Session Desciption: Two multimedia abstract painting movements, the Black-Caribbean School and Vohou-Vohou, took shape starting in the late 1960s, mostly in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, but also across other locations in West Africa, the West Indies, and France. The two modernist movements comprised, on the one hand, several African-descended artists from Fort-de-France who studied art in Nice before coming to live and work in West Africa (Serge Hélénon, Louis Laouchez, Mathieu-Jean Gensin); and on the other, a younger generation of Ivorian artists who attended art school in Abidjan before continuing their education in Paris (Kra N’Guessan, Youssouf Bath, Yacouba Touré, Théodore Koudougnon, Ernestine Meledge, Mathilde Moreau, Christine Ozoua, and others). I argue in this lecture that to conceive of “Ivorian painting” as a constellation of transnational trajectories is to challenge a predominant mode of writing modern African art history as a series of national narratives. An expanded history of “Ivorian painting,” which takes into account the African American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s influential solo exhibition in Abidjan in 1986 at a time of profound economic uncertainty for Côte d’Ivoire, also serves to register the historical and conceptual limits of African modernism as they were first becoming visible in the late 1980s. The end of the Cold War would soon usher in another transnational paradigm—a “contemporary” one—nurtured more by market forces than by state initiatives of any kind. The new dispensation, favoring individual producers over collectives, swept aside the classically modernist convention of forming artistic “schools” or movements. For African artists, the “global” post-1989 art world effectively undermined the status of formal art training, with game-changing exhibitions and major new collectors now valuing untrained practitioners to the exclusion of art-school graduates.

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Speaker Biography: Dr. Joshua I. Cohen, Associate Professor at Stanford University, is a historian of modern art specializing in African/diaspora, postcolonial, and global Cold War studies. His first book, The “Black Art” Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents (2020), received honorable mention for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize. His current book project is tentatively titled Negritude Permutations: African Modernism, Decolonization, and the Global Cold War.