Frans M. Olbrechts: 1899-1958: In Search of Art in Africa

African Arts, Winter, 2004 by Simon Ottenberg

Frans M. Olbrechts: 1899-1958 In Search of Art in Africa Edited by Constantine Petridis Antwerp: Antwerp Ethnographic Museum. 2001. 327 pp., plus 153 pages of plates and photos, 129 color plates, 121 black and white photographs, 5 maps. 37.00 Euros hardcover.

This collection of essays by eleven authors, also published in a Dutch edition, surveys, evaluates, and honors the career of Frans M. Olbrechts in developing African anthropology and art history in Belgium, particularly focusing on these disciplines' growth at Ghent University and the city of Antwerp. Since Olbrechts's writings were mostly in Dutch, his contributions have not received the attention that they might otherwise have gained, particularly in the United States. The contributors vary in age from the very senior to recent PhDs. The book is a most valuable addition to the study of the history of African anthropology and art history.

The occasion for this publication was an exhibition of African objects at the Antwerp Ethnographic Museum in 2001, curated by the editor of this volume, Constantine Petridis, who took his PhD in art history at Ghent. The exhibition reevaluated two earlier exhibitions that Olbrechts was involved in, the exhibition "Congolese Art" held at the City Festival Hall in Antwerp in 1937-38, which displayed 1525 objects, and the "Ivory Coast Expedition of Ghent University and the Antwerp Vleeshuis Museum," held briefly 1939. A few objects that were in those exhibitions are included in this one. Reflecting Olbrechts's interests, the recent exhibition and this catalogue focus heavily on figures, rather than on masks, despite the latter's importance in the regions of Africa that held Olbrechts's interest.

Petridis's prologue, in memory of Adriaan Claerhout (1926-2000), one of Olbrechts's first students, briefly surveys Olbrechts's contributions and suggests that, while he was director of the Royal Museum of the Belgian Congo, Tervuren, for the last ten years of his life, his most seminal contributions were made in Antwerp and at Ghent University. Olbrechts was interested in studying African art as art, but he also had a deep interest in its sociocultural setting, although his own work rarely fulfilled that aim.

Petridis argues in the next chapter, "Olbrechts and African Art," that Olbrechts was one of the first to question the anonymity of African artists and to press for an examination of their personalities. Based on his own experience with the cultural anthropology being developed in the United States, Olbrechts argued for intensive periods of field research in Africa. The chapter contains a brief history of the study of African art into Olbrechts's time and indicates how strong a role he played in the growth of ethnography in Belgian museums. He was not trained in anthropology or art history; these disciplines did not exist as such in Belgium when he was a student. He wrote his dissertation on the analysis of a 1702 manuscript on conjuring and healing, supplemented by field research with conjurers in the Flemish region, as part of his training at the Catholic University at Leuven. He was at that time interested in folklore, language, and ethnology, and he held strong Flemish sentiments throughout his life.

The subsequent chapter, by Aldona Jonaitis, a preeminent scholar of Northwest Coast Native American art, has little to say about Olbrechts, but surveys the ideas and interests of Franz Boas, the American anthropologist who was to influence Olbrechts to a considerable extent. She discusses Boas's interest in intensive field research, in tracing the history of objects and people, in linguistics and native texts, in the creativity of native artists, and his critique of social evolutionism. The ideas contained in Boas's famous book Primitive Art (1927) were quite influential to Olbrechts.

This chapter serves as a useful background to the next, by Mireille Holsbeke, on Olbrechts's American experience. Receiving some financial support to increase his knowledge and experience, Olbrechts decided to go to Columbia University, where Boas taught, becoming immersed in Boasian ideas and meeting many of Boas's first generation of students, some of whom later became very well known. Boas put Olbrechts in touch with the Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington, D.C., which arranged for fieldwork among the Eastern Cherokee. He used this experience to complete the translation into English of a manuscript on healing, originally in the Sequoya syllabary, which had been begun by another scholar. This allowed Olbrechts to carry out intensive field research for some eight-and-a-half months in 1926-27, and to put his linguistic interests to work. It also marked the second time that he had dealt in detail with a manuscript, and one that had to do with healing. Then Olbrechts spent three months in 1928 among the Tuscarora, and in 1929 he was for a brief time with the Onondaga. Holsbeke makes it clear, as do other writers in this volume, that Olbrechts's American experience turned him into an anthropologist. Throughout his life he stressed to his students the importance of long-term field research. It is obvious from accounts in this book that, while Olbrechts did not always act as an anthropologist in his later interests in African art, he guided his students to do so, and that he saw this as a goal in his own work. While holding a position as an attache at the Royal Museum of Art and History in Belgium, he reorganized the ethnographic section and its exhibition, writing a popular catalogue. His attention then turned to the study of art, and particularly African art, of which the museum had a substantial collection.