Ottilie W. Roederstein, born to German parents in Zurich in 1859, was one of the leading painters in the German-speaking world during her lifetime. She also enjoyed early recognition in Paris. As one of the few women of her time, she successfully dedicated her entire life to art and led an unconventional but respected existence in Germany together with her partner, the gynecologist Elisabeth H. Winterhalter. Although Roederstein's early work adhered to the conventions of the academy, the painter increasingly opened herself up to other currents in her more mature work and in the 1920s found her way to an austere, objective visual vocabulary. Despite her international reputation as a portraitist and painter of still lifes, Roederstein fell into oblivion almost immediately after her death in 1937. Now, after several decades, the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main are presenting the first monographic show of her work, accompanied by this comprehensive catalogue. EXHIBITIONS: Zurich Art Gallery December 4, 2020–April 5, 2021 Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main May 19–September 6, 2021

How was the question of black cultural difference and identity negotiated among and between black cultural and political organizations in Paris and Harlem? How were concepts of black cultural difference - the idea of what distiguished black expressive culture and what constituted the originality of a black aesthetic - absorbed and articulated by the white artistic avantgarde and the primitivist modernist styles and themes they created? How was knowledge about African culture and 'African otherness' visually represented in the discourse of French colonial ethnography and colonial art? This study addresses the dynamics of transatlantic cultural exchange, concretely the international transfer and mediation of images and ideas about black culture in two artistic metropolises - New York and Paris - in the interwar years. These transatlantic crossings and the confluences are analyzed within a postcolonial framework, they are considered as responses to and as consequences of two related and hence intersecting formations of power: racism and colonialism and their political, social, epistemological and finally, cultural dimensions in the United States and France. Proceeding from the historical significance of race, this study links up the discourses of primitivist modernism, jazz, Africanist ethnography and art, the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude, a complex and ambivalent connection neglected until recently in contemporary scholarship.