Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism

This book offers a bold new account of modernism. By focusing on cubism, primitivist-modernism, jazz, and Josephine Baker's performance, Lemke demonstrates that black art exerted a crucial if masked presence in both Euro-American high art and popular culture. American and European modernism owe much of their symbolic capital to the black cultural other. Black American artists, for their part, also relied on Euro-American American models. By reappropriating European primitivist-modernism, they invented a sui generis black modernism.