Joshua I. Cohen’s Art of the Opaque: African Modernisms, Decolonization, and the Cold War examines a range of African modernist practices (c 1940-1990) in relation to troubling dimensions of decolonization that seldom surface in scholarship about modern and contemporary art. Whereas strong narratives of liberation have rightly underlain most previous accounts of African modernism, Cohen’s project investigates how Cold War geopolitics drew new African states and their artists into a succeeding imperial age. The book’s four main chapters seek to sensitively locate individual African modernists’ extraordinary work within decolonization’s tumultuous histories, lest their output appear too straightforwardly emblematic of an independence that in fact never fully arrived. Extended discussions of major cultural festivals and exhibitions, and of the work of South African painter Gerard Sekoto, Guinean polymath Fodéba Keita, and the Vohou-Vohou group of Ivorian abstract painters provide specific instances within Cohen’s conceptual framework.

Joshua I. Cohen is assistant professor of art history at The City College of New York/CUNY. His first book, The “Black Art” Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents (University of California Press, 2020), received honorable mention for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize.