CHRIS THURMAN: The complicated relationship between modernism, Africa and blackness
Strauss’ 104 lots on auction encourage us to compare the artists with prominent ‘white modernist’ compatriots
Some settings encourage a certain amount of poetic licence. You can say things around a braai that wouldn’t pass muster in an art history seminar. A column like the one you are reading falls somewhere between these opposing ends of the spectrum, which grants the columnist a dangerous freedom. Passing thoughts develop into rhetorical positions, staked out with temporary conviction, only to be contradicted a week later (or within the space of a few paragraphs).
Here’s a claim that you probably won’t come across at a braai, or at an art history seminar for that matter: descriptors such as “African modernism” and “black modernists” are, to some degree at least, tautological. You may well wonder what I mean by that. Well, think about it: in the world of visual art, does modernism as we know it exist without Cubism, Fauvism or Expressionism? Without Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Klee, Braque?..
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