James G. Harper and Philip W. Scher at Cabinet Magazine:
In January 1934, the eminent anthropologist Julius Lips sat in a small hotel room at the Hôtel des Nations in the Latin Quarter of Paris, staring down at a trunk full of cardboard-mounted photographs. It was about all he had with him, having fled Germany with no family, no means of support, and no clear conception of his future except the idea that he might make his way to the United States. The photographs in the trunk, collected over a decade and through an extensive scholarly and institutional network, were of artworks from around the world that depicted the figure of the European through non-Western eyes. Some wryly humorous, some outright insulting, these objects tell a different story than that which Europeans had told themselves during the age of colonialism. Lips intended his research to culminate in a groundbreaking book, the working title of which was “How the Black Man Looks at the White Man.”
Back in Germany, Julius Lips had been a star on the rise: appointed director of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in 1928 at the age of thirty-three, he was tenured as a senior faculty member at the University of Cologne just two years later. But with the rise of the Nazi party and Lips’s refusal to “coordinate” with the new regime, he was dismissed from his posts and his career came to a halt. His unwillingness to hand over the trunk full of photographs only further infuriated the authorities.
more here.
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