Authentically African. Sarah Van Beurden
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from Maes’s thematic organization. Significantly, Olbrechts’s “style areas” were already being interpreted as “ethnic groups” in the museum displays.93
The third room, the “hall of art,” was developed by Olbrechts not long after his arrival at the museum.94 Despite his resistance to a mere “aesthetic approach” in Congolese Sculpture, he clearly advocated a view of African culture that elevated a portion of its their material culture to the category of art—objects that could be universally appreciated because of their intrinsic beauty. This did not mean, however, that these objects should be completely removed from their cultural contexts. The combination of the three different display taxonomies—by function, ethnicity, and aesthetic criteria—affirmed this belief in proper contextualization. At the same time, however, Olbrechts developed the selection and promotion of a number of objects as the museum’s “masterpieces.”
In 1952 Olbrechts put together a small book, Quelques chefs-d’oeuvre de l’art africain des collections du Musée Royal du Congo Belge, Tervuren (Some masterpieces of African Art from the Collections of the Royal Museum of Belgian Congo, Tervuren) comprising twenty-four pictures that were also sold separately as postcards in the museum’s store.95 He created the booklet in response to ever-increasing demands from visitors, artists, students, and collectors for images of the museum’s most beautiful pieces, affirming the wider acceptance of the aesthetic approach. The booklet demonstrates the increasingly important role of the museum’s “art” objects in the overall image of the colony presented in the museum, and hence in the promotion of the colonial empire.
Olbrechts’s selection of pieces revealed his biases: they were almost all figurative wooden sculptures, all from the southern part of the country, with a heavy emphasis on Kuba and Luba art. In contrast to the extensive background information provided in Congolese Sculpture, the explanations accompanying the pictures in this booklet were kept to a minimum, with only a brief identification of the object (such as “chief’s seat” or “statue of woman”) and the “tribe” of origin. In some cases Olbrechts added an extra line about the style (such as the “Buli style”) or the person depicted (in the case of the royal Kuba statues).
The decision to focus on a limited number of objects, stripped of their context, represented a culmination of the trend whereby certain pieces of African material culture migrated from the status of artifact to the status of art. This “art-culture system,” “a system of thinking in which a binary opposition—in this case “art” and “artifact”—generates a field of meanings,” as James Clifford described it, reinvented African objects as singular, universally beautiful, and “authentic.”96 Olbrechts’s use of the concept of “masterpiece” shows his ambitions for the status and place of African art objects in the museum. Traditionally used in Western art to refer to the most skillful and beautiful pieces, the term implies a creation that rises above the general level of production of art. In the context of African art, and in particular at Tervuren, the concept of the masterpiece functioned in a number of ways. While elevating the culture of origin to the level of an art-producing civilization, it simultaneously removed the objects from that cultural background and made them symbolic of the collection itself—in this case, the museum of Tervuren.97 Their recognition as masterpieces was situated entirely in the West and appropriated them for Western collectors and museums. Locating masterpieces among the African objects stimulated the cultural, but also the financial, value of both these objects and of others like them, benefiting mostly collectors and dealers of African art and stimulating their continued circulation.
Arjun Appadurai has described this process as the “aesthetics of decontexualization,” a process of “diversion” of the regular flow of commodities whereby the value of things increases by placing them in an unlikely context.98 The heightened profile of certain sculptural objects, raised by scholarship and display, increased their economic value. This commodification contributed to the objects’ redefinition as another exceptional resource for the colony, in turn supporting the idea of Congo as an exceptional place and justifying the welfare colonialism of the Belgian state. As with many other colonial resources, the financial value generated by the exchange of similar pieces by art dealers remained in Western hands.
The term “masterpiece” refers explicitly to the creator of a piece, the artist. While acknowledging the (unconscious) creative genius within African culture, applying the term to an African object accentuated the absence of information about the creator of the object. So while the singularity of the object increases, and with it the potential respect for its culture of origin, the individuality of the African artist remains a void. Sally Price characterized this approach: “Any work outside the ‘Great Traditions’ must have been produced by an unnamed figure who represents community and whose craftsmanship represents the dictates of its age-old traditions.”99 Arguably, the void is filled either by the scholar or the collector responsible for “discovering” the piece, or by the museum institution functioning as the “guardian” of the object. Removed from their original context and only vaguely identified, the masterpieces become “signs” for the museum that possesses them, muting them as signifiers of another culture. Any reassessment of the “primitivism” of African cultures in a favorable light is redirected to the role of the museum—and, by extension, the colonial state—as a guardian of the material.
Along with the promotion of certain choice pieces from the museum’s collection as “masterpieces,” the museum also reinstalled the art room. The idea of an art room was not in itself a new concept for the museum, as we’ve seen above. There were significant differences, however, between the older displays of Congolese art and the new art room. The new “Congo art room” contained a much smaller selection of objects in a modernist setting with a much more spacious arrangement against a white backdrop.100 Most ceramics and series of weapons and shields had disappeared. Instead, a careful selection of objects, each occupying a place in Olbrechts’s stylistic classification, was presented in a spacious, well-lit, simple setting designed to bring out the aesthetic qualities of the objects themselves, although some contextual information was provided.101 The display was organized by style area and substyles, as delineated by Olbrechts’s scholarship. Each style area was accompanied by a short introduction of the characteristics of each style. In figure 1.7 we see part of the display on the Luba on the left and in the second and third cases from the right. Also visible are a large Kongo statue, one vitrine of Kuba objects, and one vitrine devoted to the less-defined northern styles (to the far right). The functional descriptions of the objects were reduced to a bare minimum. In the case of the Luba, for example, the two cases to the left are accompanied by the description “Chief’s insignia; seats, arrow holder, scepters and ax.” By minimizing references to the objects’ function, elaborated upon in the ethnographic displays, Olbrechts created room for the visitor to focus on the appearance of the objects in a setting that encouraged admiration. This technique represented a change from the 1936 art room, where references to function were omitted entirely and display cases were crowded.
FIGURE 1.7. Congo art room, 1963. HP.1963.1.205, collection RMCA Tervuren; photo J. Loddewijck, RMCA Tervuren ©.
There was a noticeable difference between Olbrechts’s scholarship, however, and the installation of the Congo art room. In the museum display, the contextualization of the pieces has to take a back seat to their display as art objects, illustrating the different demands placed upon the scholar versus the museum professional. The latter, while also respecting the museum’s scientific identity and ensuring that the displays reflect the current state of scholarship, is forced to make decisions about the amount of contextualizing information that can be included in a display and to decide how to integrate the displays into the overall narrative of the museum.
Most of the visitors to the museum probably had very limited knowledge of the various cultures in Congo. The lack of a printed guide to the ethnographic and art room before 1967 meant that, despite the presence of a large ethnographic map above the door, the diversity of cultures might have blended