Art and photo historian, curator, and author with expertise in modern and contemporary photography, early twentieth-century European and American Modernisms, the intersections between non-Western and Western art, Surrealism, and the artist Man Ray. Extensive teaching, writing and editing, and international speaking experience. Numerous publications include the award winning Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, the catalogue accompanying the 2009-2011 traveling exhibition that opened at The Phillips Collection in 2009. Co-curator and co-editor of Man Ray--Human Equations: Journey from Mathematics to Shakespeare, a traveling exhibition and accompanying catalogue. Manuscript in progress on Guadeloupean model and dancer Adrienne Fidelin, who was Man Ray's lover, model, and muse from 1935 to 1940.
Catalogue accompanying the traveling exhibition "Man Ray--Human Equations: A Journey From Mathem... more Catalogue accompanying the traveling exhibition "Man Ray--Human Equations: A Journey From Mathematics to Shakespeare" that opened in February 2015 at The Phillips Collection in Washington DC. The Table of Contents, Directors' Foreword, and Prologue are included here.
Chapter from "Man Ray--Human Equations: A Journey From Mathematics to Shakespeare." It explores l... more Chapter from "Man Ray--Human Equations: A Journey From Mathematics to Shakespeare." It explores links between Man Ray’s treatment of mathematical models in both photography and painting and connecting them to his larger artistic practice, providing new insights into these works and a reconsideration of their place at the intersection of art and science. Turning the notion of the “art of math” on its head, this essay looks at the “math of art” as seen through the prism of Man Ray.
Published in the exhibition catalogue "Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens," published i... more Published in the exhibition catalogue "Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens," published in 2009. This chapter examines practices by photographers from the Stieglitz circle to the Harlem Renaissance that demonstrate the range of interest in African objects and the diversity of approaches taken in translating them into Modernist photographic expressions. These photographs illustrate what Roland Barthes calls the rhetoric of the image, the embedded messages and significations that inflect the way we read and understand photographs. Also demonstrated in these examples is the manner in which issues about race, gender, identity, and difference were inextricably interwoven into the many faces of American Modernism, ultimately contributing to perceptions of and shifting attitudes toward African art.
This chapter explores Man Ray’s inventive approach to representing African objects within the rea... more This chapter explores Man Ray’s inventive approach to representing African objects within the realms of fashion and popular culture that resonated far beyond the avant-garde community where such objects had long become commonplace. How such photographs mirrored the shifting meanings and signification of the objects they featured and the manner in which they functioned are examined within the context of the ubiquitous assimilation of African forms into all facets of popular Western culture.
This essay turns a spotlight on “the most memorable holiday,” as British Surrealist artist Eileen... more This essay turns a spotlight on “the most memorable holiday,” as British Surrealist artist Eileen Agar described the 1937 gathering of a circle of friends organized by Pablo Picasso in a small town on the Côte d'Azur. It offers new insights into innovative artistic practices in which this community of creatives engaged at that time and how, in particular, the Guadeloupean model and dancer Adrienne Fidelin became an important figure in those activities.
Adrienne “Ady” Fidelin (1915-2004), a striking young dancer from Guadeloupe, was muse to an inner... more Adrienne “Ady” Fidelin (1915-2004), a striking young dancer from Guadeloupe, was muse to an inner circle of vanguard artists in interwar Paris. This essay positions in her within the discourse of le modèle noir in French art brought to light in the international exhibition of that title at the Musée d'Orsay in spring 2019.
Networking Surrealism in the USA Agents, Artists, and the Market, 2019
Man Ray’s Rayographs and Noire et blanche provide cornerstones in this essay for tracing the traj... more Man Ray’s Rayographs and Noire et blanche provide cornerstones in this essay for tracing the trajectory of the reception of the artist’s photographs at the nexus of histories of photography, Surrealism, and institutional collecting practices in the United States. Within this framework, the text examines larger issues in the American reception and marketing of Surrealism as refracted through photographic practices and shifting attitudes concerning the medium as an art form. This exploration of the multiple factors and specific tastemakers, mediating agents, and institutions that have helped shape the reception of and market for Man Ray’s photographs in the United States aims to glean new insights into how these elements have impacted the market for his work and continue to do so today.
