The way in which the arts known as " nègres " electrified the artistic avant-gardes in the years 1910 is now well known. In France, Germany and all over Europe, artists became enthusiastic about these arts as they visited museums, drew them and " absorbed " their aesthetic. It is particularly interesting to consider this phenomenon in the light of the emergence, in the United States and Europe, of a major movement of reflection on the racial question and on negritude, driven in particular by the voices of W.E.B. Du Bois and the young Aimé Césaire, even if this appropriation of new formal canons was not seen, at the time, in terms of artistic fertilization, since, as Jacques Lipchitz summed it up lapidarily in 1920 : " Of course, Negro art was a great example for us. [...] But it would be wrong to believe that our art has become mulatto because of this. It is quite white. " (" Opinions sur l'art nègre ", Action, vol. 1,no 3, April 1920).
By focusing on African presences in European museums, this series of lectures aims as much to explore the ways in which a considerable number of objects have been transferred to Western public collections, and the discourses that have accompanied their arrival, as to question what their presence here says about their absence in their native territories.
