Les Autres Temps Modernes – Présence Africaine, Existentialism, Art Brut and the Revision of Primitivism in Postwar Paris (1945-1960)
The research revisits the art-historical debates concerning artistic autonomy and cultural appropriation specific to the magazine and publishing house Présence Africaine, founded in Paris in 1947 by the Senegalese writer Alioune Diop. The momentum of this novel cultural criticism by a black authorship partly recouped and built upon the prewar négritude movement’s scholarship and analysis that had been disrupted during the city’s occupation. But this intellectual milieu was further directly engaged as much as confronted with the definitive existentialist movement around Jean-Paul Sartre — a member of Présence Africaine’s initial advisory board — and with neo-primitivist endeavors of an intentionally inarticulate and quasi-ahistorical art brut, notably by the artist Jean Dubuffet and championed by establishment figures such as André Breton. The study focuses on the first decade of Présence African, in the course of which its initial concerns of cultural production as theorized by a distinctly migratory and cosmopolitan experience gradually faded into the background in favor of an activist anti-colonialist agenda. While situating this proto-postcolonialist art history in the context of the Algeria Crisis and the decolonization of the Afrique-Occidentale française territories in 1960, the study aims to also highlight the import of Présence Africaine to subsequent questions of aesthetic hegemony and appropriation within Western visual culture.