Two exhibits at MoMA (2026)

 

Two exhibits at MoMA (2026)

 

I just saw two exhibits at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Their contents were as far removed from each other as could possibly be, but as I was absorbing them the same day, I recognized there were ideas that demanded we recognize an overlap if not a connection. One was a big retrospective of Marcel Duchamp, the other, “Ideas of Africa” was of Portrait Photography by multiple Artists in Anglophone and Francophone West and Central Africa, mostly from the 1950s-1970s, with some forays into the 21^st c.

 

1.   Marcel Duchamp

 

It’s a retrospective spanning more than six decades (1900-1968) and kept rigorously Chronological, showing Duchamp’s development from a struggling Painter and talented Commercial Illustrator (he called these works “swimming lessons”) and then going on to and explorer into fields of the Visual Arts that had never been trod before. It’s the first survey of his work in North America in more than 50 years; the last major show (1973) was only a few years after his death, securing his place on the Pedestal; after that, though he’s taught in every Art History Class in every USA College and is the pride of the Permanent Collection of many USA Museums, he got fewer large showings than his contemporaries like Pablo Picasso and Man Ray. This one is massive though, with almost 300 works of his and 100 supporting items.

 

It’s a toss-up between Duchamp and Picasso who was the most influential Artist of the 20^th c. Both were extreme Rebels at exactly the same time, though in the long-run, Picasso proved to be the more Accessible to a large Audience. Duchamp’s magic is that he aggressively maintained his Inaccessibility, making it his main attraction. Duchamp’s odd legacy is Honored even by some who actively disliked him, because even his harshest Critics (or at least the harshest Critics who took the time to be serious) recognized that no one broke the rules more than he. There was a point when he a Picasso were allies, at that time Duchamp was a leading Cubist, a style Picasso essentially invented, but Duchamp abandoned Cubism almost the moment he received recognition and eventually abandoning Painting altogether despite his consummate skill. To explain the schism in the shortest sentences possible, Picasso was a leader of a group of Revolutionaries who asked “What is art?” while Duchamp asked a wholly unanswerable question, “Why is this art?”  Picasso would outlive Duchamp, and on hearing of Duchamp’s passing, he acerbically remarked, “He was wrong.”

 

Any Revolutionary invites harsh Criticism and seeks the find some niche of acceptance that allows him/her to operate without subverting their Integrity and build a Foundation upon which they can expand on. True Revolutionaries didn’t fear Criticism, but Duchamp seemed to gleefully invite it in a way that other brave Revolutionaries didn’t. Obsessively Intellectual, essentially inventing Conceptual Art after his break from Picasso, he was first, and foremost, a Trickster figure; his Art was always unexpected and generally humorous in a way Picasso generally wasn’t. Confounding like few others, Duchamp was always smiling, his Art was a joke that Audience was stuck with even though they might not be invited into.  As he said, “I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”

 

The first room shows Duchamp as the pre-Rebel son of an Artistic family, traditionally educated in the Arts, displaying influence of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Claude Monet, as well as 19^th c. Commercial Illustration. A Chess board appears in a picture for which his family posed for, it was a Duchamp family obsession, and the game would be central to the mystery of Duchamp’s Biography late-in-life. His influences, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Monet, had also been Rebel figures, but remained within the realms of the Representational, and he matured when they were mostly accepted by that hypothetical thing we call the “Academy.” That acceptance created a crisis among the next Generation of Rebels of the first Decades of the 20^th c. Basically, the new kids had to look at the work of the earlier Rebels and say, “Now what?”

 

By the second room Duchamp had embraced Cubism and on display is his first Masterpiece, “Nude Descending a Staircase (No 2)” (1912), from the period his was allied with Picasso.  A paraphrase of Picasso has baring here: “Photography taught us what painting was not.” One sees that in both their work, and though Duchamp was almost never a Photographer, the Intellectual Revolution that Photography created always effected his work with “Nude Descending a …” maybe the greatest expression of this. Painting can be called a more active process than Photography, as it requires more Action to produce a single canvas than a single photo but, conversely, a single photo is rarely the work, the active Photographer is generally moving faster, one picture after another, until among the scores taken, he/she captures the one pursued. Both Disciplines, at least when Representational, are ultimately Moments Frozen in Time, any sense of motion is provided by the Audience own eyeballs moving, and the Artist’s skill in leading those eyeballs to follow the proper path.

