Art Histories
2018/ 2019

Daniel Horn

Les Autres Temps Modernes – Présence Africaine, Existentialism, Art Brut and the Revision of Primitivism in Postwar Paris (1945-1960)

is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art and an assistant curator at the Museum Rietberg in Zurich. Following postgraduate studies at the University of California Los Angeles on a Moss Scholarship he completed his PhD in art theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna while also conducting research at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. The dissertation received the Award of Excellence by the Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy of Austria. His research was a comparative study of völkisch, proto-fascist art theory and propaganda of late Weimar Republic to early national socialist Germany and the contemporaneous political writings of Georges Bataille and his circle of dissident Surrealists. He regularly publishes on modern and contemporary art and theory and his writing can be found in exhibition catalogues, artist monographs and journals including Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Springerin, Frieze, and May Art Quarterly.

Les Autres Temps Modernes – Présence Africaine, Existentialism, Art Brut and the Revision of Primitivism in Postwar Paris (1945-1960)

The research revisits the art-historical debates concerning artistic autonomy and cultural appropriation specific to the magazine and publishing house Présence Africaine, founded in Paris in 1947 by the Senegalese writer Alioune Diop. The momentum of this novel cultural criticism by a black authorship partly recouped and built upon the prewar négritude movement’s scholarship and analysis that had been disrupted during the city’s occupation. But this intellectual milieu was further directly engaged as much as confronted with the definitive existentialist movement around Jean-Paul Sartre — a member of Présence Africaine’s initial advisory board — and with neo-primitivist endeavors of an intentionally inarticulate and quasi-ahistorical art brut, notably by the artist Jean Dubuffet and championed by establishment figures such as André Breton. The study focuses on the first decade of Présence African, in the course of which its initial concerns of cultural production as theorized by a distinctly migratory and cosmopolitan experience gradually faded into the background in favor of an activist anti-colonialist agenda. While situating this proto-postcolonialist art history in the context of the Algeria Crisis and the decolonization of the Afrique-Occidentale française territories in 1960, the study aims to also highlight the import of Présence Africaine to subsequent questions of aesthetic hegemony and appropriation within Western visual culture.