Jean Laude's work is not just another broad, generalized, vulgarized survey of the artistic and cultural heritage of black Africa, not just another civilized look at exotic and myterious art in museums and private collections. African art objects had been mere data, documents, and curiosities when, a little more than half a century ago, we "discovered" African art; that is, we reacted aesthetically to it and exhaustively studied the African hertiage in our museums in order to classify and record our impressions. We later realized that all we could possibly record was the history of our reaction to an art that we could apprehend only from the outside and will never be able to understand otherwise. The well-known poet, Jean Laude, was aware of this fact from the start.
Thus, Laude began to study specific relations between French painting and Negro art, whch began early in the twentieth century. He has recently published a two-volume thesis on the subject. His work stems form Western experience, echoing and reflecting this newfound interest in so-called primitive arts and civilizations and their subsequent influence on Western art. He denounces as presposterous the idea of "discovering" art and civilizations that were in existence when Europe was still a battlefield of savage tribal rivalries (see comparative survey of world history and art at the end of the text.) An opening of perspective, or possibly a return to the origins, would be an appropriate description of the century's new awareness, since people's attention was directed not only toward "primitive" civilizations but also toward Romanesque art in the West and the painting of early Italian and Flemish artists. The first exhibit of primitive Flemish painters, for instance, was held in Bruges in 1902.