 

Because of its embrace of fragmentation of the human form, Duchamp found within Cubism a way to bring motion to the static canvas in a new way. Though composed to be read traditionally from left-to-right, it was still a shocking break from all that went before it, even other Cubist works. The painting is dark-ish, but warm, relying on the favored palette of the Cubists, yellow ochre emerging from black tones. Heavily influenced by Scientist and Chrono-Photographer’s Étienne-Jules Marey studies of Phases of Motion, Duchamp presented us with exactly what the title promised, a single image of overlapping images, and we see the same figure caught in step-after-step, the body parts emerging progressively from each other as conical and cylindrical Abstractions, evoking the rhythm of the motion in a manner that Marey’s Scientific Realism couldn’t achieve. Most of the body is suggested in incomplete outlines in the darker palette, while the dynamism is suggested in striking whites. Though unrealistic, it’s carefully observant, even capturing the complex and three-dimensional motions of the hips from one step to the next. It was reportedly a female model, but the image and title kept that deliberately obscure, or as Duchamp said near the end of his life, "What contributed to the interest provoked by the canvas was its title. One just doesn't do a nude woman coming down the stairs ... it seemed scandalous."

 

It was not well-received in Paris, even Duchamp’s Artist brothers complained it was a mockery of Cubism and others accused Duchamp of slipping into the Futurism Camp. Reconstructing the infighting among the era’s Artistic Rebels is hard, those not fully immersed in the scene would understandably be confused about the distinction between Cubism and Futurism as if they were Gullivers (as in “Gulliver’s Travels” novel by Johnathan Swift (1726)), trying to figure out why the Lilliputians and Blefuscuians were at War with each other. Said Duchamp, “I wasn’t much interested in groups after that.”

 

Things changed when “Nude Descending a …” appeared in the legendary Armory Show in NYC (1913), an event that played no small part in the creation of MoMA, and caused a sensation. It was much-derided by some Critics, but in NYC the Criticism fell along easier-to-understand Generational lines. Duchamp was hated by Critics holding Conservative Artistic mores, so the same people who hated Cubism, and one Critic famously dubbed it “Explosion in a Glass Factory” not understanding how much praise was buried in the insult. (This Exhibit helpfully provides a table-display of the publications of the USA detractors of the show.) But it was also hailed by NYC’s Cutting-Edge Elites in a way it wasn’t in France, perhaps because NYC was far enough away from Paris that some of the infighting was unknown, so our Culture Vultures were Gullivers when it came to this particular spat (in time, both Duchamp and Picasso drew the attention of the same Collectors). Now the fight was between Old and New, and it thrived in that context. Crtic Holland Cotter recently wrote, "Whether cheering or jeering, American audiences, always susceptible to the Barnum-style hype and loving a public fight, were entertained by the fuss that the picture caused." Also, NYC is, and always will be, the Capital of the Universe, so the French were forced to take proper notice.

 

When we try to understand Art, or anything else, we rely on linear explanations; they can always be demonstrated, but also can mislead. One can see Developing Styles if the work is displayed in Chronological Order, but as the great Surrealist René Magritte wrote, “Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible.” Duchamp seemed to be jumping to the next thing even before he had finished the last one, a challenge for this Exhibits Curators given their commendable devotion to Chronological Order, and they should be praised for still delivering something reasonably Coherent, because Duchamp made that difficult. As what I described above was unfolding, Duchamp was already developing his next big thing.

 

Duchamp despised the Art World as Tradition-Worshiping and Money-Grubbing, and repeatedly went outside of it to make a living, like returning to school to study Library Science and devoting more-and-more time to competitive Chess. But the Library Science led him to discoveries that kept feeding back into his work, so it wasn’t really an exit. “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” (also known as “Large Glass” 1912-1923) grew out of this. It was long-evolving a required the evocative title to clarify what we were looking at even more than “Nude Descending a …” (Duchamp called titles “the invisible color”). In the third room, we are presented with preliminary studies with titles like “Bride” and “Virgin.” Realizing that those strange things were on some level re-Representations of a human forms, one can only think of the Grotesque Eroticisms of the much later Industrial Designer and Surrealist Painter H. R. Giger (not born until 1940). Like Giger, we see humans Mutated into Industrial Monstrosities assembled with fleshy bulges, pumps and tubes, but even Giger’s figures were far more recognizably human (or half-human) and more bluntly Pornographic. Still, Duchamp’s final painting of this project (is it even a painting?) is a Radically Abstracted depiction of a Gang-Rape.

 

We don’t get to see the original. It was a work that Duchamp kept obsessively reworking, much like Leonardo DaVinci kept obsessively reworking the “Mona Lisa” (officially painted 1503-1506, but Da Vinci was likely still working on it as late as 1517). Duchamp himself didn’t declare it finished until one of the two panes of glass he was painted on was dramatically cracked in transit to Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1954. Though that Museum contributed much to this show, they didn’t move this piece, presumably because it’s too fragile. We do get to see a careful recreation by Richard Hamilton (created 1965-1966), but there’s no broken glass, robbing the piece of much of its drama. Because of the show’s rigorous Chronology, the recreation is nowhere near the wall-full of studies.

