Art historian James Smalls, a professor of visual arts, researches the intersections of race, gender, and queer sexuality in both 19th-century art and the broader visual culture of the Black diaspora. Smalls is on a thrilling adventure to uncover the life and legacy of Senegalese performer known as Féral Benga and restore him to his rightful place in art history, and in a twist of timing fate, his research might also protect Benga’s final resting place. Smalls spent nine months in 2024 at the Getty Research Institute in California as part of their Getty Scholars Program, which gave him time to work on his next book, Féral Benga: African Muse of Modernism, and continue connecting the dots of Benga’s artistic impact.
Q: What led you to research Féral Benga?
A: I found a black and white photo of a sculpture by Richmond Barthé, an African American sculptor of the Harlem Renaissance. It’s a beautiful sculpture of a Black man holding aloft a kind of saber, doing this hypnotic dance. It was titled Féral Benga, and I thought, ‘Well, what’s that? Is that a type of dance that I’m looking at or something else?’ Eventually, I found out that this is the stage name of François Benga, who adopted the name when he began performing at the Folies Bergère [a famous cabaret music hall in Paris]. Benga was a very statuesque sort of dancer. His dance technique combined African dance with classical ballet and acrobatics. I wanted to learn more, which led to years of research trying to create an archive of his life and art.
Q: How did Féral Benga‘s statue inspire the next step of your research journey?
A: I discovered that Benga became a muse for visual artists during the early part of the 20th century and that he had a very interesting personality.
He was a very magnetic sort of person and had many amorous affairs. Benga was gay and belonged to a gay circle of avant-garde artists. Jean Cocteau was one of those people and included him in his first avant-garde film, The Blood of a Poet, in 1932.
Q: What were some of Féral Benga’s contributions before and after World War II?
A: Before WWII, Benga owned a cabaret and a Senegalese restaurant in Paris where he performed. After WWII, he again established a nightclub, a cabaret called La Rose Rouge, where young African artists and students gathered and created works, leading to the beginning of the Négritude movement within the performing arts. [The Négritude movement was an anti-colonial cultural and political movement founded by a group of African and Caribbean students in Paris in the 1930s who sought to reclaim the value of blackness and African culture.]
I want to dispel the notion that women and people of color did not contribute to modernism and the avant-garde movement. They are sort of written out of art history. I’ve learned Benga contributed greatly to these two movements. Through my research, I want to bring that to the surface so that people are aware of that, that they’re just not on the side.
Q: Did your research bring any unexpected finds?
A: I put an alert out on eBay for any imagery of Féral Benga. For a while, I didn’t hear anything. Then, suddenly, something came up. A woman in France started selling photographs of him without knowing who he was. She had this huge box of images and wanted to sell them piecemeal to make money. Each time she sent me a photo, she added some candid shots of the dancer. One shows him smoking a cigarette at a party, and another in a park. Suddenly, Swiss art dealers bought the rest of the collection. They have agreed to let me use the photos for my book.
It turned out the woman’s father was an estate dealer. He found this box of photos in a house in Châteauroux, in central France, that I later discovered was Féral Benga’s house.
Q: Did you find additional traces of Benga’s life during your trip to France?
A: I went to the Saint-Denis cemetery in Châteauroux and found the family tomb where he is buried. I’m still researching the family, which is difficult because there are no records. It’s interesting work because I’m trying to piece together this life that was very popular and well-known at the time but then suddenly sort of disappeared from history.
The concession [rights to the plot of land] on the family tomb is set to run out in 2028—the French government will disinter the remains and put them in different ossuaries. I’m petitioning the French government to preserve Féral Benga’s grave because he is an important icon of Black diasporic modernism.
Q: Are there connections between this research and the research for your first book, The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts?
A: Carl Van Vechten was a great patron of the Harlem Renaissance, a writer, and a photographer. If you see old photographs of African Americans from the Harlem Renaissance, portraits of people in music, dance, theater, and cultural people, those images are by Carl Van Vechten. He was very well known during the period. He also did a lot of private erotic photography, which is what my book was about.
The connection to my new book is that Féral Benga arrived in New York City in 1937, and Carl Van Vechten invited Féral Benga over into his studio apartment and took many interesting photographs of him.
It’s been a great journey piecing all this research together. Now, I must finish the book.
Learn more about UMBC’s Department of Visual Arts.
Tags: CAHSS, CAHSS_research, International, Research, VisualArts