A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE AVANT-GARDE IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES 1925-1950 , 2019
The pioneering collection of African objects amassed in the interwar period by Danish writer and ... more The pioneering collection of African objects amassed in the interwar period by Danish writer and art aficionado Carl Kjersmeier and his wife Amalie made a significant contribution to the process through which African cultural artifacts became central in forging an international avant-garde idiom. The artfully constructed photographs of individual objects from this collection by American Man Ray and Dane Vagn Guldbrandsen—commissioned by Kjersmeier and disseminated through his seminal publications—illustrate the symbiotic relationship between the medium and the message in effecting new perceptions about African art at a time in which photography itself was coming of age as an avant-garde art form. With new scholarship on this elusive figure and the milieu in which he operated, this essay explores Kjersmeier’s role and that of his collection and his publications in positioning African objects within transnational avant-garde practices through their photographic representations.
Keywords: Carl Kjersmeier, Vagn Guldbrandsen, Man Ray, African art, collections, modernist photography, primitivism, linien, Nancy Cunard, Bamana sculpture, Bambara sculpture
The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture
The idea of the 'project' crosses generic, disciplinary and cultural frontiers. At a time when wr... more The idea of the 'project' crosses generic, disciplinary and cultural frontiers. At a time when writers and artists are increasingly describing their practices as 'projects', remarkably little critical attention has been paid to the actual idea of the 'project'. This collection of essays responds to an urgent need by suggesting a framework for evaluating the notion of the project in the light of various modernist and postmodernist cultural practices, drawn mainly but not exclusively from the French-speaking domain. The overview offered by this volume makes an original and thought-provoking contribution to contemporary literary, artistic and cultural criticism.
By virtue of photography’s mimetic nature and its ambiguous status as an art form, images such as... more By virtue of photography’s mimetic nature and its ambiguous status as an art form, images such as Man Ray's Noire et blanche have performed and continue to perform contradictory functions in a variety of modernist discourses. Since its original publication in Paris Vogue in May 1926, context and narrative have played key roles in inflecting the way in which viewers have come to understand Man Ray’s now iconic image. This essay considers how both the context of its reproduction and extra-visual linguistic elements such as title and associated texts have infused Noire et blanche with meaning and mediated its reception. Examining the multilayered texts inscribed in Man Ray’s enigmatic picture, it dissects the questions they posed at a crucial historical juncture in inter-war France. Relocating Man Ray’s photographs of African art within both this critical context and the artist’s unique body of work facilitates the construction of a far more complex interpretation of Noire et blanche and the vision behind it than has been heretofore proposed.
Reframing Andy Warhol: Constructing American Myths, Heroes, and Cultural Icons, 1998
As an American artist who transcended his ethnic immigrant roots, Man Ray blazed a trail that And... more As an American artist who transcended his ethnic immigrant roots, Man Ray blazed a trail that Andy Warhol would follow in the next generation. Obsessed with the public perception of his work and his legacy, Man Ray innovatively employed self-portraiture as key to the construction of his persona just as Warhol would decades later. In the great distance between their ethnic roots and the cosmopolitan figures they were to become, the range of self-portraits both artists created played a fundamental role in this transformation. Although Man Ray’s self-portraits are intricately related to the construction of modernism and Warhol’s work in the same vein relates to the process of its deconstruction, their self-portrayals are bound by the same obsessive desire to control and fabricate their public image. As the sons of Eastern European immigrants, neither ever fully shed the sense of himself as outsider, ultimately adopting a notion of marginalized observer as intrinsic to his artistic persona. Whether in the avant-garde Parisian circles between the World Wars or in the celebrity spotlight of the sixties Pop scene, both artists straddled the border between participants and observers in their lives and their art.
Pablo Picasso’s Femme assise sur fond jaune et rose II, a 1937 portrait in which the artist’s di... more Pablo Picasso’s Femme assise sur fond jaune et rose II, a 1937 portrait in which the artist’s distinctive Africanizing lexicon from decades earlier finds an unusual reprise, has eluded critical attention. This article argues for an identification of the unnamed model as the Guadeloupean dancer and model Adrienne Fidelin, who was introduced into Picasso’s circle by her romantic partner, the American artist Man Ray. Foregrounding the contextual and visual factors that lend credence to this new attribution—including a photograph by Man Ray remarkably analogous to the painting—this article unmasks Fidelin as the portrait’s subject, spotlighting this striking woman whose story has been shrouded in anonymity for over three-quarters of a century. Picasso’s painting and Man Ray’s photograph serve here as vehicles for recovering Fidelin from obscurity and as a springboard for an investigation into issues of race, representation, and difference in the construction of modernism brought to the fore in portrayals of this long-eclipsed muse.
Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography., 2017
Biographical entry on Guadelopean dancer and model Adrienne Fidelin in Dictionary of Caribbean an... more Biographical entry on Guadelopean dancer and model Adrienne Fidelin in Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography.
This essay appeared in a special issue of Tribal magazine published in conjunction with the 2012 ... more This essay appeared in a special issue of Tribal magazine published in conjunction with the 2012 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde." It discusses how African objects became tied not only to vanguard artistic practice but also implicitly linked to the legitimization of photography as a modernist art form. How African art and photography became fundamentally intertwined within the dynamics of American modernism is illuminated through text and reproductions of images by a range of photographers.
Page 1. Visual Resources Vol. XXIII, No. 4, December 2007, pp. 291-336
"From Ethnographic Objec... more Page 1. Visual Resources Vol. XXIII, No. 4, December 2007, pp. 291-336
"From Ethnographic Object to Modernist Icon: Photographs of African and Oceanic Sculpture and the Rhetoric of the Image," Wendy A. Grossman.
Photographs of African and Oceanic sculpture performing under both artistic and documentary guise are examined in this article for the rhetoric of the image, the embedded messages and significations that inflect the way one reads and understands photographs. Unraveling the complex process through which conventional, anonymous object photographs of African and Oceanic sculptures gave way to self-consciously artistic compositions in the first decades of the twentieth century, this study elucidates the way in which these images functioned in the promotion of non-Western objects as modern art within an epochal shift in modernist aesthetics. This investigation into competing notions of a corresponding photographic aesthetic that arose provides new insights into the symbiotic relationship between and among galleries, museums and photographers in advancing modernist strategies of representation and the manner in which non-Western sculpture was transformed fom artifact to art to fit this paradigm. The trajectory explored here from anonymous object photographs reproduced in publications such as Carl Einstein's Negerplastik (1915) to modernist images of African and Oceanic art by photographers Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), Man Ray (1890-1976) and Walker Evans (1903-1975) reveals how conventions and understandings of the medium and the context in which photographs were seen have inflected interpretations of both the images and the objects rendered.
Keywords: Modernist Photography; Primitivism; Surrealism; De Zayas, Marius, 1880- 1961; Stieglitz, Alfred, 1864-1946; Guillaume, Paul, 1894-1931; Tableaux de Man Ray et objets des iles (1926); Museum of Modern Art, African Negro Art (1935)
Catalogue accompanying the traveling exhibition "Man Ray--Human Equations: A Journey From Mathem... more Catalogue accompanying the traveling exhibition "Man Ray--Human Equations: A Journey From Mathematics to Shakespeare" that opened in February 2015 at The Phillips Collection in Washington DC. The Table of Contents, Directors' Foreword, and Prologue are included here.
Chapter from "Man Ray--Human Equations: A Journey From Mathematics to Shakespeare." It explores l... more Chapter from "Man Ray--Human Equations: A Journey From Mathematics to Shakespeare." It explores links between Man Ray’s treatment of mathematical models in both photography and painting and connecting them to his larger artistic practice, providing new insights into these works and a reconsideration of their place at the intersection of art and science. Turning the notion of the “art of math” on its head, this essay looks at the “math of art” as seen through the prism of Man Ray.
Published in the exhibition catalogue "Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens," published i... more Published in the exhibition catalogue "Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens," published in 2009. This chapter examines practices by photographers from the Stieglitz circle to the Harlem Renaissance that demonstrate the range of interest in African objects and the diversity of approaches taken in translating them into Modernist photographic expressions. These photographs illustrate what Roland Barthes calls the rhetoric of the image, the embedded messages and significations that inflect the way we read and understand photographs. Also demonstrated in these examples is the manner in which issues about race, gender, identity, and difference were inextricably interwoven into the many faces of American Modernism, ultimately contributing to perceptions of and shifting attitudes toward African art.
This chapter explores Man Ray’s inventive approach to representing African objects within the rea... more This chapter explores Man Ray’s inventive approach to representing African objects within the realms of fashion and popular culture that resonated far beyond the avant-garde community where such objects had long become commonplace. How such photographs mirrored the shifting meanings and signification of the objects they featured and the manner in which they functioned are examined within the context of the ubiquitous assimilation of African forms into all facets of popular Western culture.
This essay turns a spotlight on “the most memorable holiday,” as British Surrealist artist Eileen... more This essay turns a spotlight on “the most memorable holiday,” as British Surrealist artist Eileen Agar described the 1937 gathering of a circle of friends organized by Pablo Picasso in a small town on the Côte d'Azur. It offers new insights into innovative artistic practices in which this community of creatives engaged at that time and how, in particular, the Guadeloupean model and dancer Adrienne Fidelin became an important figure in those activities.
