In the 1920s and 1930s, anthropology and ethnography provided new and
striking ways of rethinking what art could be and the forms which it
could take. This book examines the impact of these emergent disciplines
on the artistic avant-garde in Paris. The reception by European artists
of objects arriving from colonial territories in the first half of the
twentieth century is generally understood through the artistic
appropriation of the forms of African or Oceanic sculpture. The author
reveals how anthropological approaches to this intriguing material began
to affect the ways in which artists, theorists, critics and curators
thought about three-dimensional objects and their changing status as
'art', 'artefacts' or 'ethnographic evidence'. This book analyses texts,
photographs and art works that cross disciplinary boundaries, through
case studies including the Dakar to Djibouti expedition of 1931-33, the
Trocadéro Ethnographic Museum, and the two art periodicals Documents and
Minotaure. Through its interdisciplinary and contextual approach, it
provides an important corrective to histories of modern art and the
European avant-garde.