‘THE IMAGE OF THE BLACK IN WESTERN ART, VOLS. I-III, ed. David Bindman, Henry Louis Gates et. al.’ Review, Black and Asian Studies Association Newsletter, 62, March 2012, p. 29.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. These pictures come with thousands of scholarly words, but it is their visual impact that demonstrates most forcefully that black people have been present in western culture from Ancient Egypt, Rome and Greece, all the way through to “The Age of Obama” and that they have been portrayed in a myriad of different ways by western artists. The ‘Images of the Black’ in these volumes range from statues of black saints such as St. Maurice, to portraits of notable African ambassadors and kings, poets and musicians, or drawings of literary characters.
The series (first published 1976-1989) is being reissued, with an entirely new third volume, the ‘Age of Discovery to the Age of Abolition’, in three parts covering Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque, Europe and the World Beyond and The Eighteenth Century.
The project began in 1960, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in America, when French-Texan art collectors John and Dominique de Menil commissioned the search for ‘positive images to counteract racist stereotypes’, aiming to build a ‘subtle bulwark and a living testimony against antiblack racism’. This resulted in a photographic catalogue containing over 30,000 images that now survive in duplicate at Harvard and at the Warburg Institute in London. This little-known archive is arranged geographically, chronologically and thematically, and is a goldmine for researchers looking for pictures of Africans, both real and imagined.
Many of the images are positive. Africans were painted and sculpted by some of the most eminent artists in the Western tradition, including Titian, Tieopolo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Reynolds, Hogarth, Watteau and Gainsborough. More importantly, they have not been caricatured, but sensitively portrayed, their humanity captured on canvas for all to see. That said, many are portrayed in subservient roles, such as the servants in classical or biblical scenes, or the adoring pages in aristocratic portraits.
Seen through the prism of Western art these images of ‘the Black’ often tell us more about the Europeans and their agendas than the Africans they portray. Nonetheless, the cumulative effect of these images is to demonstrate a continuous black presence in the Western imagination and experience. Despite their grand size and scope, these volumes are by no means definitive, but rather provide a fascinating starting point for discussion and further research.
You can read my longer review of the same books for the TLS here.
The series (first published 1976-1989) is being reissued, with an entirely new third volume, the ‘Age of Discovery to the Age of Abolition’, in three parts covering Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque, Europe and the World Beyond and The Eighteenth Century.
The project began in 1960, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in America, when French-Texan art collectors John and Dominique de Menil commissioned the search for ‘positive images to counteract racist stereotypes’, aiming to build a ‘subtle bulwark and a living testimony against antiblack racism’. This resulted in a photographic catalogue containing over 30,000 images that now survive in duplicate at Harvard and at the Warburg Institute in London. This little-known archive is arranged geographically, chronologically and thematically, and is a goldmine for researchers looking for pictures of Africans, both real and imagined.
Many of the images are positive. Africans were painted and sculpted by some of the most eminent artists in the Western tradition, including Titian, Tieopolo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Reynolds, Hogarth, Watteau and Gainsborough. More importantly, they have not been caricatured, but sensitively portrayed, their humanity captured on canvas for all to see. That said, many are portrayed in subservient roles, such as the servants in classical or biblical scenes, or the adoring pages in aristocratic portraits.
Seen through the prism of Western art these images of ‘the Black’ often tell us more about the Europeans and their agendas than the Africans they portray. Nonetheless, the cumulative effect of these images is to demonstrate a continuous black presence in the Western imagination and experience. Despite their grand size and scope, these volumes are by no means definitive, but rather provide a fascinating starting point for discussion and further research.
You can read my longer review of the same books for the TLS here.
