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Artist Ernest Mancoba has become, for many scholars, representative of the West's neglect of Africa. Mancoba left his native South Africa for Paris in 1938 and later became a founding member of the European art movement CoBrA. Yet Mancoba's relationship to CoBrA has been almost entirely erased from history. This article asks why Mancoba has been excluded from art historical texts on CoBrA, and explores three factors that may have resulted in his exclusion. First, this article argues that Mancoba was marginalised by CoBrA, whose founding ideology would have demanded that they view him as a 'primitive' Other. Second, it is likely that Mancoba sought to distinguish himself from the group in order to escape the colonial mentality that drove their artistic inspiration. Finally, the celebration of Mancoba as a pre-eminent 'South African artist' has caused his work to be ghettoised, celebrated as uniquely 'African' but denied the possibility of being understood in dialogue not with other African art but with European modernists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the one hand the ideology could serve (more or less) as a common platform for any comparative art studies in Central-Eastern Europe, a common point of departure, a sort of framework of art historical narrative there between 1945 and 1989. On the other hand, however, such an instrument is useless if we would like to go deeper and draw a sort of map of Central-Eastern Europe. Aiming at the above-mentioned tasks, it is argued, we should take into consideration particular political practices, rather than the ideological discourse, or at least that what Luis Althusser called Ideological State Apparatuses, understood as different processes in different countries, producing different meanings of comparable art in comparable historical moments in the region, rather than classical concept of ideology. To show how the problem works in analytical praxis three case studies have been chosen: Clara Mosch Gallery in the GDR, Foksal Gallery in Poland, and the Balatonboglar Gallery in Hungary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]