Metropolitan fetish: African sculpture and the imperial French invention of primitive art

Abstract

"A history of the French reception of African art, especially wooden masks and figures, in the first four decades of the twentieth century, and how that reception led to the creation of the broader aesthetic category Westerners now know as "primitive art"--

Contents

Introduction : the French paradox of primitive art -- The making of a metropolitan fetish -- Inventing antiquity : Henri Clouzot, André Level and the universal history of primitive art -- The wings of snobbery : Paul Guillaume and the launch of art nègre -- From art nègre to art primitif : black deco, ethnology and surrealism in the late 1920s -- Selling "the art of the ancestors" : Charles Ratton, the art market, and the black diaspora -- Authenticity wars : primitive art between metropole and colony -- Conclusion, with an archival prophecy.