Adrienne “Ady” Fidelin (1915-2004), a striking young dancer from Guadeloupe, was muse to an inner... more Adrienne “Ady” Fidelin (1915-2004), a striking young dancer from Guadeloupe, was muse to an inner circle of vanguard artists in interwar Paris. This essay positions in her within the discourse of le modèle noir in French art brought to light in the international exhibition of that title at the Musée d'Orsay in spring 2019.
Networking Surrealism in the USA Agents, Artists, and the Market, 2019
Man Ray’s Rayographs and Noire et blanche provide cornerstones in this essay for tracing the traj... more Man Ray’s Rayographs and Noire et blanche provide cornerstones in this essay for tracing the trajectory of the reception of the artist’s photographs at the nexus of histories of photography, Surrealism, and institutional collecting practices in the United States. Within this framework, the text examines larger issues in the American reception and marketing of Surrealism as refracted through photographic practices and shifting attitudes concerning the medium as an art form. This exploration of the multiple factors and specific tastemakers, mediating agents, and institutions that have helped shape the reception of and market for Man Ray’s photographs in the United States aims to glean new insights into how these elements have impacted the market for his work and continue to do so today.
A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE AVANT-GARDE IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES 1925-1950 , 2019
The pioneering collection of African objects amassed in the interwar period by Danish writer and ... more The pioneering collection of African objects amassed in the interwar period by Danish writer and art aficionado Carl Kjersmeier and his wife Amalie made a significant contribution to the process through which African cultural artifacts became central in forging an international avant-garde idiom. The artfully constructed photographs of individual objects from this collection by American Man Ray and Dane Vagn Guldbrandsen—commissioned by Kjersmeier and disseminated through his seminal publications—illustrate the symbiotic relationship between the medium and the message in effecting new perceptions about African art at a time in which photography itself was coming of age as an avant-garde art form. With new scholarship on this elusive figure and the milieu in which he operated, this essay explores Kjersmeier’s role and that of his collection and his publications in positioning African objects within transnational avant-garde practices through their photographic representations.
Keywords: Carl Kjersmeier, Vagn Guldbrandsen, Man Ray, African art, collections, modernist photography, primitivism, linien, Nancy Cunard, Bamana sculpture, Bambara sculpture
The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture
The idea of the 'project' crosses generic, disciplinary and cultural frontiers. At a time when wr... more The idea of the 'project' crosses generic, disciplinary and cultural frontiers. At a time when writers and artists are increasingly describing their practices as 'projects', remarkably little critical attention has been paid to the actual idea of the 'project'. This collection of essays responds to an urgent need by suggesting a framework for evaluating the notion of the project in the light of various modernist and postmodernist cultural practices, drawn mainly but not exclusively from the French-speaking domain. The overview offered by this volume makes an original and thought-provoking contribution to contemporary literary, artistic and cultural criticism.
By virtue of photography’s mimetic nature and its ambiguous status as an art form, images such as... more By virtue of photography’s mimetic nature and its ambiguous status as an art form, images such as Man Ray's Noire et blanche have performed and continue to perform contradictory functions in a variety of modernist discourses. Since its original publication in Paris Vogue in May 1926, context and narrative have played key roles in inflecting the way in which viewers have come to understand Man Ray’s now iconic image. This essay considers how both the context of its reproduction and extra-visual linguistic elements such as title and associated texts have infused Noire et blanche with meaning and mediated its reception. Examining the multilayered texts inscribed in Man Ray’s enigmatic picture, it dissects the questions they posed at a crucial historical juncture in inter-war France. Relocating Man Ray’s photographs of African art within both this critical context and the artist’s unique body of work facilitates the construction of a far more complex interpretation of Noire et blanche and the vision behind it than has been heretofore proposed.
Reframing Andy Warhol: Constructing American Myths, Heroes, and Cultural Icons, 1998
As an American artist who transcended his ethnic immigrant roots, Man Ray blazed a trail that And... more As an American artist who transcended his ethnic immigrant roots, Man Ray blazed a trail that Andy Warhol would follow in the next generation. Obsessed with the public perception of his work and his legacy, Man Ray innovatively employed self-portraiture as key to the construction of his persona just as Warhol would decades later. In the great distance between their ethnic roots and the cosmopolitan figures they were to become, the range of self-portraits both artists created played a fundamental role in this transformation. Although Man Ray’s self-portraits are intricately related to the construction of modernism and Warhol’s work in the same vein relates to the process of its deconstruction, their self-portrayals are bound by the same obsessive desire to control and fabricate their public image. As the sons of Eastern European immigrants, neither ever fully shed the sense of himself as outsider, ultimately adopting a notion of marginalized observer as intrinsic to his artistic persona. Whether in the avant-garde Parisian circles between the World Wars or in the celebrity spotlight of the sixties Pop scene, both artists straddled the border between participants and observers in their lives and their art.
