Tendances et Confrontations: an experimental space for defining art from Africa

Abstract

This article traces the presence, employment, and significance of the terms moderne and contemporain as used by organizers, artists, and critics of the 1966 Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres. Coupled with analyses of the great variety of artwork on display in Tendances et Confrontations, the exhibition of modern and/or contemporary art at the festival, this study demonstrates how the innovative paintings by modernists from Africa and the Diaspora clashed with the artisanal, handicraft objects that were also presented as contemporary art. The trajectory of these stylistic labels and their rapid evolution in African art practices allowed FESMAN to serve as a site for defining African modernity, and proposing a contemporary Africa, to a global audience. Though its effectiveness was limited, the significance of this modern and/or contemporary exhibition was not lost on the artists, and the event is recognized as a seminal meeting space for exploring modern African subjectivities.

Keywords:

• Africa
• art
• modern
• contemporary
• exhibition
• festival

Notes on contributor

Joseph L. Underwood is an art historian and curator whose research focuses on artists from Senegal and how their employment of different artistic platforms (festivals, biennials, exhibitions, etc.) have created networks of transnational exchange, from the 1960s to the present. Other projects focus on themes related to the postwar era, including postcolonialism, nationalism, globalization, and biennialism.

Notes

1 Though problematic, I am choosing to employ the term ‘traditional’ in describing the genre of art shown in L’Art Nègre, largely because the festival organizers consistently referred to it as the exhibition of art traditionnel.

2 An early precedent employing the term ‘modern’ was the 1962 exhibition by Frank McEwen at the National Gallery in Salisbury. Before that, anti-modernist, or ‘colonial nativist’ tropes were prevalent (see Okeke-Agulu 2015, 40–41).

3 Two other studies that provide framework for the challenges of asserting modernism are Gikandi (1992) and Picton (2013).

4 Decrying art schools in Africa that rely on Western-based pedagogies from colonizers, he instead champions ‘inducement of inborn talent’ as the authentic twentieth-century African art (McEwen 1968).

5 Though the motif appears broadly in these cultures, further examples come from Baule, Igbo, and Bamileke carvers, among others.

6 Some of the earliest institutions that adopted the term ‘Contemporary’ in their title were the Contemporary Art Society (founded 1910, London) and the Contemporary Art Society (founded 1938, Adelaide, Australia). Others would change their name from ‘Modern’ to ‘Contemporary’ (e.g. the Boston Museum of Modern Art, founded 1936, became the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1948) because Modernism increasingly came to represent a defined art movement that was no longer actively being produced and, thus, no longer contemporary.