Authentically African. Sarah Van Beurden
FIGURE 1.5. Indigenous art room, ca. 1937. Note the centrally displayed Kuba royal statue, or ndop. HP.2002.1.18, collection RMCA Tervuren; ed. Thill-Nels.
Upon his return to Belgium, Olbrechts made a definitive turn toward the study of Congolese cultures when he curated a large Congolese art exhibit for the city of Antwerp in 1937–38.74 Adriaan Claerhout, later a curator of the ethnological museum in Antwerp, described the exhibition as a “laboratory experiment [in which] Olbrechts reduced the spectacle to the advantage of the main goal, namely testing the stylistic method [he was developing].”75 Despite Olbrechts’s attention to the role that the objects had in their societies of origin—or their “social function”—the main focus was on the presentation of the pieces as objects of art that could be classified, through an analysis of their characteristics, into geographically circumscribed stylistic zones inspired by Boas’s culture zones.76
Plastiek van Kongo (Congolese Sculpture), Olbrechts’s book based upon the work he did for the Antwerp exhibition, helped open the field of art history to the study of pieces of African material culture as art. Contrary to the scholarly production of previous scholars of Congolese ethnography, whose work was more fragmentary, the book presented a sweeping objective: a complete system of classification for Congolese art.77 Olbrechts identified four large “culture areas” (with substyles) in Congo: the Lower Congo region, the Kuba region, the Luba region, and the Northern region.78 Subsequent scholars have corrected, deepened, and elaborated upon Olbrechts’s stylistic classification, but it continues to serve as a point of reference for students of Congolese art.79
FIGURE 1.6. Map of style areas, 1946. Olbrechts, Plastiek van Kongo, 38.
Although Olbrechts’s experience with Boasian anthropology shaped Congolese Sculpture, he was also profoundly influenced by the methodology of Western art history. His system of classification was inspired by the method developed by Giovanni Morelli, a nineteenth-century scholar of Renaissance art. Based on a meticulous dissection of the form of the artwork—today mostly referred to as the practice of connoisseurship—pieces of art could be inserted in a larger developmental scheme.80 Olbrechts used this method to undermine the traditional classification that placed African cultures at the bottom of an evolutionary scale of civilizations. The application of a method developed and reserved for Western art to African sculpture elevated the stature of these pieces as art, but it also carried implications for the image of the producing cultures. While certain African artifacts had long been regarded as art, Olbrechts redefined that status as one grounded in the development and refinement of the cultures that produced them. The combination of Boas’s influence and an art historical methodology also led Olbrechts to pay special attention to the individual artist within African culture, identifying a specific workshop responsible for a series of Luba sculptures, specifically stools, known as the “Long Face Style of Buli.”81
Olbrechts’s approach was certainly not without problems, as several generations of scholars have pointed out. For example, Congolese Sculpture was not based on fieldwork, which helps to explain why the stylistic analysis was much more profound than the anthropological analysis of the sculptures’ function.82 The choice to include only sculptures, and to leave aside any two-dimensional art, also severely restricted his analysis, as did his limited use of masks.83
Olbrechts constructed the Western museum professional and academic as the savior of the remnants of a culture in decline. He distinguished two phases in the production of African art: the “classic” (or precolonial) and modern eras.84 He attributed the bulk of the material from the “classic” period to the creative genius of the African communities that produced the objects, explicitly arguing against those Westerners who attributed African art forms to foreign influences because they “consider[ed] these indigenous people primitives without art.”85 He argued that colonialism brought an influx of style elements, techniques, and tools that led to such profound changes in the production of art that it effectively stopped being African. The implication was that through the recognition and valuation of academics, the “classic” material could be identified and protected in places like Tervuren.
Congolese Sculpture displayed a clear connection between the organization of knowledge and the organization of the colonial space and its subjects. Olbrechts’s project was shaped by the geopolitical space of the colony, a space he also helped solidify and naturalize. Projecting style areas on a map of Congo created the impression of delineated identities that fell within the boundaries of the state of Congo. Olbrechts of course acknowledged that some of the stylistic areas he described crossed the borders of Congo, but he understood those to lie outside the boundaries of his work. Congo, delineated by colonial boundaries, emerged as an unquestioned cultural unit in this presentation.
The areas delineated and defined by their artistic styles often paralleled the areas of the major ethnic groups, as they were identified by the Belgians, making the scholar complicit in the colonial tradition of invented and imposed identities.86 That the major ethnic groups (Luba, Kuba, and the Mangbetu of the Northeast, for example) were exactly those that were popular with early collectors and thus strongly represented in the collections in Belgium only strengthened these categories. In relying heavily on private collections for his research, Olbrechts transferred these collectors’ preferences into delineations of Congolese cultural communities, reducing groups who varied according to language, customs, and political organization to a taxonomy based on isolated elements of material culture production.87
Olbrechts’s 1930s scholarship was part of a slow global evolution that redefined certain objects in African museum collections from artifact to art. By changing the methodology and giving a scientific foundation to the aesthetic impulse to redefine these objects as art, Olbrechts opened space for a discourse in which certain Africans could be seen as having “culture,” although he located its production mainly in the past. This reemphasized the older, conflicted, image of African societies as both the site of decline and the reflection of an authentic African culture rooted in the past. Although individual African cultures, through their art, were worthy of admiration and not merely underdeveloped backwaters, their worth, as Olbrechts defined it, was locked into their “traditional” lifestyles.88 The promotion of the idea of Congo as a “world populated with endangered authenticities,” to use James Clifford’s words, diverted attention from Congolese claims for political identity and presence.89
CONGOLESE MASTERPIECES AT TERVUREN, 1946–60
In 1946 Olbrechts accepted the position of director of the Museum of the Belgian Congo, which he occupied until his death in 1958. How did the changing image of Congolese cultures, as constructed by Olbrechts in his scholarship, translate onto the theater of the museum in a period of, at least discursively, colonial reform? How and where did colonial propaganda meet scientific innovation? How did visions of the past translate into a message for the present and the future?
A renovation of the ethnographic displays took place between 1952 and spring 1958 (officially opened in 1959). Unfortunately, there is limited information available about the changes. An updated series of guidebooks was published in 1959, but they did not include the ethnography section, and photographic evidence from this time period is very sparse.90 In 1960 Congo-Tervuren, the museum’s periodical, reported that the displays were now “more rationally organized. The two main galleries are filled with objects: the first one in an ideological and functional order, the second by ethnic group, and a third gallery called “hall of art” holds certain chosen pieces.”91
By indicating the need for a “rationalization” of the displays, the museum clearly sought to reject Joseph Maes’s organization of the exhibits as outmoded and disassociate the department from his legacy. (Maes lost his position in 1946, accused of collaboration with the Germans. He was replaced by Obrechts’s student Albert Maesen.)92 In reality,