Editor’s Introduction

Bindman, David

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Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the “Age of...

The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition, Part 3: The Eighteenth Century

Volume III, Part 3 of the multivolume work The Image of the Black in Western Art deals with the eighteenth century, though inevitably it looks both forward and back. It therefore covers the period after Volume III, Part 1 and Part 2, and before Volume IV (in two parts) by Hugh Honour, which first appeared in 1989 and is soon to be republished in a new...

Author

David Bindman

PublisherHarvard University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.xxiii-xxiv

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00142.004

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-18151

Editor’s Introduction

Volume III, Part 3 of the multivolume work The Image of the Black in Western Art deals with the eighteenth century, though inevitably it looks both forward and back. It therefore covers the period after Volume III, Part 1 and Part 2, and before Volume IV (in two parts) by Hugh Honour, which first appeared in 1989 and is soon to be republished in a new edition. This phase of publication completes the work of bringing out new editions and new volumes according to the established plan to have four volumes, and they form a prelude to the publication of Volume V, on the twentieth century, due out in the near future.

Honour’s volume begins with the American Revolution, while this part of Volume III ends around 1800, so there is a certain overlap between the volumes. But the events and movements that shaped European images of people of African descent look quite different if one sees them as the culmination of a process rather than as the beginning of one that goes on into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The chosen terminus of this volume is the establishment of the Haitian republic in 1804 and its commemoration, for that epoch-making event was the result of a process that began with the European turn against the slave trade in the third quarter of the previous century.

Many of the artistic genres that found a place for the representation of blacks in the eighteenth century were well established in previous centuries, like the allegorical representation of the Four Continents and the portrait with a black page. Their origins are dealt with in Parts 1 and 2 of Volume III, devoted to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and first published in 2010 and 2011. This part, then, is largely about the way in which traditional artistic genres were changed and renewed under the impact of eighteenth-century circumstances: the Enlightenment, the greater knowledge of Africa, and the widespread collapse of belief in most of Europe in the legitimacy of slavery.

Our concern as art historians has been to find a balance between giving full value to the images and due weight to the historical circumstances in which they were created, in the understanding that art, especially in matters of racial imagery, participates actively in history rather than just reflecting it. We have been able to consider only a relatively small number of works of art from the large numbers produced, and have chosen to look at them in some depth rather than simply provide brief comments on numerous examples. We are sure that we have not missed any image of note by a major artist, but we have also chosen to discuss images not usually considered as “art” that help to illuminate attitudes. We have tended to focus our discussion on particular types of art in one or two countries rather than spread examples thinly across all the countries of Europe. For example, the analysis of wall and ceiling paintings of the Four Continents is largely confined to Italy and southern Germany, and the formal portrait with a page to England and France, though examples exist in every country in Europe and in the Americas. For obvious historical reasons, we have concentrated on images involving slavery in the most prominent slave-owning nations: England, Holland, and France and their colonies.

This book has been a journey of exhilaration and pain for its authors, for whom, with the exception of Professor Kaplan and Dr. Smith McCrea, the subject was new before we started work. It has forced us to deal with emotionally and intellectually difficult issues that are both historical and urgently topical, with the potential to open old wounds. Yet we have all developed a passion for the project, for it has demonstrated to us that the history of art can contribute to the perpetual and always necessary struggle against insidious forms of racism that feed on misreadings of history. Art in the period under discussion was largely the servant of power, and as art historians we can begin to expose the mechanisms by which visual imagery naturalized or made attractive the horrific injustices of the kinds of servitude imposed especially on those of African descent. But we have also discovered and learned to treasure those few works in which the human subjectivity of black individuals breaks through the shell of the conventions that so often denied it to them.

DAVID BINDMAN

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