by Jon Lackman | 9 April 2009 | Africa, Books
We belatedly take note of a post by Gary Schwartz:
… a research institute in Paris and Houston, Texas, known as The Image of the Black in Western Art … was put in place by the oil millionaire Dominique de Menil (1908-97), a formidable figure in 20th-century patronage of minority politics as well as art. Her own explanation of her motivation she put into words thus:
The decision in 1960 to launch a systematic investigation of the iconography of blacks in Occidental art did not proceed from any clear plan. It was an impulse prompted by an intolerable situation: segregation as it still existed in spite of having been outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1954. Many works of art contradicted segregation. A sketch by a master could reveal a depth of humanity beyond any social condition, race or color. So why not assemble these art works in an exhibition or a book? With such a naïve approach, a serious enterprise was started.
…By 1984, the enterprise had published or contracted three of the four monumental studies it planned to bring out: 1: From the Pharaohs to the fall of the Roman Empire (1976), 2: From the Early Christian age to the “Age of Discovery” (1979) and 4: From the American Revolution to World War I (1989). But there was a life-size gap where volume 3 should be, covering the not insignificant period from about 1500 to 1800 …
At a small meeting in Amsterdam on June 26th [2008], Jean Michel Massing of the University of Cambridge said that he would be handing in the manuscript of a large book on the subject at the end of the year, a manuscript however that does not really meet the description of vol. 3. A book of studies, I assume, rather than a survey. He added in less concrete terms that the classical vol. 3 was also in the works … being undertaken under the auspices of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University, which is intending also to republish also the already-printed volumes. David Bindman, retired professor of art history at University College, London, is acting as general editor.
