ART AND RACE - THE AFRICAN (ALL) AGAINST THE EYE OF LIGHT

Drawing on a corpus of well-known and lesser-known works of art, the author revisits the Fine Arts in the 18th century from the angle of the representation of Blacks, figures who not only articulate anthropological knowledge and aesthetic experiences, but also the history of metropolitan luxury and history of colonial slavery. This book is based on more than ten years of research on the forms that the figures of the African man and woman have taken in French continental and colonial art before the abolitionist imagination. It covers visual and artistic cultures spanning from the late 17th century – at the time of Coypel, Mignard, Largillière… – when the West Indian colonies began to break through in the metropolitan artistic field, in the first third from the 19th century – at the time of Girodet, Benoist and Léthière up to Géricault… – when the failure of the first abolition of slavery (1802) hardened partisan iconography, bringing the violence of plantation life to the agenda of artistic creation.