Preface to the First Edition

Bugner, Ladislas

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Preface to the First Edition

Ladislas Bugner

Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume I: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of...

The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume I: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire

Preface to the First Edition

Author

Ladislas Bugner

PublisherHarvard University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00137.011

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-16927

Preface to the First Edition

LADISLAS BUGNER

When they turned to the east, their shadow fell to the south and to the right.

The Liber Chronicarum, written by Hartmann Schedel, thus reports the disorientation of the Portuguese sailors after they crossed the equator in 1484. The Occident was discovering new stars, a new sky, a “New World.” That year an “old” world tottered; the fact of entering the southern hemisphere did away with the paralyzing paradox of the antipodes. It happened along the African coasts. Diogo Cão went ashore in the Congo. There he met black people.

At the present time we are witnessing Portugal’s abandonment of the last remnants of its ancient colonial empire. Symbolically, at this same time the fall of the Ethiopian monarchy has brought down with it the prestigious heritage of the traditions of the Queen of Sheba and Prester John.

Again a “New World” is coming into view. A new “discovery”—but what is to be sought? Other stars in space? Should we not rather look into another revelation—the revelation of man? The time has come to reconsider the opposition of the “white man” and the “black,” which history has made a vehicle of opprobrium. Slave trade, racism, and colonialism have loaded the word Negro with a virulence so invidious that it came to stand for an antipode to be shunned.

If this word now expresses nothing but an outmoded pattern of oppression and dependency, one may decide that it ought to be dropped from common use. Then analysis can proceed more freely, in order to deal with more complex relationships, and to develop perspectives that will be fairer to all concerned. African universities, black studies programs in American universities, and Africanists have set themselves to bring about this conscientious examination of history.

But can the word Negro be discarded out of hand? As long as it conveys an intention to degrade or is so understood, it retains the force of an insult, and this derives from a history that must be fully and consciously taken into account. Following the initiative of Présence Africaine and of Léopold Sédar Senghor, an entire school has reconsidered negritude as a positive value and invested it with a new reality. Rejection of the condition of servitude does not necessarily lead to rejecting the word Negro but presupposes that it be exorcised. The insult beclouds five thousand years of history. Like the Greek word aithiops and the Latin niger, the word Negro described the individual by the simple extension of a distinctive peculiarity, and the designation was progressively transformed until it assumed its modern comprehensiveness, more and more conventional, and, by that fact, more and more useful to the cause of prejudice. The term accounted for a difference before it came to signify the default born of the disappearance of neutrality. How far does this phenomenon of inversion characterize the attitude of “whites”? Do not they also bear witness to a certain permanency by the constant renewal of the desire for knowledge through so many and such diverse situations? It is indeed on this unaccustomed scale, with variations covering several centuries, that the perspectives can most profitably be made clear, once the three volumes of this work have presented a coherent sequence of representations of the black in Occidental art. What we have done, in effect, is this: instead of following the words, we have followed the image. In comparison with simple nomenclature, art offers its own resources, its own way of naming. It is a field apart which has still another advantage: plastic figuration is not as adaptable as the written language of generic terms, such as Ethiopian or Moor—terms which often designate widely diverse types and which in the course of time can acquire widely divergent meanings. For an expression such as “a demon black as an Ethiopian” the words come naturally enough, but its transposition into a plastic image leads to a rupture of the balance between the two terms, and the artist has to choose between the representation of the fantastic demon and that of the real African.

The first task the Menil Foundation entrusted to us was to establish as general and complete a documentation as possible—this before bringing together the essays to be contained in the three volumes of the present work. As this inventory has provided the basis for the collective study, it is worthwhile to set forth the principal options we decided upon. After that we shall try to define their limits and their import.

