Finding Féral Benga

The male nude is cast in a bronze that catches light, body slightly S-shaped, holding a flat, curved saber in the air.

James Smalls, an art historian, first thought the sculpture’s title—Féral Benga—might refer to a type of dance. He was in the process of writing about the sculpture’s creator, the Harlem Renaissance artist Richmond Barthé, but now a new set of questions emerged: Who was Féral Benga, and what was his story? More than a decade later, Smalls has some answers.

Féral Benga, whose given name was François, was born in Dakar, Senegal, and ran away to Paris as a teen in the 1920s. Adopting the stage name Féral, which translates as “wild,” he began performing as part of the popular primitivist spectacles designed to appeal to white colonial fantasies. Wearing tight leopard shorts or a loincloth, skin slick with oil, Benga danced alongside his idol, the cabaret entertainer Josephine Baker, in the lavish, risqué stage shows of the Folies-Bergère. Like Baker, Smalls says, Benga consciously exploited sexualized racial tropes to make space for himself within the avant-garde art of the time. But Benga has long been overshadowed by Baker, and uncovering his story has required some serious sleuthing.

For Smalls, who studies the intersections of race, gender, and queer sexuality in visual culture, understanding Benga’s contributions to art history means rewriting a story of modern art that has traditionally been narrated as the invention of white men. What figures like Benga reveal is that Africans not only inspired the avant-garde, they also actively shaped it. Benga was not only someone to be looked at—endlessly photographed, painted, and sculpted by others—but an artist who used his body as a creative form of self-expression. “He knew Europeans were very attracted to primitivism, and that’s how he made his career,” says Smalls. “But he was a hybrid sort of person: he knew a lot about African dance. He knew a lot about classical ballet and acrobatics and how to contort and move his body to create interesting choreographies.”

After learning of Benga’s existence, Smalls began the slow process of piecing together his story. He traced his likeness over the decades, in black-and-white studio portraits, impressionistic oil paintings, and dreamy surrealist films. Smalls read the memoirs of artists, composers, and other members of Benga’s circle, scanning the lines for any mention of the dancer. One of his biggest discoveries came unexpectedly. For a week, he’d been paging through folders in the Josephine Baker archive at the Bibliothèque nationale de France when he saw a photograph of Benga holding a sword in the same pose as in his trademark danse du sabre. The resemblance was unmistakable. The photograph was on the cover of a menu from a Senegalese restaurant Benga ran on the rue de Tilsitt, just beyond the radius of the Arc de Triomphe. Barthé had seen the photograph on the menu and started the sculpture upon his return to New York.

When institutional archives yielded few other traces, Smalls set up a Google alert for Benga’s name and eventually hit a small jackpot. He found that a woman was selling four-inch postcards of Benga, once circulated as publicity for his shows, in small batches on eBay. She had inherited the photographs from her father, whose job had been emptying the houses of abandoned estates. “She had a whole box of these images. And on a couple of them, ‘Féral Benga’ was written. She didn’t know anything about him,” Smalls says.

Every several months, a new bundle of photos surfaced online that Smalls promptly bought. Now and then, the seller would throw in a few extra loose candids she’d found: Benga drinking from a water fountain, posing on the beach, or smoking a cigarette at a party. “I had to create his archive,” says Smalls. He wanted to purchase the entire collection, but the owner refused; he was ultimately outbid for the rest by a Swiss gallery. Now, a small collection of the pictures hangs in Smalls’s dining room: images of a glistening Benga in his signature acrobatic poses.

It’s an arduous task to assemble the scraps of a story that few at the time bothered to record, either through prejudice, negligence, or simply imperceptiveness in the face of history as it’s happening. And not surprisingly, mysteries abound with Benga’s biography. In the soapy, dramatic worlds of bohemian Paris and New York, much of what has been written about him, according to Smalls, is simply gossip or innuendo and often exaggerated. Benga’s primary medium was his body, and he didn’t document anything that survives. Yet it remains important, Smalls says, to tell Benga’s little-known story. Since his beginnings as an art historian, Smalls has always been drawn to the overlooked and so-called lesser movements, what was once relegated to the footnotes, because it is within the seemingly minor that women, queer individuals, and people of color are so often found. Though his fame was fleeting, Benga remains a symbol of the deep impact of queerness and African culture on visual art.

Smalls did discover more though. By the end of World War II, Benga knew that the glamorous, feather-strewn world he’d helped create had vanished. While he was once said to have owned a custom-made convertible and 20 French poodles, such decadence had faded by the late 1940s. Primitivism, the “authentic” African music and dance he’d performed at the Folies-Bergère, was no longer in style; his days as a dancer were mostly over. During the occupation of Paris, he’d grown ill. “He was a very different man, very changed,” says Smalls. Benga then reinvented himself as an impresario. Now in his early 40s, no longer so lithe, he opened a nightclub, La Rose Rouge, which became a home for the young African intellectual scene that grew alongside the Left Bank bohemia of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. As mentor to a new generation of African artists, Benga brought the idea of Négritude, the celebration of Black culture first developed by the Caribbean writer Aimé Césaire, into the world of the performing arts.

Benga is buried in a family sepulcher in the Saint-Denis cemetery in Châteauroux, France, the names ornately etched on a piece of glass that reflects the graveyard’s granite crosses. As part of his research, Smalls traveled to the cemetery and scoured municipal records, looking for descendants, who never materialized. What to do with an unknown past? How to combat the erasures of history but find a new story—to insist upon it? The rest of what we know is this: in 1956, Benga reconciled with his family in Senegal—he had been disinherited for “the lifestyle that he supposedly led between the two World Wars,” says Smalls. He married his first cousin, moved into a house in the middle of France with his uncle, the town lawyer, and within a year was dead.

In 2025, with no remaining family members to renew it, the hundred-year lease on the family plot will expire. Benga’s remains will be exhumed and placed in an ossuary, and the gravestone removed. If the lasting evidence of Benga’s life is mostly visual, it seems poignant that his body—his true medium, which once bore such an excess of meaning—would be so vulnerable. Smalls hopes that he can persuade the French government to protect Benga’s grave—to designate it an important landmark—and keep his memory alive.

James Smalls is an African American Art History Initiative scholar and part of the Getty Scholars Program, which supports innovative research about art.