 

For the final “The Bride Stripped …” Duchamp not only left canvas behind for glass, but went huge, it’s nine-feet by six-feet. Cotter again, it “may be called, discrepant chronology aside, Duchamp’s ‘Guernica’ [Picasso mural (1937)].” Among the many connections between the two Artistic Giants is that both lived through the most tumultuous eras of Human History, seeing the Hemoclysms of WWI & WWII (1914 through 1945, so thirty-one-years of Global Slaughter), were made Refugees, or partly Refugees, by both, and then lived to see the Social Upheavals of the 1960s. Picasso became overtly Political before WWII and declared himself a Communist Party Member near the end of that War, though he did eventually express his disenchantment, "I have joined a family, and like all families, it's full of shit." Meanwhile Duchamp avoided all Politics aggressively, except Sexual Politics, which leaned towards the Misogynistic with the obliqueness described above. Duchamp toyed with Androgyny (I’ll get to that) but was Heterosexual with two marriages and several other female partners who were sometimes Collaborators, but these women are mostly ignored in this exhaustive Exhibit.

 

“The Bride Stripped …” was created as WWI raged, and Duchamp moved to NYC during that War after being rejected for French Military Service for health reasons and already largely rejected by the Cutting-Edge Artistic Elite of Paris. At the same time, he was already working on his Ready-Mades, the works that permanently secured his position as the ultimate Trickster. He summarized his increasing interest in the Industrial Sciences and disenchantment with Painting in the sentence, "Painting is washed up. Who will ever do anything better than that propeller? Tell me, can you do that?" He also ran into trouble with USA Customs because some of his Sculptures were mistaken for Aviation Parts which required heavier Import Duties.

 

Influences outside of Fine Arts led him to be dismissive of the Cult-like devotion of original works, and the Ready Mades (the beginning of the Artistic sub-Genre of “Found Object”) were the ultimate statement of that dismissiveness. He took common objects that struck his liking and made them Art by displaying them in the context of a Gallery, where all must be called “Art.” As he said, “In other words, I reduce the idea of aesthetic consideration to the choice of the mind, not the ability or cleverness of the hand.” He was cultivating an “aesthetic indifference” to “avoid emotion, to have the driest possible feeling toward it.” He called the Ready Mades, “the most important single idea to come out of my work.”

In a nice irony, few of the Ready Mades we see are original, many of them are reproductions of the lost work, but then none were really built by Duchamp in the first place, so who cares? We see many, but the most important were the first, “Bicycle Wheel” (1913, but we see recreations that first appeared in 1951) and the most notorious, “Fountian” (1917, but we see recreations that first appeared in 1950). He started taking on new personas, Aliases to sign his work with, like “R. Mutt” on “Fountian,” a work which remains the most joked-about major work of Art for more than a Century later, and I’m sure Duchamp would’ve loved that. For all the debate it generated, it is shocking simple. He took a mass-produced urinal, lay it on its side, signed it, and declared it a Sculpture. Really, that’s it. He put more work into “Bicycle Wheel” for which he at least provided a wooden stool as a pedestal. Perhaps he was thinking about how Painting required more Action to produce a single canvas but Mass Production was, in fact, more Action. “Fountian” made it Grand Entrance onto the World Stage Society at an open-call Exhibition of Independent Artists because, no doubt, any sane Jury would’ve rejected it.

 

When you reach the Ready Made room, don’t move too fast. Hard to find (I missed it during my first run through) but easiest to understand of the Ready Mades is, “L.H.O.O.Q.” (1919). Less than eight-inches by five-inches, it’s hung low on a wall of the room that displayed the larger, three-dimensional, works. “L.H.O.O.Q.” is friendlier, but just as simple as “Foutain”; it’s a postcard reproduction of Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” on which Duchamp penciled a mustache and goatee.

 

Many have argued these were Duchamp’s most Political works, and maybe so, but one mustn’t ignore the narrowness of the Politics at play. They mocked the Academy and the “isms” that Rebelled against the Academy but were then adopted by the same. Though he was appalled by the savageries of WWI, that is not visible in any of his work.

 

Critic Peter Burger, “Duchamp’s provocation through the readymades not only unmasked the art market where the signature means more than the quality of the work. It radically questions the very principle of art and bourgeois society, according to which the individual is considered the creator of a work of art. By inserting the mass-produced into the art context, a gesture legitimated to the signature of the author, Duchamp negates the category of individual creation, undermining the bourgeois conception of genius.”  

 

I’m not so sure about that. Duchamp, himself, was Bourgeois, and never complained about it, unless one extended his conflicts with other Artists to somehow cover all of the Accountants, Business Owners, Doctors, Managers, Real Estate Developers, and other members of the Professional Classes that had nothing to do the actual conflict he was emersed in.

 

It was also the period when Duchamp abandoned Painting forever, his very last canvas is present in this Exhibit, “Tu m’” (1918), commissioned by his key USA Patron Katherine S. Dreier. It is full of overlapping geometries, cast shadows evoking his Ready Mades, and had a Sculptural element, a paint brush piercing the canvas like and arrow, which most see as a “fuck-you” to the Academy.

