Joshua Cohen's The “Black Art” Renaissance is a refreshing and thought-provoking study of African art in the modern world. Primarily concerned with the circulation of African art and ideas about Africa in the twentieth century, the case studies presented in this book will continue to inform our understanding of modernism for years to come. Cohen's research is found at the indistinct intersection of African and European art. From this vantage point, he indicates the concepts that have been used to distort African art by trapping it in a “methodological cul-de-sac where distinctions are out of reach because everything looks the same” (p. x). Static categories such as “primitivism” and art nègre are rightfully deconstructed and reconstructed to reveal the multivalent ways they were employed in different spaces. Next, Cohen unravels a transcontinental history of modernism to reveal complex networks of exchange between sculptural practices in Africa, the avant-garde in Europe, and the Harlem Renaissance in America. The rich and original research presented in The “Black Art” Renaissance is a testament to Cohen's inquisitive and methodical approach to museological records, archives, artist statements, and primary sources.Throughout his book, Cohen explores complex networks of exchange among Africa, Europe, and North America, complicating the linear clear-cut approaches to history that are often privileged in academia. Chapter 1, aptly titled “Rethinking Fauve ‘Primitivism,”‘ displaces the Fauves’ “discovery” of African sculpture from the fall of 1906 to the late summer or early fall of 1905. Central to this chapter are French artists Maurice de Vlaminck and Andre Derain. In a 1943 memoir, Vlaminck wrote of an afternoon in 1905 when he first encountered African sculptures at a bistro in Argenteuil, France. Awestruck by this sight, Vlaminck went on to acquire masks from a friend of his father's and eventually sold one of them, a mask that has now been identified as a ngontang mask from the Fang ethnic group in Gabon, to his friend Derain. Going a step further by considering the social and political conditions that framed the mask's production in Gabon, Cohen grapples with two possibilities: “[given] the colonial context, this mask must have been carved either as an export commodity modeled after a ritual ngontang, or as an export commodity independent of ngontang” (p. 32). Both options posit the ngontang mask as aCohen's reassessment of the Fauves’ encounter with African art is significant for several reasons: by establishing the ngontang mask as a hybrid and modern object prior to its “discovery” by the Fauvists, this chapter provides a fresh perspective from which to approach early Fauvist engagement with art nègre. The reevaluation of this encounter also invites alternative ways for considering the conceptual framework of “primitivism,” a term which continues to be used as a descriptor for those cultures and phenomena that do not fall under the discrete parameters of European artistic traditions.The purpose of chapter 2 is twofold: first, Cohen identifies specific objects and ideas that informed Picasso's practice, paying special attention to works such as Guitar and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Next, in an attempt to gain a more complete grasp of the source elements that were so influential in Picasso's work, the second half of this chapter traces the narratives of the Kru and Grebo masks owned by the Spanish artist to the West African countries of Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire. By interrogating the histories of Kru and Grebo masks in their source communities and in museum records, Cohen challenges the ethnic and geographical categories that these masks are often bound to. In this way, common assumptions that seek to erase Africa's imprint on modernity are subverted, while highlighting the influence of each mask's unique formal elements and respective historical and cultural contexts on modern history.Chapter 3 is concerned with what sociologist Paul Gilroy has termed the Black Atlantic: the triangular trade routes among Africa, Europe, and America. Much like Gilroy, whose examination of the Middle Passage explores “the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artefacts” (Gilroy 1993: 4), Cohen considers how artists and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and ‘30s welcomed new ways of thinking about Africa. During this period, African art became increasingly accessible to African Americans through the organization of what Cohen calls “‘Negro’ exhibitions rooted in modern Afro-American and pan-Africanist sensibilities,” as well as through the works of various artists who appropriated African sculptural forms, “usually with little if any background knowledge for deciphering these works’ visual codes” (p. 100). Central to the African American engagement with African art was the question of identity. More specifically, the Harlem Renaissance offered new opportunities to construct a Black diasporic identity that was realized through selective engagements with African American, European, and African sources. It is important to note that although African Americans were reckoning with a diaspora consciousness that connected them to Africa, they did not rely on a single unifying conceptualization of Black identity. In fact, as Cohen demonstrates through his reading of Alain LeRoy Locke's texts, the Harlem Renaissance invited difficult and sometimes contradictory “transatlantic dialogues around modernism” (p. 114). By working diligently through a number of Locke's influential essays, as well as those written by his