Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s

by Petrine Archer-Straw, Petrine Archer-Shaw

In the years after the end of the First World War, large numbers of Africans and African Americans emigrated to the cities of Europe in search of work and improved social conditions. Their impact on white European society was immense. In Paris, where the artistic climate was particularly sensitive and experimental, avant garde artists courted black personalities such as Josephine Baker, Henry Crowder, and Langston Hughes for their sense of style, vitality, and "otherness". Leger, Picasso, Brancusi, Man Ray, Giacometti, Sonia Delaunay, and others enthusiastically collected African sculptures and wore tribal jewelry and clothes. More importantly, they adopted black forms in their work, and their style soon influenced a larger audience anxious to be in vogue. A passion for black culture swept through Paris, and by the end of the 1920s, black forms that had provided the initial spark to the modernist vision had become the commercially successful Art Deco style.Negrophilia, from the French negrophilie -- the contemporary term to describe the craze -- examines this commingling of black and white cultures in jazz-age Paris. Painting, sculpture, photography, popular music, dance, theater, literature, journalism, furniture design, fashion, and advertising -- all are scrutinized to show how black forms were appropriated, adapted, and popularized by white artists. The photographs, writings, and memorabilia of poet Guillaume Apollinaire, art collectors Paul Guillaume and Albert Barnes, shipping heiress and publisher Nancy Cunard, and Surrealists Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille help to recreate the contemporary atmosphere. The book raises questions about the avantgarde's motives, and suggestsreasons and meaning for its interest.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, France, Race, Art

208 pages, Paperback

First published November 11, 2000

Reviews

[MH · Rating 4 out of 5]

An overview of Parisian avant-garde artists and their fascination with Africa (really, a fantasized, white-imagined blackness) as a symbol of modernity. Not all of her analyses work well - it's not very convincing when she tries to align dadaism with 'negrophilia,' and her argument that "Harlem may have popularized black culture, but it was Paris that nurtured and sustained it" (160) is pretty hard to swallow (and deeply insulting, I'd imagine, to any African American artist of the 20s and 30s), but most of her analyses are thoughtful and strong, particularly when she reads works of art. The biggest strength of the book is her art criticism, along with the massive number of images from art, advertising, sculpture and photography, and these collected and curated images make this book very worthwhile to anyone interested in this period.