 

Culture moves on different tracks, and the tracks move at different speeds. Cubism, by 1913, was derided on one track, but saleable on another. Picasso was supportive of Duchamp then, hostile later, so Duchamp became a third track. Both Picasso and Duchamp were considered “Degenerate Art” in Conservative circles until at least the late 1940s, but by then, Picasso was World-Adored inside his own passenger train. Meanwhile Duchamp … well … I don’t know, but he was at least loved in NYC. The schisms accumulated, the space between the tracks widened, and after WWII (so post-1945) and the rise of Abstract Expressionism, Modern Art (emerging first in the 1860s, so then-old-enough to collect Social Security) became so dismissive of Representational Art that Critics denied that Master Illustrator Norman Rockwell could ever appreciate a Picasso, even though Rockwell was actually a Picasso fan. Like Rebels Cézanne, Gauguin, and Monet, a half century before, Picasso had become the Academy. Then the Pop-Artists emerged in the late-1950s, and they adored Duchamp, especially Print-and-Film Maker Andy Warhol, who became friendly with him and Collected his works, including one of the “Fountains.”

 

Welcome to the Academy Marcel.

 

Which brings me to Duchamp’s more serious, harsh, Critics, like Clement Greenberg, “Duchamp is the scene …He was the first artist to realize that there is such a category as avant garde, and he became an avant-gardist in the most radical way yet… You made yourself significant not by producing good art, but by producing recognizably avant garde art with shocks and surprises and puzzlement built into it.”

 

And Barbara Rose, “I was angry he convinced so many that painting was dead, since above all, I loved painting. I got over this moment of pique because I was intrigued by his imagination and inventiveness. What Duchamp himself had done was always interesting and provocative. What was done in his name, on the other hand, was responsible for some of the silliest, most inane, most vulgar non-art still being produced by ignorant and lazy artists whose thinking stops with the idea of putting a found object in a museum.”

 

Miklos Legrady praised Duchamp’s discipline and exploration, but also questioned the destination reached, suggesting it created a get-some-thing-without-putting-the-work-in-first culture. Tongue-firmly-in-cheek, he blamed Duchamp for all the ills of the 21^st c, like the sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis and the rise of Donald Trump. Then, with a straighter face, he added, “The concept of found objects contradicts moral and ethical strategies formulated over tens of thousands of years as the most efficient way of doing business. If you put effort into production you reap the rewards. But found objects glorified the opposite, claimed that art required neither work or effort, had no standards or values, promoting Duchamp’s very clearly stated desire to discredit art, get rid of art. How such an idea gained traction among artists is truly fascinating!”

 

But let us back-track, return to the Chronology that is one of the virtues of this Exhibit. We are now the Inter-War Years (1918-1938), the era of the “Lost Generation,” defined as “Disillusioned by the horrors of war and the perceived irrelevance of traditional values, they were often characterized as disoriented, wandering, and spiritually alienated.”

 

Duchamp brushed all the “isms” off his sleeve, forging through Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Dadaism, and beyond, without noticing whose ground he trod on, though he did create a close working relationship with Man Ray (real name Emmanuel Radnitzky), a USA Fashion Photographer who became the greatest of the Dadaists, perhaps because they both shared the same Trickster nature. Duchamp was a “Conceptual Artist” (a term not coined until 1961) meaning “where the idea or concept behind a work takes precedence over the finished physical object. It suggests that the planning and decisions are the art itself, making the final execution a secondary or ‘perfunctory’ affair.”  Duchamp also belonged to the “Anti-Art” ideal (coined around 1913-1914 in reaction to Duchamp’s Ready Mades). To quote Cotter again, “During these years he [Duchamp] functioned, culturally, as a kind of artful dodger, out of sight, yet always there. One way he maintained this active non-presence was by assuming an alter ego,” to which Cotter is referring not only to the above R. Mutt, but a couple more to come.

 

One Duchamp’s Aliases was the fictional woman, Rrose Sélavy (first appeared in 1920). Around her he built a more elaborate fake biography than his others. Man Ray Photographed Duchamp as Sélavy, and I must admit, he doesn’t look half-bad. Her name was a pun on the French adage “Eros, c’est la vie,” ("Sex, that's life,"). Duchamp stated, “I thought it was much more basic to change from a man into a woman than to change from a religion to another.” He attached her name to some Entranpenurial Efforts that didn’t actually exist (so, Frauds without the actual Stealing part) and she had an impact, inspiring collections of Surrealist Poetry and, more recently, the restaurant Sel Rrose, an Oyster Bar which opened in NYC in 2019.

