poseidon.

‘ ‘Yet listen’, Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, argued in 1986 at his Nobel Laureate address, ‘to what he had to write about the very people whose handiwork had lifted him into these realms of universal sublimity’:

Profoundly stirred, I stood for many minutes before the remnant of the erstwhile Lord and Ruler of the Empire of Atlantis. My companions were no less astounded. As though we have agreed to do so, we held our peace. Then I looked around and saw—the blacks—the circle of sons of the ‘venerable priest’, his Holiness the Oni’s friends, and his intelligent officials. I was moved to silent melancholy at the thought that this assembly of degenerate and feeble-minded posterity should be the legitimate guardians of so much loveliness.

The deep ambivalence traced here were not peculiar to white Europeans and Americans; African Americans, for their part, were at least as equivocal about the beauty of African art as were Europeans. As Alain Locke—the first black American Rhodes Scholar, who was to graduate from Harvard with a PhD in Philosophy, and then become the first sophisticated black art critic - put it in his pivotal essay ‘The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts’ (1925), they ‘shared the conventional blindness of the Caucasian eye with respect to the racial material at their immediate disposal’. Racism—aesthetic and other— Locke concludes ruefully, has led to a ‘timid conventionalism which racial disparagement has forced upon the Negro mind in America’, thus making even the very idea of imitating African art for African American artists a most difficult ideal to embrace.

Locke’s solution to this quandary, as Lemke argues, is as curious as Picasso’s waffling about influences upon him: by imitating the European modernists who so clearly have been influenced by African art (of whom Locke lists Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Modigliani, Utrillo and ten others) African Americans will become African by becoming modern. The route to Africa, in other words, for black as well as white Americans and Europeans, is by way of the Trocadero. Locke even points to the work of Winold Reiss, whom he chose to illustrate his classic manifesto of African American modernism, The New Negro, ‘as a path breaking guide and encouragement to this new foray of the younger Negro artists’.

Judging by the ‘African-influenced’ work that artists such as Aaron Douglas produced, and given the circuitous route that Locke mapped out for them as their path ‘back’ to Africa, perhaps we should not be surprised that these experiments led not to the ‘bold iconoclastic break’ or ‘the ferment in modern art’ that Picasso’s afternoon at the Trocadero yielded, but rather to a sort of Afro-Kitsch, the use of decorative motifs such as cowrie shells, Kente cloth patterns and two-dimensional reproductions of ‘African masks’, in which ‘Africa’ never becomes more than a theme, as an adornment, not a structuring principle, a place to be visited by a naive tourist. Ways of seeing, these experiments tell us, are not biological. Rather, they result from hard-won combat with received conventions of representation. They are a mysterious blend of innovation and convention, improvisation and tradition. And if the resurrection of African art, in the court of judgement that is Western art, came about as a result of its modernist variations, this exhibition is testament to the fact, if there need be one, that African art at the end of the century needs no such mediation. It articulates its own silent sublimity most eloquently. For centuries it has articulated its own silent sublimity most eloquently.