The inventory of works of art related to the Occidental representations of the black African takes us back not to the person of the African nor to a particular aspect of African history, but to the cultural phenomenon implied by the term Negro. More precisely, it is concerned with the plastic expression by which the white man has marked the state of difference, of “otherness,” in which he situates the black man in relation to himself. The nuances of this otherness run the gamut from out-and-out exaggeration to the almost total attenuation of the marks of opposition—a formal gamut which has its own historical determination. From the start, therefore, the study excluded any a priori assumptions regarding the definition of the African “black” and of the homologous Occidental “white” as well.

Thus, at this stage, we are led to dispense with any preliminary definition of the “Negro” based on anthropological or ethnological data. An artist depicts a black when he intends to make the black recognizable, through a certain number of signs, to a public that constitutes his audience, in the midst of a society to which he himself belongs. As we face the ambiguities discerned in the approximate figures of blacks, what will hold our attention is not the more or less certain degree of cross-breeding, but the reticence of the artist who chose to suggest the black type without going so far as to express it completely, thus producing a “pseudo-Negro.” In this area there is no clear boundary line, but rather a zone that can be extended as desired, which enables us to observe all the gradations discoverable in the artistic treatment of the theme. For instance, we will not select a given portrait in which identification of the model as a member of the black race cannot be determined by his general appearance but solely by a technical criterion belonging to the field of anthropology. The presence of the specialized indications shows the painter’s concern for realistic exactness but does not suffice to negate the prima facie evidence dictated by the artistic structure in accordance with which the meaning of the representation is organized. Let us say immediately that the absence of anthropological definition affects only the initial phase of the choice of documents. This in no way diminishes the interest such a definition may have in further stages of the research. It will find various applications in the papers that follow.

We have also avoided being limited in our study by a definition of Occidental (or Western) art. What geographical boundaries should we adopt? Nothing could be more vague. The word Occidental is here intended to cover an area of civilization which we may call Christian, heir to and inseparable from Greco-Roman antiquity, the latter owing much to Egyptian civilization, particularly in what concerns the black. The contraposition of Orient and Occident has no place here, as is proved by the interesting surveys of Byzantine and Islamic art already carried out. Moreover, we stress the fact that the use of the word Occidental is in no sense normative; otherwise Egyptian art would certainly seem a questionable appendage. We would be ready to abandon the term altogether, provided it was not replaced by such an expression as “white art” with its complement “black art,” thus putting two ethnocentrisms back-to-back.

The resources provided by existing catalogues and inventories have not proved to be of much use. The descriptions given (some detailed, others consisting merely of a title) cover only recognized subjects, whereas there was no compelling reason to include the black in most of the themes of art, and it was never obligatory. A subject as distinctive as the Baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch by Philip the Deacon was sometimes depicted with an exclusively white cast of characters. Hence an inquiry of this sort depends on direct examination of the work or a photograph of it. It requires that the search be pushed as far as possible, and this was made feasible through the facilities offered by the photograph archives. We have done our best to make systematic use of their resources.

By our estimate, which the nature of the work makes reasonably accurate, we have gone through 6.5 million photos in some forty institutions. Let us now express our appreciation of the admirable achievements which these photo archives represent and our thanks to their directors and research staffs. Had it not been for their generous welcome and professional competence, our results would not have amounted to much.

The content of the photo archives imposes a certain extrinsic order upon the number and distribution of the works of art: in other words, the analysis of the photograph holdings is to some extent governed by the degree of activity in a given country in the compiling of inventories, and by the centralization or decentralization of this activity. Some notably large collections of representations are the product of an organized and active inventory effort, which assures an exceptionally complete survey of existing examples; or else they are due to the progress, admittedly irregular, made in establishing corpora of mosaics, manuscripts, stained glass … Most of the photo archives have increased their holdings since we visited them, filling some gaps but leaving others. It is not surprising that we have found a clear majority of reproductions of easel paintings, a fact that reflects a dominant tendency in art history as well as the ease with which movable, well-preserved objects can be photographed at moderate cost. The decoration of churches and palaces is very inadequately represented. If scaffolding was needed, we would have to await the start of a hypothetical program of restoration to get our pictures. The very idea of a large photo archive collecting reproductions of prints would strike many people as paradoxical if not Utopian. The extravagance of photographing each page of a manuscript (as is done for every picture in a gallery), not to mention the alarming paucity of manuscript cataloguing, make this the area which had had the least attention: yet for many periods this is one of the essential sectors, where omissions often risk leading to errors and contradictions. Moreover, the descriptive information accompanying the photos is inevitably secondhand. Chronology, provenances, and attributions reflect the state of art history in general, where a few areas of order and clarity stand out in a vast expanse of confusion. In these circumstances one may question the validity of conclusions drawn from this documentation. What reality does it represent? Might we reply—not entirely in jest—the reality of the photo archives!

