Colonial art

This book is one of the very first major essays written in French on the construction of race in the arts of the Enlightenment. It has the merit, first of all, of questioning our view: contrary to what one might think, the “African” is an omnipresent motif in the art of the imperial metropolises of the XVIII^e century. But it is a motif that assigns and invisibilizes Blacks, well before speeches and museums neutralize or fetishize them at the time of the colonial taboo.

The method followed by Anne Lafont thwarts the traps specific to the history of minorities: instead of recounting the “rise” of a proto-racism to demonstrate (and denounce) the stability of its forms, the author seeks to historicize precisely – and all the more implacably – the bushy, discontinuous and rather late process of racialization, of which visual forms are not only a vector, but a laboratory. Anne Lafont also escapes the classic conceptions of art history or the history of representations, which isolate or hierarchize images without a link to their visibility, or reduce them to illustrations. The transnational point of view contributes as much to undoing national and imperial novels as to avoiding overarching globalizations. Contrary to the theses on the autonomy of art, Anne Lafont tracks in a fascinating way the responsibility of images in the naturalization of racial, but also sexual and social difference, which often follow similar trajectories.

Drawing Policies

In the first chapter, devoted to the “art of whiteness”, the historian shows that the motif of the young black page appears with the first policies of segregation by color in the American colonies: executed in 1682 by Pierre Mignard, the portrait of the Duchess of Portsmouth, whose whiteness is underlined by the presence of a young black woman, precedes by one year the fiscal measures targeting non-Whites in the Antilles (1683), and by three years the establishment of the Code Noir (1685). In the graphic arts, Blacks are reduced to social attributes, their color taking on value only to contrast with the whiteness of the main subject. In the second half of the XVIII^e century, the relegation of the Black or the mixed-blood no longer comes only from the strategies of distinction pursued by the Catholics and the nobles since the end of the XV^e century: color prejudice is now part of a new, more radical logic of racialization. Contemporary discourses on art participate in these dynamics: “White (serves) to express light and black (to express) deprivation,” asserts the famous art lover Claude-Henri Watelet, justifying the submission of Blacks by assigning them to an obscurity which, in the language of the Enlightenment, is another name for obscurantism. Chiaroscuro is therefore not only an aesthetic: it is also a policy of white supremacy, within empires exposed to numerous crossbreedings.

Seen as evidence of a degeneration of whiteness (we might have expected a dialogue with the recent theses of Claude-Olivier Doron), albinos and “Nègres-pie” (affected by partial albinism) then arouse a curiosity whose stakes Anne Lafont traces. These pages bear witness to the restorative work of a history capable of being cautiously empathetic, probative and committed. By dismantling the concupiscent colonial devices that mistreat the body of Geneviève, a young albino woman from Domingue, the historian cannot deactivate the violence of the images, but allows us to perceive her existence beyond the screens of colonial art. She thus transmits the tools of a possible reappropriation. This nuanced and reflexive approach allows her to avoid the unfortunate imprudences committed by the book Sex, Race and Colonies : if not sufficiently distanced, colonial images can continue to exert a form of violence.

A visual turning point in human sciences?

In Chapter 2, Anne Lafont shows that the trivialization of racial stereotypes is mainly conveyed by the scientific images of the Enlightenment. Well-known, the horizontal series of profiles by Pierre Camper reveal immutable forms of characters, defined by the measurement of the facial angle. But in 1768, it was still only a question of showing the transformations of a species whose unity Camper, too often presented as one of the fathers of racial anthropology, did not contest. We must therefore look further back, to around 1804, if we want to situate the racist turning point in Western visual culture. While in the Caribbean, former slaves celebrated Haiti’s independence, in the French metropolis, the dissolution of the Society of Observers of Man, founded in the wake of the universalist utopias of the Directory, confirmed the fixist and differentialist turn of anthropological observation: guided by Cuvier’s instructions asking them to pay attention to the “protrusion of the muzzle” or the “shape of the orbits” of the “Naturals” (the Aborigines of New Holland, present-day Australia), the designers of the Baudin expedition to the southern lands (1800-1804) sketched the bases of a visual anthropology that was not based on the objectivity of the sketch “from nature”, but on the racist interpretation that they made of it. An interpretation biased by the desire to isolate specific characteristics and to define the visual grammar of what would become craniometry. This turning point was late compared to other histories of racialization. And according to Anne Lafont, nothing is decided yet. It is not the images taken on the ground that pose a problem, but rather their subsequent reproductions. Retouched in 1824 by Jacques-Gérard Milbert, the portrait of Morore originally made by Nicolas Martin Petit (1802-1803) has become an anthropology plate accumulating racist stereotypes. Cuvier’s wish, according to which a “Negro” cannot be represented as a simple “White smeared with soot” (p. 117), is then fully realized.

