The white peril and l’art nègre picasso, primitivism, and anticolonialism
Yet the modernists did not extend this social criticism to a radical critique of the reductive view of Africans that was promoted for colonial justification. Instead, they embraced a deeply romanticized view of African culture (conflating many cultures into one), and considered Africa the embodiment of humankind in a precivilized state, preferring to mystify rather than to examine its presumed idol-worship and violent rituals. The modernists selfconsciously subverted colonial stereotypes, both of the right and the left, but their subversive revisions necessarily remained implicated in the prejudices they sought to expose, so that modernist images now appear no less stereotypical and reductive than the racist caricatures they opposed. The modernists' method was to critique civilization by embracing an imagined "primitiveness" of Africans whose "authenticity" they opposed to a "decadent" West. This subject is therefore a difficult one for us, since it separates us profoundly from a generation that much criticism has domesticated to a comfortable neutrality and with whose modernity it has been inviting to identify. But if we are to understand early modern art, it is crucial to understand both this reductive impulse and its manifestation among the modernists: they wanted to subvert Western artistic traditions-and the social order in which they were implicated - by celebrating a Nietzschean return to those imagined "primitive" states whose suppression they viewed as having cut off a necessary vitality. Equally, we must recognize how profoundly these artists misunderstood African art and how utterly Western and moderniste were the terms of their admiration.
