Abstract

“Documents” was a Parisian art magazine published between 1929 and 1930 that placed a large emphasis on ethnographic material, in contrast to other art periodicals of the era. The journal’s originality chiefly derived from the juxtaposition of art and popular culture, prominently featured in its pages, along with an innovative use of photography and a non-conformist approach to beauty. The revolutionary yet contradictory idea that guided “Documents” was the need to affirm the value of “primitive” cultures, even when their material production did not fit classic aesthetic standards. Its collaborators, many of whom were ethnographers, struggled between dismantling art’s aesthetic ideals and conventions and valorizing the artifacts of the “primitives” without reducing them to mere functionality and use. This article dissects the contradictions “Documents” artists and ethnographers faced when evaluating ethnographic cultural production. It argues that, although their efforts were guided by a desire to rebuke Western art and its dominant evaluative categories, artists and ethnographers did not realize the implications of their anti-aestheticism for ethnographic understanding. A close examination of images and articles published in “Documents” demonstrates how the journal’s anti-aesthetic direction complicated the analysis of the material production of the “primitives” and had far-reaching implications for both the notion of art and anthropological knowledge.