Frantz Fanon, or the Difficulty of Being Martinican

These are farewells to a mode of being dominated by the jazz-age imagery that equates 'black' with 'music', and to the cult of le tumulte noir, or to the highly productive collision between forms of popular entertainment and a certain modernism in the 1930s.3 African art or art negre was popularized by many agencies from the Picasso of 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' (1907), in which the faces of the women depicted are modelled on African masks, to surrealists in search of a new vitalism that could reinvigorate a bloodless European culture. The furniture shown at the 1925 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs, which produced the term Art Deco', incorporated African' elements into the design of stools, chair backs and other pieces of furniture. A modernist primitivism emerged, but it was also underpinned by the work of anthropologists and psychiatrists who spoke of the pre-logical mentality to be observed in 'races' from south of the Sahara.