African Sculpture from Harlem to Paris to the Factory Floor

This paper analyzes how the relationship between African sculpture, African American music and modernist French painting was constructed in the 1920s in Merion, Pennsylvania by the white collector Albert Barnes, his colleagues, and the African American workers/students at his factory; in Harlem by New Negro intellectuals such as Alain Locke and Charles Johnson; and in Paris by Barnes’s dealer Paul Guillaume. This comparison focuses on an event that Barnes and Johnson staged in 1926, in which they presented a lecture on modern French art, together with lantern slides of African sculpture, spirituals sung by the Bordentown Choir for Colored Youth, and readings of translated African folklore and contemporary African American poetry. I argue that this event was refracted and made meaning differently through the journals "Opportunity: Journal of the New Negro" in the United States and "Les Arts à Paris" in France. Indeed, African sculpture's importance and meaning was a field of contestation between the American collector, French dealer, New Negro intellectuals, and the factory workers who took classes on art and music at the Barnes Foundation. This paper analyzes the various, and often antagonistic, ways that these interlocutors engaged with and deployed African sculpture towards notions of cultural value and heritage. Although African artists’ perspectives were notably absent from this event; this paper shows how these different figures--both in modernist circles and across different experiences in the African diaspora--sought to describe, voice, and/or elide the agency of African artists at this historical moment.