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A t the turn of the 20th century, pre-modern art from cultures outside the West—and in particular from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific Islands—were viewed by Europeans as ethnographic objects, or curiosities from faraway cultures. Visionary artists of the avant garde were the first outsiders to look at these art forms in a new way: the genius of African sculptors, transmitted through objects they encountered in places like the Trocadéro in Paris, struck them with a powerful wave of inspiration. These encounters affirmed aesthetic concepts that were brewing among Modernists, and redefined the magical potential of art objects infused with spiritual power. It was not until the 1920s that the first exhibitions treated these sculptures as serious art forms worthy of consideration, and it was these exhibitions that broadcast this “discovery” to the cultural world of Europe and later, the United States.
It was in the spring of 1935 that these ideas crossed the Atlantic when the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr, and its curator James Johnson Sweeney borrowed the expertise of a group of intrepid European tastemakers, including Paul Guillaume, Charles Ratton, and Louis Carré. Drawing in large part from the collections of those European dealer-collectors, they mounted a revolutionary exhibition at New York City’s young Museum of Modern Art entitled African Negro Art. The exhibition ran for two months and included over 600 sculptures from West and Central Africa. The European visitors to New York simultaneously held a selling exhibition nearby at Pierre Matisse Gallery (whose proprietor was the son of famed French painter Henri Matisse).
“We still find works hidden in American collections that came from those genre-defining 1935 exhibitions in New York,” says Alexander Grogan, Global Head of African & Oceanic Art at Sotheby’s, “This is a field where exciting discoveries are still being made today. This means it is still possible for collectors to acquire some of the best and most historic artworks.”
Early American collectors included Frank Crowninshield, a visionary art lover, founding trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, and the first editor of Vanity Fair, who had helped to organize the New York Armory Show of 1913. Crowninshield sourced much of his collection through the painter John D. Graham, who was also at the heart of the growing international avant garde.
After the end of World War II, Julius Carlebach, John J. Klejman, and Mathias Komor opened galleries on Madison Avenue devoted to ancient arts from premodern cultures. Around these galleries there emerged a scene of adventurous collectors who recognized that the power of great artworks could transcend time and place. Among the most enthusiastic (and wealthiest) of them was Nelson Rockefeller, who assembled the collection that would eventually become the Museum of Primitive Art, and which he would later donate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, forming the foundation of their holdings in the Art of Africa, Oceania, and the Ancient Americas. The Met is still today the best place to experience these arts in the United States.
In 1966, the first marquee auction of the art of Africa, Oceania, and the Ancient Americas was held in New York, hosted by Sotheby’s (then Sotheby Parke Bernet). It was the collection of Helena Rubinstein, the trailblazing beauty entrepreneur who had amassed a collection of over 400 pieces and helped to propel the fashion for collecting in these categories.
A flurry of increasingly sophisticated exhibitions began to address the art of Africa, Oceania, and the Ancient Americas as seriously as other world cultures. Exhibitions and scholarship followed, along with the realization that what was previously considered a niche collecting category was actually an essential part of world culture. The themes that appear in great African sculpture powerfully convey ideas of life, death, ancestral lineage, and the invisible world of spirits, with a gravitas that collectors find deeply compelling.
Private collectors including, notably, the late contemporary art dealer Robert Mnuchin began to place African art amongst the blockbuster postwar art. Influenced by the African American artist and dealer Merton D Simpson, Mnuchin's style of collecting moved beyond the connection to the early 20th century Modernists, and positioned it as worthy in its own right. Grogan remembers witnessing Mnuchin’s vision in his home: “He had Rothko, Motherwell, Klein— big, gutsy, expensive paintings—side-by-side with classical African pieces in a very clean interior. These great sculptures absolutely hold their own next to great paintings—as equals.”
Grogan is careful when he discusses the often-repeated foundation myths of the Western discovery of African Art: "Africa is an enormous continent: much bigger than Europe, much bigger than the United States. It had a vast number of different visual traditions. Before the cataclysmic influences of colonialism there were grand civilizations and brilliant cultures that were unequaled anywhere in the world, at any time in history.” The modern artists and collectors of the early 20th century may have helped to popularize the category but it would take some decades for the canonical Western art world to recognize African art as, as Grogan puts it, “art with a capital A.”
Mnuchin’s collection, Grogan argues, is representative of an exciting new style of collecting for the 21st century. It’s a stance that posits that for today’s collectors of major world art, African and Oceanic Art cannot be ignored. “Great art is great art,” says Grogan. “Collectors finally see that.”