 

And then there was the “Monte Carlo Bonds” (1924), a seeming parody, yet had some legally-binding legal paperwork behind it. Man Ray had Photographed Duchamp’s head covered in shaving cream, which included soapy Devil-Horns, and these pictures were featured on the documents. The idea was to raise money so Duchamp could gamble at the Monte Carlo Casinos; if he won, he’d pay dividends to his investors and use the rest to fund the building of a Museum. I have no idea what came of the endeavor, but it sounds pretty dubious unless it was another complete joke.

 

Then came the “Boîte-en-valise” (“The Box in a Valise” (1935–41)) series. It was something not-unrelated to the Ready Mades, but far-more relatable to by the Audience.  They were luxury leather suitcases (there were eventually more than 300 of them), each a kind-of Pop-Up Gallery, containing scaled-down reproductions of his more notable works. This Exhibit devotes half a very large room to more than a dozen of them.

 

In his article, “Are We Too Reverent of Marcel Duchamp?” Critic Ben Davis casts a cold-eye on this. “The myth of Duchamp, the reclusive chess-playing aesthete outsider, should be revised. He was also entrepreneurial, if in a willfully eccentric way that makes him resemble another European artist-showman who amused the U.S. at mid-century: Salvador Dalí. Duchamp’s endless repackaging of his own greatest hits into little mini-museums packed in valises—given a huge amount of room at MoMA—might be seen very much in Dalí’s enthusiastically commercial mold.”

 

As I said above, Duchamp strongly believed that Art should take no role in Politics; this Passivity seemed driven by Cynicism, or as he said, “the great artist of tomorrow will go underground.” He never wavered from that, but with the coming of WWII (1938-1945) that position started becoming as strange as his own works.

 

Since WWI, Duchamp was caught ping-ponging between France and NYC. He and Picasso were both Parisians when WWII exploded (Picasso arrived in Paris from Spain in 1904 and after 1937 returning home was not an option because of the Fascist Government).  Duchamp wisely evacuated during the Nazi Occupation of that Country (1940-1944). In short summaries, Duchamp’s experiences sound like an Espionage novel that they weren’t. Navigating Occupied France, he took on a Secret Identity as a Cheese Merchant to smuggle his work out of the Country, slipped through dangerous checkpoints, and escaped to NYC in 1942. He lived in NYC for most of the rest of his life (he had a studio at 80 East 11th Street, Greenwich Village), though oddly, the city of Philadelphia has more of his work than NYC. He did return to France in time for his death in 1968 (age 81).

 

Picasso, though, never fled Paris. He was a Foreigner, a Refugee, boldly anti-Fascist, labeled "Degenerate" by Adolf Hitler, banned from exhibiting, constantly harassed by the Gestapo, and could’ve been gunned down on the street at any time, but he never moved and never stopped working. He was not the only one: Sylvia Beach, of the USA, hid her bookstore and protected Jews. Josephine Baker, not only from the USA, but also Black and a scandalous Dancer, worked as a Spy for the Allies. Gertrude Stein (who coined the term “Lost Generation”), was not only from the USA, but a Jew and an out-of-the-closet Lesbian, managed to both survive and protect her collection of Degenerate Art with the help of some French Fascist friends, associations that led her down some morally indefensible roads. Paris must have been a strange place in the War years, the Avante Garde Art scene was somehow Crushed, Crippled, and Vibrant all at the same time, held-together by an ever-dwindling number of other Countries’ ex-Patriots, all people who knew that if they strayed far from Paris proper, they’d likely be found lying face-down in a ditch. Picasso was there to see the War end, Fascism defeated, and stayed in France until he died in 1973 (age 91).

 

This show had nothing to say on this subject, because Duchamp didn’t either.

                                                                                   

Duchamp was many things during his life, a few mentioned above. A few more worth noting: Art Advisor, Conservator, Curator, Inventor, Writer, and, of course, Celebrity. He pretended reluctance regarding the last and referred to himself as a “respirateur” (“breather”). Post-WWII, he apparently abandoned the creation of Art altogether, devoting himself even more to Chess, achieving Grand-Master level.

 

Except, he didn’t actually abandon creation. Duchamp was secretly working on another scandalous Art project in collaboration with one of his lovers, Brazilian Surrealist Painter Maria Martins. Martins was almost certainly his model and worked closely with him until she left the USA and he married his second wife in the early 1950s. The project, “Etant Donnes: 1. La Chute d’Eau, 2. Le Gaz d’Eclairage” (“Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas” (1944-1966)) was presumably unfinished at the time of his death, much as the “Mona Lisa” is presumed unfinished by many. He called it a “Sculpture-Construction,” most of the rest of us would call it a Diorama.

 

Installed in a closet-sized space, hidden behind two big antique wooden doors, and visible only through peepholes, it featured an artificial, life-sized, nude woman, positioned so we have an uninhibited look between her open legs, explicitly referencing Gustave Courbet’s equally scandalous Painting “Origin of the World” (1866). Her face is hidden as she lies on her back on a grassy hill, holding up gas lamp, and the landscape behind her has a convincing illusion of depth and distance. Cotter again, “What are we seeing? A voyeuristic fantasy? An erotic pastoral scene? The aftermath of a rape?”

