In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.
From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition: Europe and the World Beyond focuses geographically on peoples of South America and the Mediterranean as well as Africa—but conceptually it emphasizes the many ways that visual constructions of blacks mediated between Europe and a faraway African continent that was impinging ever more closely on daily life, especially in cities and ports engaged in slave trade. Images of blacks during this period did not follow European contact per se but rather tracked the professions involved in painting, engraving, and print making, which were primarily based in Holland. Dutch masters’ representational mode dominated the depiction of distant lands, and their works are featured in Part 2 of Volume III.
Taken together, Parts 1 and 2 of this third volume of TheImage of the Black in Western Art show in considerable depth the efforts Europeans made to understand the African peoples they frequently used so ill.
