Paul S. Wingert's The Sculpture of Negro Africa, 1950

African Art

First Edition

[African][Fine Art] Wingert, Paul S. The Sculpture of Negro Africa. New York: Columbia University Press, 1950. First edition. With 96 pages of halftone plates. Original rust cloth binding with pictorial dust jacket. A midcentury study of African art history. The Sculpture of Negro Africa was among the earliest comprehensive English-language treatments to frame sub-Saharan sculpture not as ethnographic curiosity but as high art. Columbia University professor Paul Wingert surveys the major regional styles and iconographies across West, Central, and East Africa—including detailed analyses of Benin bronzes, Yoruba and Ife terra cottas, Ashanti royal regalia, Fang reliquary figures, and the sculptural traditions of the Dogon, Baga, Bakongo, Mangbetu, and Zulu peoples. Importantly, Wingert attempts to correct the prevailing colonial lens by emphasizing the social functions, ritual significance, and aesthetic philosophies embedded in African material culture. The book draws on objects held in American museum collections, but the author situates these works in their original cultural contexts through an accessible synthesis of ethnographic and formal analysis. His approach reflects an emerging postwar academic interest in African art’s influence on Western modernism—especially as first recognized by European avant-garde artists in Paris—but also gestures toward a fuller recognition of its indigenous artistic integrity. Jacket rubbed with minor chipping at to left corner. Interior fine. An important text that helped reframe African sculpture as a subject of serious aesthetic study within Western art history curricula, while also documenting the early American reception of African visual traditions.

Item #22154

Price: $225.00