Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century

by Adrienne L. Childs (Editor), Susan H. Libby (Editor)

Overview

Compelling and troubling, colorful and dark, black figures served as the quintessential image of difference in nineteenth-century European art; the essays in this volume further the investigation of constructions of blackness during this period. This collection marks a phase in the scholarship on images of blacks that moves beyond undifferentiated binaries like ’negative’ and ’positive’ that fail to reveal complexities, contradictions, and ambiguities. Essays that cover the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century explore the visuality of blackness in anti-slavery imagery, black women in Orientalist art, race and beauty in fin-de-siècle photography, the French brand of blackface minstrelsy, and a set of little-known images of an African model by Edvard Munch. In spite of the difficulty of resurrecting black lives in nineteenth-century Europe, one essay chronicles the rare instance of an American artist of color in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. With analyses of works ranging from Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, to portraits of the American actor Ira Aldridge, this volume provides new interpretations of nineteenth-century representations of blacks.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138310315
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/30/2020
Pages:	262
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

Adrienne L. Childs, PhD is an independent scholar and curator. She is an associate of the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Her interests are in the relationship between race and representation in European and American art. Susan H. Libby, PhD is professor of art history at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Her research interests are the visual and material culture of French Caribbean slavery.

Table of Contents

Contents: Introduction: figuring blackness in Europe, Adrienne L. Childs and Susan H. Libby; The color of Frenchness: racial identity and visuality in French anti-slavery imagery, 1788-94, Susan H. Libby; US and THEM: Camper’s odious ligne faciale and Géricault’s beseeching black, Albert Alhadeff; ’A mulatto sculptor from New Orleans’: Eugène Warburg in Europe, 1853-59, Paul H.D. Kaplan; Ira Aldridge as Othello in James Northcote’s Manchester portrait, Earnestine Jenkins; Exceeding blackness: African women in the art of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Adrienne L. Childs; Visualizing racial antics in late 19th-century France, James Smalls; Staging ethnicity: Edvard Munch’s images of Sultan Abdul Karim, Allison W. Chang; Race and beauty in black and white: Robert Demachy and the aestheticization of blackness in pictorialist photography, Wendy A. Grossman; Selected bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

’This excellent volume exemplifies the increasing sophistication of scholarship around issues of the representation of race, particularly in the nineteenth century. High art, popular art and popular performance involving Africans are analysed with due regard to the complexities of European racial attitudes in an age of commercialism and empire.’ David Bindman, Hutchins Center at Harvard University, USA and author of Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century

’It is exciting to see scholars continue to probe the question of how visual arts of the West reflect the reactions to the experiences of Africans in the diaspora. The manner in which Europeans viewed and represented blacks in art is tied to the larger questions of power, cultural and political domination and exchange, along with an ever evolving influential aesthetics of difference. This well written volume of enlightening essays is a major contribution to the literature on race and representation as it broadens our understanding of the extent to which the dynamics of race has colored the history of art in Europe in many ways. Even though this volume focuses on European art, there are important contributions to the history of art relating to African Americans who created art in Europe in the nineteenth century. The discussions of slavery, Orientalism, photography and modernism in this book bring fresh perspectives to the subject of blackness in Europe. This volume is a must read for all who wish to advance their knowledge of a much neglected subject in American and European art history.’ David C. Driskell, Distinguished University Professor of Art Emeritus, University of Maryland, College Park, USA

'Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century assembles studies on a wide range of subjects that, taken together, reveal not just the relevance of images of “blacks” and “blackness” to studies of the nineteenth century, but constitute a compelling argument for how integral an awareness of the issues raised by those images should be to any account of the art of the period.' CAA Reviews

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