'The Savage Hits Back' Revisited: Art and Alterity in the Colonial Encounter

In recent years, not only ethnographic collections, but also the European canon of art history have come under siege. The colonial history and Eurocentric bias of both the museums and the academy have increasingly been put at center stage in a fierce discussion of the legitimacy and significance of scientific, curatorial, and artistic practices in a globalized world. In a largely forgotten intervention, the curator and ethnologist Julius Lips inverted the colonial gaze by collecting images of Europeans from colonial contact zones. Published in exile in 1937, The Savage Hits Back forged a contemporaneity of artistic works and opposed the aesthetics and narratives of Primitivism and Salvage Anthropology, subverting colonial power. The volume provides a fresh view of Lips' biography and work spanning three decades and four political systems in the transatlantic world. The contributors look at prewar ethnology, art history, and museum practice and explore the traces of an inverted gaze in global art and the possibility of a symmetric anthropology and art history. With an inventory catalogue of Lips' collection at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum Cologne.