In 1966 Bernard Rancillac’s painting Le Dîner des collectioneurs de têtes (Dinner Party of the Headhunters; fig. 1) was one of the most powerful and shocking denunciations of French colonialism.¹ It transformed a documentary photograph into a critical painting, in the era of Pop art, popular magazines, the photo-roman, New Wave film, and crucially, the first major celebration of Black art in Dakar, Senegal, and at the Grand Palais in Paris.

 

The painting’s powerful figuration must be contextualized. In post-war France, anticolonial discourses had emerged in figurative, Socialist Realist painting, promoted by the French Communist party of the early 1950s: in January 1953 Boris Taslitzky and Mireille Miailhe’s exhibition Algérie ’52 denounced French practices in the territory well before the outbreak of the Algerian War for independence.² André Fougeron included North African immigrants sleeping in Paris’s dilapidated zone under corrugated tin roofing in Atlantic Civilisation, his controversial Cold War masterpiece of 1953. This detail would be reworked as Les Nord-africains aux portes de la ville (North Africans on the City Outskirts; fig. 2), a panel of his Triptyque de la honte I (Triptych of Shame I), in 1954.³

 

The first International Congress of Black Writers and Artists was staged at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1956.⁴ Its discourses in a context of Black art and film have been vividly demonstrated in the Centre Pompidou’s exhibition Paris noir: Circulations artistiques et luttes anticoloniales, 1950–2000 (Black Paris: Artistic Circulations and Anticolonial Resistance, 1950–2000) in 2025.⁵ Pablo Picasso, who designed the congress poster, also drew Djamila Boupacha, the young Algerian girl cruelly raped by French soldiers. His portrait of her served as the frontispiece of the 1962 publication in which the feminist Simone de Beauvoir joined forces with the Algerian-born lawyer Gisèle Halimi, involving other witness accounts and artists’ responses.⁶ It created the necessary counterpart to its precursor, Henri Alleg’s powerful denunciation of military practices of torture in La Question of 1958.⁷ Besides all the tragedy and repercussions both political and personal, the thousands, if not millions, of casualties and displaced people, evidently, the Algerian ‘war-with-no-name’ (not accepted as ‘war’ by French patriots of the right) did not ‘end’ in 1962. The year 1966 was also marked by the scandal around Gillo Ponteorvo’s award-winning film, The Battle of Algiers, banned in French cinemas, with its restaging of events by Algerian actor-participants including Saadi Yacef, the leader of the National Liberation Front, whose memoirs furnished the plot.⁸

 

Rancillac and his contemporaries strongly believed in the necessity of a critical and satirical figuration in contrast with the 1960s responses to Algeria by the Nouveaux Réalistes including Jean Tinguely. The art of this group depended on ‘ready-mades’ in a neoDada and sociological spirit, ranging from torn posters taken from the street to large oil drums or feathers as in Tinguley’s Baluba series of 1961–3, with its critical take on bricolage and industrial waste. Explicit denunciations might include Raymond Hains’s torn poster OAS Fusillez les plastiqueurs (Shoot the Bombers, 1961) or Niki de Saint Phalle’s golden altarpiece Autel O.A.S. of the same year (fig.  3). Did the initials stand for œuvre d’art sacré, a sacred work of art, or Organisation Armée Secrète, the Secret Army Organization of violent, rightwing disruptors in Paris?⁹

For Narrative Figuration artists, the ‘real’ of everyday life and of popular culture was also the starting point; their ‘real’, however, was the image-saturated visual environment, anticipating Guy Debord’s analysis in the Society of the Spectacle (1967).¹⁰ Moreover, many of Rancillac’s contemporaries had visited New York: Öyvind Fahlström, Erró, Hervé Télémaque, and Peter Saul during the years 1961–3, to be followed by the artist himself in 1965.¹¹ American galleries had reciprocally brought Pop to Paris: the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend presented Roy Lichtenstein in 1963, Andy Warhol’s Death in America series in 1964, and Warhol’s Flower series in 1965. The key New York gallerist Leo Castelli collaborated with Sonnabend, his former wife, as works also travelled to the Venice Biennale—where Robert Rauschenberg’s 1964 triumph was received as Paris’s death knell. In an era of a specifically French craze for the comic, or bande dessinée, and a new culture of consumer-orientated publicity, the Narrative Figuration group’s parodic responses could indeed include denunciations of racism— for example, the grinning black ‘Y a bon Banania’ face used for decades to market chocolate drinks, frequently appearing in work by the Haitian artist Télémaque.

 

Bernard Rancillac’s stylistic trajectory evolved from a scribbled yet informel ethos to an expressionism with debts to the CoBrA painters. By 1965, however he started projecting images from comics and other sources with an epidiascope—Télémaque’s gift from New York. His scandalous Walt Disney exhibition at the Galerie Mathias Fels in 1965 (preceding his New York trip) was sarcastic; but at the height of his success as the enfant terrible of the art world, a critic asked, ‘Where are you hiding, Rancillac?’, speaking of ‘alibi’, ‘puerile obstinacy in playing the Salon anarchist’, and a cynical vision when napalm was burning Vietnam.¹²

Thus, in January 1966, Rancillac resolved to paint the political events of the year—the year of France’s withdrawal from NATO and the decision to develop unilateral defence forces under Général de Gaulle. It was also the year that Léopold Sédar Senghor, as first president of the Republic of Senegal, hosted the First World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar, including music, dance, theatre, and mass spectacle. Twenty thousand attended, surely visiting the new Musée dynamique, which housed the show Art nègre: Sources, Évolutions, Expansion (fig.  4). (For Senghor, the poet of what he proudly called negritude, the art nègre appellation was entirely positive.) This astonishingly rich panoply of the African heritage, traversing centuries, ended with modernist confrontations.¹³ A more contentious show of contemporary art and craft works involving many countries, Tendances et Confrontations at the Palais de Justice, did not travel to Paris.¹⁴ In the French capital, the second iteration of Art nègre at the Grand Palais in June received fifty thousand visitors, with extensive coverage by the world media and especially by French television and newsreels, together with a commemorative long-playing record.

 

Most of the material for Rancillac’s exhibition had sources in journals such as Paris-Match, whose colour reproductions structured France’s perception of world events at the time.¹⁵ Eighteen paintings including Dinner Party of the Headhunters would be shown at the Galerie Mommaton in February 1967, treating Vietnam, the war between Israel and the Arab states, the assassination of Che Guevara in Bolivia, the Red Guards in China (Mao’s Cultural Revolution was gathering pace), apartheid in South Africa, and even the contraceptive pill; the catalogue included an important preface by the cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu, whose seminars had been crucial for the artist.

 

Here was the riposte to the critique of his work as an alibi: Enfin silhouettes affinées jusqu’à la taille (At Last, a Silhouette Slimmed to the Waist; fig. 5) was based on a photograph of a South Vietnamese soldier stuffing a Vietcong prisoner head-first up to the waist in a cauldron of water. This spectacle in flat, acidic colours was contrasted with five images of a waist-length, stretch-nylon bra upside down as a frieze at the top of the painting. Alternatively, if the painting itself was inverted, the bras became the main scene: a scathing parody of the effect of leafing through a magazine where war reportage was interrupted constantly with adverts for France’s new consumer society.

Dinner Party of the Headhunters abandons this device of potential inversion for a graver, more surprising strategy. The initial appearance of the painting is based upon a photograph taken by Tony Saulnier, a professional photographer, explorer, and African art collector.¹⁶ It was first published in Univers Match, a special issue on the Art nègre exhibition in Paris (fig. 6).¹⁷ The photograph is lurid; a woman’s pink evening dress, the blue glassware on the table, versus the black-and-white figures, white table linen, and a black pyramid of caviar. In the background and foreground, the work is syncopated with the different and recognizable forms of African masks. The heavy sculpted wooden masks covering the diners’ faces are Saulnier’s own photomontage additions, from his mother’s collection. One mask is similar to a recent museum purchase for eight million francs, according to Saulnier’s caption.¹⁸

 

Rancillac froze and flattened the scene, transposing the colour and depth of the photo into a garish patterning of orange and yellow, with his faux-silkscreen look in vinyl paint applied to wood, not canvas.¹⁹ If the three hinged flaps are opened, the heads of Patrice Lumumba, Malcolm X, and Frantz Fanon erupt in black and white as though ‘behind’ the bourgeois scene, which their lives, politics, and writings subtend. All three figures, key to the anticolonial struggle were dead; the painting thus reveals a ‘haunting’. On the left is Lumumba, first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from June to September 1960 and leader of the anti-Belgian Congolese national movement, assassinated in 1961. (Belgium formally apologized for his torture and murder in 2002.) Opposite him is the late Fanon, a revered member of the Algerian National Liberation Front, and author of The Wretched of the Earth (his pioneering critique, Black Skin, White Masks, was published in 1952).²⁰ Malcolm X completes this concealed triptych: black rights leader and founder of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, his conflictual relationship with Islam had resulted in his murder in 1965. Rancillac’s daring divisions and hinges within the pictorial surface could, one might argue, look back to altarpiece panels linked to sin, judgement, and apocalypse. Which scene is the off-scene, which is the ob-scene, Rancillac demanded?²¹

In his preface, ‘The Image of the Image’, Pierre Bourdieu singled out two related anticolonial works for comment: the Fin tragique d’un apôtre de l’Apartheid (Tragic End of an Apostle of Apartheid) and À verser au dossier de l’affaire (l’affaire Ben Barka) (Portrait of Ben Barka: For the Files of the Affair), 1965. The chief of the Moroccan opposition, Mehdi Ben Barka was ‘disappeared’ by French police after his arrest in October 1965. A separate painted panel contains the victim’s face, behind which was the mirror to reflect—and to implicate— the beholder.

 

Rancillac’s procedure, making an image of a (photographic) image, is like a pleonasm, Bourdieu says: a superfluous doubling that denounces the original photograph’s claim to ‘double the world’. While subject matter is banalized, as the saccharine tone of TV announcers banalizes daily news, photographic realism becomes a sign of the redundancy of thought, and the gross error, bévue, of the photographer who does not understand what he allows to be seen, of the photographed subjects who do not perceive they are being seen.²² The bévue: linked to the putative ‘truth’ of the photographic source, is just as apparent in Dinner Party of the Headhunters. Affronted by Rancillac’s appropriation, Saulnier sued the artist. Was this first court case in the contemporary art world where a photographer claimed his image as intellectual property? The scandal gave the painting more publicity, an extended afterlife.²³

 

Just as Boris Taslitzky’s Algérie ’52 was shown in 1953, so Rancillac’s L’Année ’66 was shown in 1967. At the official French Communist Party exhibition of January 1967, Rancillac showed The Tragic End of an Apostle of Apartheid along with the older generation, André Fougeron and Boris Taslitzky, but also with his contemporaries Erró, Edouardo Arroyo, and newly-condoned abstractionists.²⁴ Rancillac would continue his perverse dialogue with and détournement of Warhol, maintaining a militant and anti-American profile in his work through the 1960s and following decades, publishing Le Regard idéologique, an exceptional account of those years in 2000.²⁵ Monographs, retrospectives, and exhibitions in France continued.²⁶ Rancillac’s presence in The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern in 2016—including Dinner Party of the Headhunters—established his importance internationally prior to the artist’s death in 2021.²⁷

 

The Art nègre celebrations in both Dakar and Paris ‘culture-washed’ Cold War realities. Spectacle counterbalanced the scene of once-colonized cultures awash with foreign money, in a context of arms-dealing and political assassinations. Here, art in a context of revolutionary Marxism ultimately failed to ‘act’—if a painting or an exhibition can be said to ‘act’. Yet questions asked by Dinner Party of the Headhunters about capitalism, about cultures of appropriation, about cultures of ‘collecting’ and display, and about the bévue—the gross error of looking—speak to us strongly today.

1. See Sarah Wilson, ‘Bourdieu, Rancillac: The Image of the Image’, in The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 64–98; published in French as Figurations ±68—Le Monde visuel de la French Theory (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2018), 66–101.
2. See Sarah Wilson, ‘A Dying Colonialism, A Dying Orientalism: Algeria, 1952’, in Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Doubourg Glatiny, and Piotr Piotrowski, eds., Art Beyond Borders in Communist Europe (1945–1989) (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2016), 423–37.
3. Sarah Wilson, ‘Hasty, Gross and Scornful? André Fougeron’s Atlantic Civilisation (1953)’, in Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft 18, ed. Andrew Hemingway (Osnabrück: Universitätsverlag Rasch, 2016), 71–83. Atlantic Civilisation is in the collection of the Tate, London.
4. It was at the second conference in Rome, in 1959, that the Dakar exhibition was first mooted.
5. Alicia Knock, ed., Paris noir: Circulations artistiques et luttes anticoloniales, 1950–2000 (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2025).
6. Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, with statements by Henri Alleg, Françoise Sagan, et al.; frontispiece by Picasso, with homage from the painters Robert Lapoujade and Roberto Matta (Paris: Gallimard, 1962).
7. Henri Alleg, La Question (Paris: Minuit, 1958), banned and republished in 1961: a harrowing first-hand account of waterboarding, electric shocks, and other forms of torture by French paratroopers.
8. Saadi Yacef dictated his memoirs as Souvenirs de la bataille d’Alger, décembre 1956–septembre 1957 (Paris: Julliard, 1962).
9. All works are illustrated in Bernadette Cotensou, ed., 1960: Les Nouveaux Réalistes (Paris: Musée d’art moderne la Ville de Paris, 1993).
10. Guy Debord, La Societé du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967).
11. Conversation with the artist, 25 July 2005 (Rancillac’s wife was an English teacher).
12. Raoul-Jean Moulin, ‘Rancillac: Où es-tu? Où te caches-tu?’, Les Lettres Françaises (27 May–2 June 1965). The title parodies the painting Où -est tu? Que fais-tu? (1965), exhibited in May at the Galerie Fels.
13. L’Art nègre: Sources, évolution, expansion (Dakar: Musée Dynamique; Paris: Grand Palais; Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1966). See Frédéric Vincent, ‘Regard rétrospectif sur l’exposition “L’Art nègre, source, évolution, expansion” à Dakar en 1966’, HAL Open Archive; and Elisabeth Harney, In Senghor’s Shadow: Arts, Politics, and Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
14. See Cédric Vincent, ‘Tendencies and Confrontations: Dakar 1966’, Afterall: Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry (Spring/Summer 2017): 88–101.
15. Much photographic material was syndicated internationally.
16. Saulnier had notably published Les Papous coupeurs de têtes: 167 jours dans la préhistoire (Paris: Éditions du Pont Royal, 1961), issued in English as Headhunters of Papua, trans. Margaret Shenfield (London: Paul Hamlyn; New York: Crown Publishing, 1963). He would die in an airplane crash over Guadeloupe in 1968, returning from a mission to Easter Island.
17. Tony Saulnier, ‘À Paris, rue Jacob, le dîner des collectionneurs de têtes’ (Paris, 1966), photos with text by Michel Gall, ‘L’Art nègre’, Univers Match, no. 893, 21 May 1966. At 26, rue Jacob, a social and intellectual hub was created by Saulnier’s mother, Marie-Ange Saulnier-Ciolkowska. See See Valentine Plisnier, ‘The Impact of African Masks on Artistic Creation’ (identifying Saulnier’s masks), in Walter van Bierendonck ed., POWER-MASK: The Power of Masks (Tielt: Lanoo, 2017), 15–20; and the Christie’s entry by Hermione Wakefield for a Gabon Punu mask, online sale, 11 March 2021, https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/living-african-oceanic -arts/masque-punu-62/113317 (accessed 28 August 2025).
18. The Sotheby’s Parke Bernet auction of Helena Rubinstein’s estate was the first major auction of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas; it coincided exactly with the Dakar Festival of April 1966 (see Le Monde, 21 April 1966). The Fang queen, which sold for 2,750 dollars, is worth between four and six million euros today.
19. Bernard Rancillac, Peindre à l’acrylique (Paris: Bordas, 1987).
20. See Franz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952); published in English as Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967); L’An V de la révolution algérienne (Paris: François Maspero, 1959); published in English as A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1965); and Les Damnés de la terre (Paris: François Maspero, 1961), published in English as The Damned of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004).
21. See also Maureen Murphy, who does not reference Saulnier’s legal case or Bourdieu’s preface: Maureen Murphy, ‘The Rights of Works’, Arts & Sociétés 49, https://www.sciencespo.fr/artsetsocietes /en/?s=Maureen+Murphy%2C+The+Rights+of+Works (accessed 28 August 2025).
22. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘L’Image de l’image’, in L’Année 1966 (Paris: Galerie Blumenthal-Mommaton, 1967). Bourdieu is described in the catalogue as a sociologist, director of studies at the École des Hautes Études, and author of L’Amour de l’art, Un art moyen, and Les Héritiers.
23. See Jacques Borgé and Nicolas de Rabaudy, ‘Un procès très parisien’, Paris-Match 940, 15 April 1967. See also Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, ‘Le diner des têtes de Rancillac’, Arts-Loisirs 87 (June 1967): 30.
24. Exposition d’arts plastiques au XVIII congrès du Parti communiste français, preface signed ‘Levallois, 4 janvier 1967’, included works such as Pablo Picasso, Massacre in Korea (1951); Roberto Matta, Les Roses sont belles (The Roses Are Beautiful—The Rosenberg Trial, 1952); André Fougeron, Le cortège du 13 février 1962 (Procession for Charonne Metro Victims, 13 February 1962); and the abstract panel by Jean Dewasne, Empédocles (1967).
25. Bernard Rancillac, Le Regard idéologique (Paris: Éditions Somogy, 2000).
26. See in particular Serge Fauchereau, Bernard Rancillac (Paris: Cercle d’art, 1991); Bernard Rancillac, rétrospective (1962–2002) (Issoudun: Musées de l’Hospice Saint-Roch d’Issoudun, art moderne de Saint-Étienne, and beaux-arts de Dole, 2003), with text by Sarah Wilson; and Jean-Paul Ameline, ed., La Figuration Narrative, Paris 1960–1972 (Paris, RMN-Grand Palais, 2008).
27. See Sarah Wilson, ‘Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Pop in a Divided World’, in The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop, ed. Flavia Frigeri and Jessica Morgan (London: Tate; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 113–19; and ‘Castro, Cows and the Summer of Love: How Pop Art Became Political Dynamite’, Guardian, 4 September 2015, 16–17, https://www.theguardian .com/artanddesign/2015/sep/04/castro-cows-summer-of-love -pop-art-dynamite (accessed 28 August 2025).

 

 

Photo credits:

Fig. 2: Établissement public du Palais de la Porte Dorée / Collections du Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration

Fig. 3: © 2025 Niki Charitable Art Foundation, photo: Laurent Condominas

Fig. 4: Sarah Wilson collection

Fig. 5: Ville de Grenoble / Musée de Grenoble —J. L. Lacroix

Fig. 6: Sarah Wilson collection, source: Paris-Match

 

© 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich, for the reproduced work by André Fougeron

© 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich, for the reproduced works by Bernard Rancillac

© 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich, for the reproduced work by Niki de Saint Phalle

 

 

Sarah Wilson is a professor of modern and contemporary art at the Courtauld Institute, University of London, and Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. Among her many publications, The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (2011 in English, 2018 in French) devotes a chapter to Bernard Rancillac.  Paris, Capital of the Arts, 1900–1968, curated for the Royal Academy and Guggenheim Bilbao in 2001, featured Jean Tinguely. Her Pierre Klossowski retrospective (London, Whitechapel) in 2006 travelled to the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

 

This contribution is published in conjunction with the conference ‘Jean Tinguely Revisited: Critical Rereadings and New Perspectives’, held from 20 to 22 March 2025.

 

Keywords

Bernard Rancillac

Dinner Party of the Headhunters

Anticolonialism

Narrative Figuration

Appropriation

 

Tinguely Studies, December 2025

Scholarly online journal

 

Published by Museum Tinguely, Basel

www.tinguely.ch

 

ISSN 3042-8858