We were aware of this problem as we embarked on the present investigation. A very large volume of material has been collected, the main elements of which we present here. We have our own photo archive and card index covering some ten thousand works of art of every kind over a period of almost five thousand years of history. We are confident that the coverage makes it possible to follow closely the broad lines of the subject as it developed: they stand out clearly. We have succeeded in giving direction to the analysis, defining the problems, and classifying the documents. Special attention has been given to the concurrence of catalogue indications and the reciprocal confirmation resulting therefrom, and complementary research has enabled us to go deeper into certain aspects of this information and to correct the major distortions. The subject henceforth is recognized. A framework is now available for use in research.

In the field of art history few conclusions can be considered final. For most periods, dates and attributions are always subject to revision. Much still remains to be done in order to arrive at the satisfactory systematization of a theme. Further projects define themselves: the Menil Foundation is planning a series of publications in which historical studies and contributions coming from other disciplines will take their place beside inventories of the works catalogued. But what is most urgently needed is an in-depth examination of the literary sources in relation to our theme: a comprehensive, methodical study of this kind has not yet been made. The main obstacle we have met in the artistic area is the discouragingly wide scope of the field of research—whence the temptation to present too hasty conclusions from too limited a segment. Now that an ensemble of problems has been drawn up thanks to the documentation established on the basis of the plastic arts, this complementary approach will be less hazardous, and partial conclusions may be arrived at more quickly. We can even dream of a synthesis of the two fields, which, in fact, are inseparable. Such a synthesis would be the only guarantee of the soundness of the iconographic approach.

We are filled with admiration for our ten collaborators and friends who were willing to address themselves to the reality of a wordless documentation. To them goes the credit for having cast it in a new form, and for having given the black a positive image that emerges from the transformations to which history has subjected it.

The studies dealing with the successive chronological phases mark the overall evolution of the theme, bringing out a series of representative aspects, like so many “facets” that illuminate and complement each other while retaining their autonomy. In this way they avoid giving the impression of a general synthesis. We consider this a capital point. Not only would this synthesis be premature in view of the work still to be done, given the range of the historical phenomena under consideration, it simply could not be achieved. In the present state of the question it is healthier to allow some divergence of opinion than to aim for general agreement. We are equally firm in our opinion that the theme must be worked on through a variety of methods. Each of these has been applied here in the study of a limited period or of a particular aspect of the subject, and if for practical reasons each cannot be extended to the totality, it may be to a larger phase of the development. The juxtaposition of different points of view indicates an obvious complementarity: to set aside the formulation of a general synthesis and to put on view a variety of possible approaches. These two aims clearly define a structure of work which we find promising. In the present situation, however, and depending on the period under study, one approach may prove to be preferable to another. At times the research has drawn upon earlier works, thus enjoying the advantage of starting from an already high level of acquired knowledge. In other instances, it has been necessary to reinterpret a mass of disparate elements in accordance with new and untested hypotheses.

