Perfect Documents: Walker Evans and African Art, 1935.

PERFECT DOCUMENTS: Walker Evans and African Art, 1935 Virginia-Lee Webb The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2000. 112 pp. 88 b/w photos, notes, bibliography, appendixes, index. $24.95 softcover.

Modernist strategies for the representation of African material culture arguably reached their apotheosis in the 1935 exhibition "African Negro Art" at New York's Museum of Modern Art and the accompanying photographic portfolio created by Walker Evans. The first such exhibition sponsored by a major art--as opposed to ethnographic--museum, this event constituted a benchmark in the display of African objects in the West, setting precedents that have remained intractable, albeit contested, to this day. Alfred Barr, MoMA's director, and James Johnson Sweeney, the exhibition curator, commissioned the young Evans to photograph selected objects from the 603 masks, sculptures, and utilitarian objects featured in the exhibition, a commission that resulted in the production of seventeen sets of a 477-print portfolio. This ambitious project was the subject of "Perfect Documents: Walker Evans and African Art, 1935," an exhibition held last year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Feb. 1-Sept. 3, 2000). Both the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue were organized by Virginia-Lee Webb, from the Metropolitan's Photograph Study Collection in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.

Unprecedented in both museum and photographic practices, Evans's portfolio of African art was conceived as a self-consciously didactic project, extending the life of the exhibition far beyond MoMA's walls. Sets of the prints (either in 8" x 10" format or enlarged to 16" x 20") were distributed free to selected museums and historically black colleges in the South; additional sets were sold at a nominal subscription rate to other museums. In addition, a modified version of the portfolio traveled to sixteen venues between 1935 and 1937, with the photographs serving as surrogates for the objects themselves. In all probability, the audience for the photographic representations surpassed the more than 45,000 visitors who saw the actual works over the two-month duration of the MoMA show. Whether seen on a gallery wall, in one of the traveling exhibitions, or on the pages of one of the many publications in which they were reproduced, these photographs were the first contact with the arts of Africa that many viewers experienced and the vehicle through which their initial impressions were formed.

Webb's catalogue examines in great depth numerous aspects of the history, context, and production of the portfolio, providing exhaustive documentation and a valuable reference on this significant endeavor. Information on various facets of the project is comprehensively chronicled in five chapters in Perfect Documents, each section examining specific facets of the overall project: the original exhibition, the traveling exhibition of sculptures, the photographic portfolio by Evans, the traveling exhibition of photographs, and the concluding narrative, "Perfect Documents." The text is supplemented with a section of 55 plates, an extensive bibliography, and a series of appendixes outlining venues and dates of each of the two traveling exhibitions. Additional data are compiled on the distribution and formats of the various photographic portfolios.

The publication brings attention to a component of Evans's photographic oeuvre that until recently had been generally marginalized in the scholarship on this prominent American photographer. Webb notes in her conclusion (p. 45):

   While the sculptures made it to the canon of Euro-American taste, Evans's
   photographs of them often did not. They were often seen as illustrative in
   premise and not considered part of his major work.... It is now clear that
   the African portfolio was not created in an aesthetic vacuum and that it is
   an integral part of a complex and formative period in the genesis of
   Evans's mature style.

Indeed, Perfect Documents will contribute to securing the status of this work in related scholarship, rectifying its previous exclusion from conventional narratives of Evans's career.

The photographic plates that follow the text include a range of object types, many of which Evans shot from a variety of perspectives. Reflecting his signature style, the majority of the pieces are seen in extreme close-ups, in stark frontal or profile views, in spatially compressed and tightly cropped compositions. For photographic aficionados, Evans's highly stylized pictorial vocabulary in rendering the African objects will provide compelling evidence for parallels with his celebrated "documentary style" developed during his tenure at the Resettlement and Farm Security Administrations. For others more interested in learning about the objects themselves, however, these images may prove less satisfying. Many of the photographs are monumentalized abstractions in which African works are denied any sense of their three-dimensionality or scale. Indeed, they seem more about Evans's aesthetic conceptions than about the faithful representation of the objects themselves.

Whatever the reception of the images, this compilation makes important archival sources readily available for the first time. Mining the Walker Evans Archives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, correspondence, papers, and registrarial records in the Museum of Modern Art Archives, and personal accounts of individuals involved in the project, Webb has unearthed events surrounding the production of the African art portfolio down to the most arcane minutiae. Numerous illuminating particulars are excerpted from the photographer's own notebooks and diary, charting his daily progress and noting detailed technical information. As an exercise in archival research and documentation, Perfect Documents will serve as an effective tool for the study of African art, photographic history, museum practices, and modernism in the making. Moreover, since it is conventionally acknowledged that the Western canon of African art is largely indebted to the 1935 MoMA exhibition, this publication by its nature offers insight into the historical process of canon construction and the largely overlooked role of the photographic medium within this phenomenon.