Pablo Picasso’s Femme assise sur fond jaune et rose II, a 1937 portrait in which the artist’s di... more Pablo Picasso’s Femme assise sur fond jaune et rose II, a 1937 portrait in which the artist’s distinctive Africanizing lexicon from decades earlier finds an unusual reprise, has eluded critical attention. This article argues for an identification of the unnamed model as the Guadeloupean dancer and model Adrienne Fidelin, who was introduced into Picasso’s circle by her romantic partner, the American artist Man Ray. Foregrounding the contextual and visual factors that lend credence to this new attribution—including a photograph by Man Ray remarkably analogous to the painting—this article unmasks Fidelin as the portrait’s subject, spotlighting this striking woman whose story has been shrouded in anonymity for over three-quarters of a century. Picasso’s painting and Man Ray’s photograph serve here as vehicles for recovering Fidelin from obscurity and as a springboard for an investigation into issues of race, representation, and difference in the construction of modernism brought to the fore in portrayals of this long-eclipsed muse.
Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography., 2017
Biographical entry on Guadelopean dancer and model Adrienne Fidelin in Dictionary of Caribbean an... more Biographical entry on Guadelopean dancer and model Adrienne Fidelin in Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography.
This essay appeared in a special issue of Tribal magazine published in conjunction with the 2012 ... more This essay appeared in a special issue of Tribal magazine published in conjunction with the 2012 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde." It discusses how African objects became tied not only to vanguard artistic practice but also implicitly linked to the legitimization of photography as a modernist art form. How African art and photography became fundamentally intertwined within the dynamics of American modernism is illuminated through text and reproductions of images by a range of photographers.
Page 1. Visual Resources Vol. XXIII, No. 4, December 2007, pp. 291-336
"From Ethnographic Objec... more Page 1. Visual Resources Vol. XXIII, No. 4, December 2007, pp. 291-336
"From Ethnographic Object to Modernist Icon: Photographs of African and Oceanic Sculpture and the Rhetoric of the Image," Wendy A. Grossman.
Photographs of African and Oceanic sculpture performing under both artistic and documentary guise are examined in this article for the rhetoric of the image, the embedded messages and significations that inflect the way one reads and understands photographs. Unraveling the complex process through which conventional, anonymous object photographs of African and Oceanic sculptures gave way to self-consciously artistic compositions in the first decades of the twentieth century, this study elucidates the way in which these images functioned in the promotion of non-Western objects as modern art within an epochal shift in modernist aesthetics. This investigation into competing notions of a corresponding photographic aesthetic that arose provides new insights into the symbiotic relationship between and among galleries, museums and photographers in advancing modernist strategies of representation and the manner in which non-Western sculpture was transformed fom artifact to art to fit this paradigm. The trajectory explored here from anonymous object photographs reproduced in publications such as Carl Einstein's Negerplastik (1915) to modernist images of African and Oceanic art by photographers Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), Man Ray (1890-1976) and Walker Evans (1903-1975) reveals how conventions and understandings of the medium and the context in which photographs were seen have inflected interpretations of both the images and the objects rendered.
Keywords: Modernist Photography; Primitivism; Surrealism; De Zayas, Marius, 1880- 1961; Stieglitz, Alfred, 1864-1946; Guillaume, Paul, 1894-1931; Tableaux de Man Ray et objets des iles (1926); Museum of Modern Art, African Negro Art (1935)
Man Ray’s enigmatic Noire et blanche is today a modernist icon with a celebrity status rare for a... more Man Ray’s enigmatic Noire et blanche is today a modernist icon with a celebrity status rare for a photograph. The dramatic pairing of an African Baule-style mask from the Ivory Coast with the famous face of Kiki of Montparnasse has been prominently featured in exhibitions and publications on Man Ray and surrealism. Owing to their beauty and rarity, Noire et blanche prints are highly prized in the marketplace, where they are sought by museums and private collectors alike. A new look at the trajectory of the image from its first publication as fashion photograph in the May 1926 issue of French Vogue to its position in the surrealist canon reveals much, however, about the place of the photograph and its creator within conventional modernist narratives. Th is essay proposes to correct some persistent misconceptions about the photograph—its extant negatives and prints—and to unmask, as it were, the Franco-American historical context behind the making of one of photography’s most recognized images.