Revolutions and the right to representation

However, the Enlightenment marked both the height of the slave trade and the rise of anti-colonial criticism, the worsening of segregation by color, and the rise of abolitionism. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on this contrasting period. Marked by the Atlantic revolutions at the end of the century, it seemed to promise people of color a new right to visibility and representation. Artists such as Carmontelle and Maurice Quentin La Tour created portraits of black men who escaped reification and subjection. But the gap was narrow: only a few faces pierced the fog of millions of anonymous people, such as the proud one of the deputy Jean-Baptiste Belley, exhibited by Girodet at the Salon of 1797, or that of Yarrow Mamout, by Charles Willson Peale (1819). Because revolutions are also a time of invisibility for minorities excluded from the new citizenship: Anne Lafont shows how the Afro-Native American insurgent Crispus Attucks, one of the first victims of the Boston Massacre (March 5, 1770), is erased from the first engravings of the event. With a few exceptions, Atlantic revolutionary heroism is white and male, as confirmed by the fate of Toussaint-Louverture, a “hero without an image” (p. 211). Anne Lafont does not dwell on this very much, and yet, Black people develop many strategies to escape the stigmas to which their skin color exposes them.

The visual constraints of black and white engravings also stimulate the art of camouflage. Thus, Moses Williams, a freed slave at work, disguised as an Indian in Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia museum, creates his own silhouette in shadow thanks to the physionotrace that he is supposed to handle for the clientele: a gesture of appropriation through which the technician “profile cutter” chooses to put his professional identity before his racial identity, the black background of the profile in fact disguising his skin color.

Black, the object of decoration

Chapter 5 confirms the dignity that visual studies have given to the decorative arts. The motif of the “African” or “Negro” invades the well-off interiors of the Atlantic metropolises that profit fully from the slave trade. Through its exoticism, it even gives a market value to the furniture of the first colonial capitalism (p. 254). Exhibited as signs of distinction in domestic or shop scenographies, these little-known “Africaneries” nevertheless form the African counterpart of Orientalism: detached from their context, integrated into the “theater of objects” of the worldliness of the Enlightenment, these motifs are trophies all the more powerful because they are neutralized as objects of furniture. However, tapestries and porcelain services sometimes contribute to disseminating other images: Anne Lafont recalls that the kneeling slave who will become the emblem of the British and French abolitionists is originally a seal created by Josiah Wedgwood, an entrepreneur in earthenware and porcelain. A duality present in the last chapter, which shows that if the images of the XVIII^e century legitimize colonial violence, they also sometimes help to raise public awareness of abolition, like the illustrations in chapter 19 of Candid or those of William Blake on the repression of slaves in Dutch Guiana (1772-1774).

The power of forms in question

With regard to Blacks and their access to representation, the Enlightenment, which Antoine Lilti invites us to reread in the light of its ambivalences beyond the incriminating or exonerating assessments, will therefore have been at the very least “paradoxical”, as Anne Lafont also underlines in her conclusion. These paradoxes of the Enlightenment, moreover already underlined by many English-language works linked to the Black Or African-American Studiescould perhaps have served more as a common thread to clarify the argument: the repetitions and returns of this narration, taken from an academic work, are the counterpart of the desire to introduce doubt and complexity in the face of the teleological steamroller of national novels – but it also generates its share of confusion. Stimulating, inheriting from the works showing the role of scientific images of the Enlightenment in the search for an (unfindable) objectivity naturalizing constructed phenomena, the second chapter lends itself most to discussion. Accustomed to fighting against the quasi (and misleading) monopoly of written documents in the corpora of the modernists, Anne Lafont overestimates and probably isolates the power of forms and visual culture in the definition of a racist pseudo-science, as well as the credit they have in imperial policies – a credit that is too little verifiable, for want of conducting the investigation at the imperial and transnational scales on their precise circulations and uses.

Attentive to deconstructing the racial categories of Western empires, the author forgets to abandon the use of the qualifier “Anglo-Saxon”, although it comes from the Anglo-Saxonism of the XIX^e century: an ideology notably propagated by British and American nationalists affirming the existence and superiority of the Saxon race. The book finally dismisses the powerful visual models of trans-imperial race-making that are the caste paintings of the Spanish empire. However, these discussions only reflect the impressive breadth of a work that allows the French-speaking public to access questions that have long been trivialized in the English-speaking world. A member of the scientific committee of the exhibition “The Black Model. From Géricault to Matisse”, presented at the Musée d’Orsay in 2019, Anne Lafont shows here that it is possible to decolonize the view of art, without giving up on holding the threads of a possible common history, between yesterday and today.