From “Primitive” to Postmodern: Artists of African Descent in Britain

Monique Fowler-Paul
School of Oriental and African Studies

For his appropriation of African art in Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Picasso has been lauded as a genius of modern art. However, the African artists who had so inspired him were characterized by his European peers as primitive savages. When these “primitives” migrated to Europe to train in its academies and stake their claim as modern artists, they were denied the same praise. Instead of being seen as innovative, in a spectacular double standard, their art was labeled derivative. In the first half of the last century, modernity proclaimed a linear progression of artistic development that did not allow for multiple voices, diverse cultures, or alternate trajectories.

Between 1940 and 1970, the British population swelled with unprecedented numbers of immigrants from countries under British colonial rule or from former British colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Artists came too for opportunities in education, employment, and the support of an established international art scene. This “first wave” of artist immigrants helped to redefine modernity by synthesizing its stylistic trends and formal ideologies with their non-European heritages and their own imaginations. Frank Bowling, Uzo Egonu, and Aubrey Williams are all artists whose bodies of work are formally and conceptually modern, yet modernity is a concept from which they were originally barred and to which they were viewed as tangential. Their very existence necessitates a paradigm shift, from a modernity founded on racial superiority and oppression to one that embraces artistic innovation and appropriation from all artists, regardless of ancestry.

In the 1980s, the second generation of immigrants who had been born, raised, and educated in Britain came of age. Modernism gave way to postmodernism, and it encompassed the very paradigm shift for which their predecessors had called. Artists like Lubaina Himid and Chris Ofili effectively dismantled an ideology that denigrated them and their ancestors. They rejected established narratives, and proposed new ones that liberated the double standard that had marginalized them and demanded equal respect and recognition.