UFR 03 Histoire de l'art et archéologie

The history of the reception of African arts in the West at the beginning of the 20th century and that of the development of the avant-garde are closely intertwined. From collectors to dealers, theoreticians and art critics, the players in these stories are often the same. This paper highlights a series of seminal events that linked these phenomena for a ten year period from 1913 to 1923. It focuses primarily on exhibitions organized in private galleries and independent exhibition spaces in Europe and the United States that juxtaposed African arts and works by Pablo Picasso within the context of a redefinition of the appreciation of African objects in the West, from curiosities and ethnographic objects into works of art. We argue that the quasi-symbiotic relationship established during that period between the commerce and the display of African objects and works by Picasso inscribes itself in an effort to position these works within an extended artistic field, and a more inclusive art history. Art historians, writers, and theoreticians of modern art, among them Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilhelm Uhde, and Carl Einstein, collaborated with dealers such as Joseph Brummer and Paul Guillaume. They simultaneously worked towards presenting to an ever growing audience of Picasso’s work, all the while promoting African objects as works of art. To do so, they valorized these works’ role as generative of modern art, and foregrounded the link they saw between African arts and the development of the most radical of the avant-garde movements: Cubism. For a number of his contemporaries–as expressed by Uhde in the 1914 catalogue of the Dresden exhibition Picasso u. Negerplastik–Picasso was considered as the foremost modern artist. To exhibit African arts next to Picasso not only participated in changing the way works from Africa were perceived but also presented Picasso in the context of a broader art history. Whether in Paris, Prague, Berlin, Dresden, Zurich or New York, in these exhibitions and their accompanying catalogues, the emphasis was placed on his original sources of inspiration, Picasso having found in African artists other masters.

Studying the sale of John Quinn’s African art collection in the 1920s offers a window onto New York’s burgeoning African art market, the shifting conceptual framework within which these works were perceived, and its revealing market-based consequences. John Quinn (1870-1924), American lawyer and patron of the avant-garde, gathered the largest American private collection of African art of his time, assembling more than thirty works from West and Central Africa during the decade that preceded his death. A regular client of New York’s most adventurous modern art galleries, including Alfred Stieglitz, Marius de Zayas, and Robert Coady, Quinn paid these dealers high prices for African works that were promoted for their aesthetic qualities and for what was newly perceived as their role as ignitors of artistic modernity.
During the years that directly followed his death, the collection was dispersed through a series of public and private sales. Reentering the market, the works were propelled through unexpected journeys that revealed the co-existence of two parallel marketplaces: one where African objects were valued as works of art, and the other where the same works were considered as ethnographic documents. Eventually, some of Quinn’s artefacts continued to navigate the art world, while many others entered ethnographic museums – but not before their monetary value was significantly lowered. Based on extensive archival research, this paper proposes to investigate the physical and conceptual trajectories of some of these works – from the home of an important modern art collector where they neighbored works by Picasso and Brancusi, to the shelves of museums that favored ethnographic displays. It will also consider the moment when these two marketplaces collided, raising questions regarding the intrinsic value of things or its contextual relativity.

Speakers:
Frederick John Lamp, Curator Emeritus of African Art at the Yale Art Gallery
Christopher Steiner, Lucy C. McDannel ’22 Professor of Art History and Anthropology at Connecticut College
Yaëlle Biro, Associate Curator for the Arts of Africa at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
in conversation with Amanda Gilvin, Assistant Curator at the Davis.

A new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum affords a rare opportunity to reconsider one of the most canonical African art forms: tsesah crests, commonly referred to as “Batcham,” created by Bamileke masters in the Cameroon Grassfields’ region. Drawing upon extensive research performed since the 1960s by European, American, and Cameroonian scholars, revisiting some of this information through a contemporary lens, and adding new documents extracted during archival research, this article will consider the mechanisms that led tsesah crests to achieve an outsized position in the African art world and will investigate their continued resonance in Cameroon.