US Critics and Racial Anxiety at the 1925 Exposition

Abstract What was behind the heated—some even called it “hysterical”—responses by US critics to the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes? This article uses the close reading of primary documents and speculative counternarratives to argue that anxiety about the racialized identity of modern design played a role in the US reactions. Prior to 1925, the modernism of the Parisian art world included extensive exploration and appropriation of the art of its African colonies in a movement dubbed l’art nègre, and during the decade Paris became a destination for Black American artists and musicians. White American critics of the 1925 Exposition expressed distaste for the work they saw, using language that associated French design with racialized Others. In the 1920s, one of the most thoughtful writers on the topic of African art was Alain Locke, who spent the summer of 1925 completing work on the path-breaking anthology The New Negro and did not visit Paris. It is thought provoking to ask what might have happened had he seen the Exposition and written about it. Might he have called for Black designers to have taken up this modernism?