African art in Western collections

Between 1890 and 1918 the volume of objects greatly increased as Western colonial expansion in Africa led to the removal of many pieces of sub-Saharan African art that were subsequently brought to Europe and displayed.

[4] Starting in the 1870s, thousands of African sculptures arrived in Europe in the aftermath of colonial conquest, exploratory expeditions and Christian missionary activity.

The appreciation of African objects purely as fine art in Europe was largely limited to private galleries in the early twentieth century.

In Paris, dealers such Paul Guillaume, Charles Ratton and Louis Carré played a role in the formation of major private collections of African art.

In 1897, King Leopold II took advantage of the Brussels International Exhibition in Tervuren to promote his holdings of the Congo Free State.

The 1897 International Exhibition piqued scientific interest in the natural resources, people and animals of Central Africa, thus King Leopold II decided to build on his promotion of Congo.

Highlights of the African collection include the Benin and Igbo-Ukwu bronze sculptures, the beautiful Bronze Head of Queen Idia, a magnificent brass head of a Yoruba ruler from Ife, the Apapa Hoard from Lagos, southern Nigeria, a dozen exquisite Afro-Portuguese ivories, Asante goldwork from Ghana, including the Bowdich collection, the rare Akan Drum from the same region in West Africa, a series of soapstone figures from the Kissi people in Sierra Leone and Liberia, the Torday collection of Central African sculpture, textiles and weaponry, important material from Ethiopia following the British Expedition to Abyssinia, the unique Luzira Head from Uganda, excavated objects from Great Zimbabwe and satellite towns such as Mutare including a large hoard of Iron Age soapstone figures, a rare divining bowl from the Venda peoples and cave paintings and petroglyphs from South Africa.

As Paula Girshick Ben-Amos, a professor of anthropology and African Studies at Indiana University, states in "The Art of Benin", “art of the Benin Kingdom came to public and scholarly attention in the West in 1897, when members of a British Punitive Expedition brought out thousands of objects as war booty.”[8] Around 200 of the bronzes were passed on to the British Museum, while the remainder were divided among a variety of collections, with the majority being purchased by Felix von Luschan on behalf of the Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin (the present-day Ethnological Museum).

[14] Features of the Glendonwyn Collection include multiple Benin and Igbo-Ukwu bronze sculptures, The Benin Massacre bronze sculpture (a magnificent representation of the massacre of the Phillips expedition), Oba the Warrior (a representation of an Oba, which appears in the front page of the first book of the collection), multiple 6th century BC Nok terracottas, Benin Bronzes, several dozen perfectly maintained Afro-Portuguese ivories, and a good representation of 11 of the 17 African historical cultural civilizations including Yoruba/Ife, Ashanti, Senufo, and Dogon.

As a result, the museum today has a significant collection of art and ethnographic items from the Bambara, Dogon, Mossi, Kisi, Dan, Senufo, Ashanti and other people.

"[1][18] Likewise, as a means of validating the expansion of ethnological collections, the rhetoric often employed was one of the necessity of conservation and preservation in the face of the inevitable extinction of the producers of the materials culture in their custody (121).

During the early 1900s, the aesthetics of traditional African sculpture became a powerful influence among European artists who formed an avant-garde in the development of modern art, known as the "Primitivism" movement.

[5] In France, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and their School of Paris friends blended the highly stylized treatment of the human figure in African sculptures with painting styles derived from the post-Impressionist works of Cézanne and Gauguin.

The resulting pictorial flatness, vivid color palette, and fragmented Cubist shapes helped to define early modernism.

While these artists knew nothing of the original meaning and function of the West and Central African sculptures they encountered, they claimed to instantly recognize the spiritual aspect of the composition and to adapt these qualities to their own efforts to move beyond the naturalism that had defined Western art since the Renaissance.

[5] German Expressionist painters such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner of Die Brücke (The Bridge) group, based in Dresden and Berlin, conflated African aesthetics with the emotional intensity of dissonant color tones and figural distortion, to depict the anxieties of modern life, while Paul Klee of the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) in Munich developed transcendent symbolic imagery.

Among the dealers, Mexican artist Marius de Zayas (1880–1961) was largely responsible for helping some adventurous modern-art collectors, including Walter and Louise Arensberg, John Quinn, and Agnes and Eugene Meyer, to build their African art collections.

[20] Culin, a self-taught ethnologist, built the foundation of four curatorial collections for the Museum, acquiring objects representing African, Asian, Native American, and Eastern European cultures.

Albert Barnes was one of the first American collectors to selectively acquire an extensive collection of African sculpture purely on aesthetic merits.

In contrast, the visual arts of Africa encompass not only sculpture in wood and metal but also beadwork, textiles, basketry, and other works of diverse media, all of which may hold equal value for their creators.

Such categorization was not easily replicated with African objects, which were often collected with fragmentary documentation that rarely identified the individual artist or the specific time period of creation.

[24][25] Post-1980s curatorial approaches to collecting and displaying historical African art tend towards greater specialization, broadening definitions, and a desire for contextualization.