before they reached the storerooms and displays of the museum, although the participation of the museum in the art market and its display of the objects stimulated their commodification. Another factor that explains the disproportionate number of “masterpieces” that passed through the hands of collectors or art dealers is that collectors, especially those of early generations, were mostly interested in undamaged figurative objects that displayed symmetry and showed no trace of Western influence.54 This preference helped shape the body of objects available in the West and consequently impacted the way the canon of Congolese art was theorized.
The market for African art in Belgium coalesced somewhat later than in other European countries, but it quickly became an important European center. Although African objects had circulated in Belgium since the late nineteenth century, their introduction as art began in the 1920s.55 The interest in these objects grew steadily in the 1930s, stimulated by a community of collectors and dealers of African art. Initially the circle of collectors was composed mostly of members of the upper classes, some of whom had business interests in Congo, while others (like Émile Storms) had participated in the early conquest. Although the exorbitant prices for “primitive” art were still a thing of the future, a commercial space took shape in which collectors and dealers, both foreign and Belgian, circulated. Belgium’s growing importance as a center for the trade in African art proceeded on the strength of objects brought back by returning colonials.56 In the next decades, the circles of the collectors would widen and include many collectors who had never set foot in Congo, blurring the line between collectors and dealers. The names of well-known collectors and dealers—Jeanne Walschot, Henry Pareyn, and the painter Willy Mestach, to name a few—have since become connected to the objects formerly in their possession, creating a new history and provenance for the objects, reinventing them as Western commodities and as symbols of both cultural capital and wealth.
FIGURE 1.3. Art collector Jeanne Walschot, ca. 1940. HP.2014.3.1, collection RMCA Tervuren.
Frans Olbrechts, who took up the reins of Tervuren in 1946, made the museum an active participant in the art market. He tried to compensate for the limitations of the museum’s own collecting by searching for material in Europe, spending many hours consulting retired missionaries, old colonial officials, and antique and art traders in Brussels, Antwerp, and Paris. This “extraordinary activity displayed by the Director of the Museum in the tracing of material” was responsible for the “steady growth of our collections,” ethnography curator Albert Maesen commented in 1956.57 But the relationship between the museum and private dealers and collectors was complicated. On the one hand, collectors and dealers were often competitors in the acquisition of desirable pieces. On the other hand, they also donated many pieces to the museum’s collection. Museums can also have a tremendous impact on the value of privately owned objects by including them in temporary exhibitions, strengthening their status as authentic and valuable pieces. This ambiguous relationship made contacts with dealers and collectors an intricate balancing act.58
As this overview of the origins of Tervuren’s ethnographic collection demonstrates, it was composed of objects selected for very different reasons, by different people, and at different times. Their collection reinvented these objects as trophies of war, souvenirs, and artifacts of science and created around them classes of consumption, connoisseurship, and science. What united almost all acts of collection was their interpretation as actions of salvage.59 From collecting explorers in the late nineteenth century to connoisseurs buying objects from art dealers in the 1950s, a sense of urgency was shared. The objects were seen as the remnants of older, vaguely precolonial African cultures that were in decline, partly as a result of the impact of Western modernity. This story of decline not only justified the acts of collection and Western guardianship of the objects but also framed the vision of the colonial state as the cultural guardian of the “authentic” cultures of colony.60 There was a deep ambiguity at the heart of these acts of salvage. Colonial modernity was both the threat from which collectors sought to safeguard these “authentic” cultures and the source of their authority to rescue and properly value the objects that represented this cultural authenticity. As we shall see in the next chapter, this ambiguity was resolved by blaming Congolese subjects for their inability to handle the impact of modernity correctly.
FROM ARTIFACT TO ART: CHANGING PARADIGMS OF INTERPRETATION
If objects are the raw material for the creation of collections, collections are the raw materials for the creation of museum displays. The latter are given meaning through changing paradigms of interpretation, some more coherent than others. The result, in the case of African material culture, has been an increasing divide between ethnography and art classifications, including a growing construction of canonicity. Although this was not an entirely linear development, a trend is detectable toward a comprehensive system of classification in which the category of art objects expanded and the objects themselves increased in value.
Sharon Macdonald has aptly described the position of the museum as the “nexus between cultural production and consumption.”61 The employees of the Museum of the Belgian Congo created an image of Congo for consumption by Belgian citizens and international visitors, staging the empire through the display of objects from Congolese cultures. The meaning attributed to these objects shifted over time, and the overall message of the narrative also underwent subtle, but significant, shifts. The place of art as a valuable resource grew significantly, and an integrated interpretive framework evolved in which Congo was created as a unit. This transformation of certain objects from artifact to art, a process that reached completion toward the 1950s, reconciled and aligned the political and economic narratives about mise en valeur with cultural narratives of justification for the Belgian colonial presence.
A decontextualization of the objects started with their removal from their cultures of origin, followed by a journey of recontextualization and interpretation.62 Although personal sympathies and tastes always played a role in this process, competing structures of knowledge and classification profoundly impacted the way in which objects were regarded and the way in which they were represented and displayed to the public at the Museum of the Belgian Congo. These knowledge systems—from evolutionism, to diffusionism, to the development of an art historical canon—changed significantly over the years. So while collectors helped author the museum by providing it with objects, curators played an important role in the orchestration of the material. The meaning they created was derived in large part from the way the material was ordered, the relationship suggested between objects, and how different displays related to each other.
Ideas about evolution made a strong impact upon the museum’s employees in the early years. African culture was interpreted as an early phase in human development, which aligned with the promotion of the “civilizing” mission of colonialism. Maarten Couttenier has argued that in Belgium, theories of physical anthropology gradually evolved into an interest in a colonial ethnography with a focus on material culture. This shift toward colonial ethnography helped establish the importance of scientific research at the Museum of the Belgian Congo, where objects were organized and classified to serve as a basis for research that facilitated the emergence of a cultural evolutionism dissociated from the methods and aims of early physical anthropology.63
The first iterations of the displays at Tervuren were at the 1897 colonial exhibition in the Palais des Colonies. The emphasis of the exhibition was on the economic potential of the colony and on the need for a civilizing mission. Weapons were a prominent part of the displays, arranged according to type and fanned out on the walls. The seeds of more scientific classification schemes were present, though, in the combination of a geographic approach with a thematic one. The result for the visitor was a “journey” through Congo.64 The Congolese were present outside in an “African village,” while inside their presence was embodied by large sculptures depicting Africans made by European artists.65 A separate room, the Salle d’Honneur, functioned