Une icône démasquée: noire et blanche de Man Ray. French translation of "Unmasking Man Ray's Noi... more Une icône démasquée: noire et blanche de Man Ray. French translation of "Unmasking Man Ray's Noire et blanche." Published in Cahiers Du Musee National D Art Moderne, no. 103, Spring 2008.
This article explores the framework and manner in which indigenous art of the Americas became a v... more This article explores the framework and manner in which indigenous art of the Americas became a vehicle for Man Ray's creative photographic practice alongside the arts of Africa and Oceania. The body of images examined here provides both a window into the way in which such cultural artifacts became enmeshed in transatlantic artistic practices of the interwar period and insight into the role of Man Ray’s photographic endeavors in that process.
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Keywords: Carl Kjersmeier, Vagn Guldbrandsen, Man Ray, African art, collections, modernist photography, primitivism, linien, Nancy Cunard, Bamana sculpture, Bambara sculpture
"From Ethnographic Object to Modernist Icon: Photographs of African and Oceanic Sculpture and the Rhetoric of the Image," Wendy A. Grossman.
Photographs of African and Oceanic sculpture performing under both artistic and documentary guise are examined in this article for the rhetoric of the image, the embedded messages and significations that inflect the way one reads and understands photographs. Unraveling the complex process through which conventional, anonymous object photographs of African and Oceanic sculptures gave way to self-consciously artistic compositions in the first decades of the twentieth century, this study elucidates the way in which these images functioned in the promotion of non-Western objects as modern art within an epochal shift in modernist aesthetics. This investigation into competing notions of a corresponding photographic aesthetic that arose provides new insights into the symbiotic relationship between and among galleries, museums and photographers in advancing modernist strategies of representation and the manner in which non-Western sculpture was transformed fom artifact to art to fit this paradigm. The trajectory explored here from anonymous object photographs reproduced in publications such as Carl Einstein's Negerplastik (1915) to modernist images of African and Oceanic art by photographers Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), Man Ray (1890-1976) and Walker Evans (1903-1975) reveals how conventions and understandings of the medium and the context in which photographs were seen have inflected interpretations of both the images and the objects rendered.
Keywords: Modernist Photography; Primitivism; Surrealism; De Zayas, Marius, 1880- 1961; Stieglitz, Alfred, 1864-1946; Guillaume, Paul, 1894-1931; Tableaux de Man Ray et objets des iles (1926); Museum of Modern Art, African Negro Art (1935)
Keywords: Carl Kjersmeier, Vagn Guldbrandsen, Man Ray, African art, collections, modernist photography, primitivism, linien, Nancy Cunard, Bamana sculpture, Bambara sculpture
"From Ethnographic Object to Modernist Icon: Photographs of African and Oceanic Sculpture and the Rhetoric of the Image," Wendy A. Grossman.
Photographs of African and Oceanic sculpture performing under both artistic and documentary guise are examined in this article for the rhetoric of the image, the embedded messages and significations that inflect the way one reads and understands photographs. Unraveling the complex process through which conventional, anonymous object photographs of African and Oceanic sculptures gave way to self-consciously artistic compositions in the first decades of the twentieth century, this study elucidates the way in which these images functioned in the promotion of non-Western objects as modern art within an epochal shift in modernist aesthetics. This investigation into competing notions of a corresponding photographic aesthetic that arose provides new insights into the symbiotic relationship between and among galleries, museums and photographers in advancing modernist strategies of representation and the manner in which non-Western sculpture was transformed fom artifact to art to fit this paradigm. The trajectory explored here from anonymous object photographs reproduced in publications such as Carl Einstein's Negerplastik (1915) to modernist images of African and Oceanic art by photographers Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), Man Ray (1890-1976) and Walker Evans (1903-1975) reveals how conventions and understandings of the medium and the context in which photographs were seen have inflected interpretations of both the images and the objects rendered.
Keywords: Modernist Photography; Primitivism; Surrealism; De Zayas, Marius, 1880- 1961; Stieglitz, Alfred, 1864-1946; Guillaume, Paul, 1894-1931; Tableaux de Man Ray et objets des iles (1926); Museum of Modern Art, African Negro Art (1935)