DISCUSSION 5 ARTS

Europe, African Art, and the Uncanny H enry Louis Gates,Jr.

I have felt my st rongest artistic emotions when suddenly confronted with the sublime beauty ofsculptures executed by the anonymous artists ofAfrica. These works ofa religious, passionate, and rigorously logical art are the most powerful and most beautiful things the human imagination has ever produced.

I hasten to add that, nevertheless, I detest exoticism. -Pablo Picasso

African art? N ever heard ofit! -Pablo Picasso

Charles de Gaulle was frequently heard to wonder aloud ifwithout black Africa, from which he mounted the resistance to the azi 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 twentieth century could possibly have existed as well. E specially 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 ofsub-Saharan African art. In this sense, it is not too much to argue that European m odernity 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 Sigmund 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 ofan essay entitled "Of ational Characters," D avid Hume, writing in the middle of the eighteenth century at the height of the European Enlightenment, maintained that one could survey the entire area ofAfrica below the Sahara and find not even one work ofvisual or written art worthy ofthe 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 0bservatiom on the Feeling ofthe Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), meditated on Hume's conclusions about Africa, ratifying and extending them without qualification. In Section IV ofhis essay "Of ational Character," Kant cited Hume's opinion favorably, then made the startling claim that "blackness" denotes not only ugliness, but stupidity as well:

In the lands ofthe black, what better can one expect than what isJou11d 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. Ofcourse, Father Labat reports that a

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Negro carpenter, whom he reproachedfor haughty treatment toward his wives, answered: "You whites are indeedfools, forfirst you make great concessions to your wives, and afterwai·d 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 blackfrom head to foot, a clearproof 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 ofjudgement (1790) that black Africans no doubt had standards ofbeauty among themselves, even if they did not correspond to European standards ofbeauty-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. (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, however, was not persuaded by Kant's new generosity ofspirit; in the Philosophy ofHistory, 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 ofwriting, 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 ofAfrican art and culture, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at least, was itself encapsulated in, and became an integral part of, the justification ofan economic order largely dependent upon the exploitation of cheap labor available to an unprecedented degree on the west coast ofAfrica, 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 ofAfrican 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

H EN RY LOUIS GATES, JR.

century. For a variety ofreasons, too numerous and subtle to be argued here, revaluations ofAfrican art gathered momentum at the turn of the century. Antonin D vofak's admiration, and formal uses, ofAfrican 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 blackfaced minstrelsy as a popular mode ofdebased theater and dance. The role of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in this process ofrevaluation, performing spirituals on worldwide tours during these decades, cannot be gainsaid. But it would be in the visual arts where the role ofAfrican ways ofseeing would become pivotal, in a manner unprecedented in the history of European aesthetics. The experience ofAfrican art profoundly shaped the forms that modernity assumed early in the twentieth 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. H ow uncanny that encounter was for Picasso-and, by extension, for European art, its critics, and its 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 ofEuropean and African aesthetics, L es Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907).

Picasso's discomfort-and the discomfort of critics even today-with the transforming presence ofAfrican art in painting underlines the irony ofan encounter that led to the beginning of the end ofcenturies ofEuropean disapprobation ofAfrican 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 ofAfrica 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 Action as saying ''African art? Never heard of it!" The literature is full of Picasso's denials, the energy ofwhich seems only to emphasize Picasso's own anxieties about his African influences. Eventually,

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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 ofus 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 T rocadero, it was disgusting. The Flea Market. The smell.

I was alone. I w anted to get away. But I 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 ofsculpture. Not at

all. They were magic things . ... The Negro pieces were intercesseurs, mediators . ... I always looked atfetishes. 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 ofit! I understood what the N egroes use

their sculptures far. 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?

I sn't that what we call tradition? But all the fetishes were usedfor the

same thing. They were weapons. To help people avoidcoming under the

irifluence ofspirits 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 allbecause ofthe forms; because it was myfirst

exorcism painting-yes absolutely.

