| In my dissertation, I address the iconoclastic aesthetics and discourses displayed in Documents (1929-1930), a short-lived, yet fascinating Parisian avant-garde journal. This allowed me to analyze the work of Carl Einstein and Michel Leiris, and therefore to discover a critical thought that was absolutely anti-surrealistic. Since these anti-conformist movements shared several utopian goals with European politics, I showed that it was possible to see a link between their obsession with pan-European aesthetic renewal and the traditional diplomacy's relentless exhaustion after the 1914-18 catastrophe. Unprecedented on this scale, my analysis unearths a genuine laboratory of contemporary discourse on the other, oriented toward material culture and celebrating "natural" or "primitive" practices. This partially explains the growing interest shown by several avant-garde artists and writers for African art, whose unexpected novelty was beginning to spread within some well-informed circles.; Since the function successively occupied by the noble savage and the Tahitian figures in the Enlightenment's French literature was mostly reflexive and self-critical, I wanted to explore the question of the "primitive other" in the context of interwar France. Thus I came to analyze the forms of percolation of the ethnological discourse in Documents.; Dedicated to Einstein, the first two chapters of my dissertation shed a new light on his actual relationship with the ethnology of his time. Hence, I clearly demonstrated that even in articles apparently dealing with ethnological themes, Einstein did not manage, nor try to situate his discourse in the context of actual knowledge. Hence, his intentions headed in quite another direction, i.e. artistic dissent and intellectual rebellion against all bourgeois traditions.; As for Leiris's contributions to Documents, they first seem to echo Einstein's observations. Like many authors of his generation, he believes that France is in the middle of a major crisis. Accordingly, turning his back on Western rationality, he first sought solutions in medieval occultism and magic, then in ethnographic works, which described the last "primitive other". Convinced that the "primitiveness" of African art had a close relation with the artists' ability to cope with their untamed primitive self, Leiris concluded that he had to experience a genuine encounter with otherness in order to achieve empathy in his writings.; Keywords: Avant-garde, interwar (1919-1939), ethnology, primitivism, art, dissent, France, Germany, Africa. |
