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Book

The image of the Black in Western art

Call Number

  • 704.9493 I313 [multiple volumes] (CEN)

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Publication Information

Cambridge, Mass. ; London : Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010-

Physical Description

volumes <3 parts 2> : illustrations (some color) ; 29 cm.

Summary

In The 1960s, as a response to segregation in the United States, the influential art patron Dominique de Menil began a research project and photo archive called The Image of the Black in Western Art. Now, fifty years later, as the first American president of African American descent serves his historic term in office, her mission has been re-invigorated through the collaboration of Harvard University Press and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research to present new editions of the coveted five original books and the anticipated new volumes which shall complete the series. The completed set will include ten sumptuous books in five volumes with up-to-date introductions and more full-color illustrations, printed on high-quality art stock for books that will last a lifetime. This monumental publication offers expert commentary and a lavishly illustrated history of the representations of people of African descent ranging from the ancient images of Pharaohs created by unknown hands to the works of the great European masters such as Bosch, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Hogarth to stunning new creations by contemporary black artists. Featuring thousands of beautiful, moving, and often little-known images of black people, including queens and slaves, saints and soldiers, children and gods, The Image of the Black in Western Art provides a treasury of masterpieces from four millennia--a testament to the black experience in the West and a tribute to art's enduring power to shape our common humanity. Volume II, Part 1, written largely by the noted French scholar Jean Devisse, has established itself as a classic in the field of medieval art. It surveys as never before the presence of black people, mainly mythical, in art from the early Christian era to the fourteenth century. The extraordinary transformation of Saint Maurice into a black African saint, the subject of many noble and deeply touching images, is a highlight of this volume. The new introduction by Paul Kaplan provides a fresh perspective on the image of the black in medieval European art and contextualizes the classic essays on the subject.

Notes

"In collaboration with the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and the Menil Collection."

Contents

  • v. 1. From the Pharaohs to the fall of the Roman Empire.
  • Introduction to the new edition : race and representation in ancient art : Black Athena and after / The iconography of the Black in ancient Egypt : from the beginnings to the twenty-fifth dynasty / Cushites and Meroites : iconography of the African rulers in the ancient Upper Nile / Iconographical evidence on the Black populations in Greco-Roman antiquity / The iconography of the Black in ancient North Africa / Egypt, land of Africa, in the Greco-Roman world
  • v. 2. pt. 1. From the early Christian Era to the "Age of Discovery" : from the demonic threat to the incarnation of sainthood.
  • Introduction to the new edition / Paul H.D. Kaplan
  • Christians and Black / The Black and his color : from symbols to realities / A sanctified Black : Maurice
  • v. 2. pt. 2. From the early Christian Era to the "Age of Discovery" : Africans in the Christian ordinance of the world.
  • Introduction to the new edition / Paul H.D. Kaplan
  • The shield and the crown / The appeal to the Ethiopian / The frontiers in 1460 / The African transposed / Conclusion / Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat --
  • v. 3. pt. 1. From the "Age of Discovery" to the Age of Abolition : artists of the Renaissance and Baroque.
  • The epiphany of the Black Magus circa 1500 / Italy, 1490-1700 / The image of the Black in Spanish art : sixteenth and seventeenth centuries / The Black presence in British art : sixteenth and seventeenth centuries / Rembrandt's Africans / Heliodorus's An Ethiopian story in seventeenth-century European art
  • v. 3. pt. 2. From the "Age of Discovery" to the Age of Abolition : Europe and the world beyond / Blacks outside Europe : Africa, South America, and the Mediterranean. Portuguese Africa ; Venice and the Oriental mode ; Weiditz and costume books ; Mapping Africa ; The Petits voyages ; The depiction of Africa ; The South American scene ; The Mediterranean scene
  • Black Africans in Europe. The European scene ; From the Old to the New Testament : toward salvation ; The missionary impulse ; Opulent and exotic Africa ; The world of the collector
  • Conclusion : the anthropology of the African --
  • v. 3. pt. 3. From the "Age of Discovery" to the Age of Abolition : the eighteenth century.
  • The theater of court and church : Blacks as figures of fantasy / Between court and city : fantasies in transition / Court and city : fantasies of domination / The city between fantasy and reality / Africa and the slave trade / The slave colonies
  • v. 4. pt. 1. From the American Revolution to World War I : slaves and liberators / The Atlantic triangle ; Philanthropic conquest ; Uncle Tom or the freed slave, 1852-1876 ; Memorials, or the Glory of Empire --
  • v. 4. pt. 2. From the American Revolution to World War I : Black models and White myths.
  • Studies / The art of observation / The seductions of slavery / The new Negro / Goya's Blacks / Karl Briullov and the Russian representation of Black Africans in the age of Pushkin
  • v. 5. pt. 1. The twentieth century : the impact of Africa.
  • Photography, popular imagery, anthropology, and racial theory
  • Counteracting the stereotype : photography in the nineteenth century / Marketing racism : popular imagery in the United States and Europe / Visual culture and the occupation of the Rhineland / Anthropology and photography (1910 -1940) / African taxonomies : displaying and classifying race / Europe and the construction of the "primitive"
  • Africa and Paris : the art of Picasso and his circle / Encounters with the image of the Black : the German and French avant-garde (1905-1920) / Negrophilia, Josephine Baker, and 1920s Paris / Afrophilia and Afrophobia in Switzerland and Germany (1916-1938) / Painted Blacks and radical imagery in the Netherlands (1900-1940) / Beyond Europe : the Caribbean and Latin America
  • The image of the Black in twentieth-century Anglo-Afro-Caribbean art / The image of the Black in Latin America / Négritude : Césaire, Lam, and Picasso
  • v. 5. pt. 2. The twentieth century : the rise of Black artists.
  • African American art and identity
  • After slavery / New Negroes, Harlem, and Jazz (1900-1950 / Photography (1900 -1970s) / Identity politics and the response to modernism
  • Activism and the shaping of Black identities (1964-1988) / Abstraction and identity : Norman Lewis and the "activity of discovery" / Worldwide developments
  • Contemporary photography : [re]presenting art history / New practices, new identities : hybridity and globalization

Subjects