 

Given the earlier work, “The Bride Stripped …” I lean towards the aftermath of Rape, but my opinion maybe influenced by the fact that the original, just like “The Bride Stripped …” isn’t here, but in Philadelphia, again, likely excluded because it would’ve been too difficult to move (this Exhibit will move to Philadelphia in the Fall of this year). What we get is Photographs taken through those peepholes, and they sure look like Crime Scene Photos to me.

 

Though this description has been longish, it didn’t address the whole of the Exhibits contents, I even left out some major works, as this Exhibit is just that large. It ends with Photographs taken after Duchamp’s death detailing the dismantling of his Greenwich Village studio. They are a sort of Memento Mori, with the Disassemblers and Movers out-of-frame. Its lacking of even a single human figure somehow seems fitting.

2.) “Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination”

 

The Fine Arts has always belonged to the Elites, this has been most obvious since the “Elites” became the “Intellectual Elites” with the rise of Abstract Expressionism (term coined in 1946), but Fine Art was always tied to a Patronage System of one form or another, while Popular Arts were treated dismissively. Folk Music was never hailed as Chamber Music (think the Baroque period (circa 1600–1750)), and Portraiture long-belonged only to the Aristocrats and other Rich who often insisted that the Paintings include artifacts of their Stature be in the canvases that were supposed to be devoted to their faces and characters.

 

The invention of Photography changed that, but it was a slower process than one might think. Painted Portraits became more Elitist when faced with the competition with the less-expensive medium, especially when those in the less-expensive medium started to display real Artistry, but less-expensive was not the same as cheap for a long time. Photography allowed Portraiture to move from the Aristocracy to the Grand-Bourgeoisie, then the Petite-Bourgeoisie, but only Radicals like Jacob Riss did Portraiture of the very poor, and for him, the Portraiture wasn’t generally done at request of the specific Subject of the picture, but in service of a larger Social-Justice Cause (his most famous book documented Poverty in NYC, “How the Other Half Lives” (1890)). Generally, in the 19^th c, a commissioned Portrait Photo of someone of the Lower-Economic Classes simply didn’t exist, or if it did, the Subject might be Photographed only after death, posed as if they were still alive, as keepsakes for their loved ones (this was especially popular in England).  

 

Still, Mass-Produced Media kept working its way down the Economic Hierarchy, and Photographic Portrait Studios eventually became common Store Fronts even in Middle-and-Low-Income Communities. The Portrait Photography of the Harlem Renaissance (NYC again, 1920s) evokes endless fascination today. Like the Paintings of Aristocrats centuries before, the Common People liked to display the Artifacts of their Status in the self-chosen images of themselves (so the opposite of Riss).

 

Intersecting with this was that the end of WWII (so post-1945) triggered among the most Radical Power-Change-Overs in Human History. The Colonialism/Imperialism that had dominated the West’s idea of itself starting in the 15^th c. began to withdraw from the massive landmass of Sub-Saharan Africa. A dizzying array of new and Chaotic Nations States were born, all groping for Self-Identity, but also for greater Wealth and stronger Infrastructure.  An indication of the burden of Poverty that created obstacles to the new Nations entering the mid-20^th c, Sub-Saharan Africa’s most famous Novelist, Chinua Achebe (of Nigeria), had to send his hand-written manuscript for “Things Fall Apart” to England to get it typed to be presentable for Editors for publication (it finally saw print in 1958).

 

Especially in West and Central Africa (previously, mostly, owned by the English and the French) the Peoples looked West for what to aspire to, and this could be seen in new Store Fronts emerging in the 1950s-1960s, Photographic Portrait Studios, small Entrepreneurial Enterprises that reflected what emerged in Harlem, NYC, decades earlier. Sub-Saharian Africa had begun a radical Urbanization when the oldest pictures in the Exhibit were taken, and even though today the region is somewhat less-Urbanized than much of the rest of the world, it’s currently being Urbanized faster than anywhere else on the Planet.

 

Here I must not, this creative explosion correlates with Duchamp’s public withdrawal from Artist Production. Much of his Asthetic was driven by a reaction to his sense that Mass-Production had made traditional ideas of Art meaningless, but here we see the opposite. We don’t see Duchamp’s obsessive Intellectualism; these works are not plying for the love of the most snobbish fans of either Duchamp, nor the Abstract Expressionists he was dismissive of. Boldly creative, they are unapologetically Populist, so while Duchamp became cynical of Art itself, these were men and women who wanted Folk (or at least Pop-Music) elevated to the level of Chamber Music. And music is a key component of many (most?) of these Photographs.

