'One Speaks Softly, like in a Sacred Place': Collecting, Studying and Exhibiting Congolese Artefacts as African Art in Belgium

One speaks softly, like in a sacred place': collecting, studying and exhibiting Congolese artefacts as African art in Belgium Maarten Couttenier Many publications have dated the European 'discovery' of 'primitive art' in the beginning of the twentieth century or even after the 1914-18 war.Overall, they argue that African objects, collected between the fifteenth and the eighteenth century, ended up as curiosities in European 'Cabinets of Wonders'.During an ethnographic phase in the nineteenth century, travellers and museum staff were believed to be mostly interested in the functional aspects of these objects, as they 'failed to see the beauty; curiosity was great, but is was mixed with pity.' 1 Finally, these publications state that the true art value of these objects was discovered during an aesthetic phase in the beginning of the twentieth century by artists such as Henri Matisse, André Derain, Georges Braque, and Pablo Picasso. 2 Despite the fact that Africans were of course the first to appreciate the beauty of their own objects (something that was not always recognized in the West), the Western interest in African art was supposedly linked to the need among European artists for 'new sources of inspiration outside the continent to rejuvenate its old civilisation.Disgusted by the modern world, its steel machines and its pitiless brutality, the period after the 1914-1918 war turned passionately towards the primitive, and especially the "Negro" '. 3 The widely publicised exhibition 'Primitivism' in the 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern in the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1984-85), and the introduction by William Rubin in the catalogue, confirmed this 'modernist myth'.4 'Primitivism' or 'the interest of modern artists in tribal art and culture, as 1 J. Van Hoof, 'Une contribution à l'histoire du goût dans la période contemporaine.L'influence de l'art nègre', Problèmes d'Afrique centrale, 13: 44, 1959, 132.'On ne voit pas la beauté; la curiosité est grande mais elle est mêlée de pitié.' 2 H. Guillaume, 'La Sculpture Négro-africaine', Problèmes d'Afrique centrale, 13: 44, 1959, 97.Albert Maesen, 'Styles et expérience esthétique dans la plastique congolaise', Problèmes d'Afrique centrale, 13: 44, 1959, 85-86.3 Van Hoof, Une contribution à l'histoire du goût dans la période contemporaine,132.'[…] sources d'inspiration nouvelles en dehors du continent pour rajeunir sa vieille civilisation.Dégouté du monder moderne, de ses machines en acier et de sa brutalité impitoyable, l'après-guerre 1914-1918 s'est tourné avec passion vers le primitif et plus spécialement vers le « nègre ».' 4 Wilfried van Damme introduced the term 'modernist myth' in this regard in his article 'Not What You Expect: The Nineteenth-Century European Reception of Australian Aboriginal Art', Konsthistorisk Tidkrift / Journal of Art History, 81: 3, 2012, 135.revealed in their thought and work', 5 was seen as a typical Western, twentiethcentury phenomenon.The beginning of the admiration for so-called tribal art by modern artists was dated in the period 1907-1914.In the nineteenth century, Rubin confirmed, 'tribal objects were not then […] considered art at all'.6 First, it was believed that primitive objects fell 'outside the parameters of Beaux-Arts and salon styles' of the nineteenth century.7 Second, ethnographic museums and ethnologists before 1900 were supposed to have made no distinctions between art and artefact.'As artefacts were considered indices of cultural progress, the increasing hold of Darwinian theories could only reinforce prejudices about tribal creations, whose makers were assigned the bottom rung of the cultural evolutionary ladder'.8 Third, it was acknowledged that the first travellers and colonials had brought objects to Europe.'But we owe primarily to the convictions of the pioneer modern artists their promotion from the rank of curiosities and artefacts to that of major art, indeed, to the status of art at all'. 9 Other publications in the 1980s confirmed these ideas.In a reception study of pre-Columbian culture, Elizabeth Williams stated that the 'final task of revaluation of the ars americana was accomplished only in the wake of the "primitivist revolution" in European aesthetics'.10 In his influential work The Predicament of Culture.Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Art, and Literature, James Clifford offered a caustic review of Rubin's exhibition.11 He correctly criticised the problematic use of concepts like 'affinity', 'tribalism', and 'abstraction' in the MOMA exhibition.Despite his critique, Clifford also dated the emerging distinction between the study of '(scientific) cultural artefacts' and '(aesthetic) works of art' in the beginning of the twentieth century.12 According to Clifford, before 1900, non-Western objects were sorted as exotic curiosities.Again, Picasso and others were credited for the 'nonethnographic admiration' in the era of triumphant modernism.Their intuitive recognition of primitive objects as powerful art caused a modernist revolution.Only by 1920 were tribal objects more commonly seen as cultural witnesses and aesthetic masterpieces.13 Ideas belonging to the 'modernist myth' became widely accepted, and are still repeated in more recent publications.14 Others do refer to an earlier, late-