Egyptology, to begin with, is well organized. Its terrain is relatively limited, the material in large part inventoried, precisely known and situated. The historical data and the literary sources complement the monuments. Thus the archeological approach was obviously the way to establish a first image of the black, up and down the Nile Valley (the outlet to the Mediterranean world of the interior of Africa). Later on the Cushites, dominating a large part of Egypt during the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, adopted the canons of Egyptian art and with them its themes. Aside from a few differences of detail, interesting in themselves, the ruler was extolled by being portrayed in the traditional form of the Egyptian pharaoh, with the same image of the conquered enemy, including the black, at his feet.

How did this image evolve in the Greco-Roman art of the Mediterranean basin? Instead of tackling this question directly, we must begin by considering the way society in the period of classical antiquity dealt with the black, now no longer a “neighbor,” but regarded as an exotic, “distant” element.

It is in this area that publications bearing on our subject have been the most numerous. Following on G. H. Beardsley’s indispensable repertory, brought out in 1929, and several articles that presented the principal series of objects, F. M. Snowden, Jr., published his synthesis, Blacks in Antiquity, in 1970. This work is based on an exhaustive analysis of classical literature, but it also supplies abundant illustrations. His contribution in our first volume complements his book, and much of the illustrative material is revised and brought up-to-date. The study is not limited to examples where blacks were placed in frank contrast to whites but explores the fringe areas where the distinguishing traits, while not completely disappearing, came very close to doing so. Snowden examines the farthest areas to which black people penetrated in antiquity, along with the extent of their integration. Carried too far, the argument would lead to the paradoxical situation in which one can no longer identify the subject of one’s study among a range of examples; but by the coherence of his classification and distribution of types, the author leaves it to be understood that those who deny the relevance of a piece of evidence should produce their own proof.

From beginning to end of the classical period, Egypt continued to disseminate the image of the black. Naucratis and Alexandria were two important sources of diffusion in the Nile Delta. Alexandrianism even became a style, and the word came to be descriptive of works whose connection with Alexandria itself was sometimes rather vague. A careful examination of North African monuments shows that the contrasted, precisely characterized image of the black was not widely used there and confirms the preponderant role of the delta in the diffusion of the theme down to the end of the Roman Empire.

The testimonies coming from classical antiquity are presented accompanied by all the iconography previously developed in the Nile Valley. Seeing all this together, we are made aware of an original aspect of the Negro subject matter, which is that when the Greeks and the peoples of the Roman Empire wanted to represent a far-off, prestigious but different land, they used the black as the sign of differentiation: he became one of the forceful images in the “stylized” way of picturing Egypt, as the Egyptians had used his figure just as forcefully to symbolize their opposites.

Research on that image in the Christian art of the Occident from its origins to the fifteenth century—the subject of our second volume—presents quite a different situation. Properly speaking, the theme hardly goes back further than the twelfth century, when the figure of the African was separated from that of the Devil; this distinction occurred much earlier in Byzantine art, which thus forms a transition with antiquity. But from the very beginning the commonplaces on the blackness of the Ethiopian stocked the patristic writings, and more particularly the commentaries written on them; they must, of necessity, serve as our introduction.

There has been no previous effort to assemble a documentation on the representation of blacks in Christian art. What we present in the second volume, with all the limitations and inadequacies we have already noted, is therefore a really fresh contribution, which will have to be judged by the art historian. But working from religious iconography ran the risk of narrowing the point of view too much as long as the black had not found his proper place in it. From the Crusades to the great discoveries, it seemed that the purely historical perspective was best suited to shape up the principal aspects of the subject, to bring out the mythic values of the representations, and to outline an approach to ideas and social attitudes.

The development so presented might be entitled “from myth to human reality.” The two chapters dealing with these two extremes do not describe a simple phenomenon of transition. The beginning of the fourteenth century may well be considered a turning point. But between the twelfth and the fourteenth century a certain discovery of the black African had already taken place—a process of humanization, of recourse to the data of experience, which progressively took the black out of his purely symbolic role. As time went on, the desire to free themselves from traditional ways of thinking is certainly evident in the view Europeans ventured toward their expanded horizons; a view nonetheless weighted with the old symbols rooted in fantasy. Those who were grappling for the first time with the unknown felt that mythic knowledge was “truer than nature” and furnished keys for the interpretation of the new reality.