Franc;:oise Gilot had reported a similar comment a full decade before Malraux's publication. It is even more dramatically open about Picasso's conscious indebtedness to African sources:

When I became interested,farty years ago, in N egro art and I made what

they refer to as the Negro Period in myp ainting, it was because at the

time I was against what was called beauty in the museum. At that time,

for most people a N egro mask was an ethnographic object. When I went

for the first time, at [Andre} D erain's urging, to the Trocadero museum,

the smell ofdampness androt there stuck in my throat. It depressed me so

much I wanted to get outfast, but I stayed and studied. M en had made

those masks and other objectsfor a sacred purpose, a magic purpose, as a

kind ofmediation between themselves and the unknown host ile forces

that surround them, in order to overcome their fear and horror by giving

it afarm and image. At that moment I realized what painting was all

about. Painting isn't an aesthetic op eration; it's a form ofmagic designed

to be a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power bygivingform to our terrors as wellas our desires.

When I came to that realization, I knew I hadfound my way. Then

people began looking at those objects in terms ofaesthetics.

H EN RY LOUIS GATES, JR.

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, itsformal influence, a new way ofseeing, 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 ofdisparaging those same black traditions as "ugly" or "inferior"?

What these passages reveal is Picasso's aesthetic wrestling with his own revulsion at the forms ofAfrican art, and, by extension, the traditional revulsion of the West toward African aesthetic conventions generally. Picasso vividly described 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 fas t," 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 ofWestern aesthetics itsel£ What is also striking about Picasso's recollections is his denial of the formal influence ofAfrican art-to which he was patently indebted-and the fact that thirty years later (when he made his confession to M alraux) 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 ofAfrican art to exorcise the demons of his artistic antecedents.

Picasso's anxieties with his shaping influences are, in part, those ofany 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 continent that it represented as a prime site ofall 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 twentieth century when African art could be valued outside a Eurocentric filter, the deepest ambivalences 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 1912: "Before us stood a head of marvellous beauty, wonderfully cast in antique bronze, true to life, encrusted with a p atina ofglorious dark green. This was, indeed, the Olokun, Atlantic Africa's Poseidon."

"Yet listen ," Wole Soyin ka, the Nigerian playwright, argued in 1986 at his N obel Laureate address, "to what he had to write about

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the very people whose handiwork had lifted him into these realms of universal sublimity":

Profoundly stirred, I stoodfor many minutes before the remnant ofthe erstwhile Lord and Ruler ofthe Empire ofAtlantis. 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 ofsons 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 ofdegenerate and feeble-minded posterity should be the legitimate guardians ofso much loveliness.

The deep ambivalences traced here were not peculiar to white Europeans and Americans; African Americans, for their part, were at least as equivocal about the beauty ofAfrican 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 L egacy 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-L ocke concluded ruefully, has led to a "timid conventionalism which racial disparagement h as forced upon the Negro mind in America," thus making even the very idea ofimitating African art for African American artists a most difficult ideal to embrace.

Locke's solution to this quandary, as Lemke has argued, is as curious as Picasso's waffling about influences upon him: by imitating the E uropean modernists who so clearly have been influenced by African art ( ofwhom Locke lists Henri Matisse, Picasso, D erain, Amedeo Modigliani, Maurice 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 ofWinold Reiss, whom he chose to illustrate his classic manifesto ofAfrican 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 D ouglas produced, and given the circuitous route that L ocke mapped out for them as their path "back" to Africa, perhaps we should not be surp rised 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 ofAfro­ kitsch, the use ofdecorative 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

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

na'ive tourist. Ways of seeing, these experiments tell us, are not biological. Rather, they result from h ard-won combat with received conventions of representation. They are a mysterious blend of innovation and convention, improvisation and tradition. And if the resurrection ofAfrican art, in the court ofjudgment 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.

Note Qtotations of Picasso are taken from William R ubin, ed., Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,

Studies in Modern Art, no. 3 (New York, 1994); quotation oflmmanuel Kant from

Observations on the Feeling ofthe Beautifuland Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley

and Los Angeles, 1960), p. 113. References to Sieglinde Lemke's ideas are based on her

book Was Modernism Passing? (forthcoming from Oxford University Press).