Object, Image, Collector Tells the History of African Art Collecting

Six West African Figures , about 1917-19Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965)Photograph, gelatin silver print*The Lane Collection*Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston There’s a self-portrait of American artist Willie Cole called Silex Male: Ritual that shows his semi-naked body covered with a bizarre series of markings that, upon closer inspection, turn out to be the imprints of clothing irons. The work shows Cole from the front and the back, and the images are slyly labeled “fig. 1″ and “fig. 2,” as if they came straight from an anthropology textbook. While it is by no means the most representative work in the show, Silex Male: Ritual might be the most thematically appropriate addition to the MFA’s new exhibition Object, Image, Collector: African and Oceanic Art in Focus . Like Cole’s photographs, the show considers the complicated relationship between western art and African artifacts and the attendant problems of racism, conquest, and gender discrimination. Object, Image Collector traces the reception of African and Oceanic art in the west from curiosity, to inspiration, and, finally, fine art. The show is arranged chronologically, according to the history of African art collecting. The practice began in the 19th century, when empires brought curiosities from various parts of Africa to the large European cities. Christianity and European viceroyalty replaced traditional forms of life on the continent, and ritual objects suddenly became redundant. Such objects from villages in Gabon, Côte d’Ivoire, and the Congo started showing up in Parisian flea markets and curiosity shops where the avant-garde of modern art could fetishize them anew. The cubists and the surrealists, in particular, celebrated the newly found African art for its novel approaches to rendering the human form and collected it for inspiration. It wasn’t long before every avant-gardiste worth his beret owned a reliquary guardian from a grave of Gabon’s Fang tribe. Reliquary guardian figure (byeri) Unidentified artist, Fang peoples, Gabon, 19th centuryWood, oily patinaPromised gift in honor of William E. Teel and the late Bertha L. Teel As African artifacts grew in esteem among artists, who prized the art’s formal daring and gave little regard to its functional purpose, collectors began showing the work in galleries. It’s at this point in history that Object, Image, Collector really gets into gear. The show includes work from 20 Boston-area private collections that would have fit into any early 20th century collection of African art. But it also includes striking photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Sheeler, and, later, Walker Evans, that graphically demonstrate the progression of African art from curiosity to high

culture. The photographs depict these objects in gallery shows—Evan’s contribution, for example, comes from the seminal 1935 MoMA show African Negro Art —and show how attitudes toward this work changed throughout the century. Originally, artists and collectors revered the artworks themselves but cared little about the context in which they were made. In fact, early catalogs of African art mistakenly include work from Oceania because it was formally similar to African work. The collectors knew so little about what they were buying that they didn’t even know what part of the world it came from. That changed during the 1960s and the rise of African and Oceanic programs in art history departments. The MFA’s show, for example, provides reams of wall text describing the geographical, cultural, and artistic context for each work of art—the result of decades of research. In their natural habitat, private collections, these objects lack such contextualization. They are displayed according to the aesthetic whims of their owner, just as they were last century—objects of pure formal contemplation. The MFA show splits the difference. “We’d lose our jobs if there was no text on the wall,” quipped Karen Haas, the Lane Curator of Photographs, and the curators wanted to give full credit to the artists who created this vast and varied body of work. But they also wanted to prove a point about collecting it, and the stark, white backgrounds and pedestals, which echo the displays at the 1935 MoMA show, serve to do that by drawing explicit attention to the formal characteristics of the pieces. “There was a moment before all the text went up,” Haas said, “when I walked in here and just said ‘Wow.’” The show takes the visitor through to the present day of art collecting, after collectors and scholars began to take new forms seriously. It should be no surprise that the newer additions to the African and Oceanic canon come overwhelmingly from media previously considered feminine. Textiles, for example. New understandings of the context of African and Oceanic art have bred better scholarly regard for “women’s work,” and the collectors’ market has followed suit. Object, Image, Collector offers the rare opportunity to spend time with stunning objects from private collections and to learn a little about how they got there in the first place. Object, Image, Collector: African and Oceanic Art in Focus opens tomorrow, December 10, and runs through July 18, 2010 .

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Object, Image, Collector Tells the History of African Art Collecting