Ulli Beier and the Problem of Postcolonial Modernism

This chapter examines the work of the critic, curator, and publisher Ulli Beier (1922–2011), whose advocacy for the early work of Africa’s postcolonial modernists in the 1960s reveals the simultaneously productive and awkward relations among African artists and their European champions at a time both parties differentially imagined the relationship between art, decolonization, and nationalism. It argues that although Beier understood the task the artists had set for themselves, which was to articulate the artistic conditions of political sovereignty, he also misrecognized the point of the artists’ stylistic and discursive engagements with “traditional art” and national culture as a crucial part of articulating their manifold modern subjectivities and artistic visions.