Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism.

Sieglinde Lemke. Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 183 pp. $45.00.

Sieglinde Lemke in Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism seeks to reevaluate the contributions of African art forms to the formation of modernism. She argues that, in effect, primitivism and modernism constitute each other, and then examines this reciprocal relationship in chapters focused on several different kinds of artistic practice, including some which canonical criticism has viewed as peripheral to the activities of "elite art." The result is a sharply drawn portrait of a modernism that, even during the years in which it is known as "high modernism," reflected the hybridity of its diverse inspirations, anticipated the contemporary emphasis upon globalism and multiculturalism, and erased from its outset the subsequently erected barriers between "high" and "popular" forms of art. This revaluation fully participates in the contemporary fascination with the polyphony of modernisms and with the way in which the movement is an expression of a broad range of cultural practices. For showing us the way African inspiration helped to bring this modernism into being, we can be genuinely appreciative of Professor Lemke's work.

After a review of the criticism ("Studies in Black and White"), Lemke turns first to the visual arts, with a tight focus on Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, then to jazz, where she offers a more comprehensive view of African-American-inspired music-making while anchoring her comments in the "bleached version by Paul Whiteman. She turns next to "The Black Body" in a chapter almost completely devoted to African-American dancer Josephine Baker, and then to "The Black Book," in which she counterpoints two widely divergent collections of African-American art--Alain Locke's The New Negro and Nancy Cunard's Negro. The volume is completed by a brief introduction and "Conclusions."

It is in the chapters on "The Black Body" and "The Black Book" that I found Lemke's contributions the greatest. I have not thought some recent efforts to describe the connections between dance and the practices of literary modernism fully successful, but Lemke is up to the task--and she is right that most other explorations of this subject have dealt with elite dance rather than the musical review. She credits Baker's danse sauvage, which opened on October 2, 1925, at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees as part of La Revue Negre, with parataxis, syncopation, improvisation, and a transgressive relationship to the conventions of choreographed dance, but most important she sees it as a staging of "the primitive," as a self-reflexive performance of gender, race, and self which "managed to rewrite the collective image that Europeans had constructed of black female sexuality." By the time Lemke concludes that Baker was "primitivist modernism ...on two legs ...dynamic, dialectical, and ultimately self-referential...both the object and the subject of primitivist modernism," her readers need little persuasion.

Lemke's treatment of "The Black Book" is also of interest, largely because of the fruitfulness of her counterpointing of the collections by Locke and Cunard. She buttresses her insistence on a mutually constitutive primitivism, constructed within modernism, and a modernism, structured and--as she would prefer--refreshed by primitivism, by pointing out that it is the white Nancy Cunard who insists upon "a blueprint for a black, social-realist primitivism" and Alain Locke whose volume in its second section forms itself on elite, European art. Lemke here, as elsewhere in the volume, is able to acknowledge the implicit racism which hovers beneath Cunard's perspective without dismissing her genuine interest in black art as imperialist or crassly appropriative.

The chapter on Picasso is less satisfying, both because it brings less that is new to the analysis and because it is here that Lemke is unable to maintain the careful insistence of her "Conclusions" that she has avoided "a monocausal account of the shaping of modernism." Thus here, drawing on art critic Paul Guillaume, Lemke flatly asserts that "the encounter with the cultural other enabled the Europeans to discover a new aesthetic law in which the art object became a 'creation in itself' "and continues a few pages later to claim that "these two main impulses in modern European art history--...intellectual abstraction and emotional subjectivity--are the two vectors of European modernism derived from primitivism." These claims are overbroad, certainly without a careful consideration of the contributions of Pater and the art-for art's sake '90s to modernism; or of Freud, Bergson, James, and Husserl to the renewed focus on subjectivity; or of Wilhelm Worringer's analysis of the sources of abstraction. These othe r figures enter the text, in the rare cases in which they do, as passing references. This book has a substantial substance of its own and need not address such matters, but the claims made on its behalf must acknowledge the diverse contexts within which modernism's characteristics took shape.

The chapter on jazz is more successful, although here too there is a good bit of summary of the work of others. One of its more interesting aspects is Lemke's successful paralleling of Picasso's famous statement that the masks he saw at the Trocadero were "magic things" and his Demoiselles "my first exorcism painting" with the idea that white participation in Harlem's jazz clubs was a kind of exorcism of a Puritan past, another kind of renewal. This chapter is also enriched by Lemke's account of the diversity of Harlem jazz clubs and the rise of a recording industry that featured black artists.

In her "Conclusions" Lemke invokes a topography of modernism that will be unfamiliar to many and, to some, imprecise. She identifies four aesthetic lines along which she believes modernism developed: the formally experimental or avant-garde (with which she associates Pound and Stevens); the minimalist, where she arrays Hemingway and Stein; a "realist aesthetic," "politicized," which "speaks on behalf of the proletariat"; and an "ignored fourth trend, namely that of a primitivist modernist aesthetic." One need not be persuaded by this topography, however, or of the extent to which the primitive has been previously ignored, to be persuaded that Lemke has shown the significance of primitivist modernism in a way that clarifies our understanding of both the modernist movement itself and of African-American and African contributions to its formation. Serious students of modernism will find this book very useful.