critics, Cohen presents the shifting and unstable grounds upon which African art was placed by central figures of the Harlem Renaissance.In the remaining chapters, Cohen shifts his focus to African modernist artists who “reclaimed both the rights to African heritage and the roots of twentieth-century avant-garde figuration,” through a strategic manipulation of classical African sculpture (p. 128). One such artist was Ernest Mancoba, a South African modernist sculptor and painter (chapter 4). Mancoba's early approach to art was heavily informed by the political and social conditions of his colonial-era reality in South Africa. However, during a visit to the British Museum in 1938, while on his way to Paris, Mancoba would come to a realization that prompted a seismic shift from his earlier works. Cohen writes,Moved by this realization, Mancoba abandoned the representational forms of his earlier works, choosing instead to embrace abstraction. Mancoba would later go on to join the northern European collective of avantgarde artists known as CoBrA (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam), where he would be subjected to racism and prejudice by the other CoBrA artists. An additional point of friction between Mancoba and his colleagues had to do with their philosophical convictions: Mancoba claimed postcolonial humanism, while the CoBrA artists denounced humanism, perhaps to the extent of critiquing it as bourgeois intellectualism. Even the artist's approach to art differed from that of his colleagues: while many CoBrA artists privileged spontaneity and childlike forms, Mancoba's style was slow and deliberate. For Mancoba, his work served a higher purpose beyond the aesthetic realm: by translating canonical African sculptural elements into two- and three-dimensional works, the artist ensured that his creations functioned as “healing emissaries to the spiritually depleted West” (p. 159).Mancoba's dreams of “using African art to bridge existential divides and restore the world to wholeness” correspond with some of Léopold Seghor's thoughts surrounding Négritude and art nègre which are explored in the fifth and final chapter (p. 153). Négritude was a “loosely conceived literary and anticolonial movement calling for Black cultural rediscovery and full participation in modernity,” founded by Senghor, the first president of Senegal, in collaboration with Aimé Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas. Within the framework of Négritude, Blackness was disaggregated from race in favor of a political and malleable term that could be mobilized to include people of diverse backgrounds, irrespective of their racial identities. Collapsing the “fixed ontology of ‘Black’“ allowed Francophone Black intellectuals and artists to “manipulate, destabilize, and revaluate race, even as they also rein-scribed it” (p. 163). One notable example of this reinscription is noted in the Introduction: in a speech delivered at the opening of the 1972 exhibition of Picasso's work at the Musée Dominique in Dakar, Senegal, Senghor recognized Picasso as a producer of “Black art” (p. 3). Senghor's strategy underlined Picasso's debt to African sculpture, while also positioning African artists—most notably, the Ècole de Dakar artists—as heirs and rivals to Picasso. As this example demonstrates,Thus, the malleability of “Black art,” or art nègre afforded African and diaspora modernists with the opportunity to counter prejudice, while, at the same time, establishingFrom the beginning of The “Black Art” Renaissance, Cohen makes it clear to readers that he will employ a vocabulary of contested and challenging terms. Readers are warned of the fraught histories and geographies of terms like “primitive art,” “art nègre,’“ and “Black” as a sort of disclaimer for the ways that Cohen himself uses these terms. Indeed, upon finishing this book, it becomes clear that “Black art” appears in quotations in the title, as well as throughout the book, because of the ambivalent ways the term has been deployed by avant-garde European artists, the artists and thinkers of the African diaspora during the Harlem Renaissance, and Africans, both within and outside the continent. Interestingly, the term “appropriation” is not afforded the same treatment, even though it appears multiple times throughout the book. Given the weight that “appropriation” holds in popular culture today, through debates regarding cultural appropriation that are heavily bound to discussions around racism and discrimination, it is surprising that Cohen does not complicate or confront the term's multifaceted usage. There is no doubt that the rich discussions around cultural appropriation, both within and external to the academy, would add yet another layer to Cohen's critical evaluation of art nègre and African sculpture.Cohen's text is a testament to the overlapping nature of art history. As is shown here through a transcontinental reading of modernism, movements and categories do not exist separate from one another. Instead, retracing and reevaluating past scholarship against newly encountered research allows us to locate points of convergence and gain further insight into our areas of study. Overall, The “Black Art” Renaissance is as enjoyable as it is informative. Cohen's language welcomes readers of all levels, while his use of images makes it easy to visualize the art pieces that he describes in great detail. What we have here is a book that attempts to fill gaps in our knowledge, not by answering all the questions, but by exploring multiple trajectories that intersect to produce a provoking and enriched study of European modernism and African sculpture.