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same subjects, regardless of when and where,
whether in Africa or in a setting of the African
diaspora. The parallels are often striking.

More than anything else, the exhibition presents
a universe of people whom white people have
obstinately set aside on the basis of skin color.
This segregation, occasionally rigidly legal, often
subtle, always iniquitous, has influenced the way
that the subjects see and depict themselves in
a world dominated by those who for centuries
have sought to dominate them. The artists
have refused the centrality of colonialism by
recurring to figuration, one of the oldest forms
of representation, and that figuration is breath-
taking in its inventiveness.

Triumph and Emancipation marks the beginning
of the visit, an end-point as a beginning from
which to look backward and take the measure
of what the past hundred years have meant for
these people and their struggle to be recognized
as full human beings.

But it is the themes The Everyday (which
includes Meleko Mokgosi’s three-panel spread),
Spirituality and Joy and Revelry that bring alive
real people carrying on their ordinary lives,
an ordinariness consistently belied by the
extraordinary vividness of the depictions. Vallotton (2019). The naked model is a woman
reclining on a bed, a uniform very pale brown
Spirituality covers everything from various (along with the voluminous cloth covering
traditional rituals and situations to those the bed), and on the foot of the bed is seated a
obviously emanating from the colonizers’ very black woman in a turquoise dress wearing
imposition of Christianity. Between the two are a brilliant red turban and smoking a cigarette.
hybrids of sorts, testifying to both European For those familiar with the Lausanne painter’s
influence and indomitable African tradition. To works, it is at once blatantly iconoclastic, almost
Jacob Lawrence from Atlantic City, who died in a repudiation of Vallotton, and at the same time
2000 at the age of 83, we owe an entire wall of instantly evocative of many of his paintings.
eight canvasses, Genesis Creation, depicting in
brilliant colors the various stages of creation as The exhibition is accompanied by a sumptuous
recounted in the first book of the Bible. Without catalog of 336 pages, reproducing all the
knowing his life’s details (he was a product of the paintings, with each thematic section preceded
Harlem Renaissance, spent his life working in by an original work of fiction from Black writers.
the United States and taught at the University of These alone make the catalog worth acquiring.
Washington) one would immediately assume he
was from, working in, and uniquely inspired by Running through 27 October, the exposition is
Africa. This is only one example of the unity in punctuated by a series of related cultural events
diversity that infuses all the artists’ works. organized by the Kunstmuseum ( Kunstmuseum
Basel | Gegenwart ).s
Under Sensuality, one finds the Ivoirian Roméo
Mivekannin’s La modèle noir, d’après Félix

w w w. d i va i n t e r n at i o n a l . c h