The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume V: The Twentieth Century, Part 1: The Impact of Africa

by David Bindman (Editor), Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Editor), Dawn Ades (Contribution by), Petrine Archer-Shaw (Contribution by), Suzanne Preston Blier (Contribution by)

Overview

In the 1960s, art patrons Dominique and Jean de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times. Highlights from the image archive, accompanied by essays written by major scholars, appeared in three large-format volumes, consisting of one or more books, that quickly became collector's items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to have republished five of the original books and to present five completely new ones, extending the series into the twentieth century.

The Impact of Africa, the first of two books on the twentieth century, looks at changes in the Western perspective on African art and the representation of Africans, and the paradox of their interpretation as simultaneously "primitive" and "modern." The essays include topics such as the new medium of photography, African influences on Picasso and on Josephine Baker's impression of 1920s Paris, and the influential contribution of artists from the Caribbean and Latin American diasporas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674052673
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	02/24/2014
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	10.00(w) x 11.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

David Bindman is Professor of the History of Art, Emeritus, at University College London.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the author of numerous books and has written extensively on the history of race and anti-Black racism in the Enlightenment. His most recent works include Stony the Road and The Black Church. He is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Suzanne Preston Blier is Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Elizabeth Edwards is Research Professor in Photographic History and Director of the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University in Leicester, England.

Vera Ingrid Grant is the Founding Director of the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University.

Editorial Reviews

…with the publication of the fifth volume, concentrating on the 20th century, [The Image of the Black in Western Art] has become a necessary cultural resource documenting the visual construction of blackness over the past 5,000 years…Laudatory in its scope, notable for the high quality of its essays and, in terms of reproduction quality, impressively illustrated, The Image of the Black in Western Art: Volume V should have wide popular and scholarly appeal.

The New York Times Book Review - Claudia Rankine

★ 04/28/2014
A major accomplishment of art history, the fifth volume of this seminal series moves into the 20th century. Founded by art patron Dominique Schlumberger de Menil in the 1960s, the collection and subsequent series of books are intended as a "subtle bulwark and living testimony against antiblack racism" through the exploration of representations of black people in Western art. This latest volume, edited by the influential scholars Bindman and Gates (The African American Century), looks broadly at the 20th-century shifts in representation of Africa and people of African heritage in Western visual art (most often by white artists), including the significant influence African art exerted on modernism. The essays by esteemed academics range in topic from photography in the 19th century to Josephine Baker in Paris and the Negritude French literary movement. Without exception, the texts twine together research, image, and insight in a gracefully readable exploration of a complex topic. The series on a whole is truly indispensable and this particular volume offers an incredibly dynamic tour through Western history, racial difference, and visual art, all informing one another in ways often invisible as we study those subjects. Color illus. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

This is the first part of the fifth volume in a series that has profound and moral depth—the cumulative effect of all the books in the series is to see the ways in which ethics, aesthetics, and looking are entwined, and the ways in which they are made even more complicated by culture and by class.

New Yorker online - Hilton Als

With the publication of the fifth volume, concentrating on the 20th century, [this series] has become a necessary cultural resource documenting the visual construction of blackness over the past 5,000 years. This latest and perhaps last volume—subdivided into two parts, The Impact of Africa and The Rise of Black Artists—redirects the underlying colonialist, Eurocentric framing of the previous four volumes. The co-editors, David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr., bring focus to black artists globally as makers of their own art and imagery, rather than solely the subjects of others’ fantasies and fascination… Laudatory in its scope, notable for the high quality of its essays and, in terms of reproduction quality, impressively illustrated, The Image of the Black in Western Art: Volume V should have wide popular and scholarly appeal.

New York Times - Claudia Rankine

In addition to being an indispensable guide to the evolving meanings of racial difference, these dazzling volumes filled with extraordinary images and rich arguments contribute to an alternative history of the Western world. An invaluable gift for both specialists and general readers.

Paul Gilroy

A fascinating story of the changing image of Africa's people in Western art. The images are simply extraordinary and the scholarship inspiring. Anyone who cares about Western art or about Africa and her diaspora ought to know these magnificent volumes.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

I also would recommend The Image of the Black in Western Art, which is both expensive and priceless. It's fascinating to see how black people were viewed before we decided that African ancestry made you, by God or science, property.

The Atlantic online - Ta-Nehisi Coates

★ 05/01/2014
The latest volume in this now half-century-old continuing publication is the first of two on the art of the 20th century. Three themes—"Photography, Popular Imagery, Anthropology, and Racial Theory," "Europe and 'The Primitive,' " and "Beyond Europe: The Caribbean and Latin America"—structure essays by several international academic authors on specific media, topics, or geographic areas as well as particular artists, such as Pablo Picasso, and their encounters with and portrayals of Africans in their art. The writing is clear and accessible in this well-illustrated, scholarly volume that's also suitable for a broader audience. Much of the material covered here, particularly on photography and on non-European representations, will be new to most readers. VERDICT Both a reflection of its evolving times and an agent in their evolution, this title is appropriate for both academic and public library collections.—Jack Perry Brown, Art Inst. of Chicago Libs.

Library Journal