 

I have never been to Africa, I couldn’t keep the myriads of Countries represented here straight in my head, and there were a few Countries I had never heard of before (example: Burkina Faso), but that didn’t detract from the goal of the Curators, who clearly believed in the Spirit of Pan-Africanism, even though its Reality seems more remote now than when the Colonial Withdrawal began. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first President, said in the 1960s, “this is no ordinary wind of change, this is the raging hurricane against which the old order cannot stand.” Well, he was right about the hurricane, but I doubt anyone has been able to keep track of which way the winds will blow next.

 

The Exhibit mostly concerns Local Artists of this-city-or-that, in this-country-or-that, locations that were far-flung, but all seem United in the Identities presented here. As it progressively moves forward in time, it also embraces some 21^st c. Artists of the African Diaspora, with the over-all feeling is “All for one and one for all.” The more recent works address explicitly what the earlier Artists captured (maybe) unconsciously. It’s lay-out is Chronological, but not rigorously so, with the walls to the right and left are mostly Chronological, but going down the center is a radical violation of the progress of time, featuring work by an Artist who specifically wanted to do just that (I’ll get to him later). Also, all work is from people I had never heard of before (there are fifteen Artist represented) except a of Music Videos at the very end.

 

This is the third-of-three related Exhibits, all spawned of gifts from Collector, Fashion Designer, and Photographer Jean Pigozzi (not African, but French-Italian). I haven’t seen the other two, “Bodys Isek Kingelez: City Dreams” (2018) and “Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound” (2022). Here, the subject is the “golden age of African portraiture” and its ripple effects later. It is both surprising and unsurprising how few Family Portraits there are, because such pictures are the bread-and-butter of any small Photographic Studio, but it’s also a staid and repetitive Genre. Instead, we get a celebration of Youth Culture in a Newly-Emerging World, often on-the-scene Documentary-shots, and regarding the Studio-shots, there’s a great deal of Cosplay. Wrote Critic Loring Knoblauch, “Many sitters still wanted to have portraits made in their best looks, but more and more asked to documented as who they wanted to be, rather than who they actually were. And at that moment, in nations across the continent, they wanted to be a range of things: ‘modern’, cool, international, funky, rich, Western, politically aware, stylish, and much more broadly African than ever before. And so, the local studio photographers responded to the demands of their customers, still working hard to make them look their best, but adapting their available fashions, props, and backdrops to encourage more imaginative and expansive identity creation.”

 

As you enter, I recommend you make an immediate right turn, addressing the wall that is now on your right-side first. The first grouping doesn’t appear to be Professional-Shots, but B&W photos from the 1950s of young people Clubbing. Please note the men’s clothing: It’s Western, and by the cut of the clothes, one can assume they’re listening to USA Jazz. The women’s clothing is also Western-cut, reflecting how Mass-Production shapes the final Product, but the pattens are more African, and the women’s hair isn’t Westernized; at least not yet. Continue on this path and you will make a left turn at the corner; keep looking at the Art on your right. Now were in the early 1960s, and the attire of the boys and girls are equally Westernized, and the girls have notably started ironing their hair, likely inspired by the African-American female vocalists of the of Motown music scene, born of Detroit, USA. Keep going, and keep looking to your right, by the 1970s, African-style pattens return to the women’s dresses, and their hair is likely to be more natural, or at least weaved in the African-style, but the boys’ clothing remained just as Western. This show is all about unstated Politics, and that two dozen feet of walking just summarized a lot of it.

 

There’s also the increasing emergence of the skill of the Photographers as you move forward in time. Two that especially stand-out pieces are large prints by Malick Sidibé (of Mali), “Regardez-moi!” (“Look at Me!” (1962) and “Nuit de Noël” (“Christmas Eve, Happy Club” (1963)), both are taken inside Dance Clubs, but very different ones. The former is boisterous and explosive with energy as a young man shows off his seemingly gravity-defying dance moves and other cheer around him; the latter is exceptionally sweet, like the perfect Prom Photo. One can almost hear the different music playing in each setting.

 

Now look to your left. The center run of the gallery is dominated by one Artist, and now we’re in the 21^st c. Samuel Fosso (born in Cameroon, learned his trade in the Central African Republic, and now resides in France) who was looking back upon the time you just walked through.

 

(Also, please don’t ignore the far-left wall, which mostly follows the Chronological logic of the right wall, but also mixes up the subject matter a bit more).

 

Fosso’s works are all self-Portraits, but he’s Cosplaying as major figures of the prior century, mostly leading figures of the Pan-African Movement, with some USA figures who had great impact on the so-called “Dark Continent.” They’re from his “African Spirits” series (2008) and all are “Untitled,” evoking USA Photographer Cindy Sherman’s series “Untitled Film Stills” (1978-1980). Fosso’s expert costuming and posturing makes almost all the subject’s identities clear; for example, he looks nothing like Angela Davis, but the wig, blouse, and glare make the identification instantons and undeniable. His Cosplay as Malcom X was even stronger. I admit being somewhat at a loss, the USA figures were more identifiable to me than the African ones, but I did recognize Nelson Mandela and Haile Selassie. One of his Cosplays is of Artist Seydou Keita (of Mali) who is represented in this show, but for that life of me, I don’t know which of the ten-prints was supposed to be Keita. Another face I had no chance of recognizing was ex-President Nkrumah.

