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'Dahomey!, Dahomey!': The Reception of Dahomean Art in France in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Kelly, Julia J. |
| Copyright Year | 2015 |
| Abstract | This essay examines the ways in which art works from Dahomey were discussed and analysed after they were brought to France in the 1890s, following the French conquest of this West African kingdom in 1894. The cultural significance of a number of Dahomean sculptures, which entered the collection of the Trocadero Ethnographic Museum, was clear in accounts at the time. However, later art historical interpretations of the relationships between objects arriving from Africa in Europe and their role in artistic discourse largely overlook this, taking their bearings from artists' own statements about their non-western sources of inspiration. The supposed novelty in Paris of African masks, statuettes and ritual objects in the first decade of the twentieth century, enshrined in artists' accounts, ignored the presence in the city's major anthropological museum of objects which were already regarded as important courtly art from a longstanding historical kingdom. By contrast, the kinds of African art works that artists predominantly looked to were mysterious in origin, made by unknown hands, lacking specific histories.The reception of Dahomean art works was complicated by the strong associations that developed in the European imagination between this kingdom and the ferocity of its sacrificial practices and fighting forces (for instance its famous women warriors). As this essay shows, these associations strengthened the perceived power of Dahomean art, as well as increasing the prestige of the French in having 'captured' them and brought them back to France. Artists and writers in the 20th century made use of Dahomey and its connotations, evoking the complex relationships between France and the African kingdom turned colony: Andre Salmon looked back at an image from a popular newspaper pinned on his wall as a child, showing French troops entering Dahomey's capital city Abomey, while Jean Genet invoked Dahomey's pre-colonial past.Despite its presence in the French cultural imagination, however, Dahomey and its art did not seem to play a significant role as a formative influence for the artistic avant-garde in Paris in the 1900s and 1910s, at least according to the existing historical accounts of this period. That is to say, in the formal appropriations by artists in France from non-Western precedents in the early 20th century, the Dahomean sculptures in the Trocadero museum were notably absent. This essay also suggests some reasons for this absence: the large scale of these sculptures relative to the more collectible artefacts that were coming into the European market from Africa; and, more significantly perhaps, the history and meaning that they already embodied as courtly portraits of Dahomean kings. These were not freefloating 'exotic' objects onto which European fantasies could be projected. Then as now, they did not fit into a paradigm of cross-cultural appropriation, their anthropological and artistic meanings intersecting in rich and complex ways.In his 1958 play The Blacks (Les negres), Jean Genet invoked the former African kingdom and French colony of Dahomey to represent the spirit of the whole African continent. The publication of his play coincided with the transformation of Dahomey from a part of colonial French West Africa to an independent state.1 Genet's protagonist Felicity, a black Queen, utters the phrase 'Dahomey! Dahomey!' as a rallying cry: 'To the rescue, blacks from all corners of the earth.'2 The reference to Dahomey here, at a time when royal artists in its capital city Abomey were becoming the subject of a new museum in the renascent liberated African country, and when Dahomean cultural heritage began to be officially recognised and its conservation actively pursued, encapsulates its evocative and powerful meanings for a European colonial (and post-colonial) audience. They were reminded of its status as a once-great kingdom with complex rules and customs, including sacrificial rites that led it to become synonymous with a certain kind of heightened savagery in the European imagination. … |
| Starting Page | 1 |
| Ending Page | 1 |
| Page Count | 1 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/bitstream/2134/19406/1/kelly.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/kelly.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
