Jérôme Neutres – Jean Pigozzi’s imagined Africa

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EXPRESSIONS OF AFRICA
Inside Jean Pigozzi’s Collection
Jean Pigozzi’s imagined Africa
by Jérôme Neutres
110 years ago, in 1909, Raymond Roussel published
Impressions of Africa, a masterpiece of literature that would
influence both art and literature, creating enthusiasm among
both Apollinaire and the surrealists. Raymond Roussel had
not however ever stepped foot in Africa. He always insisted
on the central and centrifugal role of “the imagination” in
the composition of his texts. “He is just following the whims
of his imagination,” André Breton, one of his most fervent
admirers, said of him. Roussel inspired generations of
creators, starting in 1912 through Francis Picabia or Marcel
Duchamp who discovered Impressions of Africa during the
theatrical revival of the text. It was Roussel who inspired
Duchamp for the masterpiece that is The Large Glass, or
Tinguely - even later - with his drawing machines in the
1950s. Amongst other artistic visions, Roussel imagined in
his book a machine that painted and drew autonomously
through “strange photo-mechanical properties.” His influence
is international: the author’s discourse and style have a
universal scope: particularly in the United States, Roussel is
considered a new Rabelais.
Impressions of Africa positioned the horizon of
modernity and aesthetic innovation in an imagined Africa.
Roussel’s Africa came out of that Africa which in European
culture, was first and foremost an “interior Africa” to use
anthropologist Jean-Pierre Dozon’s phrase, that is, first and
foremost a mental image, a sort of symbolic non-place open
to all the most diverse representations. Roussel’s Impressions
of Africa is part of the canon of books that forged a mythical
Africa, functioning for artists as a symbolic field, almost
the synonym of a utopia. Africa as a radically foreign space
represented at the beginning of the 20 th century an almost
surreal domain, which allowed a glimpse of access to other
possible artistic forms, and to other languages. A form of
visionary prejudice in one sense, if it may be said, when we
know to what extent Africa actually contained – and contains
– original and powerful cultures and images. Thanks in part to
Roussel and his Impressions of Africa, though invented and
implausible, Africa became for western creators the mirror of
an artistic modernity, festive and subversive. “Our voyage is
fully imaginary. That is its strength” as L .- F. Céline tells it so
well in the prologue to his Voyage to the End of the Night.
Raymond Roussel never traveled to Africa. Neither did
Jean Pigozzi. An eccentric dandy who never wore the same
shirt twice, Roussel spent his life between the fashionable
16 th arrondissement in Paris and the south of Italy. Without
knowing it, this other eccentric dandy of Italian origin who
is Jean Pigozzi – who only dresses himself in the clothes he
designs – grew up in Paris at an address close to Roussel’s.
There are no coincidences. It was also without knowing what
he was seeking that Jean Pigozzi found himself one day in
August 1989, 30 years ago, at the Grande Hall de la Villette,
to see the Magiciens de la Terre exhibit before it closed.
Another event that would be a milestone in the history of
culture, Magiciens de la Terre, under the administration of
Jean-Hubert Martin, then director of the Musée National d’Art
Moderne at the Centre Pompidou, showed for the first time
under the stewardship of a great French museum, amongst
a wide international selection, some contemporary African
artists. Amongst them: Frédéric Bruly-Bouabré, Seni Awa
Camara, Esther Mahlangu, and Chéri Samba. The world of
western art, up to that point so ethnocentric, was opening
itself to other horizons of creation, and African artistic
culture was coming out of the ethnographic ghetto where
people loved to imprison it. A photographic artist and lover
of art, Jean Pigozzi’s eye was at the time fascinated by the
freshness of these hanging African creations, and seduced
by their artistic strength, by their new vision of the world.
He decided after this initial visit to start, with the support
of André Magnin, the commissioner of the African section of