From the sixteenth century onward, historical ideas about the blacks were shaped by the development of the Triangular Trade and the growth overseas of a slaveholding society. The revolt in Santo Domingo, sparked by revolutionary ideals, got enmeshed in the progress of the abolitionist movement before colonial imperialism, renewing the connection with Africa, opened the history of our own time.

The slave trade can be viewed as being the dominant phenomenon of this period. The works dealing with it are still insufficient; we would hope to see it treated with a scope worthy of the size of the subject. However, the chapters composing our third volume make no pretense of being a major contribution to the field. True, there is artistic material more or less directly related to it, such as illustrations in accounts of travel, popular prints, and devotional images which we will consider in a later publication; giving it space here would hardly be justified. If the phenomenon is of prime importance historically, the fact remains that art did not concern itself with the slave trade as long as it was generally accepted in Europe. Art approached the Negro theme according to specific rules governing the nature of its testimony. Slavery began to appear as a problem from the moment the new ideas of happiness and liberty were introduced by the philosophical literature of the mid-eighteenth century. Revolutionary proclamations subsequently spread them abroad, and a constant interaction between these two currents is observable. At the same time a sharp distinction was established between subjects suitable for treatment in “Great Art” on the one hand, and “popular” themes on the other, with the result that the content of “academic” works was without significance. Neoclassicism and Jacques-Louis David’s “dictatorship” certainly did as much as the suppression of rebellion in Santo Domingo to exclude the image of the black from the painting of the time. It is therefore mostly in illustrative prints for poems, novels, and historical accounts that the abolitionist inspiration shows up. The important paintings (Morland’s, Turner’s) were done in England, where antislavery ideas were particularly strong and sympathy for Santo Domingo was all the deeper because it could at the same time be directed against Napoleon. Moreover, the pressure of David’s influence was not felt in England. In France the reaction came from Géricault. When, in 1819, he put a black at the peak of the human pyramid of castaways in his Raft of the Medusa, he was certainly pleading for the human dignity of slaves, but his picture also puts a subject illustrating a current news item against the grandiose historical compositions that glorified only the heroes of antiquity. Géricault’s black man is exalted as the antihero, in defiance of a certain conception of the “dignity” of art.

A final chapter is devoted to the image of the man transplanted to the other end of the chain. In America even more than in Europe the freedom of the black might have been central to the concerns of art, since the driving force of the idea led to a civil war. But one would look in vain for such a concern. Here and there amid the copious artistic production a moving accent of truth is discernible, but most often portraits and genre scenes emphasize the picturesque. The art of the time is mainly narrative in content, reflecting the black man’s situation through the spectacle of daily life.

This survey will draw no conclusions. Many witnesses have not been called; others are still unknown. What we have is only a first meeting with the image of the black, not yet clearly discernible but already so revealing! Of all ways of discovering the past, art is the one that enables us to go the furthest; outdistancing all analysis, it brings us the fundamental quality of a presence. The attentive beholder cannot remain insensitive to the strength of this bond between the artist and his model, dependent on one another down through the generations. On the other hand, art eschews certain kinds of conclusions: it states but does not reason. Development, causality, relationships—here these necessarily constitute the essential factors in the work of analysis by which scattered elements are organized into a comprehensible sequence. It must be borne in mind that in the end these thought processes betray a deviation from descriptive discourse. No law, unless it be the law of chance, can “explain” the presence of the black in a work of art or account for his absence; otherwise it would be necessary to explain the presence or absence of the masterpiece, whereas the answer to this falls within the domain of genius, which can in no way be reduced to a formula. The part of creativeness contained in the image of the black will ever bear witness to an encounter, an exchange in their true element, which is freedom.

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