Photograph by Franko Khoury
A mask from Côte d'Ivoire from the late 19th to mid-20th century.
via NYTimes, Art:
Out of Africa, Eclectic Visions
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: June 1, 200
African art has it all: beauty, brio, inventiveness, moral gravity,
emotional depth, practicality, sensuality and humor. It’s hot and cool,
high and low, chastening and consoling, endlessly varied, surprising
always.
So why do our big museums still give us so few African shows? And
why, when they do, are those shows so often packaged the same way?
Third-tier Western artists get solo retrospectives; entire African
cultures are squeezed into art-of-a-continent surveys.
Many such
surveys are collection samplers, the only thematic thread being the
taste or money of a single owner or institution. They are at least as
much about the Western market as about African art. And given the
present sluggish cultural climate, this model probably won’t change
soon. So it’s important to keep asking why something
knowledge-advancing can’t be done with the survey format. Two current
collection shows, one in Washington and one in Boston, answer the
question in very different ways.
“African Vision: The Walt
Disney-Tishman African Art Collection” at the National Museum of
African Art in Washington is made up of 88 traditional sculptures and
masks from the several hundred acquired by the New York real estate
developer Paul Tishman and his wife, Ruth, from the 1950s to the 1980s.
The Tishman collection was widely exhibited in those decades. A
generation of art historians grew up with it. A canon of “classical”
African art was in part shaped by it. In 1982 the Tishmans sold the
material to the Walt Disney Company, thinking it would find a permanent
home in an African pavilion at Epcot in Florida. The pavilion was never
built. Two years ago Disney gave the bulk of the collection — certain
outstanding objects had already been dispersed — to the National Museum
of African Art.
With more than 500 works, the gift is
exceptionally large. It is also very uneven. But where it’s great, it’s
great. “African Vision” is about greatness. It presents itself as a
“masterpiece” show: clean installation, scant information, one
stand-alone treasure after another. [read on...]
Photo: Franko Khoury/National Museum of African Art
A post (early to mid-20th century), made of wood, pigment and cloth, from the Walt Disney-Tishman collection at the National Museum of African Art in Washington
[...]
A second exhibition, “Material Journeys: Collecting African and
Oceanic Art, 1945-2000: Selections From the Geneviève McMillan
Collection” at the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston, takes the opposite tack. It has its textbook sculptures and de
rigueur masks, but lots of unclassical, uncategorizable, unglamorous
things too: door locks, drums, jewelry, head-bashers, splashboards and
hats, side by side, as in a bazaar.
The show not only
acknowledges the market’s role in collecting, but takes commerce as its
theme, in an installation that follows the itinerary of one avid
shopper on a half-century buying spree.
Geneviève McMillan was
born in France and educated in Paris, where she developed an interest
in African culture and where she did a little buying. A Kota reliquary
figure she picked up there opens the show. She married an American and
moved to the United States in 1946. They made their home in Cambridge,
Mass. (where she still lives), but she kept traveling.
She made
repeated trips to the South Pacific, even more to Africa, where she
sought out dealers and artists and sorted through markets in Dakar,
Monrovia, Abidjan, Accra and Kinshasa. The show, which is accompanied
by a fascinating book by Christraud M. Geary, the museum’s curator of
African and Oceanic art, moves along with her through the decades,
supplementing art with a display of travel ephemera — posters, airline
schedules, stamps — and the diary in which Mrs. McMillan kept track of
what she bought, when and where. [read on...]
Normally the installation at the Arsenale has a hodgepodge effect, but
under Mr. Storr, it is more coherent, looking like a carefully
conceived museum exhibition rather than a random assemblage of works.
Among the standouts are a pair of tapestrylike hangings fashioned from
discarded soda cans by the artist El Anatsui, who was born in Ghana and
lives in Nigeria; though steeped in African culture, their shimmering
patina evoked the luster of a painting by Gustav Klimt. [read complete article here]
