The Great Colonial Minstrel Show: Reconsidering Africa in the Art of Palmer Hayden

In 1935, after a brief sojourn in Paris, African American sculptor Richmond Barthé modeled an extraordinary nude of the Senegalese dancer, Féral Benga. Barthé's sculpture suggests the sensuous grace of Benga's erotic movements, rendering the dancer's stunning figure as a series of serpentine curves. Beginning with the arc of a curved sword held above his head, the viewer's gaze traces the contours of Benga's body down the sinews of his powerful arms and across broad shoulders that flow into a slim, lithe torso. Benga's muscular thighs follow, thrust forward and pressed firmly together as he balances on the balls of his feet. Although the quiet elegance of the repeated curvilinear forms of Barthé's sculpture deviates from the frenetic energy and sharp angles associated with Jazz Age performance and visual culture, as epitomized by Josephine Baker, the primal eroticism of the figure corresponds to the primitivist impulses of the period's modernism.¹

Painted just four years earlier during the artist's own Paris sojourn, Palmer Hayden's generically titled African Dancer (1932) is certainly no Féral Benga. In contrast to the striking grace of Barthé's sculpture, the body of Hayden's dancer strikes the viewer as more "primitive minstrel" than primitive

Paul Colin, poster for La Revue Negre au Music-hall des Champs-Élysées, 1925. © Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: DeA Picture Library / Art Resource, NY

Palmer Hayden, African Dancer, 1932. Watercolor, 13 x 10 1/2 in.

Used with permission of the Museum of African American Art, Los Angeles, CA

modern. At the center of the work the dancer struts his stuff across the page against a backdrop of toron-studded, mud-mounded architecture. In front of these spiked domes, two palm trees rise at the left-hand margin of the scene, and together the two elements produce a sense of the "exotic" African locale. Feet forward, face profiled in the opposite direction, body twisted in a three-quarter attitude with palms pushing outward, the contorted mess of angles that comprise the performer's body should conform to primitive modern expectations for an African dancer, but the effect is all wrong. Instead of a sleek black physique, skinny legs with no muscle definition emerge from beneath the billows of a short, soft skirt giving way to the figure's flabby belly, and the dancer's pose exudes none of the dynamic energy or confounding grace for which Parisians praised Baker.²

Echoing the spiked mounds of the architecture behind him, the pointy peaks of prosthetic breast cones, suspended from a necklace of sharp, talonlike forms, project from the dancer's body, as though threatening to pierce the paper on which they are painted. But who can take a threat seriously coming from a face like his? The understated edge of danger that typically characterizes images of le primitif

Richmond Barthé, Feral Benga (Benga: Dance Figure), 1935. Bronze, 19 1/2 in.

Courtesy Newark Museum. © Richmond Barthé Trust. Photo: Newark Museum / Art Resource, NY

is exorcised by the soft roundness of the dancer's flaccid paunch and, especially, the exaggerated ridiculousness of his minstrel face. There can be no mistaking the wide grin made by fat lips that finish the dancer's elongated jawline, the profile emphasizing the pronounced backward slope of the forehead, or the enthusiasm of the smile that reduces his eyes to squinting slits. Though there seems to be no need to further underscore the performer's absurdity, Hayden completes the look with a hoop earring and a preposterous little red cap, essentially transforming the dancer into an organ-grinder monkey—the effect more silly than sauvage.

Accounting for the Africa in the Work of Palmer Hayden

Although the Harlem Renaissance marks an important cultural moment at which many black Americans first embraced their African heritage as an ancestral legacy worthy of celebration...