 

This Cosplay is important to the goals of the Exhibit, becoming more obvious when you return to the outer walls, and specifically the progression of the display when you reach the works of Sanlé Sory (of Burkina Faso). Fosso’s first studio, which he built as a teenager, was in Africa, overlapping Chronologically with Sory’s though in a different Country, but Fasso’s studio was ransacked by War, and none of that work is on display in this Exhibit. Sory’s best work is from 1970s-early 1980s, and especially playful. His Subjects reinvent themselves in Cosplays likely by their own whim (the same Subject, in different costumes, appear in more than one image). Each of these are titled not with the Subjects name, but the icon he was pretending to be, like “The Intellectual,” dressed in a dark trench coat, flared jeans, and transparent aviator glasses, he holds an open newspaper out in front of him, his head toward the camera but gazing beyond us. And “The American” smugly refusing to look in the direction of the camera, smoking, wearing a baseball cap, dark sunglasses, huge belt-buckle, and rolled-up jeans.

 

Fashion Photography works into this narrative as well, mostly, but not exclusively, represented by the in-flight magazine of Air Afrique which presented various forms of African positivity as part of the Airline’s hugely Idealistic Capitalistic, Venture. Founded in 1961, it went into decline in the 1980s, but even in decline (blamed on mismanagement and corruption) was considered the most reliable Passenger Carrier to Countries that could not afford their own Airline Infrastructure. It finally ceased operation in 2002, a direct result of the Global Crisis in the Airline Industry triggered by the 9/11 Attacks in the USA. Its fleet peeked at eleven planes serving twenty-two countries, and during it decades of operations, there were only seven documented accidents/incidents; only two resulting in fatalities.

 

Also tied to fashion is Kwame Brathwaite (African descent, born in Brooklyn, USA) who is best known for popularizing the phrase “Black is Beautiful.” Often his work reflected the style of Portraiture described above, but in this Exhibit, he’s represented but works demonstrating especially elaborate Black Hair Styles, for example “Untitled” (part of “Sikolo with Carolee Prince Designs” (1964–68)). Here his work here most closely evokes that of another Artist in the show, J. D. 'Okhai Ojeikere (of Nigeria) who achieved fame documenting the elaborate architectures of that Country’s unique woven hairstyles.

 

Another 21^st c. Artist is Silvia Rosi (Italian-born of Togolese parents), who, like Fosso references the Cosplay of an earlier generations Studio Portraiture in her Self-Portraits, but following a radically different path. Closer to Sory’s work, she uses similar clashing patterns for the flooring and back-mats in several, but she obscures her own face in most of them, using a bouquet of flowers, photo album, or simply turning her back to us; she’s shifting the focus to the props, the evidence of Status as Identity. The most poignant was the one with her back turned, “Disintegrata che aspetta” (“Disintegrated Waiting” (2024)), among the more subdued in the background, and to her left is luggage; she’s speaking to us of the in-between Identities of the African Dysphoria.

 

The backward gaze of the 21^st c. work in this Exhibit was noted by Knoblauch, “In each case, we can follow the visual connection back to the past, but feel it re-energized by the concerns of the present … It leaves us with a sense that these studio portraits were far from unassumingly playful local pictures; they actually tapped into much deeper emotional and intellectual flows that were swirling in the air, that asked portrait sitters to thoughtfully consider who they could be.”

 

The Exhibit’s Curator, Oluremi C. Onabanjo (African descent, but I believe she’s from NYC), took inspiration from Philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe (of Congo) book “The Idea of Africa” (1994). “This is not an exhibition that aims to give you an exhaustive chronological history nor a geographic cartographic survey of the continent in every single practitioner, though I feel those exhibitions are extremely important. What I'm offering is a way for people to look, think and make connections across images and in so doing, it allows people to trace an intellectual history, a spirit of Pan-African potential across the African continent.” And elsewhere she said, “In substance and form, ‘Ideas of Africa’ encourages viewers to be sensitive to the circulation of ideas and images across space and time.”

 

The show ends with a Music Video of the song “Got 'til It's Gone” (1997) by Janet Jackson (African descent, USA born) that heavily sampled “Big Yellow Taxi” (1970) by Joni Mitchell (not African, Canadian born) with the lines "don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you got till it's gone?" The Video was Directed by Mark Romanek (not African, USA born) and remarkably anticipated this Exhibit, and explicitly referenced many of the Portrait Photos we’ve just walked through. Given the subject, Individual Identity, National Identify, Absorption of Other Identities, and the Weight of History, I can’t think of a better way close the show.