African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde

From November 27, 2012, through September 2, 2013, The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents “African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde,” a focused exhibition which investigates the formation of taste in African arts in New York during the modernist era of the 1910s and 1920s. Conceived to coincide with the centenary celebrations of the ground-breaking 1913 “International Exhibition of Modern Art,” better known as the Armory Show, the Met’s exhibition considers for the first time this key turning point for the arts in America in terms of its impact on the development of an appreciation for African arts. Indeed, while the Museum of Modern Art’s 1935 “African Negro Art” exhibition is commonly recognized as the first moment of New York’s consequential encounter with African arts, I argue that this encounter in fact took place twenty years earlier, following the Armory Show. At that time, the emergence of New York as a new platform for modern art revealed the possibility of dynamic art commerce between Europe and America. As a direct consequence of this generative event, the numerous galleries that opened in New York in 1914 all intended to acquaint their audience with the newest trends in art. Among the works they imported from Europe were African arts, which began to be systematically exhibited alongside work by the Western avantgarde. This moment constitutes the starting point of “African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde.” Since art historian Robert Goldwater published his Primitivism in Modern Painting in 1938, considerations of the avant-garde reception of what was then called “Primitive art” have focused on the impact it had on Western artistic practices. Half a century later, the famous 1984 exhibition “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art” at New York’s MoMA systematized this line of thought without critical detachment and provoked heated reactions among the academic community. Scholars questioned and criticized vocally the Western-centric nature of the MoMA endeavor. While these debates were necessary and opened the door to essential scholarship marked by greater self-awareness, they also had the unfortunate consequence of suspending research on the reception of African arts in conjunction with the development of European and American modernism during the first half of the twentieth century. However, in America, the systematic joint exposure, from 1914 on, of African and modern art had a tremendous impact: today, it is still so ingrained in popular imagination that it continues to inform Western appreciation of African arts. Based on fresh research performed for my doctoral thesis (Biro 2010), “African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde” considers the modernist era with African arts at its center and not as a footnote in the history of modern art. By placing the focus on the actual settings in which African artifacts were first collected and exhibited in the United States, these works are propelled beyond their role as simple props or artistic catalysts for Western artists. Unfolding both chronologically and thematically, “African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde” is divided into four sections, from the initial 1914 exhibitions of African art in New York to the engagement of African-American artists during the Harlem Renaissance of the second half of the 1920s.