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Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the “Age of...
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PublisherHarvard University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00141.004
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Acknowledgments
Our warmest thanks again go to Josef Helfenstein, director of the Menil Collection, and to the Menil Foundation, Houston, Texas, for allowing us to use the materials commissioned under the auspices of the Foundation.
We also owe a great debt of gratitude to the author himself, Professor Jean Michel Massing, who brought this large volume to a successful conclusion despite the pressures of a demanding job teaching the history of art at Cambridge University. We are all grateful for the wise advice and practical assistance given by Professor Elizabeth McGrath, who is in charge of the Image of the Black in Western Art archive, formerly in Paris and now at the Warburg Institute, University of London.
We must also thank again most warmly our colleagues at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University, especially Sheldon Cheek, senior curatorial associate, and Vera Grant, executive director, who have both worked tirelessly to bring the whole series to a successful conclusion, and Joanne Kendall.
We would like to thank Dean Henry Rosovsky for establishing the conditions under which the Image archive could be housed at the Du Bois Institute at Harvard, and President Neil Rudenstine for fulfilling those conditions and overseeing the moving of the archive from the Menil Foundation in Houston to Cambridge. We would also like to thank President Lawrence Summers for the generous space in which the archive and its library are housed within the Du Bois Institute in Harvard Square.
As editors we have found it a huge pleasure working with Sharmila Sen and her wonderfully enthusiastic colleagues at Harvard University Press—Ian Stevenson, Tim Jones, Annamarie Why, Jill Breitbarth, Eric Mulder, Adriana Kirilova, Greg Kornbluh, Abby Mumford, and John Walsh—as well as Liz Duvall, Ken Krugh, Kevin Krugh, and Cheryl Lincoln at Technologies ’N Typography. They have preserved the virtues of the earlier volumes in the series but also improved on them in numerous ways in producing this, the second part of the new Volume III of The Image of the Black in Western Art.
We would also like to thank Zooid Pictures Limited, especially Richard Philpott and Cristina Lombardo, who took on the enormous task of gathering the photographs for all the volumes and obtaining permissions for each one. They did this with great efficiency and good humor, and we are grateful to them.
DAVID BINDMAN, KAREN C. C. DALTON, AND
HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
My greatest thanks must go to Dominique de Menil, who asked me to contribute to this historical but also political project; she made it possible, as long as she was alive, for me to do it in the best conditions, always supporting the project but never interfering with it. I should also thank Francesco Pellizzi, Adelaide de Menil, and Ted Carpenter for their support and continual interest.
This volume, and the others in the series, would never have been possible without Ladislas Bugner and his collaborators, who gathered tens of thousands of photographs and books for the Image of the Black in Western Art project, started in 1960. The collections of the Paris archive were presented to the Warburg Institute in London in 1999, while the Houston archive was moved to the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University in 1994. The Warburg Institute has now become an unparalleled resource for research on the topic. From Paris, Ladislas Bugner directed the project until his retirement. His knowledge and his insights were enormously stimulating, both in terms of overall coverage and for more detailed connections. Without him, neither the photographic archive nor the five volumes of this series that he edited would have been possible at a time when most traditional art historians saw the topic as marginal. I would also like to thank his collaborators, above all Monique Bugner and Marie-Dominique Perlat, the latter also for pre-editing some of my chapters. In Houston and now at Harvard, my thanks should go to Karen C. C. Dalton and Sheldon Cheek, the former especially for research support and editorial work. In London I am indebted to my friends at the Warburg Institute, especially Jill Kraye, the librarian, and Elizabeth McGrath, Paul Taylor, and Rembrandt Duits in the photographic collection. Elizabeth McGrath, who is also working on the imagery of black Africans, has been, as always, indefatigable in her support, combining extensive knowledge with an acute sense of the complexity of the imagery. She has been a continuous support, critical but indulgent, and a pleasure to work with. I would also like to thank David Bindman—my editorial contact—and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for their support, and the whole Harvard University Press team. Finally, I would like to say that I received stimulation from numerous students, undergraduates and graduates, especially Sheila Russell, who works on seventeenth-century costume, and Temi-Tope Odumosu, who is completing her Ph.D. on images of blacks in eighteenth-century English satirical prints.
At the end of years of research, I have debts of gratitude to numerous friends and colleagues who have discussed the topic with me and who introduced works of art I may or may not have known. They cannot all be mentioned. I would like, however, to single out Ezio Bassani, Francisco Bethancourt, Ernst van den Boogaart, Anthea Brook, Jean Devisse, Jessica Hallett, Anne Marie Jordan, Paul Kaplan, Elmer Kolfin, Jay Levenson, Jean-Luc Liez, Kate Lowe, Jennifer Montagu, Ricardo Soares de Olivera, Julian Raby, Charles Robertson, Esther Schreuder, Rick Scorza, Lorenz Seelig, and Nuno Vassallo e Silva.
Finally, this book would not have been completed without the continuous support of Ann Massing, who was dragged into timetables which were not often of her choice. Her stimulation, editorial help, and good nature were always refreshing.
JEAN MICHEL MASSING
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