The Metropolitan Museum of art, New York - new acquisitions

African Arts, Summer, 2001 by Alisa LaGamma

The works from Africa selected for the current "Recent Acquisitions" installation on view in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing (May 22-October 28) reflect an appreciation for the breadth, diversity, and vitality of the continent's cultural heritage. Since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sculptural traditions in wood from sub-Saharan Africa have been the focus of African-art collecting in the West. While the exceptional accomplishments of African sculptors in representing the human form through wood sculpture continue to be the focus of collections such as that of the Metropolitan Museum, there has been a growing appreciation of other forms of artistic expression in recent decades.

These acquisitions of the last five years fill significant gaps in the African holdings. They range from classic iconic sculptural genres admired in the West for over a century, such as an exceptionally lovely mukudj mask from Gabon carved by a Punu sculptor in the nineteenth century, to an outstanding silk mantle woven in 1998 by a Malagasy master, Martin Rakotoarimanana, that represents a contemporary revival of an important precolonial textile tradition.

Many of the new acquisitions of African art in this exhibition challenge long-held assumptions about the continent's cultural isolation. A group of artifacts from Ethiopia and the kingdom of Kongo are important documents of Africa's longstanding engagement with Christianity over the centuries. Examples of textile traditions from west, central, and east Africa reflect a range of distinctive aesthetics that rank among the most esteemed forms of expression in their cultures. Furthermore, while wood sculpture is generally the prerogative of male sculptors in Africa, the textile arts and a group of fired terracotta vessels from Cote d'Ivoire celebrate the creative talents of female artists.

The broadening of the canon of African art in recent decades has also led to acknowledgment of the mastery of the abstract forms of decorative arts that are the focus of creative expression in southern and eastern Africa. Utilitarian works that were created to enhance the lives of their owners and are related intimately to their identities range from a pair of small headrests from South Africa to a monumental tent furnishing covered with applied beadwork that was designed for a Beja nomad's tent in Sudan.

Alisa LaGamma
Associate Curator
Department of the Arts of Africa,
Oceania, and the Americas

Left:

Triple crucifix
Kongo peoples, Angola/Democratic Republic of the Congo
17th century
Wood, brass; 26.2cm (10.3")
Gift of Ernst Anspach, 1999 (1999.295.15)

The central African kingdom of Kongo, with its capital at Mbanza Kongo, was founded as early as 1400. When the Portuguese navigator Diego Cao first arrived at the mouth of the Zaire in 1483, Kongo was identified as an ideal trading partner in light of its centralized government, system of rotating markets, and national currency. At the same time, European missionaries and technicians were invited to the kingdom as the guests of a powerful and unconquered African head of state.

As part of their participation in an international community of sovereign nations, the kings of Kongo adopted Christianity as the state religion. In doing so they found parallels between their indigenous world view and that introduced by the West, and they reinterpreted Catholic rituals so that they complemented their own religious system. Their alliance with the Vatican afforded them a degree of diplomatic leverage and autonomy from Portugal as trade developed with the West during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Right:

Crucifix
Kongo peoples, Angola/Democratic Republic of the Congo
16th/early 17th century
Brass; 27.4cm (10.8")
Gift of Ernst Anspach, 1999 (1999.295.7)

The Christian icon of the crucifix was easily integrated into Kongo religious practices beginning in the fifteenth century. As scholars have emphasized, this development reflects the fact that the cross as a powerful emblem of spirituality predated contact with the West. According to the Kongo conception of human experience, the cross is at once a metaphor for the cosmos and a diagram of the trajectory of a human life as it traverses the realms of the living and the ancestors. As the kings of Kongo became the principal promoters of Christianity in the region, they commissioned local representations of the crucifixion as emblems of their leadership and power. Copper, the primary material used in these works, was a precious commodity traded between Africa and the West and a powerful local signifier of wealth, prestige, and rank.

It appears that initially the Kongo artists responsible for producing such objects faithfully followed European prototypes brought into the region by Portuguese and Italian missionaries. The stylistic diversity of the corpus of known works in this tradition is due to the continual adaption and reinterpretation of the imagery, so that it became more thoroughly assimilated into local idioms of expression.