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The "black art" renaissance : African sculpture and modernism across continents

"Taking African art's impact on modernism as a global phenomenon, The Black Art Renaissance tracks a series of engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and African modernists from 1905 to the 1980s. Although it was an episode from the benighted colonial period, the Parisian avant-garde 'discovery of African sculpture-known then as 'art nègre,' or black art-came eventually to permeate Afro-modernisms, wherein black artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term"--Reading African art's impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The "Black Art" Renaissance tracks a series of twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial period, the Paris avant-garde "discovery" of African sculpture-known then as art negre, or "black art"-eventually came to affect nascent Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within this trajectory, "black art" evolved as a framework for asserting control over appropriative practices introduced by Europeans, and it helped forge alliances by redefining concepts of humanism, race, and civilization. From the Fauves and Picasso to the Harlem Renaissance, and from the work of South African artist Ernest Mancoba to the imagery of Negritude and the Ecole de Dakar, African sculpture's influence proved transcontinental in scope and significance. Through this extensively researched study, Joshua I. Cohen argues that art history's alleged centers and margins must be conceived as interconnected and mutually informing. The "Black Art" Renaissance reveals just how much modern art has owed to African art on a global scale.

Art in Renaissance Italy

Sets Italian Renaissance art in context, and particularly those who commissioned the palaces and cathedrals, the paintings and sculptures. Spanning three centuries, this work covers not only Rome and Florence but also Venice, Assisi, Siena, Milan, Pavia, Padua, Mantua, Verona, Urbino and Naples.

Art in Renaissance Italy

Religion

Stanford Libraries' Religion collections contain a variety of print and online resources for the study of religions. This page provides information on our collections in American religions, Christianity, Buddhism, and Asian religious traditions.

Paper Worlds: Urbano Monte and the Global Renaissance

New Mathematics, Statistics and Computational Sciences Librarian Alex Manchester