The catalogue reflects both the strengths and the weaknesses of the exhibition it was designed to accompany. The exhibition--which offered a selection of the photographs juxtaposed with the actual objects they documented--and the catalogue take informative first steps in the process of unraveling the complex dynamic between the three-dimensional African objects and their translation into two-dimensional black-and-white photographic images within a modernist aesthetic. At the same time, both projects stop short, leaving many issues unaddressed and questions unanswered. For example, it is unclear why this particular selection of images was chosen either for the Metropolitan's recent exhibition or the accompanying catalogue or, for that matter, how they relate to the more than 400 images Evans created that were not reproduced. Were they meant to be a representative sampling, the "best" images, or simply the most visually dramatic ones? How do Evans's prints relate to the anonymously reproduced photographs of the same objects that appeared in Sweeney's catalogue of the 1935 exhibition? And finally, what are the implications of this historic intersection of African art, photography, and museum practices within the framework of modernist strategies of representation?

Rather than addressing such complex issues, however, Webb simply celebrates the images as models of Evans's "documentary" style and photographic practice. This uncritical approach is embodied in the problematic title Perfect Documents. As the author notes, this concept comes from a comment by Lincoln Kirstein that "Walker Evans' photographs are such perfect documents that their excellence is not assertive" (p. 43). Webb subsequently suggests that these words--written in 1933 about Evans's photographs of Victorian architecture--succinctly characterize his approach to photographing African art. However, Kirstein's assessment--questionable even in its original iteration--truly misses its mark when imposed upon Evans's abstract and highly constructed representations of African objects. Rather, these so-called perfect documents more accurately illustrate Andre Malraux's assertion in his Musde imaginaire that "reproduction has created fictitious works of art by systematically falsifying scale." Perfect Documents, in its seemingly uncritical acceptance of the notion of the transparency of the photographic medium and in its celebration of Evans's photographs, misses the opportunity to examine the artifice of such allegedly documentary images within the larger issues of representation clearly raised by this enterprise. Moreover, concern for providing exhaustive archival documentation seems to have been carried out at the expense of close visual analysis. Indeed, although the photographic reproductions and accompanying documentation provide essential references, they appear to be included more as an appendage than as a central component of the publication. Closer consideration of the visual images, for example, might have averted the disconcerting error of reproducing in reverse Charles Sheeler's photograph of a Fang reliquary figure (p. 44).

Nonetheless, what emerges from the diverse components that constitute Perfect Documents is the realization that Evans's photographs--although supposedly documentary in their intention--were active protagonists in the major taxonomic shift that repositioned African material culture within a framework of Western aesthetic taste and values at a particular modernist juncture. These images functioned in the same manner as the white walls and hallowed art museum spaces in which these works were displayed at MoMA, definitively proclaiming their stature as high art. At the crossroads between the work of ethnographic institutions and evolving attitudes toward African objects in the art museum, these photographs functioned simultaneously to secure the role of the photographer as gatekeeper for modernist strategies of cultural representation. Moreover, the story behind the production of these images reveals the symbiotic relationship between MoMA's strategy for promoting a modernist aesthetic appreciation of African art and its elevation of Evans to the status of a master of modern photography.

As Perfect Documents: Walker Evans and African Art, 1935 makes clear, Evans's photographs are still consulted today by scholars and researchers as a primary reference for the objects represented--that is, as the documents they are purported to be. They are also mounted, framed, and displayed on the walls of art galleries, treated as independent art objects in and of themselves. Thus, photographs that were conceived as documents of African objects have contributed to the modernist visual vocabulary, with wide-ranging impact and implications for Western reception and perceptions of African art.

While largely overlooking these implications, Webb has managed to compile an impressive wealth of material surrounding all aspects of Walker Evans's African art portfolio. In providing an exhaustive reconstruction of this historic endeavor, Perfect Documents will prove a useful reference that will serve scholars in a variety of fields. It may be an "imperfect document," but it is a valuable one nonetheless.

WENDY GROSSMAN is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is completing her dissertation "Modernist Gambits and `Primitivist' Discourse: Reframing Man Ray's Photographs of African and Oceanic Art."