Metropolitan Fetish: African Sculpture and the Imperial French Invention of Primitive Art

From the 1880s to
1940, French colonial officials, businessmen and soldiers, returning
from overseas postings, brought home wooden masks and figures from
Africa. This imperial and cultural power-play is the jumping-off point
for a story that travels from sub-Saharan Africa to Parisian art
galleries; from the pages of fashion magazines, through the doors of the
Louvre, to world fairs and international auction rooms; into the
apartments of avant-garde critics and poets; to the streets of Harlem,
and then full-circle back to colonial museums and schools in Dakar,
Bamako, and Abidjan.

John Warne Monroe guides us on this journey,
one that goes far beyond the world of Picasso, Matisse, and Braque, to
show how the Modernist avant-garde and the European colonial project
influenced each other in profound and unexpected ways. Metropolitan Fetish reveals
the complex trajectory of African material culture in the West and
provides a map of that passage, tracing the interaction of cultural and
imperial power. A broad and far-reaching history of the French reception
of African art, it brings to life an era in which the aesthetic
category of "primitive art" was invented.